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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Plus having the government as a customer is very different from receiving subsidies from the government. SpaceX certainly has got some r&d funds from nasa, but on the whole most of their “government funding” comes in the form of contracts that they won on merit.

    Tesla’s a bit different, but consider that the government intended to spend a bunch of subsidize the rollout of electric cars and I’d argue that they got what they paid for. Had it not been for Tesla moving aggressively into that space I don’t think we’ve have nearly as many viable electric cars at this point. Certainly it’s more of a subsidy to it was to achieve a specific policy goal and that’s really not quite the same as (for example) when we specifically bail out a company with taxpayer funds because they are at risk of failure.




  • Yeah I’ve wrestled with that too - I justify it to myself that they are so much smaller than Amazon or Microsoft but they are certainly not a small operation.

    I also appreciate their participation in WinterCG and the dream of having interoperable runtime environments for serverless platforms. While I don’t think it’s quite there yet, I think it’s a force for good to have a medium-sized player trying to push the interoperability that Amazon obviously isn’t big on.





  • Yes, that’s obviously taking the lifetime K2 deaths and dividing by the summit attempts - though actually I get 19% in that situation. However we really dont have enough data to form a good confidence interval there - it’s possible we’ve had a lucky few years or maybe we’ve got better at deciding when to make the summit attempts.

    But it doesn’t really change my point. There’s some threshold where it seems fundamentally immoral to hire someone for a job that has a good chance of killing them. Mountain porter on k2 or everest is a higher risk job than “astronaut” without the same glory that comes with the space faring job title. Even if the chance of death is 1 in 200, I still think its immoral to take advantage of someone who’s so desperate for work that they’ll overlook it.