Starbase, LA
spacex.com
spacex.com
tl;dw -- louisiana has a ton of natural resources and wonderful harbors, but has allowed corporations to get away with almost anything without paying their fair share of taxes, cleaning up their waste, or generally being held accountable. And likely related, there is a long history of rampant corruption in the area. With sea levels rising and cancerous pollution filling densely populated areas, life in Louisiana has generally become very difficult :(
No doubt one of the more compelling reasons for SpaceX to do it there (along with their given reasoning).
The plans for the site involve extracting significant amounts of natural gas to make methane to burn for the rocket fuel. If they hit the launch levels they suggest (thousands of launches per year), this is not a small amount of greenhouse gases they'll be emitting which of course helps accelerate melting of the ice caps and rising sea levels, which could threaten the very site they've built it on.
Either that or pay decent wages for American workers that'll drive up construction prices and worsen the inflation which is already crazy due to these criminal tariffs.
It's the only correct one. For proof, consider the inflation that happened when Spain looted gold from S. America, then during the California Gold Rush, then the Yukon Gold Rush.
All driven by an increase in the supply of money.
He said the Falcon 1 launch price of $5MM was unrealistic, which ended up being correct. At the time, Falcon 1 was supposed to launch 600kg for $5MM. It ended up launching 420kg for $9MM. $8k/kg to $21k/kg.
Now obviously there's always a lot of doubt and skepticism around SpaceX, but you can just say "people said this would be really hard but they did it." Or you can say "Musk set a goal to 4x performance and got to an also-remarkable 3x" or whatever.
Even in this video, the smug Ariane guy heaps a decent amount of praise upon SpaceX and what they've achieved. He just said a $5MM launch will not be one of those things, and he was correct.
Yes, thus my posting it.
His underlying tone is that reusability is "a dream" (his words). Without reusability, Starlink as a network of tens of thousands of satellites would not be practical.
He said this in 2013, two years before the first Falcon 9 booster landing.
You can try to read the tea leaves on tone and some creative interpretation of implicature (despite Starlink actually needing fewer than 1000 satellites for its public launch), but they're different claims.
Not sure why there's a need to exaggerate the victimhood of SpaceX lol, super strange.
The Ariane guy was quite clear about what he thought was practical and not. He said $5MM launch won't happen (it didn't). He said reusability is a dream (he was wrong). He said nothing about the impossibility of Starlink, either implicitly or explicitly.
Especially not by 2024
I guess I assumed you meant "people who should have a pretty good idea said it was impossible" since that could be interesting, and not "a random person on the Internet said X", since that's not interesting for any value of X.
Add one more and it's people.
You can also find plenty of people on the Internet who say that humanoid reptiles live in the earth's core.
Is either one interesting when/if they're wrong?
Probably a great deal of long term economic impact.
Tons of money flowing through the state. Just to a select few people who own the plants for the most part, not for the people working there day to day. I don't see why one would think that would change.
The issue with Datacentres is that you cant model the advantage of lower colo costs on jobs in the area.
The problem is that some people dont want to permit anything unless they can measure the benefits, when the market doesnt always work like that.
>The initial phase of Terafab is estimated to require approximately $16.8 billion in capital investments from SpaceX and Tesla, with potential future expansion phases bringing total investment much higher. This facility will employ at least 3,000 people, many of whom will be from Grimes and nearby Brazos County — continuing the trend of our other Texas sites where between 60% and 80% of new hires are local residents.
https://www.spacex.com/updates#terafab
That Starbase concept (not that the numbers are realistic by any means) is orders of magnitude more ambitious than what SpaceX does today with 22k employees.
That required a double take
Underestimating humanoid capabilities is a mistake; the real challenge will be the economics and the flow of responsibility. But imagine a future where every structure built has a pov video documenting its construction. I don't like the implication for the trades any more than I like the implication of Claude for putting me out of work either.
SpaceX also has also filed a lawsuit against them claiming 5-800 million in damages for fraudulent billing and contract violations, and has made their own statements.
Does that count as evidence?
Do you hate reading most science fiction? Because the ratio of dystopic to utopic scifi is pretty unbalanced.
Sometimes people want to talk about science stuff without talking about human fallout and political implications. It’s perfectly fine to want an occasional break from those types of discussions.
Everything is human and everything is political. To pretend that it is not is, in itself, a political stance.
1. Everything is political
2. Talking about something without mentioning political and human implications is "pointlessly incomplete"
Topic: "Anyone wanna go swimming?"
Normal people: "Sure."
You, apparently: "Are you aware of how water is unequally distributed throughout the world? How can we possibly discuss swimming if we aren't willing to discuss the political fallout? This is pointlessly incomplete."
Next panel, you're just researching local water table rights while everyone else is swimming and having fun
If your position isn't that everything is political, don't say it is. If it is your position, this is perfectly in line with what you stated.
Why should we be silent over the obvious political aspects of giving Musk more government contracts? Just to please you?
Oh, you don’t really do that? You’re just being performative online?
Got it.
Yeah for sure, science fiction used to be optimistic and utopian, like Planet of the Apes, Brave New World, Frankenstein, 1984, Earth Abides, The Martian Chronicles, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and Island of Dr Moreau, We, Farenheit 451 ...
But it does more generally reflect how society views technology as a whole too. People are generally a lot more pessimistic about new tech now, myself included, we've seen time and time again how its used to control or squeeze us. There actually was a Star Trek episode, "The Game" (season 5, episode 6) about an addicting device you could compare to smartphones (though the device in Star Trek doesn't spy on you to sell your every move to advertisers, missed a trick there), and that certainly wasn't supposed to be an optimistic look at technology, so you can see why things have gone the way they have.
It's on sale now :).
Recently I have read fiction where someone discovers a spaceship/artifact/portal/alien/mcguffin/etc and then they... get the mcguffin, get more stuff, get the girl, win. The plot is just a straight line.
they're boring.
Although not a straight line, any superhero movie. they're predictable and therefore, boring.
So I found the stuff that used to fill me with wonder, I shy away from. I don't want to watch another marvel hero.
I kind of wonder if non-utopia scifi, with reality and struggles and character development... is that the good stuff? doesn't have to all be dark forest or enshittification++ though.
I liked district 9 for instance.
I just turned it all off, though it makes me fear for the future. Feels like the early stages of societal collapse.
He could switch off and stick to building rockets and electric cars. It's very easy (notionally) to just not post on Twitter.
Strongly agree, there is hardly any intelligent discussions with diverging opinions left anymore. People are too deep into their own propaganda, agenda, and echo chambers. Peak bullshit is near.
What is reductive in the richest man on Earth not paying his dues on time? What nuance, what depth do you think is needed here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifesto_of_Futurism
It's always been political
Go find some Soviet space art, or mid century American “space age” stuff, or less dark forms of cyberpunk / cyber culture from the 80s and 90s. None of that is fascist yet all of it is popularly called “futurism.” I’ve even seen the term associated with solarpunk.
