Strike at carmaker prompts sympathy action from dockers, painters and postal workers in fight over Swedish labour model
Elon Musk has decried a wave of “insane” strikes focused on Tesla workshops in Sweden, as workers target the US electric car manufacturer in a strike calling for collective bargaining rights.
In what has been portrayed as the largest fight in decades to save Sweden’s union model from global labour practices, the powerful trade union IF Metall has been leading a strike across eight Tesla workplaces in Sweden for five weeks.
It is the first time workers for the US carmaker have gone on strike and on Thursday, Musk, the tech billionaire and chief executive of Tesla, made his feelings clear, writing on X, formerly Twitter: “This is insane.”
Literally made his money on exploitation and lies. SpaceX is amazing, but built on much smarter minds; he was just the wallet. And he bought Tesla and has been lying and overpromising since he did.
And don’t change their goals every 4-8 years. It is hard to accomplish a 10 year project if you can’t guarantee you’ll still be working on it in 10 years.
Doubtful, big administrations have big issues with productivity and meeting goals. Not that I think it is thanks to Musk, but startups/scaleups organizations are often much more efficient than traditional companies and administrations.
I think every engineer who has worked both at a big traditional company and a startup can confirm.
I've worked at both and cannot confirm. Startups are good at shipping new features, but that's usually because we don't spend as long planning, have less legacy code to work around, and most importantly, we cut a lot of corners. These behaviors are not good for space travel
I think SpaceX is demonstrating that a lot of IT startup methodology actually works for the space industry too. Most famously, accepting that making errors makes you learn faster, with their many rocket explosions, this is like short iterations in IT. This is opposed to the years long planning and studying to make sure everything is 100% perfect before launch of traditional space industry. They are out-competing every public and private space industries (such as ArianeGroup) with their methods, it seems to work pretty good.
Exploding rockets over populated areas and putting debris in the sky is bad. Wasting money in explosions is also bad. I don't think startup mentality belongs anywhere outside of SaaS. If you disagree on this then we're likely not going to reach common ground when talking about spaceX.
I also don't agree that they're out competing NASA, nor do I agree that that's even a worthwhile measure here because something so dangerous shouldn't be subject to the market. Getting exclusive contracts from the government is too political to truly say they're better. The F-23 was better than the F-22 but the 22 won the contract anyway.
Yes, the ecological impact is bad. I was focused on organizational efficiency as it was the subject of the comment I replied to.
Also here's a study from Oxford University about it https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4119492
We find that SpaceX’s platform strategy was 10X cheaper and 2X faster than NASA’s bespoke strategy
If ecology is to be the top priority then NASA budget could probably go into ecological transition research too instead of the new moon project.
Startups are the land of the MVP, and I don't mean Most Valuable Player. You don't want to be sending MVPs into space? Don't use a private company. NASA has bureaucracy but it also has stability, accountability, and the ability to think long-term.
Wtf are you on about? We give SpaceX nowhere near the funds we give NASA.
We gave NASA $25 billion this year.
SpaceX was awarded a $2.9B contract to fund the entire "land starship on the moon" program (a non cost+ contact I might add) spanning multiple years. They launched two sets of crew to the iss this year, at an estimated cost of ~700m. They have had one cargo mission this year at a cost of about $150m.
Let's give NASA that 2.9b for a new program then. That's a 10% budget increase.
Hell give me $2.9b and I'll find people to put us on the moon. Elon didn't do shit except take tax money, and give it to smart people, while keeping a cut for himself.
Do it then. Nobody else in the industry seems able to.
When it comes to space programs and launch costs/waste, SpaceX is at the bottom of the list. Nobody puts stuff in space cheaper than they do. And not by a small margin.
For comparison, the cost for SLS to launch into earth orbit is $4.1B. TO LAUNCH. Development costs for that program have exceeded $27B. They have been working on it since 2011. It has launched exactly one time over a year ago.
The entire contract to SpaceX to fully develop and launch a moon lander is less than the cost of launching a single SLS rocket.
Then almost immediately bankrupted Tesla. Was their first near miss of going under.
Story has been retconned on their website to say Elon fixed the car. That the Roadster wasn't even close to production ready. He did neither.
What really happened is he wanted to redo much of the looks of the car to put his stamp on it. They spent a small fortune tweaking the Elise body to make it look just slightly less like one. Ballooned their production costs and added a ton of delays. The original team was going to use the Elise chassis as it came from Lotus and people had already lined up to buy that.
That's what all "visionary entrepreneurs" do. They pretend like they made every single product they sell with their bare hands and all the engineers and scientists designing them and the factory workers fabricating them are just for decoration.
I'm also convinced that they've breathed enough of their own farts that they genuinely believe most of the things they say.
Yup. The groundwork for privatized space travel had been in the works for a decade or two by that point. But musk wanted to buy an icbm and Russia said no. So he was convinced by much smarter people to become the money mark.
His real skill is getting people to work hard. And he brought the iterative design he learned in software development to the physical world. Pared with family money, hire the right people to do the work, and you get SpaceX.