Man if this actually starts to happen it's a good time to be a welder, concrete worker, or any general contractor or tradesman in Louisiana. Coastal Louisiana is some of the poorest areas in the US even more so than the valley in Texas where Starbase Texas is located. Probably 10-20 years worth of solid work building out that site.
Hmmm. Aquire all these properties under the guise of reviving things for racing and oopsie it failed what ever shall we do with all these properties now? Oh yeah do what we do best – build data centers.
These types of allegations are extremely common with basically every type of construction project, especially when contractors know the client has deep pockets. None of this has been adjudicated by a court. Plus this story is written by someone with bluesky link in their bio by a publication that has an obvious bias:
>Elon Musk Just Said Something About AI That’s Literally Incomprehensible
>Sure, man.
It's so interesting to me that the whole "futurism" concept got co-opted into some sort of political propaganda machine. All the articles are negative hit pieces, they're all reductive, they're almost all political in nature. I used to go on the futurism subreddit years ago and it's all the same there. You'd think "futurism" would be about .. promoting new technology, ushering in the future, you know .. futurism. Not just another political propaganda outlet.
Futurism is a focus on the future. The future may be good or bad. Your desire to focus only on the upsides (for you) and not want to hear about the consequences, externalities, or dangers is one of the most "political" positions a technologist can have.
Do you hate reading most science fiction? Because the ratio of dystopic to utopic scifi is pretty unbalanced.
Yeah, I hate modern science fiction. It's almost all terrible. Sci-fi written in the time of actual ongoing world wars and the Cold War's constant threat of instant nuclear annihilation was far more optimistic, and far more imaginative.
Classic sci-fi was far from universally optimistic, it had more optimistic pieces than we do today but I'd still say on the whole it was more dystopia than utopia. Even for its own time, the original Star Trek was considered uniquely optimistic, though a large part of that is that its just much easier to write a good story where the setting itself provides the necessary challenges for a story to work, rather than an optimistic setting which rules out a lot of the usual challenges. Even Star Trek struggled, a good chunk of its stories are about encountering a race or civilisation without that utopia, turns out telling a good story without any conflict is pretty tough, especially a long running one.
But it does more generally reflect how society views technology as a whole too. People are generally a lot more pessimistic about new tech now, myself included, we've seen time and time again how its used to control or squeeze us. There actually was a Star Trek episode, "The Game" (season 5, episode 6) about an addicting device you could compare to smartphones (though the device in Star Trek doesn't spy on you to sell your every move to advertisers, missed a trick there), and that certainly wasn't supposed to be an optimistic look at technology, so you can see why things have gone the way they have.
Yeah for sure, science fiction used to be optimistic and utopian, like Planet of the Apes, Brave New World, Frankenstein, 1984, Earth Abides, The Martian Chronicles, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and Island of Dr Moreau, We, Farenheit 451 ...
Recently I have read fiction where someone discovers a spaceship/artifact/portal/alien/mcguffin/etc and then they... get the mcguffin, get more stuff, get the girl, win. The plot is just a straight line.
they're boring.
Although not a straight line, any superhero movie. they're predictable and therefore, boring.
So I found the stuff that used to fill me with wonder, I shy away from. I don't want to watch another marvel hero.
I kind of wonder if non-utopia scifi, with reality and struggles and character development... is that the good stuff? doesn't have to all be dark forest or enshittification++ though.
You could just say “no” - it would save a lot of space, be about as polite, and way less annoying.
Sometimes people want to talk about science stuff without talking about human fallout and political implications. It’s perfectly fine to want an occasional break from those types of discussions.
Talking about "science stuff" without even mentioning the political and human implications is pointlessly incomplete. It's like trying to talk about a programming language without mentioning variables.
Everything is human and everything is political. To pretend that it is not is, in itself, a political stance.
Let's take the two pieces you put out there and just look at logical conclusions., because it's kinda hilarious to imagine you actually hold this actually-insane position.
1. Everything is political
2. Talking about something without mentioning political and human implications is "pointlessly incomplete"
Topic: "Anyone wanna go swimming?"
Normal people: "Sure."
You, apparently: "Are you aware of how water is unequally distributed throughout the world? How can we possibly discuss swimming if we aren't willing to discuss the political fallout? This is pointlessly incomplete."
