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Fuckin space garbage is what it is.
Yes it was impressive that they landed a rocket again once, but the quantity of launches and satellites is doing nothing good for anyone. It should've been a stepping stone for better technology, but instead they're just mining money. Privately owned space engineering is a disgrace to humanity.
Space engineering used to unite even the worst opponents as with the international space station, but now those institutions are underfunded, while billionaire space-musk can shoot his loads into the atmosphere without any regard to the rest of the worlds population living inside said sphere.
Tax the asshole already.
I was excited about starlink when it was announced, but already it's way too expensive, already bows to actual totalitarians and isn't affordable on the ocean and not available in remote places without a license.
And with more satellite constellations planned by amazon and others, it seems the kessler syndrome is just a question of time.
already bows to actual totalitarians
Care to elaborate?
Turkey and Russia. It's clear that profit seeking corporations would bow, but then Elon screams bloody murder when reactionary forces in Brazil manipulating social media get censored.
I feel like that explanation is missing a verb or something.
To bow, or bow down or kneel for. But I'm not going to google that for you haha. The basic problem is that starlink theoretically has immense power so it becomes a political tool. He bows to those ones but not to legitimate democratic interests.
Especially once starlink and others can make landline based internet connections obsolete by pricing them out - which they are not currently doing though, but it seems only a matter of time with competition. Basically we could get to a situation where there are only like 2 or 3 internet provider practically controlling internet globally.
They won't be able to price landline based connections out as long as they have to replace their satellites every 5 years. I wouldn't be surprised if they're running at a loss currently.
I'm pretty sure they ran the numbers for potential profits and determined it's a goldmine - in the long run. Maybe they'll need to increase the lifespan of satellites. Their internal launch costs are pretty low already. Amazon wants to build it's own constellation and is building new glen partially because they can't get launch slots from SpaceX. I'm sure you can find some numbers to do some napkin math.
Theoretically they can serve the whole world with internet without requiring only minimal land based infrastructure. That is a gigantic market they can reach. And incredibly power to wield for such a psycho.
Another strange case is high-frequency trading on stock exchanges - because light is faster in the vacuum of space compared to fiberglass they can trade on the stock exchanges around the world like nobody else can. Not sure how much money that makes.
When I searched "Elon bows to Turkey" I got this story about Twitter censoring some tweets during the Turkish election... Is that what you're talking about?
Yeah. Which is in stark contrast to Musk's rhetoric in Brazil, which had a legal court order for censoring. Maybe Ukraine/Russia wasn't the best example. My point is that it's immense power. In the hands of a soulless corporation it's bad enough but an outright fascist like Musk is much worse.
What about Turkey and Russia? Starlink doesn't work in Russia.
Follow the news so we don't have to catch you up.
Replies like this from people like you is why social media sucks. Thanks for your contribution on keeping it so.
Wouldn't it be nice if those sattelites would work together instead of against eachother. What if Amazon worked together with starlink, and the other companies offering internet so there would be less sattelites in the sky. Why does every sat internet company need their own fleet of sattelites
Well presumably to make more money lol. The good thing is that there will at least be some competition to bring prices down and keep service quality up. A monopoly would be bad. But of course that leads to more satellites. This really shows how our capitalist system can't really make rational decisions that are for the benefit of humanity. Ideally we'd have a separate economic institution to regulate industry like this under direct democratic control.
This. I wish I had more than one up vote I could give for this comment.
the quantity of launches and satellites is doing nothing good for anyone
Except for the millions of people accessing internet via Starlink to whom the alternative is either no internet, slow internet or extremely expensive internet.
agreed. it's a technology we need but like everything meant to improve humanity, it should be publicly owned (no, not the stock market - truly public).
Enshittification happens to all things, sadly.
It happens really early with that fuckin' weasel in charge.
When people talk about taxing these horrible people I think of tax as being a euphamism