As popularly used it means more or less the idea of trying to use human intellect to build or create something fundamentally new, or roughly that. It’s not a precise term more of a vibe.
I was responding to what seemed like the implication that futurism was fascist.
https://www.booksontrial.com/mussolini-and-marinetti-a-timel...
This was a very predictable outcome given the curcumstances.
You forget to mention the guy who was the posterboy for futurism literally decided to turn himself into a political machine circa 2018 or thereabouts against half of the country, apparently triggered by his inablity to cope with his child transitioning and the bruising of his ego when NPCs on the internet made fun of him for failing where they succeded (the scuba diver pedo incident is one example).
Prior to that, he was the second coming of Steve Jobs to the same cohort (pg even called him "Steve Jobs with no taste" on this forum at the time).
Tech should be considered with its political direction (or lack of) to be deserving of adulation. The Cold War dictated the Apollo program for Christ's sake. The whole thing was saturated in politics. The difference is that most people were united for the cause. Believe me, if the people running the Apollo program declared war on half the country it would have been remembered and popularized quite differently.
I'm sure Jewish German scientists had a reluctant admiration for whatever Wernher Von Brauhn was acheiving with the Nazi space program but it would be completely secondary to the fact that he was enabling the Nazi party to "win". No engineering feat could or should eclipse that fact.
Regarding Tech without taking into account the direction it's pointed at is ridiculously naive, whichever side of the political spectrum you are on.
It's not like Germany would have magically grown out of the Nazi party if only Von Braun kept on building cool shit.
top stories nov 2017 - science updates, asteroid mining allowed, battery advances
top stories now (aug 2026) - Trump is crap, Musk is crap, Obesity drugs are crap
Maybe just everything gradually gets taken over by political moaning over time?
Giga Texas
Giga Nevada
Terrafab
etc
There's plenty of examples of this company building these types of projects and following through.
Why do you think this one would be any different?
>Elon Musk Just Said Something About AI That’s Literally Incomprehensible >Sure, man.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/elon-musk-ai-in...
Futurism is a known source of easy to correct misinformation
https://www.hagerty.com/media/great-reads/how-darryl-cuttell...
SpaceX makes plumbers millionaires. It's the employer of dreams
The level of cynicism, shit-talking, and schadenfreude wish-casting in response to this is crazy. Start cheering on successes. Resist the deconstructionist mindset.
Sure, when success stops being the environmental destruction of every area he sets up shop in for SpaceX launches.
Current launch technology inevitably produces a lot of heat and noise and we don't have any rocket model that wouldn't at least rarely fail (and explode).
That said, extant Cape Canaveral does not seem to be lifeless. Lots of birds. IDK how the precise species composition has changed since 1960, but nature as a whole is a lot more resilient than people seem to think.
1) Political - The ideology/party spreading the doomerism promotes that they're the ones that can "fix it", if only you vote for them.
2) Adversarial countries, primarily China - Using the internet to convince members of western civilization to hate their civilization, hate their economic system, hate their history, hate their compatriots, adopt a no motivation defeatist attitude, etc., etc., and they can get our population to destroy itself from within without having to go to war with us.
Reject the doomerism, reject the negativity. Build. Invent. Create. Do your part to contribute to your civilization, to contribute to humanity, to move us forwards.
Does no one read history anymore?
IBM and the Holocaust
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
The V-2 rocket
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket
"The V-2 rocket (German: Vergeltungswaffe 2, lit. 'Vengeance Weapon 2'), with the development name Aggregat-4 (A4), was the world's first practical, modern ballistic missile and suborbital launch vehicle.[4] The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the Second World War in Nazi Germany as a "vengeance weapon" and assigned to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings of German cities."
Nazi's are the good guys only when they work for the U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky
IBM was a US company, just because the Nazis used their computers doesn't make computers bad.
Just because something was once used by bad people or for bad things doesn't mean that it is bad.
After all, books were written by Hitler and the Nazis and I would hope that you aren't willing to paint all literature as being in the same light.
People hat the troll. From all around the political spectrums (well...maybe not on their far edges), people have been disgusted by what Musk has become and everything around him has became toxic because of it.
You don't have to make it about politics. It's just about being a morally civilised human.
A scenario where Musk builds an interplanetary space company is infinitely better than a scenario where Musk is a warlord conquering some unlucky province of a decrepit empire with sword and fire.
Giving such people an option to succeed economically is probably the safest way how to deal with them. SpaceX > Attila, Amazon > vikings.
They have no idea what they're actually building, of course. I just love the comparison of a webhost/telco pop to Manhattan sized gigadcs that require nuclear power plants or blasting gas furnaces.
> even more so than the valley in Texas where Starbase Texas is located.
The "Restoring the shoreline" and Rebuilding the marshlands" paragraphs below the images are almost exactly the same. The first sentence is exactly the same.
FWIW, the writing style and tone match pre-LLM SpaceX writing. Of course you can prompt an LLM to mimic style, but somehow the regression-to-average blandness shines through. That can be hard to distinguish from bog standard corporate speak though.
As an engineer working on cpra projects in the past, I've wanted to reword a variety things but was forced to use their legal language.
It's mostly a good thing as it keeps things properly defined in a political context that are meant to have specific technical meanings (like marsh, beach, rebuild vs restore).
The Louisiana location has two major benefits:
Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO) Access: Launches into SSO have a launch angle of ~98° relative to the equator (i.e. south), and launching from Louisiana gives a direct launch corridor over the Gulf of America without crossing major cities.
SpaceX plans to launch millions of datacenter satellites in SSO, so this is the perfect launch site for their use case. SSO launches from their existing launch sites (Boca Chica and Cape Canaveral) would overfly land.
Existing Methane pipelines: They are next to existing Gulf Coast natural gas/LNG infra, making bulk liquid methane delivery significantly easier. Currently for Starbase, there are no pipelines and methane is shipped in via truck. Delivering the ~1,000 metric tons of methane required for a single Starship launch requires 50-60 tanker truck deliveries.
It's poor form to let a crybaby bully have his way.
I agree with GP - there is no debate to be had over this, only rejection.
You elected a bully to be your leader.
A bully who calls women “piggy”, and everyone lets him get away with it.
The Jill Stein that was investigated because she was clearly in bed with foreign powers hell bent on keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House? That Jill Stein?
You may as well have voted for Trump.
You effectively did when you voted against the sane, rational choice. You voted against a stateswoman who tried to stop precisely the kind of behaviour that is pushing us to the brink of a new world war.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/10/third-party-...
