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We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink

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  • And the international customers, what about them? The ground stations, POPs, and terminals in other countries, hmmmm?

    Dude… nationalize just means the US takes ownership of the company. They keep all the employees they keep all the customers. It runs like normal under new ownership. The taxpayers now own it. it’s a great idea.

    You see too long we have been using public funding and allowing rich people to privatize the gains. It’s time to privatize those games and take back what we invested in as US citizens. We will still offer you eurocucks Internet since apparently it is more important than having a moral fiber in your body

  • And the international customers, what about them? The ground stations, POPs, and terminals in other countries, hmmmm?

    Seriously this comment doesn’t make any sense. It’s like you do not understand what you are commenting on and yet here you are with four up votes and now have my down vote and go forth and use a dictionary before you comment next time

  • No, they're fine remaining as private companies. If the government wants to better control over the companies then they can pass regulation and if they want total control then they can build their own alternatives. Nationalization of companies should never be used as a political weapon.

    I agreed with this sentiment six months ago, but now I like public hangings and nationalizing companies

  • Those are different to taking over private companies. The government should, imo, compete against private enterprise in those areas, in turn bringing prices down and making it better for the taxpayers.

    NASA is government owned. Look at the state of it. Do you think the government taking over SpaceX would really be a good thing?

    Nice 30-year-old Fox News talking points you got there. Time to go to bed, grandpa.

  • Tankies live in alternate reality where they think that nationalization is extremely common and is a magical solution to all of societies problems... even though this view is entirely delusional.

    For example, only 3 countries have nationalized the entire ISP industry, and those are Cuba, Turkmenistan, and North Korea. All three of which are horrid tyrannical dictatorships with horrible internet. We should NOT be like them. Even when it comes to health insurance, except for 3 countries I just mentioned, every single country allows private health insurance, even if their system is public. Clearly nationalization is not what you think it is.

    I hate tankies, but not as much as I hate Nazis. Desperate times call for desperate measures. We’re losing 100 years of social advancement. But here you are telling us to protect the fucking corporations that are sucking them up.

  • Who's buying satellites?

    SpaceX is putting up satellites for SpaceX, they're the manufacturer and operator...

    It's definitely in their best interest to keep them working as long as possible.

    That said, they're high end communications devices, very fancy routers essentially. And like all computer technology, these things become obsolete quickly. So even if they could last 20 years, you wouldn't want them even 10 years from now. 100 GB/s speeds might be great now, but 10 years down the road 10 TB/s could be the norm, so at that point why are you still trying to provide service with ancient hardware 100x slower than it should be.

    Isn't that part of the grift?

    At the time it looked like one of the main reasons to launch Starlink was to provide SpaceX with a new market, much larger than the usual space launching stuff. Also this meant Felon could get subsidies through 2 different companies.

  • Yep that's my point. Not everything needs be a business.

    Allowing government to compete with business creates better outcomes in both. There is certainly something to be said about a more involved government. It’s really silly to allow big business or the government to have a monopoly on critical services.

  • You don’t nationalise a company (SpaceX) just because the existing government owned company (NASA) is significantly worse. What do you think would happen to SpaceX if they did nationalise it? Lol. It would go to hell, like NASA.

    The government should not be responsible for things like this. The government should provide services for necessities for human rights and general standards of living, but they shouldn’t take over successful companies just because they couldn’t do it themselves.

    We shot a space telescope half way to the sun and are observing the dawn of the entire universe.

    And you just wanna see a bigger penis rocket🌈

  • That would literally be the worse thing that could happen with regards to them, because they only exist and thrived because they are private enterprise. If the government were capable of doing what those companies do and doing it well, SpaceX and Starlink wouldn’t exist in the first place.

    Can you even imagine just how much money would be wasted and misused and unaccounted for, while nothing actually got done?

    Anyone who thinks this is a good idea is delusional

    Again someone who thinks that public policies are natural laws...

    NASA could do and did do what SpaceX is doing now, but they are beholden to the government and if the government says "we don't do that for ideologigal reasons" then it doesn't matter what can be done.

  • Fair enough, you got me there. Didn't realize there was such a population of internet craving people in what's supposed to be one of the last relatively untouched areas of nature on the planet.

