I get to watch the guy who killed book stores ride a giant dick into space."
It's seems governments have a budgeting problem, not a funding problem.
Just letting that system persist and then hamfistedly grabbing the gains at the end and redistributing them is difficult for a huge number of reasons including both fairness and regulatory capture.
Saying "tax the rich" as a fix to a problem shows a lack of critical thought.
At the moment it seems like every government in the world is being held hostage by the obscenely rich, while workers with multiple jobs are struggling to even afford rent.
Please give me some hope and tell me how the change might come about? What signs have you seen out there that things are changing?
Because everything I see is just more and more wealth inequality, expanding year over year. Meanwhile the media, also in the obscenely rich's pocket, reports on these billionaire space assholes as if they've achieved something worthwhile, which is sickening to me.
My answer is always some variant of "I don't like the way you treat the help"
I know I'm in the minority, but I stopped shopping with Amazon long ago, closed my audible account, and have slowly been migrating my current workplace off our/their AWS infrastructure.
A handful of people have mentioned this is too much of a hardline stance, but personally I think it's important to take some actions if you truly want to see change in the world.
It's not even like a physical constraint like having to drive a little further to a different store. Just visit a different website it's the bare minimum of effort needed.
Agreed. That's what I did.
What I found amusing is that when I cancelled the services, Amazon (unlike pretty much every other company) didn't ask me to tell them why. It seems that they want to know everything about everybody -- except for why someone would want out.
Big successes do not erase equally big failures. And the failure here, not on Amazon alone, is far too many Americans not earning enough from their labor the fund continuing to exist reasonably and show up to work.
Roughly a third of us have few worries. Media, business, a whole lot of news and opinion bolsters that third, the assumption is things are fine.
Like two different worlds.
Yeah, govt is out of touch, but so are many others, all oh whom dominate the national dialog.
SpaceX very much branded its initial launches as "we are what NASA should have been." Countless appearances and interviews with people who were very clearly "engineers' engineers" excited out of their minds to be working on the project. It was clear that there was overflowing passion given a very "shiny" space to dream, and that was the guiding light. You could disagree with Elon Musk and still admire his ability to build, inspire, and fund such a team. You could see the light in their eyes and want to contribute like them some day.
Blue Origin was very much starting from a disadvantage, not being the first private-industry movers. But - and I think this is critical - they also made an unforced error by insulating the public from the passion their engineers undoubtedly have. It makes it very much the Jeff Bezos Show, which makes the whole venture much more susceptible to public opinion about Bezos personally. His tone-deaf remarks on customers "paying" for the venture dug that hole even deeper.
Setting aside emotion, whoever paves the way for space exploration in the coming decade needs to inspire. I'm going to root for the team that understands what it means to inspire. And that makes it impossible for me to root for Blue Origin.
Wasn't BO incorporated in 2000, two years earlier than SpaceX? Whatever delay they incurred is not caused by them entering the field later.
Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are just hobbies for the rich, but SpaceX might bring real benefits to "average joes" (just like the GPS system did).
Starlink isn't profitable yet, and won't be for several more years.
Parts of their business are definitely profitable today, for example the Falcon 9 launch business. Other parts of their business are being pursued in the hope of future profits, but those future profits are some years away.
This is really all it is, it's rich guys performing for other rich guys while the rest of us fight for scraps. It's sickening to me that so many people defend the honor of rich CEOs like Bezos, Branson, Musk, Gates, etc because they truly think that more money = better than.
