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Europe is trying to leave Starlink behind

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Re: Europe is trying to leave Starlink behind

#61
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditionally that's what most public-facing CEOs and other business leaders have done, keeping their politics to themselves in order to avoid needlessly alienating customers and to maintain business continuity as administrations come and go. That won't work with Trump. Not if you built your businesses on sectors that he is targeting, ranging from EVs to space exploration and research. Musk had to pick a side. Neutra…

It would probably have worked just fine if the richest/biggest CEOs didn't jump to be first in line to appease Trump?

Again: you guys are missing my point. Whether you like it or not, or agree or not, they had no choice. Being rich as hell only leaves them that much more vulnerable to Trump.

If your business relies on the USPS as much as Amazon's still does, you want to have a seat at the table when the administration decides how they're going to kneecap the USPS. Same with tariffs, when half of the crap they sell comes straight outta Shenzhen. See also NASA and Musk. Being locked out of the rooms where these decisions get made is potentially fatal for them.

Re: Europe is trying to leave Starlink behind

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditionally that's what most public-facing CEOs and other business leaders have done, keeping their politics to themselves in order to avoid needlessly alienating customers and to maintain business continuity as administrations come and go. That won't work with Trump. Not if you built your businesses on sectors that he is targeting, ranging from EVs to space exploration and research. Musk had to pick a side. Neutra…

Your whole argument rests on excluding the middle, which could have been tepid support instead of appearing on stage to throw Nazi salutes, giving out money to voters signing fake Orwellian pledges about "supporting" the Constitution, and threatening to primary non-maggot congressional candidates. You've essentially set up a Roko's Basilisk, based around one small hateful man rather than superintelligence.

And I think I addressed the salutes (and implicitly his other actions) as being completely irrational and inexplicable. Musk does that sort of thing a lot.

If you're under the impression I think any of this is a good thing, that would be grossly incorrect.

Re: Europe is trying to leave Starlink behind

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He had little choice but to defect to Trump's side. If Harris had won, the damage due to supporting Trump would have been finite and likely fixable. However, a Trump victory would wreck essentially all of his companies if he'd gone all-in for Harris. They have massive dependencies on Federal government support. No way to hand-wave the Nazi salutes away with game theory, though. Those were just stupid. Safe to say tha…

Jeff Bezos seems to have made a few minor genuflections in Trump's direction and is otherwise unaffected (except for the wreckage Trump's tariffs are likely inflicting on Amazon.) No, Musk's decision was a choice. And now he's stuck with that choice. There is almost certainly no way that things "just go back to normal" with a future Democratic administration.

Torpedoing the Washington Post wasn't what I'd call a "minor genuflection," but whatever.

Re: Europe is trying to leave Starlink behind

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Because Elon like many people is extremely smart on narrow fields, he is not generally smart (he can’t fight for example, which is a form of intelligence. He also struggles with being honest, demonstrating potentially low EQ). That’s not to say he’s dumb - it’s just that there is no one (!) who is generally smart - there is no generally applicable intelligence, experience always matters, and you always learn by…

> ...it’s extremely unlikely that Europe will be successful at this. The future is US-China dominated. I think the events of the last few weeks have been a wake-up call to many people around the globe who now see the value of not having their entire economy (or telecommunications &etc) be vulnerable to the whims of one person, be that the richest person in the world or a president nobody in Europe voted for. I suspec…

Britain tried voting themselves out from under the influence of a politician in Brussels that nobody in Britain voted for, but found that removing that influence was a lot easier said then done.

Re: Europe is trying to leave Starlink behind

#65
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then why does spacex have superior outputs?

"Superior outputs" seems to have stagnated at Elon companies: From Falcon 9 to Starship, and from Model Y to Cybertruck, for example.

Calling building the biggest rocket in the world and the largest sat company in the world, that both launches, manufactures and operates the most sats in the world, while being the only company that can deliver humans reliably into space and also has a private space flight business. Claiming that ist 'stagnet' is an absolutely absurd claim. Oh and that was the Falcon Heavy.

Starship is even bigger and more powerful and has the most advanced rocket engine ever designed.

Just because they haven't yet managed to create a fully reusable vehicle, doesn't mean its 'stagnet'. A fully reusable rocket is insanely hard to build. Lets alone all the new infrastructure required to do it. And the first stage has already proven re-usability. If all they were shooting for was a much bigger Falcon 9, they would already have it.