Regardless, my vote for president has never come anywhere close to mattering yet, but I always do it anyways. The state I lived in last election could have had something like 50x all 3rd party candidate votes go to Kamala and she still wouldn't have received the electoral votes from it. Besides, don't you think it a bit odd that instead of steering 1% of Trump voters farther left the problem is supposed to be 100% of green party voters didn't steer farther right? I suppose maybe not to those sitting to the right. At least the same author sees to blame the democrats for the democrats not being popular enough in their much newer articles https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/07/democr...
I certainly would like some ranked choice voting or the like for the choice of president though! Congress too, only 2 states ordinarily have such for that and I don't think it can really do much until at least ~half do. Beyond being exhausted with what 2 party politics has given us the last 2 decades, forcing parties to work with more than just themselves to succeed might be the only thing to break this massive divide growing ever stronger each year. I think foreign interest love to play the 2 party battle as well - some rile up the left, others rile up the right. In the end, everyone here is more divided and the ones out there feel all the better for helping "fix" the world for however they see that being. Can't blame 'em though, the US has no better a track record in history.
For example, "our" Trump is Pauline Hanson, a vile, racist, anti-immigration candidate. She is likely to get a lot of votes because immigration is a problem -- the two major parties are in bed with big businesses, which are making billions of dollars of profit (each), most of which is directly or indirectly caused by high immigration.
In the US, people felt they had no choice but to vote someone like Trump in to get "change".
Here, the current party in power (Labor) has immediately committed to lowering immigration numbers and has also started working on related crises.
Why?
Because of they don't, then One Nation will make preferential voting pacts with their opposition and they'll lose seats next election even if One Nation wins zero seats.
This forces parties to negotiate, even outside of the peak of the election cycle.
You can't just ignore a "minority interest" where there minority is actually just shy of half the population, like can happen with first-past-the-post.
Similarly, "Vote Splitting" doesn't really work, because two similar candidates will recommend each other in the preferential voting.
> (a) serious discussion of a subject in which many people take part
The debate I'm referring to is here, the discussion between commenters on HN about which name should be used (I'm well on the side of Gulf of Mexico as well). One does not need to see multi-sided nuance on the topic itself to engage in debate, they just need to engage in discussion about it. We can certainly choose to not have serious discussion, skipping straight to the name calling summaries instead. I'd consider that a great loss of one of the last open places on the internet where you could avoid that jump whenever something political comes up.
I agree the rename has no good reasons, causes upset & confusion, and was seemingly done out of nothing but hubris & political tactics. I disagree the way to communicate that is just by replying the president is a crybaby instead of seriously discussing these points directly. Please don't mistake that as saying we shouldn't push back or "both sides are right". It's purely about what was on the original tin - can we still have serious discussion here instead of jumping straight to how much we don't like someone as the only reason why.
Nobody is calling "the opposition" a crybaby, but a specific crybaby person.
Do people actually use that name when Trump can't force them to on pain of job loss? I'm pretty sure nobody outside the US does, at the very least.
Removing parasitic elements in government spending and policy will. This starts with politics. We first need a healthy, educated, engaged, and safe population. All else follows. These are all things Elon actively works against. You aren't part of his future.
For instance, take Tesla. It wasn't anything revolutionary. Any auto manufacturer could have invested in battery technology and building a compelling EV, but they didn't. Same with manufacturing in America. Every manufacturer took as given that they have to outsource manufacturing to oversees and components to third parties. But it didn't have to be that way. It takes someone naive and optimistic enough to try something different.
> However: A closer look at the figures published last week shows that Tesla is still making losses with actual sales of electric cars - around $500,000 in 2020.
> In 2020, carbon certificates brought in $1.6 billion, without this revenue the numbers would still be below red.
https://www.electrichunter.com/ev-news/tesla-makes-money-co2...
With a "profit" margin that jumpy and a history of unrentability, i think it's fair to say that Tesla only exists today because of subsidies. It's not just tax benefits, as you frame it, but in this case EU-CO2 certificates, a direct "revenue" stream.
And Unicorns are about valuation, not money in the bank.
I wouldn't be surprised if they start investing again once they destroy the competition and create rival companies in their stead.
Right now they seem to be swatting away wind and solar and propping up nuclear companies that are in their pocket.
The titles read like they're straight out of The Onion:
"Trump Media To Merge With Nuclear Fusion Startup"
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Trump-...
Not a single US auto manufacturer, outside of Tesla, has a good EV, nor FSD. Waymo is buying thousands of Chinese cars because of how shit US car manufacturer are.
They are the worst of the worst. They shouldn't even be in business they are that bad at building cars which they literally invented.
...because Tesla sold luxury vehicles at relatively low volume. By the time Elon reneged his "$25,000 EV" promise, China was ready to export vehicles that actually hit that price point. The only thing preventing Americans from driving affordable EVs is Elon's federal protectionism. Is that really progress?
Obviously it's not a cheap car, but it's still mass market, not luxury.
Outside the US protectionist bubble, Tesla is seen as a luxury brand and their inability to deliver a $25,000 EV doesn't help.
https://teslamagz.com/tesla/model-y/tesla-model-y-becomes-ch...
Also South Korea, Australia, the EU, etc.
Local sources (https://www.autohome.com.cn/hangye/showroom/) tend to show that it's Xiaomi / Geely that's leading the race in 2026.
Additionally, sales numbers doesn't correlate with the brand image of Tesla : it is a luxury brand, no matter how you put it.
Also, you seem to be implying it's somehow a bad thing to have a luxury brand image with mass-market sales, but that's a pretty rare thing to pull off and it's also the key to huge margins. See also: Apple.
Look, Musk is a despicable human being, but the Model 3/Y has been a ginormous hit and it transformed the global EV market. Does he deserves all the credit for pulling this off? Of course not. But you need to stick your head pretty deep in the sand to pretend that a) it was not a success, and b) that Musk had nothing at all to do with it.
Also June, and a better link for monthly sales by model from your source is https://www.autohome.com.cn/rank/1.
Basically Model Y has been consistently in top 3 by monthly sales of EV in China so far in 2026. If you count by 3-month or 6-month periods, it is only next to Geely EX2 at 1/3 of its price as pointed out by another comment.
Part of the fluctuation is due to one month of every quarter the Tesla Shanghai factory is oriented at export, so domestic number drops dramatically.
HN is full of ppl claiming Chinese EV is superior in every way without realizing that Tesla is incredibly popular in Chinese domestic market.
You mean Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, right?
The requirement is economic freedom, from which everything follows.
The US is one of the most economically free places in the world, and always has been, yet obesity is at all time highs, gen Z is the first generation to score less on standardized tests than the generation before them, and civilians killed by law enforcement is at an all time high.
Economic freedom is a very important pillar to a healthy and thriving society, but acting like it is a panacea is wrong. Economic freedom at it's extreme will only lead to a weakening of the middle class and consolidation of wealth among those holding the most wealth.
