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That's an unfair and short-sighted attitude.
Being rich is not a one time thing. It's not they reach $1M once and that's it, they no longer have to do anything - they are millionaires for the rest of their lives.
There are constant expenses. Being rich is like keeping a punctured baloon inflated. You always have to keep filling it.
They don't sell ads bcz they are rich. They sell ads to BE rich. To STAY rich.
It's not a sin to be rich. After all, we all enjoy them being rich, mostly indirectly: ms office, spaceX, youtube, reddit, google, etc. We all use their products, one way or another. We take what they made, take it for granted and complain that they took our money and diversified their business model for sustainability, so we could get better stuff. Complain. Complain. Envy and complain. And complain more instead of saying Thank You, Good Job.
How pathetic and self-centered people can be... -
@netikras SpaceX benefits no one, MS Office has countless alternatives and its biggest advantage is that it is the standard so using anything else is bound to cause problems.
The others were built on a small budget before they blew up. -
@lorentz yeah, tax evasion is indeed a hard problem, and it’s also important… to someone at the top.
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@kiki Reusable rockets can launch satellites cost-efficiently which are valuable to lots of fields. The vast majority of SpaceX's cash flow is bullshit (there are so many alternatives for a lunar transport that don't waste energy on trying to look like the Tintin rocket) but I'll grant them that the reusable rockets would not have happened if Musk didn't throw a lot of money at a very dubious idea.
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@lorentz spaceX benefits everyone. They do the most tedious and the most exciting part - laying the path for future space xplorations/projects, whether or not carried out by spaceX, nasa or wtv. Future generations will base their work on spaceX mistakes and findings. And technologies.
Ms office is basically irreplaceable. Yes, there is GDocs which is cloud-based, there's OO/LO, which is/are onprem-based. And LO tends to have inconsistencies among versions - same od* files sometimes look a bit distorted when opened with newer versions of LO [ie a few years later]. Never have I encountered this with ms office.
I'm not a ms fan, but I have to admit that ms office deserves its popularity - it really is a very good office suite -
@netikras The experts employed by SpaceX would be interested in aerospace no matter who's carrying the torch. Musk's contribution compared to a public organization such as NASA isn't that space research is being done, it's his risk affinity.
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@lorentz ever heard of space shuttle?
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@horus If you go there, you already know.
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@netikras Similarly, MS office fulfills basically all professional typesetting demand so libreoffice is less important and receives much less funding than it could. I'll grant that Word is rightfully the most popular program of its kind, but its overbearing dominance in use cases that don't require a professional typesetting tool is mainly a positive feedback loop.
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@kiki Yeah, I'm also familiar with its maintenance burden, technical limitations and vast inefficiency which were allegedly caused by design constraints specified by the DoD and which made it a really bad deal.
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@lorentz spacex reusability comes with exactly the same hurdles. Second launch success rate is very low, but the hype is very big. That’s a problem.
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@lorentz perhaps. But spaceX is rich enough to afford taking risks that humanity benefits from. And that was my point.
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@kiki second launch rate is very low? They broke their own record with 13th reuse in one of falcon rockets…
It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear. “Budge’s Boots are the Best” simply means “Give me money”; “Use Seraphic Soap” simply means “Give me money.” It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.
— G.K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem
rant