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US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

reuters.com

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Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#501

Post by JohnFen »

medvezhenok wrote: post #489
JohnFen wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think it would be hard to find a reasonable person who takes anything Musk says seriously anymore and yet plenty seem to.

The reason people follow Musk is that even though he over-promises and under-delivers; the under-delivered product is still better than the alternatives (or at least was for a while). People are not complete fools and can learn to discount over-the-top rhetoric; sure, some people are harmed by believing everything verbatim, but those people also fall for scams, etc, etc. His statements are parsed as statements of int…

I have real trouble with "the ends justify the means" arguments.

> Is it scammy? Probably.

It's the behavior of a con artist.

> But he likely got more out of people by pushing this false narrative than would have been otherwise accomplished.

Even if that's the case, he could have had the same, or better, effect without the lying. The lying is clearly aimed at gaining investment money and preorders, though, not at some bizarre attempt at motivating engineers.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#502

Post by commandlinefan »

lesuorac wrote: post #308
jandrese wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it impressive that the government is actually punishing a project for running late and underdelivering. They should expand this to all parts of the government. Can you imagine if the F-35 was cancelled the first time it fell behind schedule? The Space Launch System? The Littoral Combat System? The USS JFK? So many boondoggles could be killed off before they spend money. Maybe contractors would have to start pr…

I think you may not understand what the government is. The government is a collection of individuals. It is not a single borg instance. Some individuals within that collection are going to act different than other ones. Also the government does a lot of funding through different mechanisms. Many miltiary programs are a cost+ program where they pay the contractor the cost of development plus a profit% so the initial b…

> Some individuals within that collection are going to act different than other ones

Actually, no, they seem to have been acting as a (predictable) monolith for at least the past three years...

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#503

Post by lesuorac »

kelnos wrote: post #427
lesuorac wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may not understand what the government is. The government is a collection of individuals. It is not a single borg instance. Some individuals within that collection are going to act different than other ones. Also the government does a lot of funding through different mechanisms. Many miltiary programs are a cost+ program where they pay the contractor the cost of development plus a profit% so the initial b…

The problem with cost+ is that contractors can inflate the actual cost of things, and pocket the difference. Obviously they can't do this to an unlimited extent, but the cynic in me would have a hard time believing this isn't a common practice.

I mean there's almost certainly crime that happens in contracting but there is a real risk of being caught if you commit fraud. Do remember that companies such as Google do pay out literally millions of dollars to random people that send in invoices for work never requested or done.

Cost+ at face-value isn't that bad of an idea. An alternative to it is the government hiring a bunch of people to do a project and ideally the government only pays Cost in that case. For people that don't believe the government can do anything this is a pretty good trade off.

IIRC, the `+` part is capped at 15% profit so IIUC that's similar to an operating margin of 15%. Although IIUC, executive expenses and a ton of other things come out of the `+` part so it should be lower than 15%. But the point I'm going to make here is that an operating margin of 15% isn't really impressive and that's the best that the contractor can do.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#504

Post by thot_experiment »

bmitc wrote: post #473
thot_experiment wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it? Why do we need to visually see, basically permanently, a ring or string of lights in the sky, unwittingly, just because of some billionaire? There are upsides also. > You can predict where the satellites are going to be and avoid them. You could for example not collect from the relevant photosites during transit, we're not using photographic plates anymore. This is not some sort of insurmountable problem, I'…

> You absolutely can't see them in the earth's penumbra I have seen them with my own eyes and they've been filmed. It's just not correct. It's particularly visible when the sun is hitting them. You can find several photos and videos of them from the ground.

My mistake, I meant umbra, the part where there isn't any sun, which makes up most of the sky most of the night.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#505

Post by pstuart »

wolverine876 wrote: post #497
coffeebeqn wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point anyone who takes his claims at face value is a fool

Is it legal to cheat the foolish and ignorant?

It's legal to do lots of shitty things. But is it immoral to do so? Yes.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#506

Post by SteveGerencser »

kelnos wrote: post #422
Powdering7082 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah there's a pretty common routine of SpaceX & Tesla having some of the best results in the world for what they are trying to accomplish AND being much worse than what was promised.

And that's one of the (many) frustrating things with Musk: he fairly consistently overpromises and underdelivers. Even if that underdelivering is better than what you can get elsewhere, it still leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.

Perhaps, but he does deliver. As a rural internet customer who has been told for a decade now that "fiber is coming to our area" by the local telco, I am more than happy to give Musk the benefit of the doubt as one of the cleanest players in a filthy industry full of lies and graft.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#507

Post by didntknowya »

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #261
throw0101c wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> […] (and Musk in general) have been over-promising and under-delivering for years now. Related, "Tesla FSD Timeline": > September 2014: They will be a factor of 10 safer than a person [at the wheel] in a six-year time frame * https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/ * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38625380 (earlier today)

To be fair FSD is the hardest software problem that man has ever attempted.

can't be that hard if he claimed he could finish it in 3-6months.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#508

Post by oittaa »

JumpinJack_Cash wrote: post #361
madaxe_again wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve got news for you about Earth-based networking gear. You don’t just install it and forget about it forever - you replace and upgrade, almost continuously, and lifespans are frequently significantly less than five years.

A 1000Gbps cable laid down in the ground will be able to support 1000Gbps even 50 years from now provided that it doesn't get truncated by accident or Earthquake

That "cable laid down" is vacuum of the space in this situation. It's not going to disappear.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#509

Post by mensetmanusman »

memish wrote: post #448
mdasen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink (and Musk in general) have been over-promising and under-delivering for years now. Starlink claimed 150Mbps back in 2020 and that speeds would double to 300Mbps by the end of 2021.[1] Instead, speeds have halved.[2] At this point, T-Mobile is likely serving more rural high speed internet customers with greater speeds (T-Mobile has 4.2M home internet customers and Ookla's stats show 34% to be rural for 1.4M;…

"under-delivering" Delivered millions of EVs that everyone said would never work, dragging the entire car industry out of its stupor. Delivered a vast electric charging network and made it available to the competition. Delivered the best satellite internet. Delivered rockets that NASA uses. Delivered the most payload to space, more than even China. Gee, imagine under-delivering that badly.

over delivering compared to the world, under delivering compared to where Musk wants to be

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#510

Post by Qwertious »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #292
shmatt wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Abandoned_military_pr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancelled_military_pro... F35 Survived but there are like 50 other planes that didnt in that second list

Bradley IFV is not on this list.

The Pentagon Wars was misleading bullshit and the Bradley IFV was a good idea that was slated to come in under budget (before James Burton demanded his tests).

The tests were a huge waste of money that conclusively proved that the Bradley couldn't survive an anti-tank missile, which is irrelevant because 1) the Bradley isn't a tank and was never required to survive one, and 2) the Pentagon already knew that; they'd tested the components individually already.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gOGHdZDmEk

(28min 20sec)

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