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by danpalmer 5mo ago
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- narrator 5mo ago[flagged]
- emkoemko 5mo agoumm we all helped? its called taxes... how do you think Starship is being funded ?
- eagerpace 5mo agoBy an already super profitable SpaceX. The moon stuff is a drop in the bucket and only came well after success. What other company would you rather see funding go to?
- overfeed 5mo ago> What other company would you rather see funding go to? I'd rather not give any welfare-queen company another taxpayer dime.
- BoxedEmpathy 5mo agoMostly starlink
- GroksBarnacles 5mo agoI'm with you. Everything government that at least still pretended to serve the public interested and greater good has been openly captured by individuals and movements concerned with some more selfish agenda.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- gpt5 5mo agoWhy is everything today has to be "good" or "bad". Where is the nuance? Where is seeing things as they are - an exciting endeavor built by thousands of people, one of them has flaws you don't like. The rise of moralization of everything is really killing online discourse. It's gotten to the point where people will now mostly criticize and support ideas based on who proposed them, and not based on their merits. Tribalism at its worst.
- qsera 5mo ago>people will now mostly criticize and support ideas based on who proposed them, and not based on their merits. "People" were always like that and will be so..stupid. Let me quote Agent K from MIB for you. > A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it... The funny thing is that these are the same people who applauded obvious scams because Musk proposed it when they liked him...
- bigyabai 5mo agoIf you replace "online" with "modern", then your comment could be an impassioned 1940s-era defense of Nazi Germany for their "merits" in face of their flaws. The sum of these merits adds up to something. SpaceX is a political venture, and just like the uncomfortable questions that Microsoft/Google/Apple all pose, it's worth asking what the consequences will be in the long term. Lawful intercept sounded like a great plan, before it was leveraged by America's adversaries in Salt Typhoon as a prepackaged surveillance network.
- ianburrell 5mo agoThis isn't a new thing, ideas and actions have always been judged by who says them. If anything, the difference is that in the past, his behavior would have gotten him thrown out both from his companies and out of polite society.
- nomel 5mo agoMy theory is that tribalism is hard coded in our brain, strongly selected for by those bad times in the past, where the ability to turn off emotion and critical thoughts meant you, a generally social creature, could murder your fellow man, to keep your family/in group alive/fed. I think religion helped reduce tribalism, at a societal level, by making evil/demons/bad acts as the "them" and everyone that went to church on sunday (it was the whole town previously) was the "us". Now, without religion, and the physical/social bringing together it brought, that hardware in our brain still tries to segment a clear "us"/"them", but with much less guidance.
- bigyabai 5mo ago> the increasing use of NASA as US propaganda NASA has been propaganda since Operation Paperclip, sadly. It's hard to politicize something that's always been political, even if Musk gives Peenemünde optics a run for it's money.
- danpalmer 5mo agoOf course, which is why I said "increasing". NASA is propaganda, but when the focus is on scientific advancement I can get behind that (as a non-American). The problem is the recent shift away from science towards a more performative roadmap – getting to the Moon (again) is about showing off US might, not about science this time around, at least that's how it's being messaged. Many pure science endeavours have been canned. And the Artemis missions have a strong vibe of propaganda to them with slick marketing designed to emphasise America. I guess to sum it up: doing good stuff and being seen to be good because of it, is fine, but making a show of doing good stuff explicitly for show, while behind the scenes doing as little as you can get away with, is not.
- ordu 5mo ago> getting to the Moon (again) is about showing off US might, not about science this time around The first time around it was also about showing off US might. I don't think that something has changed much. Maybe wild Musk's lies are the only thing that was added.
- nilamo 5mo agoWeird AI photos on this article, too. Like, it's cool. Take pictures of the cool thing you actually have.
- fragmede 5mo agoThose aren't AI.
- BenFranklin100 5mo agoThe after effects of DOGE has left the NIH in tatters. Staff has been gutted, grants are months and months behind causing research groups and startups to go under. Whatever good Musk has accomplished with SpaceX will be offset by the harm he has done to biomedical research in the final accounting.
- ghshephard 5mo agoJust realize that Gwynne Shotwell is the driver for 99% of the day-day at SpaceX and you can ignore everything else.
- mrandish 5mo agoIt's funny because I when realized it was signed by Elon I immediately wished it had been signed by Gwynne instead (although I'm sure she reviewed it anyway). I just knew being signed by Elon would push responses to being (even) more about Elon and divided along partisan political lines. Which, at this point, has already been beaten to death and is just... tiresome. While discussing the broad concept of space-based compute in general (outside of SpaceX, Elon, etc) can still actually be interesting.
- danpalmer 5mo agoThis used to be my rationalisation, but my understanding is that Shotwell is the driving force behind the commercial and Falcon sides of the business and that there's a quite strong cultural divide between that and the Starship/Starlink side of the business which is driven by Musk. Apparently there's a lot of culture clash there.
- kortilla 5mo agoCulture clash between starlink and falcon has to be the dumbest thing I’ve heard. Falcon only exists in its current form because of starlink and starlink only exists because of falcon. Starlink is by far falcon’s biggest customer and starlink enables falcon to iterate and try things nobody that cares about their payload would.