[toolz]

Which isn't ideal, but easily better than the pentagon that has literally never passed a full audit since they started auditing them in 2018. I'm a huge fan of musk's company's, but I don't want my public tax dollars ever choosing winners/losers

[toomuchtodo]

Your public tax dollars picked Tesla and SpaceX as winners vs losers, through billions of dollars of subsidies.

[yardie]

I'm not a huge fan of Elmo but Telsa get's subsidies that all car manufacturers are eligible for. The fact that those manufacturers have to purchase credits from Tesla is their decision. If they can't delivery a quality ZEV the public wants to buy they have no one else to blame.

[AtlasBarfed]

This post was true five years ago.

It isn't now. Tariffs (long-standing ones that have survived both parties in power) in fact are keeping byd from the US market to protect primarily Tesla.

In Tesla because of the brilliant behavior of its precious CEO, will likely be specifically targeted for exclusion from subsidies in the EU, and inevitably at home when this administration passes by

[bangaladore]

> It isn't now. Tariffs (long-standing ones that have survived both parties in power) in fact are keeping byd from the US market to protect primarily Tesla.

This is a bad take. Nobody can compete with BYD. This isn't a Tesla vs BYD issue, this is a Everyone vs Cheap labor and deregulation issue.

[AtlasBarfed]

Byd is a product of CCP subsidies, of course they can be competed with

It would simply take a government capable of recognizing the multifold benefits of EV transition: environmental, geopolitical oil independence, energy efficiency, associated alt energy rollout and grid adaptation, lower total costs and associated economic benefits, reduced cancer and air pollution death rates, reduced logistics costs.

That's just off the top of my head and I'm not even that smart

[bangaladore]

> Byd is a product of CCP subsidies, of course they can be competed with

If you ignore the 1/5 (not exactly sure, but somewhere in that ballpark) labor cost, sure. And that's one example.

[zpeti]

Those subsidies also went to Boing and ULA, who also bid on those contracts.

This is such a debunked argument but I guess its undebunkable because its a branch you can hang onto about how the only reason SpaceX exists is the government. Question is why hasn't Blue Origin managed the same then, or Arianaspace in the EU.

[bell-cot]

> Question is why hasn't Blue Origin managed the same then, or ArianeSpace ...

Or any of hundreds of other national space programs and companies, in countries which would have been ecstatic to pay 10X the US Govt's "subsidies to SpaceX", to put themselves or their nation's company into SpaceX's current position of utter global dominance.

[addicted]

They are crowing about increasing the Pentagon’s budget.

[jedberg]

Musk's companies fail their audits too. Tesla can't account for $1.4B of government money they received.

[bpodgursky]

Why does this matter? Government either gives loans and demands they are paid back, or pays for deliverables. If you have to keep your fingers in the books to feel good about what's happening, it was a badly structured contract.

[jedberg]

Because it's my money and I want to know how it's being spent, whether it's the government or a private company spending it. I had no choice in where that money went, so I need transparency on how it's being spent.

That's why every government contractor has to report what they are doing with their government money.

[bena]

The Pentagon will never pass an audit. Some of that money goes into things the auditors do not have clearance for.

[axpy906]

Didn’t they at one point fail to account for Trillions of dollars in their budget? How do you do that? The scale for me is unimaginable.

[timschmidt]

"September 10th, 2001 then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged to the American public that Pentagon can't account for 2.3 trillion" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FWFAs9ffGk

[kolbe]

Auditors don't get access to whatever the modern equivalent of this is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bank_%26_Trust_(Baham...

[jcranmer]

AIUI, the Pentagon failing an audit is essentially akin to most people failing an audit because they can't produce every single paper receipt for everything they've ever purchased. Combine that with the fact that the Pentagon is (I believe) the single largest purchaser on the planet, the fact that much of what it does is compartmentalized in different security buckets, and that the managerial staff tends to be younger than most organizations, and it shouldn't be so surprising that it's persistently in a state of being unable to literally dot every i and cross every t.

[ethbr1]

How many other companies need to fund rebuilding of entire countries? (granted: usually the DoD's fault in the first place...)

[ceejayoz]

They use auditors with clearance. I'd imagine certain programs require very specific auditors to supervise them, like how the FISA court works with specific vetted lawyers at times.

The more mundane problem is things like "drive that truck over there… drive another one back" often result in the exact location of an asset being unclear fairly frequently.