> obesity is at all time highs
Obesity is a choice. I know people won't like me writing that. I know it is very hard to lose weight. It's still a choice, though. I don't see how making people less free would change that.
> gen Z is the first generation to score less on standardized tests than the generation before them
The government is the primary institution that provides education, not the free market.
> civilians killed by law enforcement is at an all time high
I don't see how that is a result of economic freedom.
> Economic freedom at it's extreme will only lead to a weakening of the middle class
The US was much more economically free in the 1800s than now, and the middle class became the dominant class, by far.
> consolidation of wealth among those holding the most wealth.
Wealthy people get that way in a free market by creating products and services that other people want. In other words, they do not "consolidate" wealth, they create it.
> The government is the primary institution that provides education
I thought there was a large section of free market libertarians that want to get rid of public schooling?
>I don't see how that is a result of economic freedom.
Again, i was using it as a proxy for safety, not economic freedom.
> The US was much more economically free in the 1800s than now
The middle class became the dominant class post-WWII. wtf are you talking about?
If I have one million people pay me $1000, I am creating value, but I not 'creating wealth' I would literally be consolidating the wealth of one million people into my bank account.
Owning desirable assets could be considered 'creating wealth' due to the price of those assets going up, but owning assets is not creating products and services that other people want.
I will go back to my original point, that economic freedom is not a panacea and does not solve for health, education, and safety, but rather creating things that people want to seperate them from their money. Health, education, and safety are all more effective when provided by the government.
I've heard that before, and it's simply not true. Pre-revolutionary colonial America had a thriving middle class.
Consider this. A couple of decades ago, a sunken Missisouppi river steamboat was found in the mud. It had foundered before the Civil War, I don't recall the date. And so it was dug out, and researchers went over its cargo.
They were shocked to find out what the cargo was.
It was everything needed for a general store. Pots, pans, jars, knives, forks, shoes, clothing, preserved meats and candies, tools, etc. Nothing in it was for rich people, it was all meant for the middle class. And it was packed to the gills with that cargo.
If you like, look at paintings and photographs of towns in the 1800s. Do you see a couple mansions, and a bunch of shacks? Nope. You see middle class homes, general stores, all signs of a prosperous middle class.
> all more effective when provided by the government
Government providing that has a pretty sorry history.
> due to the price of those assets going up
The price of the asset is a function of its ability to create value.
Do me a favor and point to an American history book that informed your point of view. But fair is fair, I submit:
https://www.amazon.com/ALASTAIR-COOKES-AMERICA-Alastair-Cook...
Read it and tell me that the US consisted of overlords and serfs. Yes, I know about the slave South, which was an overlord/serf economy.
Not much economic freedom for slaves or for Indians forced off their land (e.g. illegal seizure of the Black Hills by the US government [0], the Cherokee in Georgia, etc).
Prior to 1900s-era state laws and the federal Securities acts, you could sell fraudulent investments backed by nothing but the blue skies of Kansas. I suppose that's an economic freedom that was lost, can't say I miss it.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seizure_of_the_Black_Hills
> you could sell fraudulent investments
Fraud is against the law in a free market.
SpaceX is 85% of all mass to orbit for the entire planet, then it's China, and Europe is <5%.
The next people to set foot on the moon will likely be Americans, and they will be put there by SpaceX rockets.
You need big billionaires to pull off huge projects, no one else can take those risks. It’s basically how America was built.
What you’re talking about is improving people’s quality of life which we desperately need but it takes money and that comes from the first capitalist part.
Don’t get too sucked into any of the nonsense on the far right (obviously) but also don’t get too sucked into what the progressives are saying. They don’t have a plan for how to fund their socialism.
But are they building it ghost to ghost?
Florida is more interesting than people realize.
I spent my childhood fishing in a swimsuit every day I could. I loved it. But as an adult, any south of Ocala and east of Gainesville is a cultural wasteland (with cutouts for Miami and Tampa).
We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon, but overall I still hope it's possible.
(Anyone asking antagonistic questions can go ahead and save their fingers, I won't respond to the petty comments.)
And if we do, how are we going to fight them? By shooting missiles at them?
I was a huge believer in Elon musk. I invested and made a lot of money in Tesla before Model S had even entered serial production. Now? Fuck you Elon, go Peter Beck…
I get that rockets are cool and a lot of people in the tech bubble think that starlink is the greatest thing ever, but most people don't care about that nearly as much as they care about seeing their children die from preventable diseases he cut the funding for or getting violently ill because he drove thousands of food inspectors and researchers out of a job.
Handling the enormous federal debt that he continues to play a part in worsening is going to very painful in the long run.
Billionaires don't "dig" anything except the foundations for things that are going to make them even more money.
Elon Musk isn't the problem, he is the symptom. The problem is that it is basically required to be ruthless and corrupt to get anything done in this country at the scale, price, and timeline needed to be commercially viable. The solution is less regulation and bureaucracy, not more.
Vetocracy isn’t democracy. It’s a tiny minority having veto power.
So yes the only person who succeeds in such a system is a human battering ram who can just bash their way through it by being a manic asshole with insane force of will.
There should be tons of Elon Musks, including nicer ones, but nice people get vetoed.
rockets and wifi satellites are only solving problems because corporations have sucked public infrastructure dry for generations
3,000 short term jobs doesn't put a dent in the thousands of jobs he has cut, not to mention the losses to our economy due to the tariffs, immigration policy, and deficit spending that he caused.
> We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon
I'm of the impression that you can't corrupt your way out of corruption.
https://www.moneytalksnews.com/slideshows/billion-and-counti...
It is not him, SpaceX is a government funded project yet he keeps all the money. You should be outraged.
It’s rent vs build and I’m not so sure the government benefits so much from owning space shuttles. But arguing that the government purchasing launch volume is the same as them buying the R&D for the shuttles is not a logical coherent and consistent position.
For what it’s worth a common refrain I’ve heard from people who hold your position is that government patents are also the property of the people. So not only does the government spend a lot on R&D, in such a model it’s incapable of monetizing this R&D as a way to recoup those expenses.
By this method the money largely comes from the government and is captured into private interests, literally hollowing out the government tax base for corporate power
Of course Musk talks big. He is almost always late. Lots of things have never happened, or have not yet worked (but they’re still trying)
At the same time he has monumental successes that nobody, ever, has achieved. Worlds safest car (multiple times) worlds highest selling car (model y), car of the year, massive factories building at a speed and quality that made Toyotas CEO say they’re in trouble and have a lot to improve.
The whole supercharger network that smashes every other one.
World’s first reusable rocket, done it 300 times now. Only two others have done it once. By far, by far more launches than every country and company in the world put together. Starship coming along.
