The slap fight between Donald Trump and Elon Musk has highlighted the absurdity of keeping so much of our space program and satellite internet infrastructure in the hands of a single oligarch.
African Nation - has natural resource and has no way to get it out of the ground.
Foreign company that does this all the time: Yo, we’ll literally pay you to let us dig up this stuff.
Regime: Yes, I was paid, perfect. Thanks. And we’ll charge you what seems like tons of money also.
10 years later
New Regime: Hm…that’s an awfully nice mine you have there. We’ve increased taxes on it 400 times and you are still not closing. It means there’s too much money to be had! So we will take it and do the mining ourselves! How hard could it be?!
New regime nationalizes mine
3 months later
New Regime: Sadly, we must now close the mine and send everyone with jobs home because my drunk cousin is not a good mine director, and all the things broke and we didn’t know you had to order more spare parts.
New Regime places FOR SALE sign on mine and waits for another foreign company to start the cycle over again.
Stopping exploitation by Shell, BP & Friends isn’t exactly what made those regimes despotic
Hardly. Usually the process goes like this:
African Nation - has natural resource and has no way to get it out of the ground.
Foreign company that does this all the time: Yo, we’ll literally pay you to let us dig up this stuff.
Regime: Yes, I was paid, perfect. Thanks. And we’ll charge you what seems like tons of money also.
10 years later
New Regime: Hm…that’s an awfully nice mine you have there. We’ve increased taxes on it 400 times and you are still not closing. It means there’s too much money to be had! So we will take it and do the mining ourselves! How hard could it be?!
New regime nationalizes mine
3 months later
New Regime: Sadly, we must now close the mine and send everyone with jobs home because my drunk cousin is not a good mine director, and all the things broke and we didn’t know you had to order more spare parts.
New Regime places FOR SALE sign on mine and waits for another foreign company to start the cycle over again.