volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@deanbetz but why would the US government that has done such a bang-up job with NASA be expected to do any better with SpaceX, regardless of the legal technicalities of its structure?

Your proposal reminds me of how the USPS is set up, and lord knows people have some pretty big complaints about that.

@simonbp they have not sold this rocket as a crewed commercial flight. A crewed rocket has not yet been developed, and I imagine it won't be for a few years.

This is not intended to be a crewed rocket.

A future rocket is, but not this one.

Heck, one would think that if they intended this rocket to have a crew they would at least install a door for the crew to enter :-)

But no, you're confusing some different rockets.

@deanbetz well that's simply not true.

SpaceX has done an awful lot of research on its own.

Not that it matters. Paying for research does not amount to paying for a company.

Anyway, I agree with you about being skeptical of any subsidies, so I think we should stop re-electing the representatives who promote such subsidies. But that's just where our country is right now, and it's a separate question from nationalizing.

The national bureaucracies have let us down, which is why we are in this position in the first place. I see no reason to think that we'd be better off spreading that politicized and failed bureaucracy to SpaceX.

@Corb_The_Lesser well let any interested parties pay for it.

I'd chip in even though I'm not interested in going. Though I do have friends who are.

But anyway I was replying to the caption above that was talking about sending people, which is phrasing that is often problematic.

It immediately reminded me of, "they're not sending their best" if I have that infamous quote right.

@arstechnica

@deanbetz if we paid for it we would already have it.

SpaceX is not nationalized today because the country didn't pay for it.

Instead, the nation paid for NASA, whose program didn't produce the successes that SpaceX did.

Which in the end is just another reason we should probably not nationalize SpaceX.

@icedquinn heck, I kind of like the idea of putting sociopaths in political office. At least then we can keep an eye on them :-)

But actually to be a little bit serious, some psychological conditions might actually be a benefit to the public in a politician.

A desperate need for approval might translate to a representative working extra hard for his constituents to get those pats on the head.

@HistoPol ok, ok, I got off my lazy butt to look up the link to the list of features 🙂

Check out the unique features part of this page:
https://qoto.org/about/more

Yeah I never had any use for Twitter because I just couldn't put up with a website that artificially handcuffs people to limited character lengths. I want people to be typing as much as they need to get their thoughts out.

So that is one of the critical features I was looking for when finding an instance.

@AlliFlowers @ctrlxcvz

@realTuckFrumper well that is oversimplifying, but it's not that unreasonable to make such a claim.

It's like saying pro Republican is pro Trump. Not exactly true, but in a broad generalization, it's all too backed up by the numbers.

@kaffeeringe the problem is that people may disagree on what that dignity entails, and I would even say you risk undermining dignity by imposing your personal feelings of dignity onto others.

You quickly get into issues of bodily autonomy.
Would you let me tell you what you can and can't do with your body? I would hope not, especially since you don't know me 🙂

I can already tell that we have different ideas about what constitutes dignity, so it's pretty likely that you would not like for me to impose my own values on you.

And that's why this is tricky.

@arstechnica

@impactology even so, I would caution against that kind of thing in any domain that doesn't directly involve politics.

You get into messy issues of, well there's a bug in this MRI machine that needs to be patched, but the developer thinks his boss is contributing to authoritarianism, so he's refusing to work, and the end users impacted by the bug are just screwed.

You get into conflicts of interest pretty quickly when you start asking people to function outside thelr positions like that.

@HistoPol yes, it's a modified version where the administrators added the extra features.

@AlliFlowers @ctrlxcvz

@MlleaPankhurst no it's the opposite, the appeals court pointed out what the Voting Rights Act provides for and insisted on respecting it.

It doesn't aim to cut the act. It aimed to reinforce it.

@impactology bad things happen when you try to apply technical solutions to social problems or social solutions to technical problems.

The two worlds really don't engage cleanly.

@lawprofblawg VRA definitely contains enforcement mechanisms because we don't assume people are nice and will voluntarily comply.

@notabird no, that's what the law looks like.

The democratic process passed the VRA with certain features and without certain features. The court merely respected the act of Congress made by those we elected.

If we want to change the law to provide more access to courts, great! Our legislators can do that at any time.

But this is really the opposite of authoritarianism. This is respecting limits on authority.

@marcelias

@AlliFlowers it's also important to point out that different instances have different features.

Just for example, the instance I use has practically no limit on post size and supports quoting of posts, among other additions to the standard Mastodon feature set.

@ctrlxcvz @HistoPol

@arstechnica send? No.

If folks want to participate in a big experiment in survival on Mars, let's go for it. It would be their choice, and there are plenty of people willing to do it.

Framing things like this as sending overlooks agency.

@ScriptFanix well they satisfied the legal review to say that they didn't unduly endanger any rare species.

We have safeguards in place through which experts analyze their plan, and they can't operate without satisfying the experts about issues like this.

@Gustodon

@davidpmaurer@mastodon.sdf.org but you're missing the thing that I'm trying to emphasize here, that I wish got emphasized much more often: you say the count is so close, but we voted for that count!

You say two to five elected officials have a crazy amount of power, but that's because the rest of the people that we voted for, that we empowered, maintain that situation.

Hell, at the extreme the representatives that we voted for can at any point even eject those two to five people if they are misbehaving. If they are so damn obstinate that they are interfering with the performance of the chamber, my representative and yours could vote to expel them.

So let's stop re-electing the idiots who maintain this bad situation. Let's stop re-electing the ones who put up with the crazies.

But we can only hold our own representatives accountable for their actions if we stop acting like everything is up to only five members.

That just gives a pass to all of the other representatives who could be doing something to fix the problems.