They're not being held back by anti-progress haters, they're just straight-up ignoring the environmental agreement they voluntarily signed.
When companies have complete disregard for public welfare and dump the cost onto everyone else, that damage needs to be part of their value equation.
FTA -
>That agreement, signed by a Boring executive in 2022, was intended to compel the company to comply with state water pollution laws. Instead, state inspectors documented nearly 100 alleged new violations of the agreement.
Americans don’t want economic growth, or don’t want foreigners in the country?
I feel like we should be honest - Americans are perfectly comfortable picking and choosing when laws get enforced. We do it all the time. We don’t treat every law as sacred. Enforcement is selective in a million other areas, from antitrust to wage theft to pollution. Nobody insists those must be pursued to the letter every single time.
So why single out immigration as the one area where “the law is the law” trumps any rational or humane appeal? It starts to look less like a principled stand on legal consistency and more like a cultural preference. One that just happens to line up with race and class anxieties rather than some universal devotion to the rule of law.
Norms and goalposts aside, what’s the value in adopting a formal policy of harassment against non-criminal, non-violent workers?
Congress can debate immigration laws on the books, but this cultural shift seems to be something else entirely. Instead of measured enforcement, it appears to be the normalization of cruelty. We're punishing people who are part of the workforce contributing to our country's economic output.
Seems like the real question is, what do we get out of this? Because it doesn't appear to be aligned with security or prosperity. It's just needless suffering, bureaucracy, and wasted resources.
Compared to what, just rolling the dice? SpaceX isn't the only shop that can deliver against requirements.
Procurement bids should be transparent and avoid the illusion of conflict. This is the complete opposite of that. It's hard to take Musk's campaign against "fraud and waste" serious when he's awarding the contracts to himself.
The quote from Duffy indicates that the SpaceX team doesn't have any real knowledge about or experience with the FAA systems. Seems like they're being brought in just because they're a Musk company.
In the last 50 years, over 1600 murderers have been murdered by the state. It's a question of authority, not justification, and I think that's a much less meaningful distinction.
The fact that there's so little sympathy for the death of a CEO who, in their view, callously discards human life tells us the authority is a much smaller dealbreaker than the justification.
It's animating outwards. The article highlights how they're interfering with FEMA, sending death threats to meteorologists, and generally making things harder for disaster responders.
I feel like The Atlantic has really declined. Every once in a while they'll put out something interesting, but for the most part their entire model appears to be writing for an aging population who is scared of change in the world.