I think you're both correct and I think your analogy about Reddit being a minefield is perfected if we imagine that it's a minefield in a beautiful place.
Great experience with one step and blown to bits with one small step in a different direction.
Right, to catch a predator managed to catch people without needing to backdoor stuff. These people are just lazy and incompetent, potentially intentionally.
They will just get sacked for sycophants either here or abroad. For every principled worker there is, there is another person willing to eschew those principles for that paycheck. This is a desperate world by design to enable these tradeoffs by the very people who build, maintain, deploy, and ultimately control the worlds systems.
Absolutely not. The French revolution overall had enormously positive effects on Europe in terms of equality. A quick look into that period across Western Europe will give you numerous cases where suddenly the powerful became uncharacteristically eager to let go off significant parts of their power. In fact this event may well have had the biggest such effect of any event in history.
A recent event last year in the US also immediately resulted in actions undertaken whereas peaceful protests did not. Mostly protective actions, but it showed a very clear impact, the contrast was stark.
Based on what? Sure quips like that are catchy, but what "oligarchs" were there in the Soviet Union circa 1920-1989? The "nomenklatura", while well-off, were absolutely nowhere near the wealth of today's American oligarchs or modern (capitalist) Russian ones. Moreover, unlike oligarchs, they do not form a class: wealth does not transfer reliably one generation to the next, and individuals would phase in and out of high status according to their position in their career.
A very striking way to illustrate this is to look at the career histories of high government officials even very late into the Soviet Union. The last Minister of Coal, Mikhail Shchadov, was born in a village, worked in a mine, went to mining school for engineering, became head of his mine, and thereafter worked his way up the ranks until he was head of the whole apparatus. This story, not that of inherited wealth or monopolistic oligarchs, dominates the histories of Soviet ministers even very late in the decline of the Union.
Where is the "other set" of oligarchs of which you speak? There is none, which means there is hope for workers who might wish to enact fundamental economic change.
You can quibble over degree and the path taken, but wealthy insiders using money to control politics and ideological insiders using political control to amass wealth feel like two sides of the same coin, both leading the same way.
Your definition of class also seems to be very different from a traditional Marxist take -- hereditary systems were mostly seen as a symptom and not the problem itself, and were mostly orthogonal to any understanding of class.
I _hope_ there is hope, but I don't have much confidence that it lies in century old tropes of "rise up and throw off your chains."
But that's the key point: these people weren't insiders, not before gaining their positions, and they didn't even really accumulate wealth. They gained benefits from their position, sure, but little of that was attached to their position -- rather, to their office, and when that office lapsed, so did those privileges. When Khrushchev was removed from office, he got a small pension (500 rubles/mo.) and a house + cottage in which to spend his retirement, and even that was considered relatively comfortable.
So what did they accumulate? Few acquired power for life; none acquired significant wealth, or a power base independent from the party-state. Even after the end of the union, it was not the former nomenklatura who became new oligarchs: by and large it was the security services and their affiliates who were able to feed on the corpse.
You're right to critique how I described class in the previous message, but what I was trying to accumulate was essentially the above. It's not perfect, but I think this is very much a situation where it's important to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I would far rather live in a society where my leaders were once workers like me, raised in the same way, and all men were subject to the same basic economic guarantees. What we live in today is the rule of oligarchs, and it'd be a big step up to merely suffer the rule of bureaucrats.
No he can't because the US is paying for that, it is the government's mission. And fwiw now the gray area of free starlink in Ukraine also taken care of, the US government is handling that contracting like they do with all weapons systems. Before starlink was made available for free in Ukraine for humanitarian purposes, but the military also obviously found good uses for it before the gray areas were resolved.
I’m not sure how to respond to being called insane.
Anyway, I’ve been paying close attention to current politics and listening to alarm bells being rung from historians all around the world. Reality, as defined by the current administration, is not based on science or verifiable facts; That’s not the reality I want to subscribe to.
Elon Musk went head over heels to support this administration. Starlink contracts are being cancelled by large foreign governments for a reason. SpaceX only exists because of US government subsidies.
You're borderline saying "the present US administration, elected democratically, is equivalent to the Nazis".
That's insane. We used to have a rule on the Internet for people like you.
I'm no Trump fan, and people making alarmist statements like yours only help people like him get elected.
So, you know, stop. Especially if you think they're Nazis.
SpaceX exists because the US wants access to space and they are the cheapest way to space in history. They can continue to exist because starlink and their commercial launch services are massively profitable.
Still calling me insane and saying, “people like you.” Hmm.
You didn’t call out anything substantive in my previous comment so I’ll assume those points are not disputed.
As to the profitability of Starlink:
> Starlink is projected to generate between $11.8 billion and $12.3 billion in revenue in 2025, according to analyses from Quilty Space. This projected growth is driven by increasing subscriber demand and significant government contracts, particularly with the U.S. military.
You’ll likely find similar when looking up SpaceX profitability in 2025.
So, again, these things only exist because of the US government.
Do we agree on this yet or do we need to delve further somehow?
Let's review the easy to parse things that have been said
> I suppose you could say the same thing of Germany in the 1930s. The parallels aren’t even that hard to find as there are literal rockets being built in both cases.
You're obviously comparing both Elon and the current admin to Nazis. Which is insane, i.e. a view of things incompatible with reality, if you actually believe that.
> We used to have a rule for people like you on the Internet.
It's obviously Godwin's law. You aren't part of some oppressed class that I'm singling out, idiots have tons of power these days (look at the Whitehouse).
> You’ll likely find similar when looking up SpaceX profitability in 2025.
> So, again, these things only exist because of the US government.
> Do we agree on this yet or do we need to delve further somehow?
If you read carefully you'll see that I said that SpaceX would not have existed from its conception if not for the US government. But I asserted that it is no longer necessary and that is absolutely true. You pointing out that a basket of money includes dollars from the government (i.e. starlink revenue) doesn't even come close to disproving that. Google gets paid from government contracts too and their existence is not contingent on those contracts.
This conversation is over. I hope you will investigate facts and appreciate nuance more in the future.
That's easy to feel when you are passionate about an opposing viewpoint. What's hard is to see clearly enough to change your own viewpoint based on facts.
> You're obviously comparing both Elon and the current admin to Nazis
He did sieg heil twice on stage. He funds far-right parties internationally. His family heritage is literal nazis.
Directly from the article: Godwin's law can be applied mistakenly or abused as a distraction, a diversion, or even censorship, when miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole even when the comparison made by the argument is appropriate.
The space shuttle was an awesome feat of engineering, but in practical terms, it cost a lot for every launch, so it really didn't deliver well on the most important piece of what reusability is supposed to get you.
The tiles themselves were apparently a big source of the problems on the shuttle too. If they can figure out reusable tiles with starship, with quick turnaround and low-cost for maintenance, that'd be a huge engineering accomplishment.
They've gotta consistently re-enter it first though.
I believe it's because the space of physics interacting with specific designs of specific components in the context of a large system with other specific components is very, very big and thus it is not feasible to just "simulate everything" ahead of time.
Also combustion itself is not properly understood all the way down, so there is literally a big physics gap involved here.
Great experience with one step and blown to bits with one small step in a different direction.