Mastodawn

Polemicintent Dec 16, 2023

enmodo ⚛️ 🧬 🇺🇦 🍉

If you look into the history of Tesla and SpaceX you'll realize Musk would have gone broke years ago without government money.

I've never met a libertarian who didn't decry government subsidies as socialism, encouraging freeloaders, and feeding the nanny State. But take away their own subsidies and they scream bloody murder like a baby pulled from its mother's teat.

https://boingboing.net/2023/12/14/spacex-loses-900m-starlink-subsidy.html

SpaceX loses $900m Starlink subsidy | Boing Boing

Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by SpaceX, will not receive a hoped-for $900M subsidy that was already on the chopping block. It failed to deliver promised speeds to users, and fo…

Boing Boing

enmodo ⚛️ 🧬 🇺🇦 🍉Dec 15, 2023

Thanks everyone for all the engagement with this post. Out of interest I posted the exact same thing on Threads and got precisely zero engagement.

enmodo ⚛️ 🧬 🇺🇦 🍉Dec 16, 2023

Just to be clear I wasn't implying that all the government money received by Tesla and SpaceX in particular was a subsidy such as the one in the cited article. It also includes government contracts which were key in getting them off the ground (no pun intended). Many argue that since NASA and the military are directly funded by tax payers we are subsidizing their suppliers of goods and services. Either way the source of income is "government money".

cuan_knaggs Dec 15, 2023

@enmodo it's like we need a new reality show called "the real welfare queens of america" featuring all these libertarians

Dave Spector Dec 15, 2023

@enmodo libertarians are like toddlers with money. Usually someone else’s money — screaming Me! Me! Me! Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! All the god damned time.

Jonathan Dec 15, 2023

@enmodo The two Republican commissioners were the ones defending Musk too.

I thought Republicans were against handouts. 🤡

Oh right. They don't have any philosophy whatsoever. It's just whatever the hell they want to say.

Jonathan Dec 15, 2023

Also, he's received all kinds of assistance from NASA, not just money.

This is the same story as the LA freeway thing underground. He dug a hole. And then he stuffed it full of Teslas with drivers and called it a solution to congestion 🤡. It's underperforming every single day.

enmodo ⚛️ 🧬 🇺🇦 🍉Dec 15, 2023

@jmcrookston probably hoping for a fat campaign donation from Musk. Remember how much they hated Tesla while it was still based in California? It'll be interesting to see if the red hat Trump base will buy his cybertruck. My guess is no. At least not unless it comes with a "rolling coal" option.

Jonathan Dec 15, 2023

Yep he's just there buddy so they support everything. No morals, no philosophy, no nothing other than they see thievery everywhere because they are thieves.

Rolling coal option that's funny. Also probably true, sadly.

Lee Fife - old account Dec 15, 2023

@enmodo 99% of the libertarians I've met work for the govt or a govt contractor...

aethervision Dec 15, 2023

@enmodo Rand was on government assistance when she wrote The Fountainhead.

enmodo ⚛️ 🧬 🇺🇦 🍉Dec 15, 2023

@aethervision yup, sucking down that social security until she shrugged off her mortal coil.

The Frog Dec 15, 2023

"Libertarians are like house cats: fiercely convinced or their independence, yet totally dependent on a system they can't understand and despise"

(This is not from me)

James 🦉 #FBPE

@enmodo Likely because they are infantile and have confused tantrum with ideology.

Androcat Dec 15, 2023

@enmodo Our tragedy is that we spent 20 years having inane theoretical arguments with Libertarians, and we still remember them...

Meanwhile those Libertarians are basically all actual full-on Nazis now.

They don't care. They never did care. They were just assholes doing a bit, and now they've moved on to a worse, more terminal bit.

And we're stuck letting their nonsense live in our heads rent free...

sj_zero Dec 15, 2023

Elon Musk is entirely a product of government. His electric cars have always been massively paid for by the taxpayer, his spaceship business is almost exclusively a product of government spending, nobody in the private sector was ever going to look at the boring company.

So when I hear people on the big government side of things complaining about him, I'm like "why are you complaining? This is your guy!"

Dr. Eric J. Fielding, PhD Dec 15, 2023

@enmodo I would not call the money that NASA spends on SpaceX services, including carrying supplies and astronauts to the International Space Station, to be a subsidy. The USA has no other business that can provide those services and the cost per flight is something like 20 times less than the retired NASA Space Shuttle.

Howard Cohen Dec 15, 2023

@enmodo I've never met a libertarian who wasn't a white guy with a good job. Maybe they exist, but I've never met one.

Dan Herbert Dec 15, 2023

@enmodo While I think I agree with the general sentiment, it's not true that SpaceX relied on subsidies to reach where they are today. They had contracts to provide rockets to the gov't, with advances in funding to aid development, but they were not handouts and the US expected an actual rocket for that money. The Starlink subsidy is a rare case of actually trying to qualify for an important (to Starlink) subsidy and then badly failing to hit the mark.

Dan Herbert Dec 15, 2023

@enmodo Tesla's situation regarding subsidies is more nuanced. They did accept an interest-bearing loan as part of a gov't program, but it was actually a relatively small loan compared to other auto makers (2% of total program allotment) and it was paid back in full with interest, being the first company in the program to pay back the loan. The per-vehicle tax credit applied to consumers, but the case could be made that it helped boost sales, though they hit record sales after it was exhausted.

Matt Palmer Dec 16, 2023

@danherbert @enmodo the libertarian world view is one of absolute minimum government, which would certainly preclude running a space program. Thus it's reasonable to comment on the hypocrisy involved here.

Dan Herbert Dec 17, 2023

@womble Defense is considered a pretty classical part of the libertarian world view. It's difficult to have a good national defense system if everyone else has a space program and you don't. A lot of the motivation for getting private companies partnered with NASA was to ensure many cheap privatized options for launching spy satellites. (I'm not a libertarian, just a space enthusiast who remembers why the space race existed at all)

Matt Palmer Dec 17, 2023

@danherbert running an LEO multinational space station doesn't seem to have a useful defense purpose.

Dan Herbert Dec 17, 2023

@womble The ISS was designed specifically to force 2 rival nations to cooperate with each other. The station has 2 halves, run by Russia & the US and they're dependent on each other. Since the end of the space race, Russian and US cooperation in space has been a critical diplomatic symbol to open options for broader diplomacy to avoid WW3. I'm not claiming NASA is a strictly libertarian agency, only that it has room to appease anyone on the political spectrum.

SilvertipGrizz Dec 15, 2023

@enmodo Bingo!

AluminumRooster Dec 15, 2023

@enmodo yep. The Farm Bill comes to mind.

OGJester has moved Dec 15, 2023

@enmodo don’t forget the Saudis. They’ve given huge grants to SpaceX. Elon is a puppet to the real money.

enmodo ⚛️ 🧬 🇺🇦 🍉Dec 15, 2023

@OGjester and into Twitter and they likely have a direct feed of supposedly private DMs.

dan Dec 16, 2023

@enmodo It's all about public money, whether it's tax avoidance or subsidies. The only reason Musk was angry about Starlink being used in Ukraine was because he wasn't getting the typical military-industrial complex money other US companies were getting for supplies to Ukraine. I don't believe his publicly stated reasons for turning it off. In the end it was turned on again once funded by the Pentagon. He got exactly what he wanted from that little charade. Similar publicity shenanigans by Blue Origin and the NASA moon contract. All the billionaires know how this works.
@billyjoebowers

Simon Flett Dec 16, 2023

@enmodo Musk 's procession of lights across the night sky is a powerful global symbol of oligarchy out-of-control.