My jaw remains latched to my maxilla
matching bids on a set of launches is hardly “matching prices” across the board.
this article went to a lot of trouble to hide the fact that the price for spacex is still 30% cheaper than even this “matched pricing” that those big old fart companies seems to think is the best they can do. hell, they already start counting their ‘profit’ chickens in this very article when they are not actually competitive. spacex is still talking about dropping their already unmatched costs and pricing.
if really feels like this was written by the big hands who reeeally need boeing and lockheed to not be old, stale, inefficient behemoths. those government contract pipes are already welllll greased.
But musk is nonunion, treats his workforce like crap, funds team oligarchy insurrectionists, does not care about who gets killed as collateral, and does not have to deal with constant underfunding and political nonsense out of Washington. If failure was an option out of the incumbents things might be different, but they have not had that kind of freedom since the 1960’s. The marvel of musk is what is possible with the wealth that the oligarchy has stolen since the 1960’s. Moving from a military funded economy to venture capital was the right move, but deregulation and trickle down bullshit economics combined with liberal stupidity has lead us to glorifying neo feudalism like idiots. Exceptionalism is a myth of epic proportions. You are a product of your chosen path, opportunities, and social networking. If you were born into a family with massive colonial holdings in Africa, and were willing to screw over millions if people, kill thousands, and knowingly accelerate or even profit from the impeding global catastrophe from the climate, you too could be a neo feudal lord like musk.
i think the issues with the company could be addresses with regulation.
im also not a fan of musk, notice youre the one that invoked his name. regulate the company, hate the man. but im not going to text-wall about him, its more energy than he deserves.
How do you think regulating space x will affect the prices? Man child is certainly not covering additional expenses out of his pocket.
The U.S. should work on fixing 40 years of union-hostile legislation. But yeah, fat chance.
In my opinion, you maybe should first deliver something before you go giving empty promises and sign a contract. But hey, that’s Musk’s motto: overpromise, underdeliver.
Old fart companies, lol. Oh, you mean the old farts who are more or less on budget and time and delivered what they promised?
If SpaceX, i.e., Musk’s rhetoric, is not one of the reasons Artemis (3) mission will get delayed significantly, I’m gonna eat a shoe. As someone who has done budget calculations for global projects, I can tell you the biggest factor in calculating the cost is time. Since the timeline is off, the money needs to be off as well, as these two are connected.
No need to say we are way off this timeline, and one of the reasons is the absolutely bullshit timeline Musk seems to think is reasonable but is actually unobtainable for the company SpaceX. I don’t know why he does this every time; eventually, he has to backpedal anyway.
Some not very deep examples:
- Hyperloop - a complete bullshit concept, made no sense to anyone who had actually used their brain, basically a scam, very stupid promises.
- Tesla self-driving - I don’t think I have to say anything here…
- Tesla Cybertruck - I mean, what? How was this design greenlit for serial production?
- Tesla auto taxi fleet - I mean, who actually believed that…
- Tesla semis - They are practically nonexistent.
Etc., etc.
Musk’s track record is not great, and at this point, we definitely should not give him the benefit of the doubt.
Reminds me of when the entire frontend of an embedded system got subcontracted out multiple times with the end being some kid in Jordan who had zero idea what he was doing,
Can you share more details on this story?
Sure, anything specific you’d like to know?
I was on contract with company A to support firmware & drivers. The frontend was contracted out to company B, who subcontracted it to company C, who sub-ubcontracted it out to company D in Jordan, who sub-sub-subcontracted it out to E.
Several details were lost via this game of telephone, including the fact that this was an embedded system. There was zero infrastructure for collaborative development, and it would take several days for the kid’s source code - a single file thousands of lines long - to trickle its way down to me, and it was slow even on a development host.
On no, I’m suprised that it even ran considering that it had to run on an embedded device. Or was it a horrible stitch job?
It ran, just so horribly slow that it was unusable. I rewrote parts of it to demo a 40x performance increase to the company execs, and they fired the contractor - which then meant that I got to write all of it, by myself, for the same pay as before.