To say that he never does anything is a very, very strange set of blinders to view the world through
"Nobody ever" doesn't really feel accurate here.
>Worlds safest car (multiple times)...
According to which body? Tesla's interpretation of NHTSA data? Some other organization? Did other cars prior to Tesla's inception obtain this title "multiple times"?
>... worlds highest selling car (model y)...
In 2023, the Y peaked at ~1.22 million. In 1923, the Model T sold ~2.09 million.
>... car of the year...
Numerous bodies label things "car of the year", and many cars were named that before and after Teslas were produced.
Please provide a list of all the companies that have reused a first stage booster many times.
And all the companies that have launched more to orbit in a year than everyone else combined.
> According to which body? Tesla's interpretation of NHTSA data? Some other organization? Did other cars prior to Tesla's inception obtain this title "multiple times"?
August 2013 (Model S): Tesla announced that the Model S achieved a 5.4-star rating from the NHTSA, noting it was the highest score ever recorded at the time.
February 2017 (Model X): The NHTSA gave the Model X a 5-star rating in every category, making it the first SUV with the lowest probability of injury.
August 2018 (Model 3): Tesla published data showing the Model 3 had the lowest probability of injury of any car tested by the NHTSA.
September 2022 (Model Y): The Model Y earned record-breaking safety scores during European testing, achieving the highest overall safety score recorded by Euro NCAP at that time.
December 2024 / 2025 (Model Y & Model 3): The IIHS awarded the Model Y a Top Safety Pick+ designation, while Euro NCAP named both the Model 3 and Model Y as "Best-in-Class" safety winners.
January 2026 (Global NCAP Wins): Euro NCAP and ANCAP crowned the Model 3 as the safest Large Family Car and the Model Y as the safest Small SUV under updated protocols.
> * In 2023, the Y peaked at ~1.22 million. In 1923, the Model T sold ~2.09 million.*
Safe to say the model T had a lot less competition in 1923 than the Y does now. Clearly it’s a bigger achievement now.
> Numerous bodies label things "car of the year", and many cars were named that before and after Teslas were produced.
Tesla were the first electric car to win coty and be highly praised as having a chance to make EVs mainstream. I don’t know how old you are and if you remember, the Model S was nothing like we had seen before (I’m an automotive journalist, FWIW)
Never owned a Tesla.
No horse in the race.
Interesting. Perhaps ironic?
If only society cared about genuinely good people like they seem to care about Musk. It's puzzling.
Just the same as saying Israel is committing genocide is not antisemitism, saying Musk has achieved incredible things is not caring about or supporting him.
Both cases are simply stating facts without any judgement or show of support/not support.
>Both cases are simply stating facts...
Sure, unless (as I pointed out in my other response) we're playing fast and loose with what actually constitutes "facts".
If your Tesla (made by a company he took private at $420/share) makes you passive income as a robotaxi while you sleep, which you spend paying off the loan you took out in 2020 for the ticket to Mars that you bought to avoid covid which ended up being pointless because nobody got it past April then I’d understand being confused about his reputation. If not, you kind of just posted a roundabout way of saying that you don’t care or notice when he makes stuff up.
That does not mean he has achieved nothing incredible.
If John Carmack or Tim Cook or Henry Ford said they were going to make cheap, reliable fusion reactors in every home but never did, they would still be the legends they are for the things they did do successfully. The things they didn’t do don’t change what they did.
The two are unrelated, infact.
If I wanted to have a completely different conversation, unrelated to his reputation for making stuff up, with a fan about his creations I’d say something like “He created reusable rockets? Wow that Elon guy must have so many patents relating to aerospace and manufacturing” but that would be a totally different thread
People have goals they work towards...
Sometimes they have success/failure.
That's different from "making stuff up"
How convenient. You have to ignore him on a personal level to be a supporter like you are. Because you know he's a repulsive individual on every level. And if you didn't qualify your support for him you'd debase yourself.
I’m simply stating facts That are easily verifiable.
It could be factual to say "I find his achievements incredible" or "many people find his achievements incredible". But not "he has achieved incredible things".
And subjectively, launching more to orbit than the rest of the world is an incredible achievement. So is reusing a first stage rocket 300 times. So is building the world’s best selling car.
These are incredibly difficult things to do, hence, “incredible”
Personally I describe nuclear weapons as incredible (though also horrific).
That's beside the point though, which is that you can't say something being "incredible" is a fact. It's a subjective judgement.
Sure, I can do that.
It seems things are getting done.
Social media is unhealthy. You know what else is unhealthy? Hacker News' constant bashing of every. single. thing. ever.
Ten pads and thousands of flights per year sure will accelerate Golden Dome, err... I mean "going to Mars"
State of Louisiana was probably on their hands and knees begging. The construction would last decades and anyone with a strong back that can be told what to do and do it will have a job. It would help lift a lot of people in that area out of poverty.
logistically, i wonder how long it takes to ship from Starbase Texas to Louisiana via barge. It has to be easier to get Starships to Louisiana than the East side of Florida.
It's not gonna help us do shit. It will line the pockets of the usual wealthy Louisiana oil barons and politicians similar to the Meta Datacenter that got backed door approved by our politicians.
Man, I was hoping they would pick Alaska (as it's even better for launching into those orbits) - we could really use new industries other than just resource extraction, but Louisiana makes a lot of sense, I just am surprised that there's actually the available land there to do this. Interesting.
I would absolutely love if we were building launch infrastructure up here. We have tons of open space for it, Cape Chiniak is "fine" but kind of remote. What I wish we would do is put some launcher's on the road system, or close to it, then build out our own space infrastructure here in AK. We really need something other than just resource extraction up here and asteroid mining and space manufacturing is going to be particularly bad for the Alaskan economy. Once it's cheaper to get a big rock from space, or battery tech gets just a little bit cheaper, the economy up here is in deep trouble.
My little startup is trying to do build some tools up here for local airlines using AI, and I'm able to make money at it? Which is cool - there's not a huge amount of technically talented people here compared to Seattle or the Bay Area, but there's still smart people in these parts, we have resources, and we have available land and permissive building rules. That is so crazy valuable in a world where NIMBY rules everything down south. Like, obviously I don't want them drilling for oil in DNP, but you know, I have been to and worked in the arctic, I'm pretty fine if we were building things up there, or on these remote Aleutian islands, or in these relatively empty and uninhabited/uninhabitable places.
I wish these companies would look north to build. There are some Nimby d-bags up here, but there are FAR fewer of them than any other place I've ever lived. For context on a hyper micro-scale, my driveway permit outside of Anchorage for our cabin was handled for free with a friendly email to the borough and them wishing me luck. Obviously, other people's mileage may vary, especially for things like giant projects, dams, mines, etc. but the burden here is so much less - you can almost just... feel it. Despite being "harder" to do things up here, it's remarkably permissive.
