- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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I disagree.
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You already have a government space agency. Maybe give them more funding so they don’t have to rely on space-x to get their stuff into orbit?
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There’s a national telecom network already in place. It at least has the potential to be faster and more reliable, if it isn’t already… At least compared to low earth orbit satellite coverage.
There’s no good reason to continue providing Elon or his companies with any government handouts. Pull that funding and give it to… I dunno, students who have more debt than homeowners with a mortgage… NASA… Literally anything that helps people?
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A lot of people are calling this a bailout for Elon, but in reality it would be a seizure. Elon doesn’t want to let go of Starlink and the US likely wouldn’t pay him what it’s worth to take it over.
What people seem to be missing is the precedent this would set. It’s all well and good when we empower the office of the president to seize a private company we don’t like, but after we give them that power what’s to stop them from seizing other businesses?
XYZ company refuses to get rid of their DEI policy because the shareholders voted to keep it? Well now the orange man can seize it.
Let’s not forget that previously it took 2/3rd majority to confirm presidential appointments, but the Senate under Obama decided to change that rule to 50% to get past Republican objections. The result of this is all these shit appointments Trump has passed with 51% of the Senate, none of them would have gotten by if the Democrats hadn’t made a precedent for changing the rules.
What people seem to be missing is the precedent this would set. It’s all well and good when we empower the office of the president to seize a private company we don’t like, but after we give them that power what’s to stop them from seizing other businesses?
XYZ company refuses to get rid of their DEI policy because the shareholders voted to keep it? Well now the orange man can seize it.
The problem they don’t see is that once a precedent is set, also the other party can do it. What you point out is valid also like “XYZ company refuses to establish a DEI policy because the shareholders voted agains ? Well not the democratic president can seize it”.
Let’s not forget that previously it took 2/3rd majority to confirm presidential appointments, but the Senate under Obama decided to change that rule to 50% to get past Republican objections. The result of this is all these shit appointments Trump has passed with 51% of the Senate, none of them would have gotten by if the Democrats hadn’t made a precedent for changing the rules.
Tipical case of not looking beyond one’s nose
I am not saying that I don’t agree with you. But this country is still not even close to considering nationalizing its own telecommunication infrastructure. Much less a privately held space company and a service of communication satellites. A large chunk of America believes that a for-profit business model for every good and service possible in life is the best course of action.
Yes it’s the right long term goal, but the US is nowhere near ready for strong nationalised enterprises, they would just stop getting funding and die. There is a requirement for strong, positive minded government and a shared understanding of the benefits of having nationalised societal services before it can work.
You have NASA FFS. Just fund it.
NASA is too beholden to politics… You can’t do 7 year builds and missions when the Senate flips every 4 years and has to kill everything the other side did on principle that it has a D or R attached to it. Everything is political.
<.< Legitimate question, what was the last thing each party killed that was put in place by the other party?
It is usually due to “budget cuts” as the easiest way to kill a project is to defend it.
Juno Jupiter flyby
Maven mission to mars
New horizons kbo flyby
Terra mission-earth science satellite
Aqua mission -earth science satellite
DSCOVR
SLS-which may actually be a bad program but is a good example of the political issues with NASA vs senate.
Juno Jupiter flyby
But Juno went to Jupiter?
Starlink should be globalized. A planet only needs one low-altitude orbiting communications network. Better to standardize the technology and platform and let them contribute to one system than to have a dozen identical competing systems crashing into each other and fucking things up for everyone.
Ah. My Kessler syndrome is acting up again.
There is no such thing as something being “globalized” The UN for instance is a debating club where the majority of the seats represent individual dictators who dominate but do not speak for their countries citizens.
The idea of 50 countries collectively providing 0% of the funds should determine the mission is somewhat laughable. Also no country on earth has a process by which foreign dictators can seize or direct a company run out of their nation.
You could always just fund the space agency you already have, instead of funneling money to a foreign billionaire.
No this the one time I’m with the commies. Nationalize that shit. Like you said it’s all taxpayer money anyway. A little bit of Wall Street speculation, but who gives a fuck about those people
it’s all taxpayer money anyway
Good point.
this the one time I’m with the commies
Are you against universal and free healthcare, education and retirement? Are you against improving worker rights, paid holidays, sick leave, guaranteed housing and guaranteed employment? Are you against unionisation of workplaces and collective worker decisions mattering in business? Are you against heavy regulation against climate change and pollution of the environment? Are you against anti-racism, feminism, anti-fascism and the redistribution of wealth from the richest to the poorest? I’m sure you have a lot more common ground with us commies than you think
No I’m also with the commies on single payer health care and super high tax brackets for the rich. I do hate me a fascism, infact I hate all authoritarians.
