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Yes, technologically, this is amazing. But I honestly think it's sickening that a company controlled by one man is allowed to send 30,000 pieces of junk into sp

• ramraj07 3y ago
  The semi good news is these seem low enough orbit that even with everything they could do they don’t last longer than a few years/decade. https://cybernews.com/news/starlink-lost-200-satellites/ https://cybernews.com/news/starlink-lost-200-satellites/
  • rewmie 3y ago
    > (...) longer than a few years/decade. Also known as a lifetime.
    • keep_reading 3y ago
      A decade is a lifetime? I knew the life expectancy in the USA was contracting but I didn't think it was that bad
  • inemesitaffia 3y ago
    That article and subsequent ones I've seen from that site are disinformation
• sschueller 3y ago
  It should not be possible for a single human to amass any amount over a billion maybe even less. We managed a global cooperate min. tax rate of 12.5% we can manage to also tax billionaires down to billion. Stock can be converted to voting only, don't let them borrow against their stock etc. etc.
  • screamingninja 3y ago
    How do you propose to implement that?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • warent 3y ago
    Sharing this in a forum full of "billionaires temporarily down on their luck" is bold and not likely to end well; yet, I agree with you and GP. Hacking should not be synonymous with runaway capitalism, siphoning human energy, and plundering the earth. Star Trek economy for all!
    • chippiewill 3y ago
      As a fellow temporarily embarrassed billionaire I'm more than happy to be taxed down to just the one billion.
    • edgyquant 3y ago
      > billionaires temporarily down on their luck This is such a pretentious, bad faith line that you’ve heard from someone else and are repeating. Yeah I heard it in philosophy class freshman year too. You gloss over the possibility that maybe other people just aren’t as hateful and jealous as you and believe that capital allocating into the hands of those who have created the most value is an efficient economic system. That doesn’t equate to those people believing they will one day create that much value and profit for it. Maybe stop projecting your mindset on others.
      • warent 3y ago
        There is no hate here nor anything intended to be a personal attack on specific individuals, but clearly my comment struck a nerve. This comes across as a saddeningly extreme armchair psychological evaluation and extrapolation to just attack my entire character.
      • 3y ago
• bryanlarsen 3y ago
  SpaceX is an American company. They are regulated by both the FCC and the FAA. Those regulators are effective -- otherwise the second launch attempt of Starship would have happened at least a month ago.
• gambiting 3y ago
  Hundreds of millions if not billions of people gain absolutely no benefit from this yet they have the common good(night view of the sky) polluted by an American billionaire so he can make more money. I hate it with passion - as much as Starlink is amazing from a technological point of view and the nerd inside me loves it, I don't think it should be allowed, full stop.
  • krona 3y ago
    There's lots of infrastructure which people gain nothing from directly. This sounds like an Anarcho-primitivist line of argument.
  • stainablesteel 3y ago
    that's not true, the technological innovations of yesterday have brought more wealth, less poverty, and more overall benefit to the entirety of humanity than saying "i don't like these inventors who make new things that make life easier for everyone, lets kill them" the roman empire literally killed people who invented new things because the emperors thought it would have put too many people out of work. we know now through economics that this is nonsense, and more productivity ends up not only making more for everyone but also making plenty of jobs to fill in what has been automated or made more efficient. there is easily going to be plenty of benefit for the future of this, you're trying to view it through the lens of "how does this benefit me or some rando on another continent right now". and your lack of knowing an answer doesn't mean there isn't benefit, but for some reason you've mistaken it as that.
