Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance' • Hacker News Board

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#511

Post by lefra » Sat, May 30, 2026, 8:22 PM UTC

scoofy wrote: post #510

lefra wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are asking for money to extract oil (and hopefully sell it for more money). I don't see why the oil well being already drilled or not should make a difference if I don't want to invest in CO2-producing endeavours.

The point is that in the secondary market, the oil will be extracted regardless. By you not participating, you actually increase the return on equity for others, making it more profitable. Buying the stock does not add money into the business. The area for disincentivizing oil production is the political sphere, not the financial sphere. Refusing to participate in secondary market ownership does almost less than noth…

To be clear, I was answering your second paragraph, about "funding oil extraction that is happening anyway". I understood this as "buying shares directly from the extracting company".

I agree that buying on the secondary market doesn't directly give money to the company. However, it increases demand (and therefore price) of shares in petrol companies, which might help them raise more money per share for new projects.

The earnings coming from such shares also comes from actively encouraging CO2 producing activities. Some people don't want to earn money that way, because they think it is morally wrong.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#512

Post by Forgeties79 » Sat, May 30, 2026, 8:30 PM UTC

bar000n wrote: post #310

UltraSane wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I truly do not understand why anyone believes anything Musk says anymore.

could it be that those people don't actually believe him and just appreciate the genuine shit-show he puts up enabling them to laugh at people who get sad about what he says, and their eagerness to believe

“Pretending” to be a fan of a troll because he tries to troll people who think he’s a troll is a good thing…?

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#513

Post by tomhow » Sat, May 30, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC

KingMob wrote: post #282

turzmo wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Think so? I feel like HN has always had a high level of simping.

HN is, at the time of writing, over 48 million posts over nearly two decades. Whatever you want to notice, you'll notice plenty of examples of. So, sure, I guess there has been plenty of "simping" over the years on HN. There has also been plenty of the opposite of it. As someone who reads the comments (particularly the most emotionally charged ones) every day, the sentiment towards prominent tech companies and leaders has been leaning decidedly negative on HN for several years.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#514

Post by scoofy » Sat, May 30, 2026, 8:40 PM UTC

lefra wrote: post #511

scoofy wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that in the secondary market, the oil will be extracted regardless. By you not participating, you actually increase the return on equity for others, making it more profitable. Buying the stock does not add money into the business. The area for disincentivizing oil production is the political sphere, not the financial sphere. Refusing to participate in secondary market ownership does almost less than noth…

To be clear, I was answering your second paragraph, about "funding oil extraction that is happening anyway". I understood this as "buying shares directly from the extracting company". I agree that buying on the secondary market doesn't directly give money to the company. However, it increases demand (and therefore price) of shares in petrol companies, which might help them raise more money per share for new projects.…

>Some people don't want to earn money that way, because they think it is morally wrong.

I mean that's fair, but it's also why I brought up the three major schools of ethics. The consequentialist likely won't care if it's going to happen anyway. The virtue ethicist will.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#515

Post by tristanj » Sat, May 30, 2026, 9:29 PM UTC

thg wrote: post #492

narrator wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starship is going to make whole entire industries viable that were not viable previously. It might even take a significant chunk of air freight which is going to be a big deal with rising oil prices.

> Starship is going to make whole entire industries viable that were not viable previously. Starship is a complete and utter failure, as you can read about here, among other places: https://www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/starship-is-going-nowh... > It might even take a significant chunk of air freight which is going to be a big deal with rising oil prices. By being several magnitudes more expensive than an airplane wo…

Starship in its current incomplete form (v3 fully expendable ship and booster) already has the lowest cost to orbit in $/kg of any launch vehicle ever. It's around $400/kg to orbit fully expendable.

Add in booster reuse, which SpaceX has already demonstrated on test flight 9, and the cost to orbit drops to $200/kg.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#516

Post by moogly » Sat, May 30, 2026, 10:28 PM UTC

tordrt wrote: post #439

moogly wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lots of people think we would have been better of in an alternate universe where we never discovered oil & gas. Who? Other than strawmen, I mean.

