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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

#551

Post by YokoZar »

jandrese wrote: post #519
I_Am_Nous wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FCC originally didn't want to include fixed wireless or satellite internet for RDOF consideration, so from that fact alone I believe they were intending it to be fiber optic. A fiber plant is pretty immutable, even if you end up upgrading the things connected to the fiber for higher speeds. Once it's buried, it's pretty reliable (unless a passing herd of excavators get hungry and smell the fiber buried undergroun…

Buried fiber is never going to happen for the rural folks serviced by Starlink. It's hard to get companies to put fiber down in well populated suburbs, getting them out into the country is pure wishful thinking, especially if you're only talking about a billion dollars.

Do we have to bury it? Why not just put it up on transmission lines?

It seems weird to me that we can run Cable TV to fairly remote locations but not fiber.

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

#552

Post by uxp100 »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #464
KennyBlanken wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he fairly consistently overpromises and underdelivers. Can we please just call it what it really is? Lying. He's a pathological liar.

How many startups start by telling investors, employees and customers, "We're going to fail"? They know the odds are that's going to happen. Are they pathological liars? No one can predict the future. Musk is what plenty of entrepreneurs are...over-confident. That's part of the profile. That doesn't make him or any of them liars.

I think plenty of entrepreneurs emphasize that they are scrappy underdogs, that it’s a long shot, and that it’s going to take hard work. That’s you know, the optimistic side of the truth that they’re going to fail. I’m sure Musk has said things like this. He’s also just lied about stuff. He’s remarkably careless about what he says/tweets for a CEO. Might have something to do with his drug use, who knows.

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

#553

Post by seadan83 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #531
AlexandrB wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is important to consider when judging Tesla's engineering capability, but not when judging Elon Musk's highly optimistic promises. Either Elon is aware of the fact that FSD is really hard and he's lying repeatedly about being able to deliver it "later this year". Or he is not aware that FSD is as hard as you say and needs to "hit the books" and understand the problem better. I don't really see an "out" here afte…

Software timelines are notoriously hard to forecast because you're essentially trying to predict how long it will take to do something nobody has done before. So you look at what's left to do and as long as you don't run into any unforeseen issues you say, looks like about six months from now. Sometimes you don't run into any unforeseen issues and it turns out to be about six months. Sometimes you do, and then it tak…

Just reminded of the an old trope for estimates, either:

- less than 3 months

- 3 months

- 6 months

Anything less than 3 months - is an accurate estimate. Otherwise, 3 months is the amount of time it takes to do _anything_, right? If it's a really hard problem, then we say, okay, it's 6 months. At the end of the day, those 3 months and 6 months means "NFC", which goes back to the estimation technique that everything is either a "1", "TFB", or "NFC". 3 months = TFB, 6 months = NFC

On a more serious point, we (as software engineers) generally feel we can solve almost any problem with 3 months worth of resources and effort. 3 to 6 months sometimes (IMO) can be a bit of the scariest estimate to give or receive.

For reference & more on NFC/TFB/1 estimation technique: https://pm.stackexchange.com/questions/26218/how-to-implemen...

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

#554

Post by cubefox »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #548
cubefox wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He "wields power against others"? What are you talking about?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38127745 For someone who is such a fan, do you not know who your hero is?

That's a bunch of cherry-picked gossip. You could make another list with a lot of people saying positive things about him.

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

#555

Post by DonHopkins »

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.

There's a lot of water you're carrying there, Stan.

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

#556

Post by pavon »

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…

The various FCC rural broadband programs in specific have been horrible about ISPs not completing the work and not having money clawed back.

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

#557

Post by DonHopkins »

JohnFen wrote: post #446
jcranmer wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect his statements are carefully made to not technically meet the legal definition for fraud, but colloquially he's absolutely a liar. They're probably not carefully made, but fraud requires knowledge of falsity, and short of an internal report saying "this feature won't be ready before XYZ," it is going to be extremely difficult to prove Tesla knew the claims were false. The other thing you'll run into is re…

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

And I think it's safe to say that sycophants bending over backwards to carry Musk's water like DoesntMatter22 aren't reasonable people, don't base their opinions on facts or reality, and shouldn't be taken seriously.

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

#558

Post by robertlagrant »

lesuorac wrote: post #382
jandrese wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if cost+ contracting hasn't been a major factor in projects going overbudget and behind schedule. Even with cost+ the contractor needs to provide an estimate up front of both the time and money needed. While it is understood that it is just an estimate, having projects come in for 5x or more of the original estimated cost is egregious. SLS for example was estimated to cost $1.5B, but instead costs $11.2B and still…

> SLS for example was estimated to cost $1.5B I wish it was; lol. The initial estimate was $18B [1]. I suspect you saw the $1.5B number for some sub-component of SLS. That's another common problem with government projects. The media will read some government report that says a new railroad will cost $1B and then report that the entire project will cost $1B while the report only talked about track cost and not about l…

> I do wish NASA would move closer to how DARPA does things where you payout a reward to companies that achieve some milestone.

SpaceX seems to have done well out of how NASA does bids for contracts. And that's for actual work done, not for fudgeable project milestones?

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

#559

Post by DonHopkins »

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…

Tell that to the disembodied pulverized head that was attached to somebody who took his claims at face value, and try explaining to his widow that her late husband was a complete fool to fall for it, so it's not Musk's fault.

The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash: A reconstruction of the wreck shows how human error and emerging technology can collide with deadly results

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/t...

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

#560

Post by paulsutter »

mdasen wrote: post #38
I_Am_Nous wrote: post #15

When applying for RDOF you say what service tier you are targeting and instead of shooting for the minimum 25/3, Starlink applied for 100/20. When they didn't reach those speeds[1], they were ineligible but not just because they didn't hit the required speeds on their existing network. There are more details here[2] but the jist is that Starlink bid to supply 100/20 internet to over half a million subscribers and the…

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;…

As a SpaceX shareholder since 2006, I can confirm that they’ve been turning the impossible into the late, very consistently. There is no more impressive company anywhere
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