    • gambiting 3y ago
      >>hat's not true, the technological innovations of yesterday have brought more wealth, less poverty, and more overall benefit to the entirety of humanity than saying "i don't like these inventors who make new things that make life easier for everyone, lets kill them" That's sounds like trickle down economics to me - it benefits people in rich countries so it's fine, eventually it will make everyone better, right? A person in a country with no Starlink offering now cannot take clear pictures of the night sky because an American billionare wants to make even more money, but it's fine because "overall benefit to humanity" might be there? >>more productivity ends up not only making more for everyone but also making plenty of jobs to fill in what has been automated or made more efficient. I don't see how that applies here at all. I wouldn't have any problem with Starlink(or similar constellations) if they were limited in their impact only to countries they are offered in - but for obvious reasons that's not possible, they impact everyone on Earth equally even if not everyone on Earth can access the service. >>and your lack of knowing an answer doesn't mean there isn't benefit Oh but I have an answer - but I don't think the benefits outweight the disadvantages. If you want to entertain a thought exercise for a second - imagine if an American corporation decided to use technology to increase rainfall everywhere on earth, so that they can increase harvests in US. Only they get the profit from it, but it impacts everyone on Earth. Sure you could argue that it's great, there is more food, there are more jobs being created, surely everyone will benefit at some point, right? But if I live in a country that is impacted by it, then I really don't care about this argument - your benefit doesn't balance itself against the negatives for me.
• afavour 3y ago
  People will object to what you're saying but IMO there's a core truth in it. One person in control of this many things is capital B Bad, no matter who they are. Like the fact that he gets to decide whether Ukraine is able to use Starlink or not, this level of centralized control feels like a time bomb. Compared to technology like GPS it feels like we're backsliding. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/world/europe/elon-musk-starlink-ukraine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/world/europe/elon-musk-st...
  • stainablesteel 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • baz00 3y ago
    I suspect if he does enough fucking around he will end up doing some finding out. And he's doing a lot of the former and annoying nation state and union level entities.
  • pokstad 3y ago
    How is it any less bad for someone else who didn’t build the thing to decide what is done with it?
    • afavour 3y ago
      Because those people can be held accountable for their actions. e.g. if the US military decided to decommission GPS tomorrow morning the democratically elected government would be able to force them to change track. Moreover these institutions are set up to make it very difficult for one single person to make a unilateral decision. Which is a good thing.
      • robertlagrant 3y ago
        This would work if governments were empowered on a granular level, but they aren't. If you've decided (Republican|Democrat)s are evil then you'll always vote for the same party, and there is no accountability.
• keep_reading 3y ago
  > 30,000 pieces of junk 30,000 pieces of junk to you, a life changing technology for lots of people all over the world. Check your privilege.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• fasteddie31003 3y ago
  I would say this "billionaire demagogue" has done more to reduce CO2 emissions and advance space accessibility than any other human in history.
• mucle6 3y ago
  Junk? Why do people who dislike the outcomes of capitalism use hyperbole?
• stainablesteel 3y ago
  this is such an insane stance the US government spends orders of magnitude more cash, at much lower levels than the federal level, more than any billionaire does in their life on a yearly basis the political parties in control are also holding hands with media companies, and have no regulation on their own actions either personal or public, they can trade whatever stocks they want and move onto whatever job with a conflicting interest that they want afterwards. musk has nothing compared to politicians, and much more oversight than any of them because he's spending his own money. it didn't fall from the sky, he has it because he's successful. unlike the politicians who print as much money as they want and retire with $100m+ and zero accountability for all of their failed and inefficient projects
  • FireBeyond 3y ago
    > the US government spends orders of magnitude more cash, at much lower levels than the federal level, more than any billionaire does in their life on a yearly basis Are you really comparing a government responsible for something approaching 350 million people a year and all their infrastructure and support services with a billionaire's lifestyle expenses? Fun trivia: I once looked at Bezos' net worth and the City of Tacoma, and according to all their records, he could "afford" to buy Tacoma. A city of 220,000 people. Every residential, commercial, industrial, government building in the city. Every street, road and highway. The utilities. All of it. One person... buy a city of a quarter million people. And I posted about it on HN, thinking people would be similarly agog as I was. Apparently not. Several said "Oh, that's not as much as I thought he could", or "not too bad", etc.
