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Musk-Trump dispute includes threats to SpaceX contracts

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Re: Musk-Trump dispute includes threats to SpaceX contracts

#741

Post by thinkindie »

credit_guy wrote: post #604
thinkindie wrote: post #148

At least Berlusconi didn't have access to nuclear warheads. Seriously, I visited the US few times between 2005 and 2010 and each time people were raising the topic of Berlusconi. How can you have a president like that, who voted for him, bunga bunga etc etc. Now you know how you can have such personality in power too. With even more power.

> How can you have a president like that Did people really think that Berlusconi was the president of Italy?

Prime ministers in Italy are also called Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri, therefore technically yes. He was holding the executive power, and although Italy is a parliamentary republic, most of the laws are driven by the Government.

Re: Musk-Trump dispute includes threats to SpaceX contracts

#742

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #693
CamperBob2 wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really buy the education argument. How do you "educate" somebody who lived through the first Trump administration and voted for more of the same? Let's get specific: what exactly did they miss in school that would have driven them towards a different decision? At some point it's necessary to confront the uncomfortable truth: stupid people are easy for smart, ill-intentioned people to herd, which gives the lat…

>This bug in democracy was there in the beginning. But it's only now, 2500 years later, that it can be exploited effectively enough to invalidate the whole concept. Not sure where the 2500 number came from. The US is about 250 years old, and the founders were extremely wary of democracy based on its history prior to the US. The US constitution was designed to mitigate issues with democracy, e.g. that is the purpose o…

My comment is too old to edit, but I would like to issue a correction. I should not have written "This article estimates that the US is the #2 longest-lasting republic after the Roman Republic", since the caption for the figure in the article states something different ("Duration of Long-Lived Democracies", i.e. the word "democracy" is used rather than "republic", and also there wasn't a claim to "longest-lived")

Never trust internet comments!

Re: Musk-Trump dispute includes threats to SpaceX contracts

#743

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

ringeryless wrote: post #729
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This bug in democracy was there in the beginning. But it's only now, 2500 years later, that it can be exploited effectively enough to invalidate the whole concept. Not sure where the 2500 number came from. The US is about 250 years old, and the founders were extremely wary of democracy based on its history prior to the US. The US constitution was designed to mitigate issues with democracy, e.g. that is the purpose o…

umm Switzerland disagrees with the assessment of the USA being the oldest democratic republic. If we are only speaking of republic, Portugal has been one since the 12th century, albeit there's been 10 or 11 iterations on the constitution, including Salazars so-called New State.

Correction here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44223617

Re: Musk-Trump dispute includes threats to SpaceX contracts

#744

Post by __s »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #720
__s wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_Social came out of him being banned by twitter a few years ago

I have never seen the inside of it. But to be honest the home page looks clean. How's the interface, in case you have ventured in? Is it clean and simple?

Never visited

Re: Musk-Trump dispute includes threats to SpaceX contracts

#745

Post by bdangubic »

ETH_start wrote: post #721
bdangubic wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

comparing Hegseth to HRC will do a whole lot more :)

Clinton deleted 30,000 emails to prevent them from being scrutinized in an investigation.

we are not banana republic (just yet, getting there though) so anyone that breaks a law under a given statute you file charges, run an investigation and punish if law(s) are broken. if memory serves me well there was one :) can’t say the same for Hegseth et al but night is young so-to-speak…

Re: Musk-Trump dispute includes threats to SpaceX contracts

#746

Post by insane_dreamer »

coffeemug wrote: post #32
jmyeet wrote: post #18

It's wild to me how many conspiracy theories I've seen about how this is all staged, like it's a distraction or it's just Elon repairing his image and trying to rescue Tesla (whose sales are cratering). Psychologically, I think this is reflective of cognitive dissonance. The two conflicting ideas are that two people with much to lose would get in the dumbest fight imaginable and the myth of meritocracy [1]. You see,…

There is no myth. Both Trump and Elon have generational talent in their respective domains. This is the kind of talent that’s so unique, it creates its own domain that didn’t exist before, and that no one will be able to replicate after. But they’re both unstable, and have many other negative features. One can have an extraordinary talent in starting generational companies, and have a social media addiction (among po…

Elon maybe—we’ll see if they outlast him. Trump did not start any generational companies.

