Cool beans, see ya soon, I’ll keep you updated.

In 2019, the U.S. invested $667 billion in R&D. The private sector is responsible for most R&D in the United States, in 2019 performing 75 percent of R&D and funding 72 percent

In some economies, the private sector overwhelmingly drives R&D. Israel leads the way, with the private sector responsible for 92% of total R&D, followed by Viet Nam (90%), Ireland (80%), and both Japan and the Republic of Korea (79%). The private sector also plays a significant role in the US, China, several European economies, Thailand, Singapore, Türkiye, Canada, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, and others, where it contributes over half (50%) of total R&D. source

source

The business sector is the largest funder of R&D in the top R&D-performing countries, with lower shares funded by government, higher education, and private nonprofit institutions. In each of the leading R&D performers in East and Southeast Asia—China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—the domestic business sector accounted for at least 75% of R&D funding in 2021. source

In order to maintain a monopoly you have to keep innovating and offering a quality service, otherwise there there will be a 100 startups waiting to take your place if you ever give them an in. The most dangerous monopolies are created by government regulations, bureaucracy and bailouts.

Starship has ~150 tons payload capacity, if made fully reusable you only have to cover the fuel and operational costs, fuel is ~1 mil for a LEO launch so $6.66 per kg + operational costs, so the $10 per kg figure isn’t too far off.

Governments: spend 80 years developing space tech with public funding, allowing humanity to walk on the moon, have global positioning satellites, and essentially kickstart the computing industry from a necessity to build computers for orbital calculations

Yes, government funded endeavors are sometimes the only way to do things that don’t have a clear ROI but they are also incredibly inefficient and as such should be kept only until it becomes viable for the private sector to take over.

Private companies: *mostly disappear and waste shareholder money, like Virgin or like Bezos’ attempts at space

That’s the beauty of the private sector, pure meritocracy, if you suck - you die. If those were public initiatives they would have been kept regardless of the costs or the results, wasting the taxpayer’s money instead of the shareholders’.

one company with public funding raking in those 80 years of publicly-funded research to itself

If it was that easy NASA or all the failed companies you mentioned would have done it themselves. SpaceX has done an absolutely incredible job at innovating in the industry that has been in stagnation since the 80s, designing rapidly reusable rockets, lowering the cost per kg to LEO from $72k in today’s money, from the space shuttle days to $2500 and planing to reduce it to $10 with starship.

The public funding part doesn’t mean free money from the government, the government pays SpaceX for fulfilling contracts because NASA can’t do it themselves, at least not as efficiently as SpaceX. Right now majority of SpaceX’s revenue comes from starlink which mainly serves private consumers so it’s reliance on the government contracts is being overstated.

underpaying and exploiting its engineers

SpaceX $155K-$247K/yr ($117K - $175K/yr base pay + $39K - $72K/yr stock)

NASA $113K - $158K/yr

lowering the costs at the expense of safety due to cutting in safety measures thay will never be tolerated when humans ride those rockets

As of 2025, SpaceX is the only U.S. company with a human-rated rocket system certified by NASA for regular flights to the International Space Station. NASA completed the certification of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket in 2023, marking the first time a commercial system was certified for human spaceflight.

Dumbass liberal lemmitor: pRiVaTe Is ClEaRlY sUpErIoR

Yes.

Government agency starts multiple, multi-year, billion dollar projects, delays ensue, costs overrun, results are unimpressive. It has to rely on private contractors or other countries for the most basic things, spends $211 billion for a space shuttle program that goes nowhere and ends up costing $0.5 billion per launch.

Private company goes from nothing to a successful rocket launch in 10 years for less than $1 billion, half of which is private funding. In the next 10 years makes rockets reusable, lowers the cost to orbit by 30x, launches a viable commercial service people are willing to pay for.

Communists on lemmy:

Capitalists on Lemmy: private company is better just because it’s private

Have a government run space agency, government constantly cuts funding. Awards contracts to incompetent military company to build over priced rocket. Crony capitalism and money disappears.

That government guy sure seems incompetent, I hope no one puts it in charge of a space company.

Private guy steals all NASA talent from budget cuts builds talented team, innovates new technologies for rockets

That private guy sure seems like he knows what he’s doing, I bet he’d be great at running a space company.

and then goes full blown Nazi and you love him even more.

IDK where that’s coming from, I never said that, you’re just making stuff up now.

have a government run space agency

a private company shows up

does everything better at a fraction of the cost and actually innovates

commies on lemmy: We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink

It’s not even theft, it’s piracy.

Removed by mod

Idk much about the CEO, the only reason why I mentioned him was to highlight that imo when it comes to brave people on lemmy judge the person not the product, and the product is good. I see no reason to dismiss it just because 1 guy (who probably haven’t even touched it) out of 100s of employees did something that doesn’t align with my morals. As far as I know brave makes money from it’s ad program, bat value and other non browser services; VPN and premium versions of its search, llm, and talk. It doesn’t have “the firefox deal” so as long as you disable brave ads and don’t directly give them money there is no ethical conundrum regarding supporting a bad person.

Only if you are going tor only. Im no expert but imo there is no better general purpose browser right now, both in terms of usability and privacy. Default firefox is a joke, librewolf is decent but it’s fingerprint protection relies on blending in which is difficult to achieve with it’s small userbase or if you have a lot of extensions and it’s identity separation is done manually through containers while brave uses randomization for fingerprinting, that doesn’t have this issue and it does site containerization between all tabs automatically. Ungoogled chromium is just brave without all the privacy benefits, mullvad browser is just tor browser without tor, which might be useful in some cases if you are using multiple browsers but I wouldn’t main it , and it has the same problems as librewolf. Opera is Chinese spyware, Vivaldi is whole ass operating system with a browser functionality, everything else is dead or not ready or not any better so yeah… I’ll be sticking with brave until something better comes along. If someone here knows a better alternative please let me know in the comment.

It’s a great browser especially if you go through the settings and disable the things you don’t need, but the people here don’t like it because the CEO donated $1000 to anti gay marriage bill in 2008. There were some other controversies like injecting brave’s referral codes on crypto exchanges if you were signing up for an account and allowing bat donations to creators that didn’t sign up for it but all of that has been remedied.

They are reciprocal so should be the same as what other nations are charging the US. The formula for them is: tariff for X = X’s tariff on US, so no surprise here.

About as enforceable as banning bitcoin.