Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Starbase, LA

spacex.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 641 posts

Re: Starbase, LA

#281

Post by modeless »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #277
modeless wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People often cite Hyperloop but he explicitly said he wasn't going to build it himself. They often cite FSD but it is far from abandoned and is driving my car today. What other projects are you thinking of which are actually abandoned? The Tesla solar roof is the biggest one I can think of, I think it's fair to count it as abandoned. I guess the project to make building bricks out of Boring tunnel dirt didn't pan out…

Boring company maybe? It's not abandoned, but they likely gave up the idea of an underground system of roads under a city, and just focus on single project individually like traditional construction company.

It's far from abandoned. They're actively building TBMs at their factory and tunneling in Vegas and it's pretty different from any other transportation project I'm aware of.

Re: Starbase, LA

#283

Post by dgellow »

bko wrote: post #140
sockaddr wrote: post #74

Elon-types won't "dig us out" of our mess. Removing parasitic elements in government spending and policy will. This starts with politics. We first need a healthy, educated, engaged, and safe population. All else follows. These are all things Elon actively works against. You aren't part of his future.

I don't know, government waste and most policy sucks. But there's no reason we can't do stuff or even try. For instance, take Tesla. It wasn't anything revolutionary. Any auto manufacturer could have invested in battery technology and building a compelling EV, but they didn't. Same with manufacturing in America. Every manufacturer took as given that they have to outsource manufacturing to oversees and components to t…

> It takes someone naive and optimistic enough to try something different.

You mean Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, right?

Re: Starbase, LA

#284

Post by dgellow »

Game_Ender wrote: post #235
boplicity wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to forget that Tesla was made possible almost exclusively through government incentives. This is something that most people seem to have forgotten: Tesla exists because the government created incentive programs that paid in cold hard cash. Musk took advantage of those programs, and Tesla absolutely would not have been nearly as successful (and likely not existed) without it.

The government should find ways to strategically invest in developing major industries. The market for them is global and China has/will have a bigger internal market than the US, so without intentional development we'll get a continued industrial consolidation that is bad for the US and the world. I have robotic lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners made by Chinese companies partly because an intentional policy from China…

The current administration is literally cutting all those strategic investments

Re: Starbase, LA

#285

Post by consensus1 »

gchamonlive wrote: post #268
WalterBright wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation is caused by deficit money creation. It is not caused by taxes, tariffs, corporate greed, union greed, oligarchs, or anything else.

That's a very narrow view of inflation. If you increase wages, there's more demand for goods, more demand means higher prices which means higher inflation. Same with tariffs, they are paid when importing goods, which is passed onto the consumer, resulting in higher prices and thus inflation.

And where did that money to increase wages come from?

Re: Starbase, LA

#286

Post by Noaidi »

aksss wrote: post #116
chasd00 wrote: post #2

Man if this actually starts to happen it's a good time to be a welder, concrete worker, or any general contractor or tradesman in Louisiana. Coastal Louisiana is some of the poorest areas in the US even more so than the valley in Texas where Starbase Texas is located. Probably 10-20 years worth of solid work building out that site.

Incremental domestic capital investment, good. The level of cynicism, shit-talking, and schadenfreude wish-casting in response to this is crazy. Start cheering on successes. Resist the deconstructionist mindset.

Elon Musk is mostly a bad person. I do not want mostly bad people to succeed. Why is that hard to understand? You either do no think he is a bad person, or ignore the fact he is.

Re: Starbase, LA

#287

Post by 1970-01-01 »

maeln wrote: post #59

Feels like an impossible project that will end up being 5% of what was advertised (the 5% being what was actually planned all along), but is made with folie des grandeurs to pump a stock who's hype has died down.

The stock really didn't move much (+2%) with this big announcement. It is a city; not a short-term idea we can forget about in two weeks.

Re: Starbase, LA

#288

Post by manytimesaway »

decimalenough wrote: post #248
bigyabai wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only mass-market in the US because of subsidies and tariffs. Chinese EVs change the equation entirely. Outside the US protectionist bubble, Tesla is seen as a luxury brand and their inability to deliver a $25,000 EV doesn't help.

As of March 2026, the Model Y is the best selling car in China . https://teslamagz.com/tesla/model-y/tesla-model-y-becomes-ch... Also South Korea, Australia, the EU, etc.

No it's not. It was the most sold during March, but that's it.

Local sources (https://www.autohome.com.cn/hangye/showroom/) tend to show that it's Xiaomi / Geely that's leading the race in 2026.

Additionally, sales numbers doesn't correlate with the brand image of Tesla : it is a luxury brand, no matter how you put it.

Re: Starbase, LA

#289

Post by WalterBright »

jcranmer wrote: post #217
hparadiz wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Sorry, I'm too busy trying to check an algorithm to convert floating-point numbers to strings for correctness to deal with people playing the "I'm a rocket scientist, therefore everything is easy to me" card. And yet somehow Elon isn't that (see his most recent SpaceX, where he quite literally uses that to justify his competence to build orbital data centers).

I implemented float-to-string for my compiler's printf back sometime before 1985. It's a medium difficult problem.

Once you understand engineering, transferring that skill to another engineering discipline is not that hard.

For example, the equations for Newtonian mechanics, electronics, beam design, rotating inertia, etc., are interchangeable.

> his competence to build orbital data centers

Since nobody has yet built an orbital data center, nobody is competent at it yet.

Re: Starbase, LA

#290

Post by jazzyjackson »

MarkusQ wrote: post #279
jazzyjackson wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are going to be even more pissed off when there are more satellites than stars (I know nominally they’re not visible but they are shortly after launch while moving into position, and at large scale that would be happening all the time, not to mention the other side of burning up in the atmosphere after a few years)

Do you have any idea how many stars there are?

Depends on what city you’re in :p
Post reply on HN