[advael]

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

[thegreatpeter]

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

[advael]

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

[bell-cot]

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.

[advael]

I would rather things like internet not be provided by entities that are incentivised by profits, controlled by one or a few individuals, none of whom are publicly accountable. I am actually willing to tolerate some inefficiency for the upsides of that tradeoff, but I think lots of governments manage to do utilities competently, too

[inemesitaffia]

I'd like to see a pre SpaceX post like this from you. Anything pre 2015 is fine. Because this is nothing new.

What you're essentially arguing for is SpaceX building this for the government and government being the middleman.

More money would be spent. Not less.

[advael]

I not only haven't mentioned Musk a single time, but have thought this for my entire adult life. Utilities should be public goods. Hell, this isn't even that unpopular an opinion. Not everything boils down to culture war or mindless gossip about particular famous rich people

Also frankly I would mind companies like SpaceX being contracted to build and sell satellites a lot less than them also continuing to control or operate them

[inemesitaffia]

I'm not talking about Musk, or culture war stuff. The rest is fine.

The government has Starshield. And several other non SpaceX satellite systems. They famously sent four (4) recievers of that sort to Ukraine.

There's this idea out there that SpaceX is somehow stealing from NASA. Paired with the notion/assumption that the government builds its space vehicles. Completely incomprehensible.

[advael]

Apologies, the prior commenter in the thread mentioned it, and I think the overall claim that someone's being disingenuous is frustrating when the contradiction claimed is hypothetical. My objection here is less to the use of contractors to do things like manufacture the satellites, and more to do with allowing private companies to act the operator of a service that's somewhere between a utility and an emergency service. I think this about companies like comcast too

[parineum]

> 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.

[inemesitaffia]

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.

[advael]

Private here is meant to refer to the "private sector", as in using a company, not the existence of the contract being classified or something. I suppose SpaceX is publicly traded now, but that distinction also, in my opinion, is not the important one here. At any rate, if you think I'm wrong or mistaken, I'm happy to hear you out, but you're going to have to go into a little more detail if your intent is to convince me. Like I am not even sure what "paired" means in this context

[inemesitaffia]

Paired means at least two companies get the contract. SpaceX to my memory has always been paid less when that happens.

Examples are

CCrew - Boeing

CCargo - Sierra, SpaceX is now a sub for another company bc their engines are made in Ukraine.

HLS - Blue Origin

NSSL - ULA, Blue Origin (Maybe RKLB)

NRO Starshield GMTI - Northrop Grumman

SDA - York Space

SEA-2 - OneWeb

>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).

It's the likes of Boeing and Lockheed vs SpaceX not Government vs Private Sector. That's how it's worked since Apollo.

>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

This is the core of the disinformation. SpaceX has always been cheaper, see Europa Clipper for one of the most egregious examples. The post SpaceX era is also cheaper for the government because of the shift in contract types. That's how you hear Boeing is losing money on Starliner and Air Force 1, because companies now eat the losses they used to pass on. Raytheon (and SpaceX mind) dropped out of SDA because of this.

The contracts are also openly bid. And if they aren't classified you can bid too. Lots of these contracts don't even have pré-qualification.

This stuff is known to anyone that follows the industry. In fact, the fact other companies are involved makes it more expensive because they charge more than SpaceX per unit of work. But government keeps its leverage and industrial base.

The person you read from who claimed (I can tell they aren't original thoughts) these things is lying to you and any cursory check (sometimes just reading articles instead of just headlines is enough).

It's like the X company isn't paying taxes, "this is a bad thing" stories, then you look at the balance sheet and not only is the company paying taxes, it's lifetime and operationally unprofitable, so it has no corp tax incidence (like anyone doing part time work at minimum wage or below (at a charity))

[advael]

I stand corrected that all these contracts are no-bid, though some functions still are. I remain skeptical that paired contracts do much to help competition or efficiency in a market that tends toward consolidation, and am unsure why you add the unrelated point about corporate taxes, which isn't particularly revelatory: It's well-understood that a ton of companies operate in a mode that doesn't chase profitability, and indeed this seems to be disincentivised by the tax structure. People who are upset about how corporations operate financially should push for changing this on a policy level

[inemesitaffia]

SpaceX and the current space polity dreamt up under Reagan and Bush and delivered by Obama is a complete bipartisan win. Things are cheaper, faster and more abundant in the sector.

Launch, Human Spaceflight, Satellites and Satellite Internet are now (and for most of a decade) been primarily American. Even the foreign competition is largely American (See Telesat)

Paired contracts (openly bid from a larger pool of qualified companies mind), a fixed cost for delivering ends/products etc have meant lower costs to the government, redundancy in case of failure, less time between having an idea and having it implemented (HASTE, LUCAS and Starshield).

Of course there's the risk that this means companies exit the market if they can't deliver in the old environment (SDA, Starshield) but there's still the option for old companies to compete in truly novel projects (F-47) with the old contracting system. And pairing also allows the government to bring in new companies to the fold to compete with the old guard.

As for corporate taxes, those articles are standard fare to direct misplaced anger at companies that aren't doing well on the whole (because they've never turned a profit or are in a low margin business) or are reinvesting all their money(something that's supposed to be a good thing). We aren't talking about transfer pricing and similar shenanigans. Accountants just roll their eyes. But it breeds unnecessary anger (See the "BlackRock is buying single family homes"; "SpaceX has got ~$30B of government subsidies" nonsense too)

>It's well-understood that a ton of companies operate in a mode that doesn't chase profitability

In the end these articles insinuate that said company isn't paying their fair share/ is freeloading on the polity.

The responses to the articles clearly show that it's not well understood.

It's the best and worst of times, but we should at least have clarity on what's better and what's worse.