"As an example, they gutted NC DMV."

When did that happen? I didn't see anything saying they were taking anything away. I saw they increased pay by 5%, authorized retention bonus, and are supposed to add about a 5% increase in the number of license workers.

You could just increase pay by $20k and add another 100 workers, but that ignores concerns about operational inefficiency and outdated technology. It will be interesting to see if the privatized pilot increases efficiency or not. I wouldn't hold my breath, but we'll see.

> As an example, they gutted NC DMV. So quality of service and wait times deteriorated. Then they go out and say that government doesn't work - must be sold to their private owner buddies.

They’re suggesting the DMV is privatized? Can you share a link?

Is the privatized NC DMV any better than the public one? I was just at the Delaware DMV getting my 2 vehicles inspected and registration renewed, and while not an entirely horrible experience, it did seem like there were a lot of inefficiencies and complacentcy.

I've also noticed the difference in the US post offices around me and the FedEx stores and wonder why the post offices aren't nicer customer experiences.

That particular playbook long predates Trump: campaign on the ineffectiveness and incompetence of government and, once elected, prove it—with ineffectiveness and incompetence. Repeat ad infinium.

[flagged]

It’s going to kill institutional knowledge and be so expensive to repair after regime change.

That’s a great point. I think it’s just trying to boil the ocean.

"Are they 1% as inspiring as what the DoD does with their budget?"

It would be closer to 2%, but we could measure it by engagement. Ask people what their last positive interaction was with NASA vs the military. The military does all sorts of outreach with things like the Blue Angels, stadium flyovers, competitions at fairs, etc. Ask them what NASA has done over the past year vs what the military has done over the past year. Chances are many people couldn't name something NASA achieved in the past year. Would it be at the 2% number? I don't know.

I'm not saying one is better than the other. I think both should look for budget inefficiency, but until those are identified I wouldn't propose budget cuts. But it does seem that the NASA missions could be more inspiring recently.

Beyond FL, they’re careful to make sure parts of the rocket at built in EVERY state! Now something that should be cutting edge innovation is tied to Congress which is intentionally not innovative and you wonder why it falls behind.

MSR has indeed been a mess. I think it's pretty obvious that NASA has been trying to instill a "sunk costs" mentality in Congress, and it's not working out the way they wanted.

MSR is a fine enough concept though, I think Rocket Lab's proposal to get it done is sound and the government should take them up on the offer. If nothing else, the money to Rocket Lab for MSR development would help to make Rocket Lab a more viable SpaceX competitor, which should pay off for the US government in the long run.

isn't congress on fixed time contracts already....

SLS doesn't serve any actual NASA needs. It's fake make-work. Case in point: Congress expressly ordered NASA to launch Europa Clipper on SLS, to make it appear that SLS was indispensable to core NASA science missions. But, due to design flaws, SLS turned out to be technically incapable of launching Clipper at all. So they backtracked and allowed free-market competition to compete for the Clipper launch. Which it did: a very, very cheap Falcon Heavy launched it instead.

Which it was capable of doing all along—Congress and NASA lied about this, misled the public, to make it appear that their jobs-creating, pork-barrel project was serving some genuine need NASA had. It wasn't! They had alternatives all along—they were pretending they didn't.

When you read about these things, you have to know all the actors you're getting information from, and what motives they have to mislead you.

There's not a single real mission in NASA's budget, or conceivable future budget, that needs an SLS—full stop. Sole exception being the moon project, which was created with the express purpose of finding a problem SLS would be the only answer for (and even that's now in doubt, what with Starship).

I read this recently, and it doesn't sound good

https://idlewords.com/2024/05/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm

Does it? Do we want to repeat what we did 50 years ago or do we want to do something better and stay this time?

It doesn't work, not for Moon missions. It was never designed for Moon missions in the first place, the original plan was unspecified "deep space" missions without any clear plan of what it would actually be doing (because it's actual purpose is to keep money flowing to old Shuttle contractors.)