Re: Musk-Trump dispute includes threats to SpaceX contracts

#747

Post by [deleted] »

jmyeet wrote: post #66
the_af wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Musk is not implying any of those less-than-flattering things. Nobody knows what Musk actually thinks , but what he implied is pretty clear. He calls it "a bomb", and we all know what that means. And this matters, because Musk was a major campaign contributor and advisor to someone he has now implied to be a pedophile. What does this say about Musk ?

As per usual, every accusation from a narcissist is a confession. You know who absolutely is connected to Epstein? Elon's brother, Kimbal (allgedly) [1]. And while not related to Epstein but is just gross and in a similar ballpark, Elon's father Errol, had a stepdaughter from his wife's first marriage, Jana Bezuidenhout, who grew up in his house from age 4. He later went on to father two children with Jana (the first…

[deleted]

Re: Musk-Trump dispute includes threats to SpaceX contracts

#748

Post by CamperBob2 »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #735
alimw wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure where the 2500 number came from. Athens probably? From what I remember of school, this was the world's first democracy. (I've heard that Americans are taught something else!)

I didn't get the impression that Athenian democracy was particularly successful. So it seemed weird to say that the flaws in democracy are only now becoming apparent. In fact, I understand that CamperBob2's critique of democracy is quite similar to that of Socrates. So I'm puzzled by the claim that it's "only now" that the critique is being proven correct, given that US democracy is notably more stable and long-lived…

The flaws in democracy were always apparent, and they've always been exploited by parties willing to do the dirty work. But they couldn't be exploited consistently and decisively. Now they can be.

Think of it this way: you can't reach people who don't read much by starting a newspaper, but you can reach them with Fox News and Twitter. Mix in a bit of that old-time religion -- Billy Graham with a side of sauce Bernays -- and the left-hand side of the bell curve is yours to do with as you please.

Re: Musk-Trump dispute includes threats to SpaceX contracts

#749

Post by TeaBrain »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #96
dingnuts wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a national space agency that has had plenty of time and money to do the stuff SpaceX is doing. Why wouldn't SpaceX turn into the funding and political football that NASA is, if it were nationalized? Like, this isn't a hypothetical. SpaceX only has a market because of the incompetence of the "public option."

> We have a national space agency that has had plenty of time and money to do the stuff SpaceX is doing. That's quite inaccurate. NASA doesn't do much themselves, they hire external contractors but keep significant control over them. SpaceX got more funding and less control and they didn't start from scratch, NASA gave them all of their technical documentation, now-how and working prototypes. NASA could have done eve…

>NASA could have done everything SpaceX does if they were given the same conditions and funding

This may have been hypothetically possible, as are many things that never came to be, but it is impossible to know whether this really would have happened.

Re: Musk-Trump dispute includes threats to SpaceX contracts

#750

Post by unethical_ban »

jiggawatts wrote: post #727
iamleppert wrote: post #611

What do we even need to be sending people into space for? It seems like a lot of savings could be had if we just completely shut down the entire manned space program. Unless there is some direct business case for it, why do it at all? Don't tell me some vague definition of "science". This isn't some new frontier that needs exploring, its well understood at this point. There needs to be a direct benefit to the america…

You're being downvoted unfairly, because the fact of the matter is that the only science being done in orbit that fundamentally requires humans is research into the effects of microgravity on the human body. But we know it's bad, and we know the fix : Just simulate gravity by spinning the spacecraft like in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or in Interstellar. Easy. There's this... thing... with NASA that you can recognise once…

Of course, this entire conversation is off-topic because the topic is not the merit of funding human spaceflight, but the merit of a president suddenly threatening a specific company with losing their federal contracts for criticizing the president.
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