For what it’s worth, I agree with you 100%. I’d love to see Musk fail in every one of his business endeavors, but if we’re going to drop space garbage over the planet, an uninhabited island seems like a great place to do it. The fact that a small group of people has superstitious ideas about that small patch of land should be irrelevant.

I’m one of those people that has the technical knowledge to repair most electronics. I still buy new sometimes.

A while ago, I had to repair a faulty pellet stove. It was obvious that the main control board was bad (there was a single small circuit board connected to a handful of relays and sensors, all of which tested as good). This board contained a small cheap microcontroller, a few MOSFETs, and a handful of discrete components. A replacement was $500. Maybe $10 in parts at the most, and they wanted to charge me half the cost of the entire appliance.

I was able to isolate the problem to a bad MOSFET and order a new one for about 50 cents. Had this been a complex circuit, there’s no way in hell I could have found the problem without a schematic.

So in my opinion, the problem is twofold. Manufacturers want ridiculous prices for replacement parts, and no documentation exists to repair the parts themselves. They obviously have schematics from when they designed the board. They should be forced to release them.

It makes sense for housing assistance to be temporary. First, though, we need rent control and an appropriate minimum wage so that people don’t have to rely on government assistance indefinitely.