Next panel, you're just researching local water table rights while everyone else is swimming and having fun
This is pretty contrived. Politics is as simple as “Janey and I really want to swim in the ocean” vs “I wanted to go to the lake by my house.” The politics are how that conflict gets resolved peacefully.
Nope, just showing how ridiculous it is to hold the position that everything is political. It's okay to just talk about things casually, dude. Chill out, it'll serve you well.
If your position isn't that everything is political, don't say it is. If it is your position, this is perfectly in line with what you stated.
Your strawman didn't show anything, except that you're unwilling to engage with other viewpoints in good faith and will immediately dismiss them as ridiculous instead of advancing actual arguments.
Why should we be silent over the obvious political aspects of giving Musk more government contracts? Just to please you?
Why should you be silent about it? Because it’s not the topic. How is this SOOOO confusing and difficult for you? Do you not notice how annoyed everyone around you is when you desperately try to ram politics into every single conversation you have in life?
Oh, you don’t really do that? You’re just being performative online?
Musk is one of the dumbest motherfuckers on Earth buddy. Just say you have no real argument and you're just upset at some strawman you thought you were conversing with.
That’s Italian futurism, which was a specific movement. I think the term was being used more broadly here.
Go find some Soviet space art, or mid century American “space age” stuff, or less dark forms of cyberpunk / cyber culture from the 80s and 90s. None of that is fascist yet all of it is popularly called “futurism.” I’ve even seen the term associated with solarpunk.
As popularly used it means more or less the idea of trying to use human intellect to build or create something fundamentally new, or roughly that. It’s not a precise term more of a vibe.
Mid century American and Soviet space art had transparent political purpose, as does solarpunk. Futurism is rarely if ever just "it's the future, and that's neat!". It comes with the inherently political baggage of "We got from where we are to the glorious future, by way of (ideology)". Star Trek is a great example of this.
That could be said about everything including things usually not associated with futurism like romanticism. Everything carries at least a little political baggage.
I was responding to what seemed like the implication that futurism was fascist.
>It's so interesting to me that the whole "futurism" concept got co-opted into some sort of political propaganda machine.
This was a very predictable outcome given the curcumstances.
You forget to mention the guy who was the posterboy for futurism literally decided to turn himself into a political machine circa 2018 or thereabouts against half of the country, apparently triggered by his inablity to cope with his child transitioning and the bruising of his ego when NPCs on the internet made fun of him for failing where they succeded (the scuba diver pedo incident is one example).
Prior to that, he was the second coming of Steve Jobs to the same cohort (pg even called him "Steve Jobs with no taste" on this forum at the time).
Tech should be considered with its political direction (or lack of) to be deserving of adulation. The Cold War dictated the Apollo program for Christ's sake. The whole thing was saturated in politics. The difference is that most people were united for the cause. Believe me, if the people running the Apollo program declared war on half the country it would have been remembered and popularized quite differently.
I'm sure Jewish German scientists had a reluctant admiration for whatever Wernher Von Brauhn was acheiving with the Nazi space program but it would be completely secondary to the fact that he was enabling the Nazi party to "win". No engineering feat could or should eclipse that fact.
Regarding Tech without taking into account the direction it's pointed at is ridiculously naive, whichever side of the political spectrum you are on.
It's not like Germany would have magically grown out of the Nazi party if only Von Braun kept on building cool shit.
That’s just a microcosm of everything. The culture war ate the entire public discourse to the exclusion of practical concerns and even coherent ideas. It’s all vibes and tribalism and bashing the other tribes, while the tribes themselves become increasingly incoherent in terms of what (if anything) they really mean or stand for.
I just turned it all off, though it makes me fear for the future. Feels like the early stages of societal collapse.
> Feels like the early stages of societal collapse.
Strongly agree, there is hardly any intelligent discussions with diverging opinions left anymore. People are too deep into their own propaganda, agenda, and echo chambers. Peak bullshit is near.
Okay but Musk himself deliberately and continuously uses his companies and wealth to participate in the culture war so it's no surprise it comes up when his companies do.
He could switch off and stick to building rockets and electric cars. It's very easy (notionally) to just not post on Twitter.
The article reports that one party in a dispute says they should be paid.