Man, come on.. There are even at least two comments from people in this thread arguing this exact point. Ill promise you its frequency is even higher in the real world than on HN. You must not be very much exposed to the environmental movement, or be much online, if you havent seen this.

Yeah maybe I'm out of touch.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#517

Post by kergonath » Sat, May 30, 2026, 11:10 PM UTC

eigenspace wrote: post #294

kergonath wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why tungsten? In terms of thermal conductivity, It’s way worse than silver and copper and on par with good aluminium alloys. Those are cheaper and much lighter (so again much cheaper to put into orbit).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment The idea is to use tungsten because of the high melting point and hardness so that it survives re-entry in order to best strike the rival datacentre.

This has zero advantage over drones or ICBMs. It’s a joke, a Cold War fever dream.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#518

Post by ben_w » Sat, May 30, 2026, 11:20 PM UTC

pendenthistory wrote: post #198

bluescrn wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the Starship project may be struggling, Falcon 9 is still a massive success, with a successful launch every couple of weeks, making up most of humanity's access to space/LEO right now. And Starlink is a pretty big deal, particularly in a time of conflict where undersea cables are very vulnerable. If Elon hadn't shifted so far to the right, these threads would be near-universally praising SpaceX despite Starship…

Interesting definition of "struggling", as in "managed to catch the largest booster rocket ever built with by snatching it mid air, and land the largest space ship in the ocean using a belly flop maneuver that everyone said was crazy and would never work".

Overall, the rocket launching part of SpaceX is making a loss. Starship R&D is, despite being cheaper than traditional old space development, still *very* expensive.

If Starship wasn't being developed (either because it worked and replaced Falcon or just if they stop), they wouldn't be making a loss on rockets.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#519

Post by jemmyw » Sat, May 30, 2026, 11:25 PM UTC

Gomotono wrote: post #498

tordrt wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Industrial Revolution started in 1760-1800 and was driven by coal, completely replacing wood as the primary industrial fuel. We almost exterminated whales and deforested the entirety of Europe before discovering fossil fuels, which both bounced back after. The first EV an the first solar panel are second order effects and only possible because of the industrial revolution driving massive human innovation and grow…

The revolution could still have happened differently and slower. I didn't say it would have been possible without ANY coal but you do understand that the amount of co2 we put into our atmosphere is not from 1760? All of that big huge co2 output happend in the last 100 year... Solar plus batterie is currently winning. In germany the problem again is NOT the economy, its literaly the energy provider companies being slo…

The first coal powered steam machines were very inefficient. They only made sense at all being sited in an actual coal mine where coal was being extracted for thermal heating, so the fuel was abundant and cheap. Yet they were still barely worth it. From that they were iterated on, but it still took time for them to be made efficiently enough to work economically outside of the mine the fuel came from.

This points to the industrial revolution not being clear progress but requiring specific starting conditions. Steam machines had been around as a curiosity for a long time. And there's no guarantee there would have been slower progress to similar electrical technology without coal/steam because those things also accelerated the development of metallurgy and precision manufacturing specifically. Coal powered machines got efficiency with better precision made iron and steel, coincidentally things that required coal to make.

So I doubt we'd be where we are without coal, it might go further as without coal and the specific circumstances of coal access and necessity on the home island of a nation that has become an economic powerhouse by conquest.

But we can't run the world again. Hopefully we can bounce up to the next level and drop the majority of fossil fuel dependence. We've been pretty dumb about it imo in that we know there are potentially massive downsides too continuing to use it like we are, and we know there are areas like air transport that might have no alternative, so smart would be to transition everything as fast as possible to preserve the niche uses.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#520

Post by wewtyflakes » Sun, May 31, 2026, 12:19 AM UTC

whodidntante wrote: post #470

wewtyflakes wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That strategy would be a taxable event.

There is a high correlation between wealth and taxable accounts. For those that are not well off to have large taxable accounts and have most of their assets in retirement funds, this should not be an issue.

Pile on enough assumptions and qualifiers and then suddenly everything is so easy