This bothers me a lot. Not because SpaceX is not qualified to do this, but because it shows that the military/industrial complex has gotten their nose under the tent. Once they become one of your biggest customers, then they can subtly threaten your bottom line and ask for “favors”
I suspect this is not the first such incident, but it’s the first that anyone has been willing to cop to. I also suspect that, somewhere, a lawyer is screaming, “NO SHUT UP YOU IDIOT!”
In case you hadn’t figured it out, the kerfuffle about Iran’s nuclear program really has nothing to do with them being a threat to the US – it’s all an attempt to maintain Israel’s status as sole nuclear power in the Middle East. If Israel is not able to engage in nuclear blackmail, they’d have to negotiate with their neighbors, which is a problem, since some of the neighbors don’t acknowledge Israel’s existence.
Back when I worked in security, I regularly encountered things that just left me shaking my head, “why would anyone want to do this?” It made me feel increasingly distanced and out of touch with the industry/community, as the decision-making herd went thundering off over the horizon, ignoring the sign that said “cliff.”
After we’ve collapsed our civilization and made huge swaths of the planet uninhabitable, it’s just going to open up new opportunities for others. They won’t be others that are interesting, in the sense that we are (in the sense that we mine oil and burn it and fly through the air and argue about going to Mars) but life’s going to be hard to completely eradicate.
Not that we aren’t trying.
One of the big surprises of the cold war was how effective the Soviet intelligence apparatus appears to have been.
The US has tried to assert its colonial dominance over the internet, and has acted as though it is its domain since the beginning. That has had a lot of policy implications, and has created a “karma debt” that I think we are only starting to confront.
The first time I saw this, I mis-read it as “Lemmy”, which – as you will see – would be double plus epic. But it’s still pretty good.
There’s something about the internet mindset – the anonymity (or, I should say, “apparent anonymity”) on both sides, that brings out the worst in people. It seems to me as though half of the new internet entrepreneurs are trying to figure out how to screw the other half. And both are trying to screw their customers.
I am going to try to de-convolute something that is so convoluted I’m having trouble even spelling “convoluted.” I will begin with a summary of facts, and then discuss them in more detail.