Consequently, it can't do a Moon mission like the Saturn V could, it requires the idiotic nonsense that is the NHRO, which will endanger astronauts because it can't get Orion (which is a whole other can of pork) into a low lunar orbit. It also can't handle the lander, so now Artemis has to count on SpaceX and/or Blue Origin for that, which is probably what you're alluding to not working. But if those don't work, then neither does Artemis and then how can you say SLS works?

Another problem with SLS is it's expensive AF and has a terrible launch cadence. Maybe you think that doesn't really matter, but it is for those reasons that NASA isn't going to test Orion again before putting astronauts on it. The last time they tested Orion, to verify the design and modelling, the heat shield started to come apart. But NASA can't do another test flight, because SLS sucks so hard, so instead they're going to fly Orion on an untested trajectory and trust their modeling to keep astronauts safe. Their same modeling which failed to predict Orion performance the first time. It's homicidally reckless. There is a real risk of this becoming yet another instance of NASA management's "go culture" getting people killed. Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia, each time they say they've learned their lesson and will make changes to ensure it doesn't happen again, but either those changes are only superficial or they decay over time. We're now on the precipice of NASA management flying astronauts around the Moon with a heat shield which may quite possibly disintegrate during reentry, because SLS is too expensive for NASA to test it but NASA management wants to move forward anyway.

Except for the under powered orbits but that is a whole other issue.

https://youtu.be/XFIvKSVRtZ0

https://youtu.be/sGT-8PHSVso

I think that's what this is, the 4k people in NASA probably never would have quit (great benefits or whatever), maybe the strategist at the top (whether they are right or not) think its better for this talent to be concentrated at private firms? And tbf, the private sector does move fast :/

Costa Mesa seems like a random addition here?

Likely so, but you have probably listed a bunch of organizations already utterly swamped with eager and qualified job candidates relative to their hiring numbers.

Both India and China hold Most Favoured Nation status with the USA. That hardly marks them as enemies.

Hey everyone, consider looking at the Wikipedia page for an agency before posting piss-takes on social media regarding that agency.

Sending things to space is a small part of what NASA does. "Aeronautics" is not "space rocketry", and all federal agencies do more than what their name indicates.

> I imagine everyone else at NASA who respects themselves would have left for SpaceX a long time ago

not everyone wants to work for a company that is well known for grinding 20-somethings into the dust with an extremely poor work-life balance.

> For the rest of that decade, the only way Americans could access ISS was by purchasing tickets on Russian spacecraft.

Perhaps our coolest diplomacy program. I love that RU and USA have managed to cooperate in space through many decades of conflict.

Man who believes NASA exists to hurl stuff into space. What a sad, narrow existence.

This is a dumb take. NASA has (or had until Trump can back) plenty of interesting things. New Horizons, Europe Clipper, the James Webb, Hubble, Mars missions, ISS operations, human spaceflight, etc, etc are all being done by NASA workers. They do way more than just launch rockets and SpaceX can't even come close to the stuff NASA was doing.

My perception as one who works in space based climate research is that both have being done, mass firings of people that makes no account of their skills or value, plus targeted firings that are less about finding waste and more about advancing ideology - anti-diversity, anti climate and earth science. From my view it’s awful, as I opine that the goal is to starve all non-military or non-human spaceflight efforts.

Cutting all probationary employees or recent promotions was just an awful strategy. For every department in the government.

Sounds less like a hot take than a false dichotomy? The only choice is one of two non-specific analogies?

We are overspending! Let's, uh, sledgehammer a small part of the pie (non-military non-entitlement spending) while increasing military and law enforcement budgets and cutting taxes!

The only thing left to do was the sledgehammer?

But why would you do that at all? If you want to save some money why not replace expensive healthcare system with one from some European country? That would save more money.

Destroying things is easy building things is hard. In a six month term musk destroyed a lot. What is he rebuilding?