SpaceX also has also filed a lawsuit against them claiming 5-800 million in damages for fraudulent billing and contract violations, and has made their own statements.
tl;dw -- louisiana has a ton of natural resources and wonderful harbors, but has allowed corporations to get away with almost anything without paying their fair share of taxes, cleaning up their waste, or generally being held accountable. And likely related, there is a long history of rampant corruption in the area. With sea levels rising and cancerous pollution filling densely populated areas, life in Louisiana has generally become very difficult :(
I haven't had time to watch the video but my understanding was a lot of the Louisiana coast have big problems with rising sea levels and much of it in the process of falling underwater. Perhaps it's relatively trivial to reinforce the coast for the forseeable I don't know.
The plans for the site involve extracting significant amounts of natural gas to make methane to burn for the rocket fuel. If they hit the launch levels they suggest (thousands of launches per year), this is not a small amount of greenhouse gases they'll be emitting which of course helps accelerate melting of the ice caps and rising sea levels, which could threaten the very site they've built it on.
They're also the folks working on the largest co2 -> methane converters in the world. Because that's how they'll need to make fuel on Mars, and no one else on earth wants to fund an expensive technology to replace an inexpensive gas pumped from the ground. By definition, these reactors will have to be capable of producing enough fuel for a rocket in order to be fit for purpose. That opens the door for carbon neutral operation. It's tough to imagine a greener rocket than a fully reusable one that's carbon neutral running on methane. Sure beats spewing hypergolics or solid rocket fuels.
What are the chances they'll employ cheap labor they can just use as election fodder for stealing hard-working american jobs?
Either that or pay decent wages for American workers that'll drive up construction prices and worsen the inflation which is already crazy due to these criminal tariffs.
They put themselves in that situation, the US admin, not me. I'm just commenting. Or is any of what I said wrong? I mean there's something called ITAR that requires American workers, but that doesn't mean the impact on inflation isn't real
To be clear, ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) restricts certain roles to "US persons". This is a weird term in US immigration/nationality law. A permanent resident (green-card holder) is classified as a "US person". As a result, SpaceX can employ non-US citizens for ITAR regulated roles.
That's a very narrow view of inflation. If you increase wages, there's more demand for goods, more demand means higher prices which means higher inflation. Same with tariffs, they are paid when importing goods, which is passed onto the consumer, resulting in higher prices and thus inflation.
It's the only correct one. For proof, consider the inflation that happened when Spain looted gold from S. America, then during the California Gold Rush, then the Yukon Gold Rush.
So you are applying economic dynamics from the... gold rush to the modern era? You do realise gold isn't the base value for dollar since 1933 at least.
Which money? The real money comes from the working class that make the world run, if it's manual labor, creative labor or managerial. The fake money comes from speculation.
I live around a lot of those people in SW Ohio who find themselves traveling to states like Louisiana for welding, electrical and general contracting work because the expertise isnt there. I have to imagine much of the same will happen and if anything they might reap rewards following construction. Regardless I would assume little to no relevant expertise exists there at the moment.
One thing about construction trades is that they will hire apprentices. Someone needs to do the grunt work, and they learn on the job (or in class if they are union) and eventually become productive or wash out.
Did you watch the video? This person didn't say it was impossible to launch enough satellites for Starlink.
He said the Falcon 1 launch price of $5MM was unrealistic, which ended up being correct. At the time, Falcon 1 was supposed to launch 600kg for $5MM. It ended up launching 420kg for $9MM. $8k/kg to $21k/kg.
Now obviously there's always a lot of doubt and skepticism around SpaceX, but you can just say "people said this would be really hard but they did it." Or you can say "Musk set a goal to 4x performance and got to an also-remarkable 3x" or whatever.
Even in this video, the smug Ariane guy heaps a decent amount of praise upon SpaceX and what they've achieved. He just said a $5MM launch will not be one of those things, and he was correct.
His underlying tone is that reusability is "a dream" (his words). Without reusability, Starlink as a network of tens of thousands of satellites would not be practical.
He said this in 2013, two years before the first Falcon 9 booster landing.
Calling reusability "a dream" is different from saying "Starlink is impossible."
You can try to read the tea leaves on tone and some creative interpretation of implicature (despite Starlink actually needing fewer than 1000 satellites for its public launch), but they're different claims.
