NASA freezes Starliner missions

That took long enough. Insane that the gov was entirely silent after this week's starship launch as well...

Even though I'm not an elon fan, pretending to not notice for political reasons (not to mention the insane halving of launches at Vandenberg AFB) is completely insane and damaging to our country.

I wish I had any idea on how to deal with the Elon situation. I genuinely believe SpaceX wouldn't be achieving nearly what it is without him, but he's obviously also going way off the deep end these days and it's uncomfortable to watch one man with that much power getting increasingly unhinged.

It's something I constantly wonder about, I strongly believe we should be taxing the absolute shit out of people and working hard to flatten society, but I also worry that we need insane people in power sometimes to get stuff done. Starship (hell, even F9) is an astonishing achievement and there's zero chance that innovation would be possible anywhere except SpaceX or another entity with very strong leadership (Valve or Steve Jobs' Apple if they made rockets)

> I strongly believe we should be taxing the absolute shit out of people and working hard to flatten society.

I'm very curious about this mentality.. Do you beleive that meritocracy leads to better outcomes? Why do you think that the government is better positioned to allocate resources than the people who made the money?

If Elon would have been "Taxed the absolute shit out of" after his sell of Zip 2, he wouldn't have founded paypal. too much tax on the paypal sell, he couldn't invest in Tesla or start SpaceX.

I mostly feel like you didn't read my comment since you're pointing out the exact conundrum I did, however yes obviously the government is better positioned to spend some of that money, there are a lot of things that have long term positive externalities that are not captured by capitalist incentives. The rest of it? Why don't we just take it from the rich and give it to the poor. We can have a progressive tax that approaches 100% as you get into the 100s of millions of dollars that's redistributed as UBI. Estate taxes that prevent the buildup of generational wealth etc.

I think it's an organisational problem. The financial problem is an outcome, not a cause.

Society devolves to status hierarchies, and the people who climb those most successfully are narcissists and sociopaths.

So there's a default assumption that you have to be that kind of crazy, glib, abusive, exploitative, bullshitter/charlatan to do remarkable things.

Occasionally you get someone who is both narcissistic and exceptionally talented. They get shit done, but they leave a trail of human wreckage behind them.

Sometimes - often - it eventually turns out that it isn't even the right shit.

Meanwhile talent that lacks that narcissistic edge is overlooked and sidelined.

This is cripplingly inefficient, because so much ability is just wasted.

And it's very literally disastrous, because crazy people can't be trusted to have a sane relationship with the physical world or with other humans.

So the problem is engineering effective hierarchies which are reality-based, have enough incentive to reward drive and talent, but exclude - or at least strongly constrain - unhealthy and toxic Cluster B types.

Easy, isn't it?

> but they leave a trail of human wreckage behind them.

Musk has not left a trail of human wreckage behind.

His children and ex wives might disagree