Maybe when my little startup is more capable and I've got more money coming in, and I'm spitting out drones from my little machine shop, maybe I'll be able to do more?
In space you can just start. Nobody is really going to stop you.
(I know nominally they’re not visible but they are shortly after launch while moving into position, and at large scale that would be happening all the time, not to mention the other side of burning up in the atmosphere after a few years)
Well played sir, well played.
“I can do it in this challenging environment or I can not do it at all” is kind of a false choice if you think AGI is imminent. Personally, I think we’re already there for KVM stuff, it’s just the goal posts are accelerating at an exponential rate the same with the capabilities.
If you assume we aren't going to create a singularity in the next few decades, then no, it doesn't make sense economically to do it. Even ignoring that we'd have to develop a design that works in space, and even if SpaceX is able to significantly reduce cost per kg to orbit, it would still cost 15-30x more to build the same data center, and you have to pay that premium every time a piece of equipment burns out.
It would be cheaper to build aircraft carrier sized ships to hold them or give every adult in the town where they are building a couple million dollars to fuck off. And again, that's only if SpaceX can produce an as-of-yet mythical level of scale. If they stop anywhere short of that, then we're talking about billions of dollars to build in space what you could build on earth for tens of millions.
Instead of installing MWs of illegal gas generation and also still causing local electricity rates to spike, why not arrange to buy down the electricity of local ratepayers and also comply with existing laws & regulations?
It's worth asking why operators aren't doing that yet. I suspect it's because neither OAI nor Anthropic have an extra $50B-$100B to put out at the moment. We'll see what happens post-IPO.
The worst that would happen is that it becomes difficult to build in convenient places. That certainly would be annoying. But the problem with space as the solution is that space is by far the least convenient place imaginable, with the possible exception of the bottom of the deep ocean.
The outcome is almost entirely determined by launch costs.
Edit: Oh wait, you're the guy who makes bold claims and then refuses to bet on them because you know you'll lose money. 10 months ago you said, "no Tesla has EVER driven without a driver with Tesla assuming liability for crashes. And I don't think they ever will."[1] When I tried to get you to bet money on your prediction (which is now false), you ignored me. A few months later, you said, "Tesla doesn't even have the permits to operate Robotaxis in California and probably never will because they are actually stricter vs Texas."[2] and again I tried to bet you that Tesla would have Robotaxis in California before the end of 2028, and again you refused.
I really wish HN had a way to mark or mute users, because if I knew who I was replying to, I'd collapse the thread and not waste my time engaging with you.
And the Tesla robotaxi is still a embarrassing failure.
When the weather agrees, yes. Sooooo many launches are scheduled around weather patterns and are affected by weather delays - I'd be shocked if LA didn't have 3-4x more 'launchanble weather' days on average compared to Alaska.
I'm sure we'll get to the point where we can launch and land without regard to weather outside of the extremes, much as we have with air travel, but we are far from there today.
Icing might be a problem? I would expect there to be basically no reasonable icing accretion possible well before max q? But I'm not sure because that's not my field.
Regardless, if we're going to be building data centers in space to avoid NIMBYs, we can build rocket infrastructure in Alaska to avoid NIMBYs too. And other infrastructure too? Maybe. I know the SpinLaunch lunatics (I mean that in the most loving way, I love that crazy idea even though it seems insane to me) were getting some sort of permit to launch from Adak. I have been out there a few times and I wish we would try to build more infrastructure out there too... with the NW passage being more traversable due to global warming there's could be a lot more infrastructure there too.
Liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellants are loaded at cryogenic temperatures -- boiling point is -183C for O2, -161C for CH4; SpaceX does some amount of subcooling so the propellants may be even cooler than that.
Ice accumulation while just sitting on the pad is a given, even in tropical climates (the water just freezes out of the air). Might even be a greater problem in (say) florida or louisiana than in Alaska given higher humidity.
That would largely be my only concern up here, and turbulence? I don’t know how well large rockets do in rough air? That said, cape chiniak is on Kodiak and some of the absolute worst “turn you nearly every way but loose turbulence” I’ve ever seen has been down wind of terrain around ADQ? But going up that seems like less of a problem, or only a problem for a few dozen thousand feet?
I’ve accumulation on the forward end of the rocket and associated drag was what I was thinking.
Regardless, I’d really like to see more space industry stuff up here.
The wake up call might be difficult, for the whole country or even the whole world.
What does this mean, how can a shoreline erode
Then you take a bunch of humans and you cut down all the really old cypress trees for lumber. To facilitate that process you cut channels through all the plants that are in the way so you can ship that lumber via new unobstructed waterways. You also do it for oil/gas exploitation.
So now you have a lot of infiltration of saltier or fresher water and less protection during storm surge and such. Lots of plants die and these plants were holding the dirt/soil in place (and the storm surge helps wash that away).
Also you re-engineer the original waterways that deposited silt/dirt and helped build these areas up so that they deposit silt/dirt in other places (also you harvest the silt/dirt for use in farming so it never even gets that far down the waterways in the first place).
It's interesting that Lousisana works so differently. I always kind of assumed that dunes would always be needed to keep the sea out in low lying areas, but that's not the case at all.
Does each job pay $30M?
Rockets sometimes fail. SpaceX has one of the lowest failure rates in the industry, but that's still ~0.5%. When they fail near launch, they cause humongous explosions. Because of this, anyone with even a tiny bit of care for people launches over the ocean, so that when it goes oops, it only harms some fish.
The existing launch sites SpaceX uses are good for launching into prograde (Starbase, TX and Cape Canaveral, FL) and retrograde (Vandenberg SFB, CA) orbits, but they are all either unable or kind of marginal for launching into polar/very highly inclined orbits. (Starbase, TX cannot do it at all, Vandenberg SFB, CA has limitations on when you can launch, and Cape Canaveral, FL needs to fly a dogleg which reduces performance.)
Part of their plans for the space datacenters involve launching a lot of mass into sun-synchronous (which is very highly inclined) orbits. For that, they need a launch site with the ocean either to the north or to the south.
People seriously need to value this thing realistically. Otherwise we are handing the money required over to a raging narcissist who plans to launch hundreds and thousands of rockets, each one burning KEROSENE or methane... For what? Live on mars? Aykm? Starlink? Nifty but I get unlimited 5g 300 Mbps unlimited for 8 euros a month. And does starlink work inside? What else? Does nobody else see it as kind of strange that humans with all of our technology still have not figured out a better way to power a rocket with kerosene or methane? And we're powering the most cutting edge computing AI using.... Fossil fuels.
