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Gonna be extremely funny if building stuff on Mars and then shipping them all the way to Earth ends up being cheaper than shipping them from somewhere on Earth due to the longshoreman union and the Jones Act.
LMAO. "We can easily imagine colonies on mars with a significant industrial base as well as regular transit of materials from Mars to Earth, but breaking up the longshoremen union and repealing the Jones act? That is beyond the realm of science fiction."
Wouldn't SpaceX rockets be Jones Act compliant anyway? They are built in the US, owned by a US company, registered in the US, and (in so far as they are crewed) crewed by US citizens.
The idea that wet Jones Act shipping between Miami and Puerto Rico costs more than space Jones Act shipping between Starbase and a US Mars Colony is scarily plausible. So is the idea of angry longshoremen trying to fix this problem by picketing Starbase and being zapped with Elon's latest death ray.
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