Re:The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mo...
by greglindahl on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @09:52PM
(#20047642)
Winning a competition to ship cargo and then people to the space station is a bad thing?
Is there some universe in which entrepreneurs exit the electric car industry solely because the government starts offering consumers subsidies to buy them?
Re:The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mo...
by GuB-42 on Thursday May 30, 2019 @12:03PM
(#20052547)
It is not a bad thing. I will never criticize a company for making money or an entrepreneur for grabbing opportunities.
I don't like the hype around Elon Musk and I think Hyperloop is a borderline scam (I can detail if you want). However I also think the success of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX are well deserved. With them the world is a better place and Elon Musk is a richer man, that's capitalism working as intended. That subsidies helped creating a company that makes nice electric cars and solar panels is the reason the subsidies exist in the first place.
My previous point wasn't a criticism.
- Electric cars: subsidies
- Solar panels: subsidies
- Tunnel: transport infrastructure
- Rockets: NASA/military contracts
Starlink looks more like a commercial project but it doesn't mean the government can't get interested. After all, the internet itself started as a military project.
There are missing pieces in both theories (Mars and government money), the biggest one being PayPal. And some of them don't fit perfectly. So chances are that we are just making stuff up.