Not sure why there's a need to exaggerate the victimhood of SpaceX lol, super strange.
The Ariane guy was quite clear about what he thought was practical and not. He said $5MM launch won't happen (it didn't). He said reusability is a dream (he was wrong). He said nothing about the impossibility of Starlink, either implicitly or explicitly.
I guess I assumed you meant "people who should have a pretty good idea said it was impossible" since that could be interesting, and not "a random person on the Internet said X", since that's not interesting for any value of X.
The level of cynicism, shit-talking, and schadenfreude wish-casting in response to this is crazy. Start cheering on successes. Resist the deconstructionist mindset.
Is it realistic to demand a spaceport with no environmental impact from anyone, SpaceX or not?
Current launch technology inevitably produces a lot of heat and noise and we don't have any rocket model that wouldn't at least rarely fail (and explode).
That said, extant Cape Canaveral does not seem to be lifeless. Lots of birds. IDK how the precise species composition has changed since 1960, but nature as a whole is a lot more resilient than people seem to think.
Elon Musk is mostly a bad person. I do not want mostly bad people to succeed. Why is that hard to understand? You either do no think he is a bad person, or ignore the fact he is.
I'm capable of understanding people are multidimensional and capable of both good and bad things. it's possible think someone is a bad person while understanding that not literally everything they do is evil. this project being successful will improve the lives of thousands of others would you rather the project fail and have things stay the same?
One of the killer features of the modern democracy/market system combo is that it can channel quite a lot of bad people's efforts towards neutral or good outcomes.
A scenario where Musk builds an interplanetary space company is infinitely better than a scenario where Musk is a warlord conquering some unlucky province of a decrepit empire with sword and fire.
Giving such people an option to succeed economically is probably the safest way how to deal with them. SpaceX > Attila, Amazon > vikings.
1) Political - The ideology/party spreading the doomerism promotes that they're the ones that can "fix it", if only you vote for them.
2) Adversarial countries, primarily China - Using the internet to convince members of western civilization to hate their civilization, hate their economic system, hate their history, hate their compatriots, adopt a no motivation defeatist attitude, etc., etc., and they can get our population to destroy itself from within without having to go to war with us.
Reject the doomerism, reject the negativity. Build. Invent. Create. Do your part to contribute to your civilization, to contribute to humanity, to move us forwards.
The people who build rockets and computers and the Internet are the good guys of history. We should do more of that. That statement shouldn’t have a political valence—people who subscribe to that idea can argue whether taxes should be higher or lower. But if you reject that concept you’re rejecting civilization itself.
It has a political valence when one party is campaigning on punishing and stopping them from building. "Should" is a meaningless word unless I have agency to change that, and I don't.
"The V-2 rocket (German: Vergeltungswaffe 2, lit. 'Vengeance Weapon 2'), with the development name Aggregat-4 (A4), was the world's first practical, modern ballistic missile and suborbital launch vehicle.[4] The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the Second World War in Nazi Germany as a "vengeance weapon" and assigned to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings of German cities."
Nazi's are the good guys only when they work for the U.S.
How come you are not addressing the most obvious reason?
People hat the troll. From all around the political spectrums (well...maybe not on their far edges), people have been disgusted by what Musk has become and everything around him has became toxic because of it.
You don't have to make it about politics. It's just about being a morally civilised human.
3) Elon Musk has fascist leanings and many people don't want to live in a world where such a person has ever increasing wealth, influence and power. Especially since he has no qualms about using that same wealth and influence to subvert and distort elections, both domestic and foreign.
He didn't cut government spending, just ask the GAO. He did though go on a rampage to prove that brown people weren't worthy of the positions they held.
They're pretty well known for lawlessly purging bureaucracies of experienced, civil servants loyal to the rule of law, to make way for cronies and regime loyalists.
They're pretty well known for scapegoating and persecuting immigrants and minorities and "enemies within" - and engaging in political projects to imprison and/or eject them from the nation.
Musk didn't cut government spending. Legally, only congress can do that. They increased spending. 10s of billions of that spending has gone to towards a mass build out of prison camps where many people, citizens included, are being held in horrid conditions indefinitely without due process and without being charged with any crime. This seems to be a project that Musk supports.
You could do this misdirection thing on x but here, you'll find people who see through this tactics instantly.
