> We could provide food for the poor and disabled who lack or are not using family support with a tiny fraction of our industrial output.
I absolutely agree. We spend $30K/year per person (not per household, per person!) under the poverty line, and that's only on HUD, Medicaid, and Food Stamps. These resources should be lavished on those who actually need them. The tricky part is dealing with the perverse incentives which come with doing right by the disabled. The obscene abuse of military disability benefits is a case in point.
There's no such thing as "jobs natives don't want", only "wages natives don't want".
> Maybe, or maybe they just employ less people and less things get built.
The foreign born population residing in the US fell from ~15% to ~5% from 1920-1970. It was one of the most prosperous and productive periods in human history.
US was prosperous post war because the industrial capacity of the rest of the world was destroyed. Comparing that time period to any other doesnt make sense.
We can only employ natives if we want, we just have to accept that prices of things that are currently run on immigrant labor will go up, and a lot less of it will be produced. Personally I am unwilling to make that tradeoff but obviously you dont have to agree. US labor market suffers seriously from baumol's cost disease, only solution to that is immigration with the understanding that immigrants will take unwanted jobs in exchange for a better life for their kids.
Do yourself a favor and DCA in from here. SpaceX was "only" valued at 210 Billion back in June 2024, around 11% of its current valuation. A return to that valuation would take it down to ~$16/share!
SpaceX is a phenomenal company. I've wanted to buy in since 2009. But the stock is the exact inverse of my ideal single-stock investment thesis--huge downside with severely limited short-to-mid-term upside, given the huge premium already being paid.
If these figure represent actual deaths (big if), those people will have died because literally nobody on earth was willing to pay to keep them alive--yourself included.
If a pillar is removed from a building with no warning, no one would claim that its collapse was from the unwillingness of anyone else to put a new one in place.
If DOGE had announced a 2-year phaseout of humanitarian aid, governments and NGOs might have had time to fill the gap. Doing so arbitrarily and abruptly was simply cruel.
We both know you haven't lifted a finger to help these people. You're not interested in actually saving lives, just that sweet righteous indignation (after all, it's free!)
I've been pursuing the public good my entire career, including making major career moves to improve the developing world. You've crafted a delusion to justify your clearly antisocial behavior. You have no right dictating to people that they need to do x, y, and z to have genuine ethics when you are stumping to increase child mortality in Africa. Good day to you sir!
But wait, I do pay taxes? By you logic, no policy choice can ever cause harm because the responsibility is always redistributable to several billion bystanders. Pretty convenient!
No serious really argued that; what they argued is that a Mars colony is impractical, interplanetary travel as a fantasy, and data centers in space as delusional.
>“When you talk about conventional technologies on a booster like you see other people doing, and being able to recover and reuse that booster 15 times with relatively minimial refurbishmoent costs, that’s pretty darn challenging, and maybe not the right place, in our view, to start on that problem,” Bruno said.
This doesn't really sound like doubting any claim; he's talking about how his organization was approaching it given their limited resources.
I think that misremembers or misrepresents history.
The DC-X was program developed in the early 1990s expressly to prove the feasibility of orbital rocket vertical landings and rapid turn-around/reuse. It never made it to the full orbital regime because it was scrapped early, but it was considered successful in proving the proof-of-concept. It was also managed by the predecessors of ULA (McDonnel Douglas, which later merged with Boeing).
> “We have not really changed our assessment over the last couple of years because we have yet to see the other forms of reusability—flyback or propulsive return to Earth—demonstrate economic sustainability on a recurring basis. It’s pretty darn hard to make that actually save money… We’ve seen nothing yet that changes our analysis on that,” the ULA CEO said.
> The ULA CEO’s points about the possible lack of savings on reusable rockets put him in stark contrast with other noteworthy leaders in the space industry. Apart from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin is also intently focused on using reusable rockets. Even Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck, whose company designs and launches small rockets, has embraced the idea of reusing previously-flown boosters.
Economic viability is not the same goal. One is a business goal, one is a scientific/technological one. The goal from the DC-X 35+ years ago was the latter. Certainly, we'd expect the economics to improve since then.
The technological viability was shown with the proof of concept. If you meant strictly economic viability was unknown, I agree with you. This isn't meant to disparage SpaceX. They're doing great. I would say there is a risk that isn't often talked about which is the quality risk. Early on, SpaceX disregarded well-known quality control checks, presumably because they didn't think they were worth the time/cost. When that burned them, they integrated those checks. Do that enough times, the economic viability erodes.
Not in scientific edge domains. Eg: quantum computing is shown to be scientifically feasible right now, but nowhere close to having economic viability in a business sense. Same with fusion etc etc
Engineers became really jaded by Shuttle and the failure o X-33. Many of them, inappropriately, started claiming it was impossible. You still hear people claiming things are impossible today that are “merely” very hard, like full reuse, getting launch costs same order of magnitude as transpacific air freight, orbital datacenters, terraforming Mars, space settlement in general, travel to other star systems, etc.
Again, what do you mean by “it”? Economic viability? I already stated I agree with that. Technologically viable? I disagree, since the proof of concept was shown decades earlier. We don’t need to to keep going around and around this point.
Nope. Technological possibility of landing on a droneship was claimed to be impossible. And yes, of course it was never actually impossible. The technical expert was obviously wrong even at the time, kind of shockingly so, but you see similar kinds of claims of impossibility today by so-called experts.
Annnd…we’re full circle. Again, DC-X was considered a successful proof of concept. Almost 40 years ago. Musk himself said SpaceX was “just continuing the great work of the DC-X project."
Nah, it was everything. Everyone expects aerospace timelines to slip. That wasn’t the issue. I had an aerospace greybeard (guidance and navigation expert… nice guy, btw) from a civilian space agency that you would recognize tell me that booster landing on a droneship was “impossible.”
It's actually far better than that! When people hear "poverty rate", they think "the percentage of people living in poverty". That's not what the census data on poverty is reporting, though. The census data is based on income only. It excludes in-kind welfare (Food Stamps, HUD, and Medicaid) and even excludes some welfare that is paid out in cash (like refundable tax credits). In other words, the census data is reporting that 10% of Americans earn under the poverty line. The number living under the poverty line is far, far lower.
The United States doles out >$30K/year in welfare spending for each person (not household, each person) under the poverty line. And that's just HUD/SNAP/Medicaid. The idea that any significant portion of the US is living in "abject poverty" (let alone half!) is hysterical in every sense of the word.
I absolutely agree. We spend $30K/year per person (not per household, per person!) under the poverty line, and that's only on HUD, Medicaid, and Food Stamps. These resources should be lavished on those who actually need them. The tricky part is dealing with the perverse incentives which come with doing right by the disabled. The obscene abuse of military disability benefits is a case in point.
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