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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

#571

Post by DonHopkins »

mulmen wrote: post #413
zbyte64 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with all of this, but if the problem is too hard for the expert, why would I listen to a billionaire/CEO?

Experts have a narrow, deep view while CEOs have a wide, shallow view. If the expert works in a lab developing new experimental solar panels they probably don’t see a clear path to mass production. The CEO might know another manufacturing expert that does see a path to production and have enough high level understanding to know the methods are compatible.

In this case the actual CEO we all know we're talking about is a serial confabulist who publicly agrees with anti semitic conspiracy theories and tells his advertisers to go fuck themselves, so your abstract hypothetical arguments generously giving some unspecified billionaire CEO the benefit of the doubt don't hold any water.

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

#572

Post by Powdering7082 »

aksss wrote: post #564
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.

No, engineers and software developers tend to be overly optimistic about the ability and speed to do things, and it’s integral to the task of building cool shit. It’s simply not lying. It may look that way to those on the outside, and you can say it’s irresponsible not to recalibrate, but even the adjusted estimates are optimistically recalibrated. The estimating well is poisoned by vision. Lying is something very di…

1) It's not just engineers and software developers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy#Empirical_evi...

2) Musk is particularly bad about it & does it in places that directly financially benefit him.

Telling people that if they fork out 15k now they'll have full self driving in X timeline, completely missing it and then doing the exact same thing for years on end seems less like the planning fallacy and more like fraud, but I guess we can just wait to see what the courts decide on the matter

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

#573

Post by nozzlegear »

trothamel wrote: post #395
Deprecate9151 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Commission decision does address this. Unfortunately the section is redacted of specific details, but it appears Starlink argued that it's second gen satellites would be launched via Starship and address these issues. However, they didn't successfully launch Starship yet as they described in that plan, and only announced Falcon 9 would launch second gen satellites after they were already denied based off of the i…

Given how much of the decision is blacked out, it's hard to give it any credibility, either.

Presumably the people who are relevant to the decision making are able to read the full reasoning and give it its due credibility.

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

#574

Post by literalAardvark »

monkaiju wrote: post #540
literalAardvark wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100/20 average is spectacular for those living in the US boonies. And they're the target. No one else comes even close. You can't run fiber there, can't mount towers everywhere.

>can't mount towers everywhere How are you getting phone/power?

Barely. Those take much less bandwidth.

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

#575

Post by mulmen »

DonHopkins wrote: post #571
mulmen wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Experts have a narrow, deep view while CEOs have a wide, shallow view. If the expert works in a lab developing new experimental solar panels they probably don’t see a clear path to mass production. The CEO might know another manufacturing expert that does see a path to production and have enough high level understanding to know the methods are compatible.

In this case the actual CEO we all know we're talking about is a serial confabulist who publicly agrees with anti semitic conspiracy theories and tells his advertisers to go fuck themselves, so your abstract hypothetical arguments generously giving some unspecified billionaire CEO the benefit of the doubt don't hold any water.

It’s unfair to put words in my mouth to make your own unrelated point. It’s your choice to interpret my words as a defense of Musk.

If I wanted to defend Musk I would do it explicitly. You don’t need to read between the lines.

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

#576

Post by Wytwwww »

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…

> Software timelines are notoriously hard to forecast

Perhaps. Of course, we all know for a certainty that this had almost nothing to do with you're describing. The people how were actually designing the software knew that it won't happen in six months. I doubt Musk wasn't aware of that, so the only alternative that he was lying.

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

#577

Post by mulmen »

tcmart14 wrote: post #520
mulmen wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Experts have a narrow, deep view while CEOs have a wide, shallow view. If the expert works in a lab developing new experimental solar panels they probably don’t see a clear path to mass production. The CEO might know another manufacturing expert that does see a path to production and have enough high level understanding to know the methods are compatible.

In this case yes, but in this case we have to assume the research side has achieved it's goal (its proven a material exists with the desired properties), now it is a manufacturing problem. If the lab can't produce the material, the manufacturing lines have nothing to manufacture with. And that seems to be the case with FSD. CEOs make wild claims, but the tech isn't there. The material has not been proven to exist in…

Sure, agree in this case.

But the point is that we are all equally capable of being wrong. Especially when we step outside our area of expertise. CEOs are just another type of expert but their domain is organization. We have to consider the source’s experience relative to the domain in question before we can decide if their prediction is trustworthy.

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

#578

Post by qwytw »

Powdering7082 wrote: post #252
chrisco255 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I regularly get 150+ Mbps on my Starlink terminal. Don't really care that they didn't hit the ambitious goal of providing 300+, it is already more than 15x better than the next best option available for me. T-Mobile has a three decade head start (maybe four if you count their Sprint Wireless acquisition's history), so hardly surprising if there is currently more T-Mobile home internet users than Starlink users. But I…

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.

However if Starlink can't compete with mobile broadband in medium (and sometimes even lower than that) density areas they don't really have much of a market. While there are certainly quite a few people in the developed world living in remote areas who don't have any better options for > 50/5 Mbps besides Starlink are there really enough of them to justify such a massive investment?

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

#579

Post by snuxoll »

lxgr wrote: post #418
Shawnecy wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is in comparison to launching satellites into space. I think most people would agree it's probably more along the lines of "trivial" when compared to that.

Neither are trivial, the two just scale very differently. I do see the benefit in resilience of building out fiber even to moderately unprofitable (from a unit economics point of view) regions, just like we also build roads to communities that will never "pay the investment back" in taxes. But there are cases where it just can't be justified. But it's also not a simple either-or: There are other technologies than fib…

Outside of truly rural areas the question with fiber is how long is the payback period, not "will it be profitable". Especially if deployment is integrated with routine highway re-pavement projects (roads need torn up and redone roughly every 30 years, after all), the majority of the cost becomes the fiber bundles themselves - perfect for even a smaller county or city government to handle with a modest bond issue.

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

#580

Post by [deleted] »

YokoZar wrote: post #551
jandrese wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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