[dead]

[dead]

I don't think we should underestimate how poor their grasp of technical reality might be.

Yes, but the administration doesn't know that.

> a Trump-like figure, spouting vapid promises of greatness

Can't pinpoint who you are referring to. Gemini thinks Yeltsin? But neither it nor I remember any "greatness" promises from the guy.

Why it will get worse? They got what they voted for.

I don't think this is true or at least is not reflected by any statistics.

Inequality, as measured by GINI has been falling both for the EU as a whole and within most European countries for decades now. The last decade in particular has seen declines in nearly all EU countries.

Taking the EU on average the last time it increased was in 2014 - which is to be expected as the 2013 expansion allowed a number of relatively poor countries into the union.

For individual countries, you can check the statistics here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI

A few examples, I looked at Ireland in particular, and inequality has never been lower - the earliest statistics I could find is from the mid-1980s. Inequality peaked around 2000 for the UK and has declined hugely since then. France is more equal than it was in 2000 although the fall is less dramatic than that for the UK. Admittedly Germany has seen a slight rise since 2000 but Germany has also absorbed millions of very poor refugees in that time.

The US is an outlier globally - with rising inequality over the last few decades.

Slightly off-topic, this untrue claim of rising inequality in Europe is often presented without challenge and then used to justify some radical political solution. To my mind, it's using the same political "mind hack" that the the MAGA/alt-right in the USA have used (in this case concerning race, immigrants, global multilateralism, or social tolerance - "wokism" - in general).

For both, the veracity of the claims is apparently unimportant and uninteresting as long as the claim aligns with one's political orientation. The goal of these oft repeated untruths is to provoke indignation or anger - in order to drum up support for some radical political "solution".

This has exactly zero with being left out of economic progress and wanting it. They literally vote for people who are leaving them outside of all subsequent economic progress. And that was also their voting record in the past. What they actually voted for was culture war - disgust with trans specifically and hate toward anything that can be casted as liberal which includes science. It was wish for Christian autocracy and enforcement of associated values.

The feel good explanations are just that - feel good euphemisms. Acting on them failed in the past repeatedly. Politicians who tried to improve situation of these people were punished, repeatedly. Meanwhile, politicians acting in offensive and harmful way were rewarding even when they made lifes of their voters worst.

We really should stop projecting these good faith falsehoods when the are and were clearly false.

I don’t know enough about economic conditions in Europe to say something intelligent, but unfortunately I’m very pessimistic about the near- and medium-term future of America. There’s nothing on the horizon that will make life better for everyday Americans, who are currently struggling to keep up with the sharp rise in the cost of living in recent years. From tariffs to business uncertainties, all I see is life getting even more expensive, and we might reach a tipping point where everything falls apart. I’m also very concerned about the national debt and the dollar.

All I know is that the 1990s until now have been a bonanza for some people but increasingly difficult for many others. I blame this on the financialization of our economy, with housing policy in America’s coastal metro areas definitely not helping (municipalities restrict supply through zoning and other mechanisms, and the financialization of our economy only exacerbated matters by pouring gasoline on the demand side). This is a failure of our leadership class; I’m not just talking about politicians, but I’m talking about our wealthy, our corporate executives, and even ourselves when we have positions of influence. Collectively the leadership of our country has chosen maximizing their own material benefit at the expense of maintaining a livable society. The result is anger due to Americans increasly having a harder time just getting by while our “leadership” keeps adding to their power and wealth.

Due to anger over establishment politicians, the Republican Party has been completely captured by MAGA, and the Democratic Party has a very vocal left wing that came close to winning the 2016 primary and was a serious contender in 2020.

Unfortunately Trump on a good day is far more destructive than Clinton, both Bushes, Obama, and Biden on their worst days. Trump’s neo-mercantilist economic policies won’t bring prosperity, but unfortunately his stance on “culture war” matters have resonated with large swaths of the American electorate; we’ve long had problems with racism, xenophobia, religious bigotry, anti-intellectualism, and other related issues since the colonial era.