Fail
Erosion from that decision was already an issue 50 years ago; weather events accelerated the pace, but so have upriver dams that cut off sediment supply, and also shipping canals that have carved gaps into it that push surges further inland than they would otherwise, and also the chéniers that diverted floodwaters regardless of cause into more fragile marshes, and also farmland that was in active use as far south as Pecan Island up until Rita salted it, and also 50 years of oil-industry support infrastructure, and also the Deepwater rig explosion that leaked oil that killed off marshes (the settlement of which is how the state ended up capable of awarding this land), and also rampant invasive nutria that negated efforts to use agricultural fresh-water discharge to reverse previous damage.
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11042/
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...
https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/44432/noaa_444...
https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/45895/noaa_458...
https://gulfspillrestoration.noaa.gov/media/document/2018-07...
https://www.usgs.gov/publications/accelerating-elevation-gai...
Filter Lifecycle Intensity by category 4 and 5.
You won't see any lines close to land near Cape Canaveral. Though to be fair, Vermilion Parish seems to be far enough west in Louisiana that it doesn't get direct hits either (but some are close).
Then look at the NHC Storm Surge Risk map: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/203f772571cb48b1b8b...
Cape Canaveral is mostly 0-3 ft with some >3 ft. Meanwhile the entire immediate coast for the new Louisiana SpaceX location is >6 ft to >9 ft.
I think they'll probably have more a lot more trouble with storms than Cape Canaveral. The dynamics along the Atlantic coast are a lot different from the Gulf.
Sounds really neat, but "incredibly ambitious announcement" from an Elon Musk company is starting to wear thin.
Is this real, or will it join the graveyard of other incredibly ambitious projects that were eventually abandoned to focus on the next incredibly ambitious project.
For example, SpaceX is responsible for a massive spike in orbital launches [1].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...
Including robotaxis, tesla semi-trucks, hyperloop, optimus, roadster 2.0, cheap whole home batteries, true FSD, Mars landing, nueralink, and more I'm sure.
It is difficult for me to get excited about a decades long, ambitious project when the follow through rate is <10%.
[x] Partially reusable rocket that dropped cost to orbit by an order of magnitude. And no, the space shuttle (while an amazing piece of engineering), doesn't really count. It cost a billion+ to refurbish and did nothing to make space more accessible. Now we have businesses that exist purely because the Falcon 9 exists. Heck, the entire new space industry got validated (and hence got investment) due to SpaceX's success.
[x] Returning human spaceflight capability to the US at a fraction of the price, using the same reusable rocket platform after the old defense primes failed to do so. And then making it cheap enough that it has now also flown about half as many private missions as it did for NASA.
[x] Global satellite constellation providing gigabit-scale internet with 10000+ satellite (once written off by "experts" as yet another "incredibly ambitious project" that will never happen).
[x] Commercializing and bringing down the cost of electric cars to the point where they are actually a viable option now (unlike the compliance cars made by OEMs 10 years ago).
[x] Building the largest rocket to ever exist that now has a clear path to being the first ever fully reusable launch vehicle.
[x] A BCI implant that has now brought back mobility and communication ability to multiple patients with debilitating conditions.
Given that each of these were things that no one had done successfully before, or had failed spectacularly - I don't really care that they took longer than initially planned.
There is, in fact, a graveyard here. It is mostly filled with confident predictions that his companies would never do the things they have since done.
The new roadster is delayed, not abandoned. It's known to be in active development and is very likely to be demoed this year. Wrong timeline but not abandoned.
The Tesla semi is on the road daily and the factory to build large quantities is almost complete. They're hosting a "factory inauguration" event next month. Certainly not abandoned.
Tesla has already committed to replacing hardware as necessary on cars that purchased FSD in the past so that they can run unsupervised as promised, after Tesla has unsupervised FSD working. Certainly the timeline was wrong but again, clearly not abandoned.
New Roadster is over six years late and has basically gone silent at this point. Maybe it'll still come, just extremely late, but I'm very skeptical.
Semi might be real, we'll see.
If cars that were built with AP2/2.5/3 get upgraded to unsupervised FSD, I'll eat my hat. They don't even know what hardware will be needed yet and some of those cars are now a decade old.
Go ahead and count it as "abandoned" if you want. He did talk about building a Hyperloop and is not currently pursuing it directly. But I think failing to win required government approval/funding is a bit different than capriciously giving up on an idea, and The Boring Company itself is far from abandoned. Very different from the solar roof which is unambiguously a commercial failure.
TBC's continued existence isn't very relevant; the point was they/he have yet to build a lasting, full-scale hyperloop, despite his statement they would try. He stopped trying, and I'm fairly sure government approval is far from the only significant obstacle to making a functional and profitable hyperloop anyway.
I might even let go of the hyperloop concept, if they built something else of DC-NYC scale that beats the alternatives in a few measurements.
Gwynne Shotwell is the actual reason SpaceX is as successful as it it.
> Gwynne Shotwell is the actual reason SpaceX is as successful as it it.
Weird take. If you read any of the biographies or books about SpaceX, you would know that many key personnel at SpaceX (e.g. Tom Mueller [1], Hans Koeniggsman[2], Tim Buzza [3], Jim Cantrell[4], Garrett Reisman [5]) have all mentioned his major role in the engineering decisions there.
Gwynne has done an amazing job at running the company - but she doesn't make the engineering decisions. You cannot deny the achievements of the company - so you just say that he had no role in it. This sort of retconning of history just because people don't like him, is super weird.
> When we first started he didn't know a lot about propulsion. He knew quite a bit about structures and helped the structures guys a lot. Over the twenty years that we worked together, now he's practically running propulsion there because he's come up to speed and he understands how to do rocket engines, which are really one of the most complex parts of the vehicle. He's always been excellent at architecting the whole mission, but now he's a lot better at the very small details of the combustion process. Stuff I learned over a decade-and-a-half at TRW he's picked up too."
> Musk "didn't know a lot about rockets initially, but he learned a lot over time," Koenigsmann said. Musk picked knowledge up quickly, which was "amazing to watch," he added. "I really enjoyed working with him and learning how he sees things," Koenigsmann said. "He sees things from a different perspective." Musk provided a "unique perspective" on scenarios involving basic physics by asking what the limiting factor was, according to Koenigsmann. An example of this was when Musk pushed his engineers to shorten the time it took to fuel SpaceX's rockets. Musk said SpaceX should aim to reduce the time from 30 minutes to eight minutes — the same time it takes to empty a rocket tank, according to Koenigsmann. SpaceX uses propellant at very low temperatures to increase its density, allowing engineers to cram more into each rocket, Insider previously reported. Rockets need to be fueled quickly before launch so the propellant doesn't warm up. As a result of Musk's direction, SpaceX's rockets are fueled "in a remarkably short time," Koenigsmann said."
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/buzzat-1-15-...
> Elon Musk is our chief designer. I think between himself and the technical design teams, they came up with the initial concepts of the size of the vehicle, how much propellant's on board, what the engine thrust is going to be, two stage rocket, that kind of stuff.
