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by Razengan9 hours ago |
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upvoteby advael9 hours ago|
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Can't speak to the world as a whole but the US has we spent 50 years gutting most government functions that aren't part of the police/military/surveillance apparatus (and many of those as well). SpaceX itself is an example of the primary mechanism of this: Diverting funding to private, no-bid contracts that remove both market forces and democratic oversight from those services while also ballooning their costs
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upvoteby thegreatpeter7 hours ago|
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Medicare, social security and the interest on the debt are the 3 top federal spending categories

Social welfare is the top local spending category in many local/state governments

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upvoteby advael6 hours ago|
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Yea, and medical costs - including those paid for by medicare, often for people who aged into the program with worse health, which in turn is partially attributable to a tendency to avoid preventative care earlier in life due to higher costs - in the US are drastically more expensive than elsewhere, primarily because of this exact pump: Providers, insurance, equipment manufacturers, and various middleman orgs have arisen to deal with a system that is riddled with cost-inflating private-public partnerships and regulatory band-aids to mitigate small parts of the mess that end up having second-order effects that mostly also raise costs.

I believe some functions are simply best performed by non-profit-motivated government agencies. However, I would usually prefer an actual unregulated or black market over the corrupt frankenstein of private-public partnerships

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upvoteby inemesitaffia4 hours ago|
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Private no bid contracts?

Disinformation on the Internet? Never seen it before.

The contracts are not just publicly bid but paired.

Come off this nonsense.

Space is the sphere of government and the launchers and satellites have always been built by companies and SpaceX is very visibly cheaper.

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upvoteby bell-cot5 hours ago|
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While there's a lot of truth to your "gutting most gov't functions" claim, you might want to compare SpaceX's subsidies and launch costs with those of the gov't's traditional providers. And look at myriad $billions that have been squandered on the Senate Launch System.

There are plenty of solid reasons to despise Elon - no need for counterfactuals.

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upvoteby parineum2 hours ago|
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> There are plenty of solid reasons to despise Elon - no need for counterfactuals.

There really aren't that many. He's kinda a dick and briefly supported the president very publicly.

Most of the other reasons are just as fatuous as this.

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upvoteby DSingularity8 hours ago|
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Once you notice the pattern of how these companies are started you will see that there is a hidden hand of government behind much of what we think is an independent, market driven, capitalistic enterprise. Whether it’s Facebook or Oracle or Palantir or SpaceX it’s all the same. Heck even the founding of Silicon Valley itself can be viewed to be government driven. The bottom line is national security is not going to be left to the whims of a market when the pentagon has a black budget that can eclipse all of VC spending with the stroke of a generals pen.
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upvoteby mind-blight3 hours ago|
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While there's some truth to this, the early investments in Palantir and Facebook from In-Q-Tel were tiny. For Palantir, the contracts with a single government agency were far more capital than the investment.
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upvoteby bell-cot5 hours ago|
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> Why didn't the government try...

As a broad generality, governments are utter crap at inventing/building/operating bleeding-edge technologies at giga-scale. Exceptions are generally narrow-focus military hardware, plus flood control, aqueducts, and other "obviously needed for the nation's welfare" stuff.

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upvoteby Peanuts992 hours ago|
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Are they actually worse than businesses though? The internet, jet engines.. in fact whole swaiths of technology have been created under governments not enterprises. This just feels like an economic concept people blindly accept.
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