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Comment by echlebek | Hacker News Reader

This piece seems pretty biased and it's disappointing to see Ars publishing stuff like this. Iron workers were dying at a high rate 100 years ago because of unregulated labour practices, and the progress that was made with regulation is a net positive. Not only is this basic historical fact not acknowledged in the article, there is not even any speculation on what horrors a deregulated space industry could have in store. Cmon, man.

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It also seems like just a big reach for a story. Musk twited a black and white photo and somehow that's referencing a specific historic skyscraper photo, and not only that, the purpose is to send a message to the FAA? Seems like an absurd leap.

I can definitely see the picture trying to emulate the skyscraper picture, in fact that's what I thought they were trying to do when I first saw the picture, but the message to the FAA seems a little too far fetched.

For reals?

When I saw the Starship pic I would've never thought, not even remotely, about the NYC one.

I also immediately saw the allusion.

Yes, you could use exactly the same rhetoric to justify Carnegie Steel or Stalin's Five Year Plans! "This is the future! We are building a new age for our glorious nation! Don't ask what it costs the workers or who is living in a mansion on the money siphoned off the budget! Don't ask if we could achieve the same without crippling and killing workers!"

It wasn't until the 1930s that employers in the USA even provided and mandated hard hats. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/history-hard-hat-1...

The FAA is not a workers protection agency. That's OSHA and as far as I'm aware SpaceX does not have a (public) problem with them. The FAA is in charge of regulating airspace. SpaceX's fight with them is about determining how fast a rocket company is allowed to iterate and launch. Skyscrapers boomed in the 20s because of lax zoning laws that enabled land developers to build tall and build often. The connection to the picture is that SpaceX wants the same lax "zoning" laws to be adopted by the FAA, allowing them to build many more "skyscrapers" in as short a time as possible.

IIRC, the FAA in the United States has a mandate to reduce accidents https://www.faa.gov/data_research/accident_incident/ They seem to be good at their job. So regulations which got in SpaceX's way would tend to be ones which reduce the chances of aircraft falling out of the sky or exploding and killing the crew and passengers and possibly airport crew.

More importantly, the rhetoric in that opinion piece can be used interchangably to argue against any kind of regulation or worker protection.

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