[4] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/former-spacex-exec-explains-e...
[5] https://magazine.wharton.upenn.edu/digital/from-nasa-to-spac...
> The thing that impresses me the most is his ability to reach very, very, very deep into particular technical topics, but across an incredibly wide scope. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen that can really do it with that level of acumen. He can jump from talking to our electronic experts about the arcane details about the architectures of the processor inside the flight computer, and then talk to our structures guys about a particular type of alloy in their welding techniques. His ability to switch gears and interact at such a very high technical level with experts in each of these subjects, and not only keep up, but surpass them in many cases, is remarkable.
Nobel syndrome
I still feel glad for the SpaceX engineers and scientists who succeed and doing new and innovative stuff. But their employer is just like every other military contractor sucking on the unlimited teets of the US Government. What a waste of taxpayer money.
I grew up in during the Cold War and I'm sick of this shit. America always thinking it has to dominate any country that doesn't bow down before it.
Unless you're a total pacifist, it's a genuinely stupid and unserious position that warrants invective ridicule and mockery.
I mentioned this in another comment, but was downvoted rather than greeted with pushback from people volunteering to become my personal slaves. If that sounds ridiculous, please understand that's exactly what these retards (or bots) desire. That's what their position invites to happen.
(I also can't change their mind, so might as well get some morally clean slaves out of it. I might even let them free if they realize the error of their ways, which is something a conquering force would never do.)
Just because you personally prefer to be subjugated doesn't mean anyone else does. That necessarily means being able to defend yourself from bad actors, and history has proven the best way to do that is by investing in technology.
The OP wrote:
> You're being down-voted (and so shall I) but I think you're right. Despite all the animosity towards him, Musk is doing things that are economically meaningful for our nation.
In the context of the US building big things, ramping up manufacturing, doing Space exploration, &c. and the person I replied to wrote:
> Musk has done a huge amount to put us INTO this situation
What situation did he put us in to in this context? Did he put us in to the situation where we are building bigger things now? Are you saying that there was a situation that we were put in to and that situation only started when Trump was elected and prior to that we were... what? Building big things and trying to restore manufacturing and now we're also doing that under Trump?
Someone here should be specific about what they're talking about instead of just "Musk bad Trump bad". Yea they're both morons or whatever but what exactly are we supposedly criticizing here? Just that Trump got elected? Ok that's a boring conversation let's switch back to talking about manufacturing and building big projects in America.
- 2.9% inflation - Billions of dollars of grants for state-run energy projects - NATCAST - Healthy & stable funding for the sciences - Competent leaders at the federal and military levels to oversee large complex projects - Healthy partnerships with allies
Specific actions that have been taken by Trump (backed by Musk) that caused us to lose the above:
- Starting an unnecessary war with Iran - Cancelling grants for energy projects specifically in blue states - Imposing nonsensical tariffs on trade partners - Starting a full-blown trade war with Canada - Alienating other allies, ex. starting a middle-east conflict without any alliances (excl. Israel) - Specifically closing NATCAST because "illegal" - Gutting of science funding by DOGE & others - Removal of competent leaders & prioritization of loyalty over competence when choosing staff
I have a hard time taking anyone seriously when they bring up anything about Trump having a positive impact on manufacturing in America. For 4+ years he's been lying to the American public about how tariffs work and claiming that US consumers paying more taxes to the US gov't in the form of tariffs is going to 'return' manufacturing to the US. We have almost half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the US - explain to me again why this is a capacity problem?
If it's just complaining about Trump/Musk then yea sure let's complain about them in a different topic, but the OP was talking about Musk building big things and he undeniably has (or his companies have, rather).
> We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon, but overall I still hope it's possible.
There is no hope if people like Musk are unnacountable and increasingly powerful. The situation you need to dig out of was caused by people like Musk.
And large dream projects wont make the hole smaller. They will make it deeper.
Predictability is extremely important for markets and planning and general welfare. He doesn’t have to randomly declare things on a Thursday that haven’t changed for decades and create anxiety among (you name it community or industry) just to stay in the headlines.
Donald Trump has destroyed predictability, as well as any semblance of functioning, predictable government. Trump is an extremely influential and powerful unilateral executive - in all the wrong ways.
Evidence you say? I guess tariff policy and a completely arbitrary war with Iran that roiled markets, just to name a couple from this year.
not spending ensures no voters know who you are, but the most spending doesn't result in the most votes
funny prisoner's dilemma for partisans, well, more amusing if you sell ad space
This is potentially one of the most out of touch comments I've seen here in a while, and that's saying something.
In this case you don't get to try the options first. You made a decision based on what you've seen and heard.
And you think the advertising budget isn't the key thing?
“not spending ensures no voters know who you are, but the most spending doesn't result in the most votes”
Did your eyes glaze over after the first line, it’s such a short comment
In the US, his political beneficiaries have managed to "achieve" net negative migration to the US for the first time in 50 years, and the first decline in overall population in US history.
If this becomes the new trend (and if Musk gets his political desires fulfilled, it might), the hole is getting much, much deeper while our capacity to climb out is being severely impaired.
And oh yea, he killed hundreds of thousands of kids, mostly under 5.
Prove me wrong bro
Fuck Elon get out of my state.
Pretty cynical corpo-ambiguity-speak, even by Musk standards.
We're supposed to be happy they're promising not to develop one-hundred percent of the land footprint? They will leave at least 0.00001% of land area as wetlands and therefore we oughta be happy?
Such empty bullshit it's more insulting they even put an environment-leaning section on the site. Just say "fuck it, our space fetish is more important than the wetlands."
Evolution has done stranger things, but my bet is that the birds will find somewhere else to be over learning to not be startled by nearby earth-rumbling explosions.
A rocket launch every hour or so as SpaceX is promising might be quite different.
The Solar City timeline should have taught us everything we need to know about these astronomical projections... they couldn't even throw enough billions at solar panels that kinda look like roof tiles to get them to work, and the same cabal wants us to think the next step is space travel and terraforming?
You can still choose to read that cynically, but I think the cynical angle is taking moral ecological credit for a pragmatic engineering reality :P
Having that intermittently a couple times per day I think will be very disruptive.
I was just trying to say that the marshland restoration stuff is likely not lip service, insofar as they actually do need wetland buffer zone to keep their launchpads above sea level.
"Promises" or "commitments" like this need to be evaluated based on the previous behavior of the people "making" them (although they were very careful with working to not use either of those words, and just imply them)
just one launch base will transform the Louisiana economy.
[0] https://www.klfy.com/louisiana/interactive-map-shows-which-p...
I don't think so. Likely the pad with last 10 years max.
In any case, I highly doubt that but in any case sea level is almost certainly going to rise below a meter. Filling a meter higher with sand is a pocket change for this project.