    That being the case though, why didn't this all happen in 2013, when O3b launched to specifically solve this problem for them? It's still running, by the way, after several rounds of upgrades, and significantly more stable than Starlink with their dinky little 5 year disposables. Microsoft, Honeywell and Amazon all use it. But the original and ongoing intent of the project was explicitly to bring internet access to all otherwise unreachable areas, such as islands, deep in Africa, and the open ocean.

    I don't oppose Brazilian villagers having internet if they want it, but the situation in which it arrived to them feels suspect to me. I have no proof that Starlink actively went out and pushed internet service onto them like a drug dealer but it would not be out of character for Musk and his subordinates to do so, and that just feels bad.

    Regardless there is already an existing solution to this. If you want internet in the Amazon you can use satellite internet. It does not have to be Starlink. If you want good internet, maybe don't live in the Amazon. People in general should probably be leaving that place alone. The article you linked even talks about one of the village leaders splitting his time between the village and the city. We can try and run a fiber line to Manaus and/or Porto Velho and that should be able to serve a reasonably large enough area around them, but even if that fails there are already other solutions.

    I agree with almost everything you wrote. Purely speculation but the starlink terminals might be cheaper? The latency/bandwidth would also be significantly worse with O3b since it's in medium earth orbit compared to starlinks low earth orbit. "Regular" satellite internet is prohibitively expensive with even worse bandwidth/latency.

    I also agree that people shouldn't be living in the Amazon but they are and we can't really force them to leave.

  • I love how you completely ignore how starlink is only viable for ukraine because the US military industrial complex.

    There was satellite internet before Starlink and Starlink should be banned for all the 5ghz interference it creates

    I'm ignoring that fact because its mostly irrelevant to this conversation.
    Would the Ukrainians prefer if it was controlled by a more reliable ally? Of course

    "Regular" satellite internet is nowhere near what starlink offers and it's pretty telling you assume it is.

    An actual problem that you've not mentioned is the interference with ground based telescopes

  • American exceptionalism definitely sucks, but this is not an example of American exceptionalism. The source is an article from an American magazine, published for an American audience.

    I'm referring to how the post title shared here is in first person as if everyone is American. If that's unrelated to exceptionalism then oops.

  • Ruthless "dictators" who saved a billion lives through the elimination of Nazism, the industrial development of the second most populous country on Earth and half the continent of Europe, and through the refusal to participate in the exploitation of the global south.

    Communists saved Europe from Nazism and you will never forgive them for it

    ........ only after they were betrayed by Hitler after they allied themselves with the Nazis to invade Poland.

    And then raped and killed civilians in the countries they "liberated" by forcing millions of people from their Eastern European vasal states to die to protect the Russians.

    Then replaced Nazism with a slightly different authoritarian system that opresses it's people and performs ethnic cleansings, but has a red and gold cost of paint.

    And then also exploited the global south, but just weren't as good at it as the west, and filtered even more of what was exploited up the chain to the party leaders.

    And tried to make up for that lack in ability to exploit the global south by exploring Eastern Europe.

    Communist we're allied with the nazis at the start of the war and as someone who's great grandmother fled Poland to the UK to avoid being rapes and murdered by the red army, I will never forgive them for that.

  • ........ only after they were betrayed by Hitler after they allied themselves with the Nazis to invade Poland.

    And then raped and killed civilians in the countries they "liberated" by forcing millions of people from their Eastern European vasal states to die to protect the Russians.

    Then replaced Nazism with a slightly different authoritarian system that opresses it's people and performs ethnic cleansings, but has a red and gold cost of paint.

    And then also exploited the global south, but just weren't as good at it as the west, and filtered even more of what was exploited up the chain to the party leaders.

    And tried to make up for that lack in ability to exploit the global south by exploring Eastern Europe.

    Communist we're allied with the nazis at the start of the war and as someone who's great grandmother fled Poland to the UK to avoid being rapes and murdered by the red army, I will never forgive them for that.

    only after they were betrayed by Hitler after they allied themselves with the Nazis to invade Poland.

    This is literally pro-nazi historical revisionism. I've made a detailed response to this load of bullshit here, if you care to learn some history about it. Please do read that in good faith and respond point by point if you actually wanna get educated on the subject.