    • stainablesteel 3y ago
      yes i am comparing that, its a legitimate comparison given the context. and i don't know what "lifestyle expenses" you're referencing, these are companies we're talking about. afaik musk doesn't even own a house and i'd love to know how much bezos could afford if you could provide that link, it sounds interesting. because how much would be left over for him? out of all the US, with all his wealth, would he buy tacoma and then be broke? because that's a pretty small influence if one of the wealthiest people in the world could only afford a city of 220k. that adds to my original point that the government spends way more. any "power" a billionaire has is truly just a drop in massive bucket.
• Dig1t 3y ago
  I think perhaps the fact that you refer to advanced satellites, some of the most advanced and scientifically interesting objects humans have ever produced, as "junk" maybe reveals some personal bias. It sucks that propaganda is producing people who are anti-science and anti-progress. As they say "Rocket man bad".
• newsclues 3y ago
  Would you feel better if it was a public company really? I don’t find them to be particularly accountable to anyone or anything beyond profit.
• mcpackieh 3y ago
  This is an ignorant take; your thoughts are clouded by hate. 30k satellites are not "pieces of space junk". When they reach end-of-life they will deorbit and burn up. Just because you don't like the man that would own them doesn't change this.
• jagtstronaut 3y ago
  You can look at it this way if you want. Or you can look at it as people in rural areas and undeveloped countries are no longer slaves to the single telecom company that is out there charging them an atrocious amount of money for horrible service.
  • Dig1t 3y ago
    I can personally attest that this happened for me. Starlink was an absolute game changer for my neighborhood.
• pmontra 3y ago
  Tonga is 100,000 people. They could have aimed to Tuvalu, close to Tonga and only 10,000 people. Or Niue, same area and less than 2,000. I'm not sure Niue is an ITU member though.
  • mensetmanusman 3y ago
    Focus on Omaha, the fact that some piece of land is a country or a city doesn’t matter much…
• mensetmanusman 3y ago
  The are 100,000 flights daily into ‘space’ where they are (gravity) forced to fall back down to earth. Think of starlink as a far smaller network of planes that are a bit higher but are also slowly falling down to earth.
• panick21_ 3y ago
  This is just complete nonsense. First of all, its not even remotely junk. These are sophisticated pieces of equipment and they will in almost all cases not be junk. Its standard regulation that all sats deorbit themselves at end of live. And even in the very few cases where the sat fails Starlink sats are low enough orbit they will only be junk for a very small amount of time. > Tesla's revenue in 2 days are roughly the same as the yearly GDP of Tonga. Space X's revenue is 10 times the GDP of Tonga. Completely irrelevant statistics. Why don't you compare it to the Vatican City? Or you the local lemonade stand? Or to Apple? > There will be no real oversight of this billionaire on the loose. Except of course the tons of regulation that Starlink and SpaceX in general have to agree to in order to be allowed to operate. Before you are allowed to launch you need to actually tell the regulator where you are gone deploy, what your end of life policy is. Of course lots of regulation about spectrum and so on.
• snapplebobapple 3y ago
  You're missing the whole point of the free market system. Musk didn't start a billionaire, he got there by founding companies that created a lot of value, then he reinvested and did it again. The system is somewhat self regulating in that regard and it makes me pretty happy to see him getting richer and richer when he's doing it by taking things others thought too hard and making them reality (online payments, then electric cars, now, most spectacularly decimating launch costs and increasing launch capacity to space.) Spacex is building the factory now that will make all sorts of things possible in space just by the sheer volume of gear they will be able to pump up there, it's going to be amazing, we may actually end up a multiplanet species because of this guy (or my hope is he figures out planets are probably stupid and goes for whatever the latest, most feasible version of o'neill cylinders ends up being.)
• mlindner 3y ago
  > 30,000 pieces of junk Please try to follow the rules of this site... Calling operational satellites "junk" is not conducive to any kind of intelligent discussion. > a company controlled by one man is allowed We live in a country that (thank God) still allows (for now at least) people to run their own businesses and create products to sell to people. It'll be a sad day if that were to ever change. > There will be no real oversight of this billionaire on the loose. Getting the ITU license through Tonga does not suddenly make all regulation in the US disappear. They'll still be covered by the FCC, just like any other operator in the US.