And maybe try to actually compare it to the competition. Ariane 6 for instant was financed in 2014. And had lots and lots of work done before it, the engine that is in the Ariane 6 second stage has been in development since the late 90s.

SpaceX only had the resources to seriously invest in Starship around 2020 and even then it was nowhere close to top priority.

I know its fashionable to shit on Musk, but common, at least have some perspective. They are by far the biggest most successful space company in the world by such a wide margin that its not even funny. The competition has not yet even replicated the Falcon 9. And Amazon is struggling to get even an inferior version of Starlink up. And Boeing can't get their human system to work at all.

Re: Europe is trying to leave Starlink behind

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tons to space.

Because the USA is a big economy where people speak only one language. Would Elon Musk be able to create same success if he started Starlink or SpaceX in Norway?

People only deserve success if they were born in a trash can during the civil war in Sudan. That's such a fucking dumb logic.

Musk specifically went to Silicon Valley because that's where the opportunity were.

But he was only one of many who tried to make it big. Just because the US is a big country doesn't magically create rockets that can fly to space.

Re: Europe is trying to leave Starlink behind

#67
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then why does spacex have superior outputs?

> then why does spacex have superior outputs? * The dictate of fail fast and iterate quickly, along with simplification of mechanisms and ample compute power. * Not being mired in the bureaucracy of committees and government bodies to answer to Yes, being enabled by a billionaire with a dream made a huge difference. But that's not a guarantee, as there's been 3 such billionaires and only one SpaceX.

Musk wasn't even close to being a billionaire when SpaceX was founded. He is a billionaire because about 10 years after SpaceX was founded Tesla and SpaceX at the same time took off.

And other people as rich as Musk tried their hand in the space industry.

Re: Europe is trying to leave Starlink behind

#68
post #46

One web needs ground based gateways, which isn't really an option in warzones. These gateways will be immediately targeted. The only option is to used space based lasers for relay. Of which, spaceX is the only entity on the planet with this technology. Love or hate Elon, he's been able to turn himself into a very powerful figure on the world stage through technology alone. If you think him having complete control ove…

IRIS2 is literally being shot up this year and will work with good ol' regular 5G, instead of relying on expensive specialized terminals like starlink. [0] No need to bring anti-worker propaganda into this. [0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/eutelsat-succeeds-w...

Starlink already has connections to phones operational and deploying more of that far, far faster then any of the competitors.

And IRIS2 as far as I know isn't a direct to cell technology.

Re: Europe is trying to leave Starlink behind

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stay out and distance yourself from either camp? You're absolving the agency of the richest person in the world. And I get that might hard when one has got a crippling social media addiction and can't help but run their mouth. But again, let's not absolve the agency of the richest person in the world.

Traditionally that's what most public-facing CEOs and other business leaders have done, keeping their politics to themselves in order to avoid needlessly alienating customers and to maintain business continuity as administrations come and go. That won't work with Trump. Not if you built your businesses on sectors that he is targeting, ranging from EVs to space exploration and research. Musk had to pick a side. Neutra…

[deleted]

Re: Europe is trying to leave Starlink behind

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really follow what you are arguing here. You starting with long hours is the same as hiring two times the amount of people, then you say that the european companies are all to old to innovate? There are plenty of european startups in the space race, they just can't compete... because europeans have a distain for "Fetishizing long work hours"

Those are two mostly unrelated discussions. If you do demanding work, a full working week is 20-30 hours. Even 40 hours is too much and cannot be sustained in the long term. You can do more in the short term, but you'll eventually burn yourself out. Longer hours are only possible with routine and/or fake work that doesn't really make you more productive. All organizations eventually stagnate, because humans have thei…

>If you do demanding work, a full working week is 20-30 hours. Even 40 hours is too much and cannot be sustained in the long term. You can do more in the short term, but you'll eventually burn yourself out. Longer hours are only possible with routine and/or fake work that doesn't really make you more productive.

This line shows me that we will never agree. If i showed this to my boss he would laugh... and so would my entire team.

Silicon Valley runs on 80-hour weeks, sleepless nights, and a culture that glorifies obsession. It's a system that burns hot — and burns people out. Many of the engineers and founders who fuel these breakthroughs walk away in their 30s and 40s, exhausted but occasionally leaving billion-dollar companies in their wake.

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