    Regarding deportations in time of war, I agree it was a failed policy and I don't support them generally, it happens that systems and political ideologies you support make mistakes. This was one of them. It's still extremely minor compared to actual imperialism and genocide committed by western states in times of peace while plundering billions of people in the global south, and it's something that happened during a period of 10 tumultuous war/preparation years and never happened again, unlike the constant imperialism of the west.

    Again proving that you don't care about brown people and your entire "leftist" ideology is supported on CIA propaganda.

  • Isn't that part of the grift?

    At the time it looked like one of the main reasons to launch Starlink was to provide SpaceX with a new market, much larger than the usual space launching stuff. Also this meant Felon could get subsidies through 2 different companies.

    Isn't that part of the grift?

    Isn't what?

    I mean the reason for starlink was that they could, and they could do it for cheaper than anyone else because they would be launching at cost.

    Also, falcon doesn't really get subsidies for launching. SpaceX got a grant for the rural broadband infrastructure thing, but that's like a one time thing, it doesn't really pay for ongoing launches.

  • This post did not contain any content.

    The nationalization of SpaceX will mean a slowdown in development, like in the case of NASA.

  • Has anyone considered funding NASA?

    They made rockets that didn't explode with duct tape and a TI-83 calculator.

    What "they made" 50 years ago is of little value now. Expertise matters, and it's lost with time passing.

    Still - yes. Nationalization is a bad solution because it gives the state power to nationalize. Seems a truism.

    Just let NASA work in its normal role. Instead of replacing that with SpaceX contracts.

  • I'm referring to how the post title shared here is in first person as if everyone is American. If that's unrelated to exceptionalism then oops.

    You never clicked on the link, did you?

  • The nationalization of SpaceX will mean a slowdown in development, like in the case of NASA.

    sounds good who gives a shit

  • Nasa with less risk aversion. If a Nasa rocket blows up that's big news. If a Space X rocket blows up, that's a Tuesday.

    yeah but if SpaceX becomes NASA then what

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    It’s funny how the article asks the question, but completely fails to answer it. About 15 years ago, Nvidia discovered there was a demand for compute in datacenters that could be met with powerful GPU’s, and they were quick to respond to it, and they had the resources to focus on it strongly, because of their huge success and high profitability in the GPU market. AMD also saw the market, and wanted to pursue it, but just over a decade ago where it began to clearly show the high potential for profitability, AMD was near bankrupt, and was very hard pressed to finance developments on GPU and compute in datacenters. AMD really tried the best they could, and was moderately successful from a technology perspective, but Nvidia already had a head start, and the proprietary development system CUDA was already an established standard that was very hard to penetrate. Intel simply fumbled the ball from start to finish. After a decade of trying to push ARM down from having the mobile crown by far, investing billions or actually the equivalent of ARM’s total revenue. They never managed to catch up to ARM despite they had the better production process at the time. This was the main focus of Intel, and Intel believed that GPU would never be more than a niche product. So when intel tried to compete on compute for datacenters, they tried to do it with X86 chips, One of their most bold efforts was to build a monstrosity of a cluster of Celeron chips, which of course performed laughably bad compared to Nvidia! Because as it turns out, the way forward at least for now, is indeed the massively parralel compute capability of a GPU, which Nvidia has refined for decades, only with (inferior) competition from AMD. But despite the lack of competition, Nvidia did not slow down, in fact with increased profits, they only grew bolder in their efforts. Making it even harder to catch up. Now AMD has had more money to compete for a while, and they do have some decent compute units, but Nvidia remains ahead and the CUDA problem is still there, so for AMD to really compete with Nvidia, they have to be better to attract customers. That’s a very tall order against Nvidia that simply seems to never stop progressing. So the only other option for AMD is to sell a bit cheaper. Which I suppose they have to. AMD and Intel were the obvious competitors, everybody else is coming from even further behind. But if I had to make a bet, it would be on Huawei. Huawei has some crazy good developers, and Trump is basically forcing them to figure it out themselves, because he is blocking Huawei and China in general from using both AMD and Nvidia AI chips. And the chips will probably be made by Chinese SMIC, because they are also prevented from using advanced production in the west, most notably TSMC. China will prevail, because it’s become a national project, of both prestige and necessity, and they have a massive talent mass and resources, so nothing can stop it now. IMO USA would clearly have been better off allowing China to use American chips. Now China will soon compete directly on both production and design too.
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