701–710 of 831 posts
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2022, cut out crimea.
I believe by the time Starlink arrived in Ukraine Crimea was already occupied and post "referendum" and providing service there would be like providing service to Russia, no?
Which since 1991 has been and remains Ukrainian.
If anyone from Starlink or SpaceX is reading these comments here’s what you want to do: Sell your own branded trail cam with solar charging and LTE from orbit. You can charge $25-$40 a month for unlimited pictures sent from the cam. This would open up hunters, nature enthusiasts, and researchers to be able to place their hardware anywhere in the field without worrying about connectivity. Here in SWVA we have deep hol…
> This would open up hunters, Christ what more do you guys need to shoot a rabbit.
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> most successful businessman in the history of the world You're ranking Musk above Jobs, Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Disney, Toyoda, Walton, and Buffett?
IMO it depends on what you see as the point of business and entrepreneurship. I don't see money as the goal, but rather on creating great things. So Buffet wouldn't even rank for me, while you would have omitted Musk's closest competitor - Thomas Edison. Put another way, if in 30 years Musk has 10 trillion in wealth would seem, to me, to be much less relevant than if he succeeds in making humanity a permanently multi…
Why is a company worth more today than it was five years ago?
Because it's generating more revenue, has more assets... is better at doing whatever {company thing} is.
One can argue that (a) {company thing} isn't good for humanity at all and/or (b) a company which generates more money isn't really more successful, but merely a side effect of capitalist valuing.
And maybe...
But I'd say there's a pretty strong argument that Buffett is worth what he is because BH made multiple companies very much better at doing what they do. In the same way that Ford or Walton made their money by building companies that did what they did better.
And I'd add in the perspective that science and discovery without engineering into mass application is... a hobby with limited impact. The real litmus test is "Can you use this to improve many people's lives?"
And when you do that in a capitalist society, you usually have a chance to make a lot of money.
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> There's no inherent reason for this to be a winner takes all market. Economics? Competitors would have to match SpaceX's vertical integration: Satellite design, reusable launches at cost, its exiting armada of satellites, and its moving target of customer penetration. The latter is huge. Starlink is clearly not satisfied leaving any satellite demand on the table. There is no military on Earth that has demand for sa…
"SpaceX is really good and it's hard to compete with them" is not an economic reason for it to be winner takes all. Economic reasons would be, for example, regulations that either explicitly or implicitly prohibit others from competing, as are present in many terrestrial ISP markets. Some way for SpaceX to corner the market for some essential resource like spectrum or orbits and exclude competitors that way.
I don't know what the precise defining lines are, but I can certainly see how you'd make more money running an electricity cable to a home with no electricity, than running a second cable to a home that already had an electricity supply in place.
And Wikipedia says "frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate [...] examples include public utilities such as water services, electricity, telecommunications, mail, etc" - starlink does sound like capital-intensive telecommunications.
Of course, even if nobody cares to take on Starlink in the broadband satellite internet market, there are a bunch of incumbent cable and cell phone companies. So it's not like starlink are on course to an internet access monopoly.
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The issue is that space launch has some huge economies of scale. And {world space launch demand} is >> {one country's space launch demand} The argument for China overcoming SpaceX would be: - China needs to get within functional (not cost) technological parity with SpaceX ASAP (i.e. which means reusability, albeit for cadence/capacity reasons) - After that, they need to incentivize global demand to launch on Chinese…
I don't think China needs any third-party payloads. Even if they only launch Qianfan it should be enough to bring costs down.
They create demand so they can scale manufacturing that they can use to decrease prices that creates more demand... etc. etc.
You can't beat a company doing that by just getting "big enough" unless the scaling company (a) runs out of increased demand or (b) cannot convert increased volume into cheaper economics per unit.
Neither of those seem very plausible.
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The issue is that space launch has some huge economies of scale. And {world space launch demand} is >> {one country's space launch demand} The argument for China overcoming SpaceX would be: - China needs to get within functional (not cost) technological parity with SpaceX ASAP (i.e. which means reusability, albeit for cadence/capacity reasons) - After that, they need to incentivize global demand to launch on Chinese…
"convincing a substantial portion of global launch demand to use Chinese rockets seems the trickiest bit, give the CCP's relationship with the rule of law." Expound more on this please assuming I'm a potential Brazilian South African ,Saudi or Thai client .
The American private company might be prohibited from launching military assets for you, but once a launch contract is otherwise signed, you know it's going to happen.
In contrast, a Chinese legal agreement is worth what, if the central government decides to get involved?
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Heroin addicts have the option to escape heroin any time they want. Just ignore the heroin.
Funny how while you mean it ironically, it still is true. Its time people take responsibility of their actions.
Vertical integration by Starlink of the cheapest launch capability in the world (by far) is the reason there are no competitors, and there will be no competitors. The pace of innovation at SpaceX is not THE reason - it’s an additional reason that no one has a snowballs chance in hell of ever catching Starlink. I’ve seen talk of competitor satellite networks or a possible competitor emerging. Folks it’s game set and m…
Odd. You seem to be overjoyed at the possible birth of a monopoly situation? I think your emotions and tribal instinct would be better served towards something more benign, like football or baseball ... Lest your voting intentions become equally malignant.
EU will step in eventually and regulate if it becomes too great of a concern, right now it's quiet because it hasn't reached critical mass yet.
Musk's empire is already being dismantled and the trend will continue, either by direct competition of laws.
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My family had starlink installed at a remote house we own for internet access. While we could get it up and running, the connection wasn't reliable and we encountered many issues. When we tried to contact Starlink for help, support was non-existent; sent us to multiple dead ends, and often wasted our times with repairs promised weeks into the future, over and over, which never surfaced. After 8 months of pain, we end…
I think this is quite perceptive. Musk is a narcissist, and the driving motivators of narcissists are a bottomless need for praise and attention and contempt for others. Musk is famous for being contemptuous of his employees, and he's starting to show more and more contempt for Rest of World. Cybertruck and X both reek of it. Everyone here is assuming Musk is rational and SpaceX and Starlink will continue to develop…
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It's massively hypocritical, even if the people don't realise it right away. If you take libertarianism to its logical conclusion you wind up with feudalism, which is anything but free. Whenever libertarians try to take their philosophy through to its logical conclusion in practice they just wind up reinventing government only worse (or reinventing banking only worse in the case of crypto).
Well, yeah, that’s the point of corporate libertarianism. You can’t grant absolute power to corporations without also implementing feudalism. Of course, there are voters that think they are voting for individual libertarianism, but are voting for corporate libertarianism instead. (Similarly, there are progressives and moderates that end up voting for corporatists.)