Moreover, despite Trump’s promises in 2016 to “drain the swamp,” Trump is backed by many prominent billionaires and other influential and powerful people. Trump is not a one-man operation; he would have no power without an entire apparatus of GOP politicians and a stacked Supreme Court.

The only thing keeping Trump’s popularity afloat is his relentless attacks on “enemies” of MAGA, such as immigrants, scientists, universities, unflattering media outlets, Democratic politicians, etc. But eventually the fallout of his reckless policies will trickle down to Trump voters in the form of higher prices for goods and services, and either when Trump runs out of enemies or when the MAGA base gets crushed by the weight of high prices and are looking for answers, what are Trump and MAGA politicians going to do?

Unfortunately I don’t see any easy solutions. A return to the pre-2017 status quo ante is only going to lead to the same leadership that led to such anger in the first place. However, staying the course is definitely going to lead to a crash. The solution is going to need to come from the people, but it’s hard for average people in America to compete against systems that entrench the power of our two-party system and that require massive amounts of money to effectively compete. There are no easy ways out of this mess.

> Trump came with a "believable" story

If they believed Trump, they deserve everything they get. Sadly those who didn't believe didn't vote enough.

It has nothing to do with the deficit. If it did, the big beautiful bill would have looked much different.

Trump and the Republican Congress are adding several _trillion_ to the deficit with the latest bill they rammed through in the middle of the night. They do want less taxation, but only on the richest of the rich.

Not to mention - tariffs are essentially an inflation tax on _every_single_purchase_.

> and not even nasa could figure out how to run a profit despite a monopoly

You seem to be unaware that NASA does run a profit, and that SpaceX wouldn’t have been possible without NASA’s research and money. NASA has invested tens of billions in SpaceX.

https://www.planetary.org/articles/nasa-versus-spacex

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Economic_impact...

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/3721375-how-much-does...

Congress expressly directed NASA to create SLS, and expressly structured it to maximize job creation in designated Congressional districts—a goal obviously in tension with getting shit done*.

I don't think it's correct to blame the NASA, the agency, for management decisions made by their overseer!

*(Imagine what SpaceX would look like if Starbase were split into 50 pieces in 50 states—nosecones from Alaska, winglets from Senator Shelby's district in Alabama... Imagine, if their senior executive wasn't breathing down everyone's necks to build things faster, but instead prioritized employee headcount as his objective function (maximizing–not minimizing). The way Congressional lawmakers run their pet projects is quite ridiculous).

NASA does way more than Artemis. And, absurdly, the budget is cutting almost everything but Artemis and instead shoveling more money into pointless rockets.

Run a profit? What does that mean? What profitable business is currently available for an aeronautics and space agency that was never about making "profit".

Looking forward to SpaceX launching the next Voyager mission.

Do you remember when a President of the United States was impeached for an affair with an adult intern?

Do you remember when a Republican presidential nominee defended his opponent from a racist question at a Republican Rally, calling him a "decent family man?"

--

Then, can you think of a time when a POTUS committed a pump a security he was selling, only to dump it immediately after his inauguration, and it it was barely talked about at at all?

The shuttle program wasnt what NASA wanted to do, it was the military that pushed for that.

It's ironic that you'd blame them for the thing they didnt want to do.

If theyd kept their budget and autonomy after the moon landing it looked like they wouldve been building reusable rockets like the ones elon is building now, except in like, 1980.

Yes, too much oversight is the problem here, not lobbying and self-interest/corruption.

Probably the creation of techno-fascist state, or at least the desire to have one as outlined by Thiel and co. The excessive deference that all tech companies have had towards elected leaders instead of striving for independence under the law, and now they strive to co-opt government to achieve their goals.

