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I don’t see downsides of keeping skilled labour “hot”. One indirect benefit of domestic manufacturing is that it gives blue collar workers a sense of productiv
by xattt 2y ago
I don’t see downsides of keeping skilled labour “hot”.
One indirect benefit of domestic manufacturing is that it gives blue collar workers a sense of productivity and involvement in society.
Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings, and a fairly compensated workforce is less likely to feel stagnant in their stage of life, and less likely to be radicalized.
Edit: it seems there is a distinction between how you keep the labour hot - meaningful long-term missions; or a half-assed approach.
- panick21_ 2y agoThe downside to keeping skilled labour 'hot' are many. First of all, if you have skilled labor, instead of of keeping them 'hot' actually 'eat' them. Ok, the analogy breaks down. But why keep them 'hot' just have them build actually useful stuff instead. Its not like there is a lack of useful things they could be doing. And second giving people bullshit useless projects like SLS, does not actually keep them 'hot'. Its more like warmed up Pizza. The people and more importantly organization lose the actual ability to do things quickly at reasonable prices. Somehow it seems acceptable that SLS will cost more then 30 billion $ in development cost and 2-4 more billion $ per launch. Not to mention the time. Don't misunderstand political pork as actually strategic workforce development or long term government policy. That just what you personally wish it to be, not what it actually is.
- skummetmaelk 2y agoWhich other useful things can they do? Spend their lives building advertising services or playing zero-sum games in financial markets?
- panick21_ 2y agoThe whole time when SpaceX didn't exist and NASA invested money in nonsense they could have invented reusable rockets, LEO constellations, nuclear reactors the list goes on. I really don't have a clue what your issue is. There is literally no problem with not having enough ideas that are cool that NASA can work on.
- thmsths 2y agoBuilding rockets and probes for a reasonable price and in a reasonable amount of time. SLS was initially billed as "a simple project to reuse a bunch of parts from the Space Shuttle" and yet it's over a decade old, 20 billions in cost and has not launched even once. So we get no real innovation (as I said previously it's just reusing fairly old technologies), it's not cheap and it's not fast. As for keeping the specialists hot; surely there are better ways to do it. It feels like saying let's keep digging ditches and filling them back up to keep our ditch diggers in shape.
- adolph 2y agoWhile “keeping skill labor “hot”’ sounds great in theory, the practical example of US space industry pre-SpaceX leads me to grant greater weight to “not actually great.”
- fooker 2y agoSkilled labor is somewhat transferable. Who do you think are making the shells being shipped out to Ukraine ?
- elif 2y agoPalmer lucky (oculus) is mostly sending drones with grenades. I think those are probably most of the kills tbh, and (according to my friend who works there) it is a very young, fresh, startup approach and not at all like the traditional defense industry.