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Comment by nocoiner | Hacker News Reader

So SpaceX cannot continue to maintain the zero-marginal-cost service for the terminals they sold to Ukraine (and funded by USG) at 5x retail? And now they’re attempting to extort the USG (who, by the way, is also their primary customer)?

I’m not a socialist, but SpaceX should be nationalized now. The capabilities that it provides cannot remain in the hands of its current majority owner. I’m happy to see it re-privatized, in the very near future, with ownership sold to more responsible, and less flighty, stewardship.

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> So SpaceX cannot continue to maintain the zero-marginal-cost service for the terminals they sold to Ukraine

It makes absolutely no sense to say that this has "zero marginal costs". Internet connectivity for the ground stations has costs. Operation of the ground stations has costs. Supervision of the whole system has costs. Ongoing fighting of Russian countermeasures has costs. Ground stations and ground terminals even have opportunity costs -- possibly very large opportunity costs, considering the money the same hardware could be generating in rural US instead.

> I’m not a socialist

Good for you.

> but SpaceX should be nationalized now.

Now you are a socialist by definition. Congratulations. It started in my country in 1948 with large industrial concerns, then this trickled down all the way to self-employed people. You're at step 1 now.

You were so eager to write your rejoinders that you literally could not finish reading the final two sentences of my post? I think I fairly clearly anticipated and addressed most of your points in my post.

If you want to debate the wisdom of the U.S. Defense Production Act (apologies, I do not know what country you live in, based on what you said about nationalization of your industries - but if you’re unfamiliar with that law, feel free to look up it, or I’m happy to give you a capsule description if you like - I assume you have something analogous where you live, or maybe even a stronger version of it based on what you said in your post) or “too big to fail” and how I think that implies the necessity of temporary nationalization under exigent circumstances, then those are topics we could probably have an interesting discussion about. I bet we’d have some interesting disagreements!

But I do think it was fairly clear that I wasn’t calling for perpetual public ownership of formerly private enterprise.

...how do the final two sentences of your post change anything? And no, that had nothing to do with the Defense Production Act. US Defense Production Act has nothing to do with nationalization. And our situation had nothing to do with it; it was simply a consequence of Moscow-backed Communist Party taking charge of the country and ending democracy as we knew it.

I guess I’ve forgotten how to argue online, because obviously I’m not making my meaning clear. Agree to disagree and/or just to drop it?

Sorry about what happened in your country. I think democracy is pretty great and regret that the threats to it are unceasing.

Nationalization of large industrial corporations (like SpaceX is) on the basis of being considered vital for industrial interests of the state was the hallmark of all nascent socialist countries in the middle of the 20th century, so saying that nationalizing a large manufacturing corporation considered vital for the state is "not socialism" made absolutely no sense to me.

How do you know the service is zero marginal?

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