Yes, he has cut expenditure but what has been critiqued was WHERE he did that.
USAID for example.
And yes, he did fail to save (much) money in the process and it will cost the US even more in the future because the loss of soft power, intelligence, etc. USAID alone provided is unmeasurable high.
And this is just USAID as an popular example. There are thousands of veterans who lost their jobs. Waste, fraud, or abuse are missing and what remains is a cringe clown rising his arm because he's so edgy and needs attention very very desperately.
Debatable. Optimus will be programmed by watching thousands of YouTube videos and by indexing the entire NEC. It is entirely possible that a single Optimus can be a master welder, electrician, and HVAC technician. What Optimus can't do is take responsibility for the completion of the work as being done to code. Nor is it clear how much Optimus will cost to buy or operate.
Underestimating humanoid capabilities is a mistake; the real challenge will be the economics and the flow of responsibility. But imagine a future where every structure built has a pov video documenting its construction. I don't like the implication for the trades any more than I like the implication of Claude for putting me out of work either.
Latest LLMs that have good visual understanding (Gemini and GPT) are able to tell if construction work is up to code. You can give it a picture of electrical wiring, plumbing, framing and it will tell you if it's up to code with very good accuracy.
Nope, it won't. Won't stop the government from advertising the failed California high speed rail, either. But I think Musk is more likely to deliver on Optimus.
These guys have been popping up on my instagram bragging about how much money they're making building DCs and any argument they get between their "Im making $350k/week, what're you getting, lib?!" is defended with "Well all your instagram comments are stored in datacenters, and you didn't cry then!"
They have no idea what they're actually building, of course. I just love the comparison of a webhost/telco pop to Manhattan sized gigadcs that require nuclear power plants or blasting gas furnaces.
it doesn't fix everything wrong in the state but it's > 0. There's a lot of additional economic activity that comes with the construction too. Restaurants get busier, Walmart gets busier, lots of auto repair/servicing will be needed etc. Som e people will move for construction and end up staying there. It can be a shock to the local communities though but i think the positives still outweigh the negatives.
The biggest issue is these kinds of construction jobs are temporary. It's similar to but not quite as bad as datacenters where you get a very short term influx of skilled highly paid labor but those jobs don't stick around after the construction is over. Starbase will require more people on site at least.
The construction is temporary but what are the economic impacts of having a fully operational spaceport that launches 20,000% more tonnage to orbit than the Florida Space Coast?
Probably a great deal of long term economic impact.
One would think the same thing about having some of the biggest chemical manufacturing and refining industries around and yet the people of Louisiana are some of the poorest in the US.
Tons of money flowing through the state. Just to a select few people who own the plants for the most part, not for the people working there day to day. I don't see why one would think that would change.
My friend. If you know anything about Louisiana and their current government is that the people are there to be exploited. This is not going to help the people of the area at all.
>It's similar to but not quite as bad as datacenters where you get a very short term influx of skilled highly paid labor but those jobs don't stick around after the construction is over.
The issue with Datacentres is that you cant model the advantage of lower colo costs on jobs in the area.
The problem is that some people dont want to permit anything unless they can measure the benefits, when the market doesnt always work like that.
The whole "temporary jobs" line is completely irrelevant nonsense. Sure, it's correct, but who cares? The alternative is zero. It's not like there is only a limited amount of undeveloped land and a bunch of people bidding for it. And of course those jobs don't stick around after construction is over. They're construction workers. They move on to the the next construction job.
Sounds like "legal language" threshold for whatever reason? The Terafab announcement used the same phrase:
>The initial phase of Terafab is estimated to require approximately $16.8 billion in capital investments from SpaceX and Tesla, with potential future expansion phases bringing total investment much higher. This facility will employ at least 3,000 people, many of whom will be from Grimes and nearby Brazos County — continuing the trend of our other Texas sites where between 60% and 80% of new hires are local residents.
That Starbase concept (not that the numbers are realistic by any means) is orders of magnitude more ambitious than what SpaceX does today with 22k employees.
Is it a good time though? - Their Texas suppliers have been chasing payment and Greg Abbott rolled over and let Elon get their property without payment. Not the only Tesla/SpaceX vendor not being paid either. https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/cars/tesla/tesla-cybertruc...