I’m clearly for the workers rights we have fought for and established in this country. And while I can acknowledge the communist impact in these achievements, I would not go ahead and give you guys full credit nor say that these are policies that are specific to you. Most of this stuff is just center/left social welfare and human rights. Commies are the ones that like to do purity tests and isolate anyone that doesn’t agree with 100% of your policy points.
Pretty big jumps from liberal to leftist to self proclaimed communist ideas on how these ideas and policies look, so yes we agree on general principles and concepts. But we certainly don’t agree on how to bring them about.
Also, every single self-proclaimed communist is on the suspect list because you guys did a lot of campaigning against Joe Biden to help Donald Trump get elected so I’m just saying I don’t really fuck with you guys anymore. That’s my new purity test. Did you support Joe Biden and Kamala during the most important election in American history?
super high tax brackets for the rich
I’m a communist and I believe in the expropriation of their capital to eliminate super-richness, not in their taxation.
workers rights we have fought for and established in this country
Your country (the US judging by the comment) has miserable worker rights, as a western-European. Worker rights are bad here, but the US takes the cake.
I would not go ahead and give you guys full credit nor say that these are policies that are specific to you. Most of this stuff is just center/left social welfare and human rights
I’m not so sure. The legal abolition of homelessness and unemployment is far from being a centre/left welfare measure, as evidenced by the fact that the only countries that have achieved this are communist ones such as Cuba or the Soviet Union.
we certainly don’t agree on how to bring them about
We don’t agree on how to bring them about because the liberal method of bringing them about is proven ineffective in every single instance of liberal democracy. Worker rights and welfare are systematically being eroded in essentially all liberal democracies for the past 3-4 decades, home ownership rates decrease, unemployment increases, retirement age gets delayed (Denmark just rose it to 70 years e.g.), education and healthcare budgets get gutted, infrastructure crumbles, real wages diminish for the majority of the population, and little action is taken against climate change. There were only advancements in worker rights in Europe (and less so in the USA) because of the fear of communist revolution in the past century, hence the complete lack of progress and actual degradation of rights and democracy with the rise of the far right all over the Western World.
I’m not USian so I didn’t support any of your genocidal candidates. Funny how you talked of purity tests earlier in your comment and come up with that later. But as an outsider: the US liberal obsession with blaming the election loss on the progressives and not on, you know, the politicians enacting genocide and not doing anything about improving the living conditions of people in the US while in government seems pretty weird. If the Democrats can’t bring themselves to even remotely appear more appealing than LITERAL DONALD TRUMP to the average voter, what the fuck are they doing?
Hang on a minute, equivalents of SpaceX and Starlink could have naturally grown out of NASA, it was the obvious place for them to come from but NASA did not show that innovation and nationalisation of them might dilute their abilities. For clarity I am not suggesting the innovation came from Musk, he has no science or engineering, his talents are grifting, showmanship and taking credit for other people’s work, he is a natural figurehead though and seemed quite clear thinking until he lost his mind.
NASA has had it’s funding cut year after year for decades. It’s far easier to innovate when you have money to back up the r&d and testing.
I wasnt discussing underlying cause, whatever the reason for stifled innovation in some fields possibly evident in NASA it is likely preferable not to pull independent labs into NASA that are having success in these areas.
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Has anyone considered funding NASA?
They made rockets that didn’t explode with duct tape and a TI-83 calculator.
If that was actually their expenditure I don’t think they’d have their budget cut.
Shouldn’t be incompatible with nationalizing SpaceX and Starlink. Just give it all to NASA, actually.
literally nasa
Nasa with less risk aversion. If a Nasa rocket blows up that’s big news. If a Space X rocket blows up, that’s a Tuesday.
Arrest Musk on violation of controlled substances acts, file immigration violation charges, invalidate his ownership shares due to securities fraud, as he falsified education and naturalization forms.
Or just emminent domain the shit. The Law is just made up right now.
Throw Musk in prison for his many documented crimes, but don’t support this kind of dictator shit.
The precedent that will set and the implications… No… We should not do this.
Health insurance, ISP, Oil Cos, and utilities should also be nationalized. The US is a weird place where everything is a business. A shithole capitalist hellscape
Tankies live in alternate reality where they think that nationalization is extremely common and is a magical solution to all of societies problems… even though this view is entirely delusional.