Who were the people in the front row behind the current president during his inauguration ceremony, I wonder?

Some of the tech industry leaders were going all-in on Trump before the election [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40562399

Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Ellison and of course Elon Musk who funded the trump

Well, among other things, the Vice President was quite literally a tech venture capitalist with all sorts of tech support (not that kind though)

The relentless disintermediation of, well, everything in society is powered by big tech. No middle class can exist anymore in the neoliberal turbocapitalist system that's trying to grow into place everywhere; there is just the little human puttering about, and a bunch of extremely rich oligarchs and tech bros taking their money.

Technology made all of this possible. From amazon (destruction of local shops) to uber (not saying the old system was good, but who needs transit concentrated into the hands of a few) to google (monopolizing and stifling search and adtech). And who knows what role large scale manipulation by stochastic propaganda parrots will play.

So Thiel and Musk have nothing to do with Trump getting elected.

Or Social networks as an easy way of spreading misinformation.

New to the club AI that delivers convincing sound, photo and video „proofs“ for any fake news they want including elaborated texts fitting to their target audience

[flagged]

[flagged]

Just a wild guess: The connection is uncontrolled growth, where companies evolve from a normal business to a perpetual "increasing shareholder value" grift (think the Apples, Googles, Microsofts, Metas, (Space)Xs out there...). It happened when tech incorporated "the user" as a product (as opposed to tech working to actually solve problems and elevate the status quo).

That's not what's important right now. What's important is figuring out whose fault this is

- Randy Marsh

Inner emigration?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_emigration

Start perusing https://news.ycombinator.com/active as your hn frontpage and make note of a very obvious flagging bias there. Vouch and upvote the information that is getting hidden while not breaking the guidelines. Hulk Hogan's death being front page news while MechaHitler getting flagged tells you everything you need to know about this site.

It used to be they tried to hide it and were embarrassed when they got caught. Sometimes they even got thrown out of office.

If i leave a knife on the table and you decide to stab me with it, who is to blame? The knife, me or you?

The workers did, the people with money welcomed him with open arms hoping for less regulation and big contracts. Look in the row behind trump during his inauguration if you need proof.

who did most of the tech billionaires sponsor?

It's a very worthwhile story to follow imo :)

I work for one of the largest financial companies. It's not us or the sector. There's a whole shadow sector behind the scenes doing this stuff run by billionaire funded think tanks who manipulated tech markets and leverage political and social manipulation through their connections. It's the world we live in but we didn't create it.

Shit education leads to pliable humans leads to social manipulation leads to desired outcomes from marketing efforts.

Also looks like the paper explicitly said it wasn't doing a public/private sector comparison so much as observing that SpaceX doing repeatable stuff in LEO on short timelines delivered without the cost overruns of NASA doing more complex one-offs over longer timelines and concluding that, surprise surprise, the repeatable stuff and incremental improvement stuff had much better cost control than the deep space science missions and space station enhancements. Yes, if you look at the raw number of missions SpaceX has operated, most of them have been successful Falcon 9 launches and most of them have been to deploy minisats to a standard design, and its track record of these is excellent (including adding reusability). NASA's track record would look a lot better if it mostly launched satellite constellations to LEO too and better still if it held off on planning anything in deep space, but that's not really what NASA is for. If you look at SpaceX in terms of private programmes rather than missions, the Falcon 9 is outstanding and the Starlink minisats work, the Falcon Heavy seems fine, Starship has been going on a very long time (including work before the Starship name was coined like the the Raptor engine) and hasn't achieved anything useful yet, and the stated goal of going to Mars hasn't got off the drawing board. But they're very, very good at building and delivering significant improvements on the repeatable stuff that isn't NASAs focus

Also, if you're doing a fair comparison between public and private sector you've got to consider all the launch startups that aren't SpaceX, including the ones that haven't successfully launched...

Better healthcare for fewer people. Might work well for space exploration.

It's working great! For certain companies.