Your spacex contracts thing is bullshit too, but first the more important stuff. I think you'll agree many of these affect poor americans greatly, as well as poor people worldwide. A partial list of what Musk did with DOGE:
* Mass layoffs across the government. Especially education is badly affected.
* USAID shutdowns
* DOE downsizing (ie. killing education)
* Sabotaging student loans (purposefully cutting the infrastructure and personnel for getting a student loan)
* Killing off local Social Security access by closing offices
The list goes on. Next time Elon Musk says he needs engineers, I hope someone has the courage to ask him why he seriously and purposefully damaged education for Americans.
As for the spacex contracts: a cheaper price only helps if it actually leads to less spending. Since the US cannot risk spacex being the only access to space, it cannot cut funding to ULA contracts. Therefore spacex is more expensive, despite the cheaper sticker price.
Think of it this way. Let's say there's 2 cars. One is 40,000 USD (thanks to Musk and Trump's tariffs). One is 20,000 USD. But due to law you can only buy the 20,000 USD car if you ALSO buy the 40,000 USD car, there's no other way. So the real price is:
* the "cheaper" car: 60,000 USD total price
* the "expensive" car: 40,000 USD total price
See the problem here? Spacex is not actually cheaper. Only by not counting a bunch of costs because they come out of a different budget is spacex cheaper. A fact ("deception" I would say) that keeps repeating in mr. Musk's businesses. The sticker price on Tesler cars, for example, has similar problems: EXPENSIVE mandatory maintenance means the price of Musk's electric cars is far more than the competition, despite the sticker price sometimes being cheaper. Of course, now even the sticker price is far from the best.
The rest of the world is not entitled to unlimited American funds for all time.
>* DOE downsizing (ie. killing education)
Canada doesn't even have a federal-level education department. Is Canada filled with uneducated morons?
>As for the spacex contracts: a cheaper price only helps if it actually leads to less spending. Since the US cannot risk spacex being the only access to space, it cannot cut funding to ULA contracts. Therefore spacex is more expensive, despite the cheaper sticker price.
The mind boggles at this "logic".
The desire for having multiple launchers is not because "the US cannot risk spacex being the only access to space", but because the US got badly burned by putting all its rocket eggs into one space shuttle basket.
If SpaceX didn't exist, and the US government used ULA and Blue Origin for all its launches, the US would be paying far more than it is now. Don't believe me? Biden's NASA administrator Bill Nelson quoted a member of the Joint Chiefs as telling him that SpaceX had saved the US government $40 billion for just launching military payloads <https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-...>.
The above is purely a cost analysis, and doesn't even cover SpaceX allowing the US to no longer being dependent on Russia for sending people into space, as was the case from 2011 to 2020.
Thanks for making this comment. I can not imagine a stronger endorsement that mr. Musk and SpaceX/Tesler are responsible for all these things, that neither company is really a positive for the US.
Btw: if you're going to be racist, don't you have a problem with the fact that mr. Musk ... is not an American? I mean that is the one thing I'll credit Musk with: making Trump suck his ** in front of conservative "we hate immigrants" voters, on the white house lawn exposes the hypocrisy of MAGA and GOP voters better than even throwing a nuclear bomb on Breitbart could.
I lean pretty far left myself. But this kind of comment is why I think the left keeps losing.
The person you're engaging with is presenting rational arguments and logic in good faith, and instead of engaging and disagreeing and presenting your own counterarguments, you're just labeling them a racist.
This is not persuasive to anyone. In fact, it massively hurts your case, as readers assume you simply don't have any good reasons to support you. And I'd say it goes even further, and hurts "the left" as a whole, as people are conditioned to view that movement as in support of silencing conversation. Fewer than 20% of the population wants to live in a world where legitimate discussion might have you branded as a racist, homophobe, sexist, fascist, etc.
And not only that, it completely weakens the word. If you use the word "racist" to describe pretty much anyone who disagrees with you, then suddenly it applies to the vast majority of people, at which point it (by definition) no longer describes behavior that society finds unacceptable. Then it loses all power to cause anyone to actually reflect on themselves, or to take it seriously when the charge is levied against others.
I highly recommend reserving these words for the specific and rare times where they actually apply.
Killing education please. Dept of education does not run schools. Regarding loans, the best thing he could have done is abolish the program completely as it is the main reason the cost of education has gone up so much.
He also made a great many people rich not to mention how many jobs. That does not count?
Also I have no idea what expensive mandatory maintenance you mean. As if any other car does not require maintenance.
Your spacex contracts thing is bullshit too, but first the more important stuff. I think you'll agree many of these affect poor americans greatly, as well as poor people worldwide. A partial list of what Musk did with DOGE:
* Mass layoffs across the government. Especially education is badly affected.
* USAID shutdowns
* DOE downsizing (ie. killing education)
* Sabotaging student loans (purposefully cutting the infrastructure and personnel for getting a student loan)
* Killing off local Social Security access by closing offices
The list goes on. Next time Elon Musk says he needs engineers, I hope someone has the courage to ask him why he seriously and purposefully damaged education for Americans.
As for the spacex contracts: a cheaper price only helps if it actually leads to less spending. Since the US cannot risk spacex being the only access to space, it cannot cut funding to ULA contracts. Therefore spacex is more expensive, despite the cheaper sticker price.
Think of it this way. Let's say there's 2 cars. One is 40,000 USD (thanks to Musk and Trump's tariffs). One is 20,000 USD. But due to law you can only buy the 20,000 USD car if you ALSO buy the 40,000 USD car, there's no other way. So the real price is:
* the "cheaper" car: 60,000 USD total price
* the "expensive" car: 40,000 USD total price
See the problem here? Spacex is not actually cheaper. Only by not counting a bunch of costs because they come out of a different budget is spacex cheaper. A fact ("deception" I would say) that keeps repeating in mr. Musk's businesses. The sticker price on Tesler cars, for example, has similar problems: EXPENSIVE mandatory maintenance means the price of Musk's electric cars is far more than the competition, despite the sticker price sometimes being cheaper. Of course, now even the sticker price is far from the best.