For example, only 3 countries have nationalized the entire ISP industry, and those are Cuba, Turkmenistan, and North Korea. All three of which are horrid tyrannical dictatorships with horrible internet. We should NOT be like them. Even when it comes to health insurance, except for 3 countries I just mentioned, every single country allows private health insurance, even if their system is public. Clearly nationalization is not what you think it is.
Tankies
boy howdy you’ve got the entire strawman army mustered in this thread.
It seems like you don’t know what that term means
Sure thing sport. I must be a tankie lol. You toolbag
A strawman is when somebody mischaracterize an argument, calling someone a tankie is not that.
sure thing bud. I’m not going to waste my afternoon going through your shitstream to point out how you’re wrong, I simply have better things to do with my life. in fact, gonna block you now, QOL plus
The precedent that will set and the implications
and what precedent is there for dealing with the executive of your country’s entire space launch infrastructure when they become dependent on horse drugs?
No really, what’s the precedent here, I want to know. Because if we set a precedent by ignoring it until the problem is impossible to ignore, that’s gonna be a far more expensive fix.
So yeah, yeah we should consider this very strongly.
If the government actually nationalized SpaceX, the precedent would be insane. You’d be telling every private company working in defense, infrastructure, or tech that if they become too essential, the government might just take it. Doesn’t matter how much risk or capital they fronted.
SpaceX isn’t just launching rockets for fun—it’s practically a branch of the U.S. space program at this point. GPS, Starlink for military comms, launching classified payloads, putting astronauts in orbit. If we nationalize that over a political pissing match between Trump and Musk, we’re basically saying innovation is conditional on obedience.
And let’s be honest—once you do this to SpaceX, you open the door to doing it to AWS, Tesla’s energy grid systems, Google’s AI infrastructure. Any private company that gets too important suddenly becomes “too critical to stay private.” That’s a fast track to killing private innovation in sectors where we need it most.
If Trump’s threatening funding, and Musk is threatening to walk, and the public’s response is “just take the company,” then we’ve officially politicized the tech-industrial base. That’s not governance, that’s dysfunction.
Nationalizing SpaceX would be a Cold War move in a modern economy. It might feel good in the moment, but long-term, it’s a terrible idea.
how can you be so casually apathetic about saddling our soldiers sailors airmen and spaceforce with the products of a horse drug addled asshole?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/us/elon-musk-drugs-children-trump.html
What kind of prick tells these people VOLUNTEERING TO DEFEND YOUR COUNTRY “hey man, the ketamine kid is the only way!” - how are you comfortable or confident in the products produced when he’s tripping balls in the oval office?
meh. this is a pointless argument, I’m never going to convince these elon fanboys their hero is a prick
I’m sorry were you talking to me? Because nothing in your response had anything to do with what I actually said.
I never claimed to like Elon. I don’t. I never expressed support for this administration’s policies. I don’t.
My argument is about the moral, ethical, and historically dangerous precedent of nationalizing a private company.
That drug-addled sycophant stood before the most powerful political body on Earth wearing a baseball cap and a T-shirt while the Vice President of the United States told President Zelensky to put on a suit.
Unbelievable.
Where the hell do you get off making wild, baseless assumptions about things you barely understand? What exactly prevents you from engaging in civil discourse like an adult, instead of spouting off like you did in that comment?
Fine if we’re slinging assumptions now, here’s mine: You strike me as a fedora-wearing, vape-huffing, woman-hating neckbeard. Am I wrong? Don’t care. That’s the image your words paint.
I never claimed to like Elon. I don’t. I never expressed support for this administration’s policies. I don’t.
you just defend his right to run spaceX on specialK.
mmkay bud.
you just defend his right to run spacex on specialK.
Is not the US “the land of the free” ?
Obviously he has the right to run SpaceX, like you have the right to try to build another one.But obviously you seems to not understand what are the implication of setting this kind of precedent and all the implications that will arise. But that’s ok, after all the only important thing is to hate Musk.
I don’t give two flying fucks who runs space x. Once again. I’m not defending Elon in anyway.
I am expressing my concern about the United States government nationalizing a private company. You’re still making bassless assumptions. Pull your head out of your own ass and actually think about what I’m saying before spouting off at the mouth.
No, we already have NASA
Then make it work.
Stop cutting their funding and saying the earth is flat and that global warming is a myth.
Quite ironic from people constantly accusing their political adversaries to be communists…
