American taxpayers paid for both Starlink and Space X. Overpaid, actually, that's why he's the richest man in the world. None of his businesses are profitable, he just skims hundreds of billions off the enormous government grants he gets.
Since we overpaid for that tech, we should just confiscate it from him. He can be thankful that he doesn't go to prison for misappropriating government funds.
He can keep Tesla. It'll be bankrupt in 2 years anyway.
Company says that everyone should give them money and stop using competing products.
Obvious thing to say in the land of self-interest.
How about no
How about we take down every starlink satellite so NASA can operate unabated, and our telescopes aren't interfered with.
Fuck off and give me the fiber that was promised and paid for decades ago.
"Oligarch mouthpiece demands diverting of major public funds to oligarchs instead"
Story of America, really.
SpaceX can fuck right off with that plan.
Remember how Elon Musk conned Vegas out of millions with the hyperloop.
Satellite internet is not the future; it's cell internet.
I got a better idea: a civil war against oligarchs
No fucking thanks. Gigabit+ fiber > Nazi-ass satellite internet that doesn’t have even remotely near the needed bandwidth for actual dense population centers.
Wireless data transmission should only ever be used for nomadic, temporary, and/or sacrificial links.
They’re useful for quick deployment, but are intrinsically brittle and terrible for resiliency and efficiency.
The longer the dependence on them for a given use case, the less defensible arguments in support of them become.
I’m all for the use of satellite delivery of internet services, but only when it’s used in conjunction with a broader roll out of hardwired infrastructure, at which point it can reasonably be relegated to serving as a secondary, backup diverse path.
Cory Doctorow described it as anti-futuristic tech. Where fiber networks get better, faster, and cheaper the denser they get, wireless satellite will get slower and less reliable the more people share that spectrum.
Going from the most secure, hard wired formats to a con man's satellites would be a fatal error. Any sort of military conflict and the network is all down, atleast broadband keeps secure networks intact.
Just have a look at what's going on in ukraine. Once they started using drones, the drone were attacked through their wireless connections. Now they trail fiber optic cables for control. What does that say about the relative reliability and security?
Gotta gear up for America's century of humiliation.
Publicly funded fibre can be provider agnostic. Starlink can't. Unless Musk is arguing for the nationalization of Starlink, which frankly I could get behind.
We paid for it, it should be nationalized. But they only ever socialize their losses, the profits are private.
Technically, S0aceX should be nationalized by the US based on the volume of money they've received in contacts.
If Intel has to give the US government 5%, Starlink should have to give back 25%.
Except StarLink cannot possibly provide the same bandwidth, latency, and throughput a fiber connection can. Because of physics.
I can either share my 10G symmetrical connection with nobody, or with 200 others.
And, Fiber costs me $70 a month. Starlink, with worse performance, costs 4x more.
It's not secure either. The next world war will involve efforts to sabotage satellites.
"Give me all your money" says world's richest person, in a fit of originality.
Fuck. That.
all you can eat latency and an oversaturated network on devices with a limited lifespan.. what else could you ask for!
Starlink has much better latency than most satellites, but still 10 to 50 times as much as fiber.
Hmmm ditch lightning fast and stable fiber for the mediocre speed and unstable micro satellite internet connection controlled by a petty asshole...
What to do, what to do?
I have a better idea: don’t do that.
I’m a starlink customer and think it’s one of the best advancements in the past decade as it provides real access to rural addresses. The side effects of this is nearly immeasurable.
Spacex needs to STFU about this though. Fiber should continue to be deployed where possible.
Fiber should be deployed to rural addresses like yours (and should've been a long time ago). Instead, that money was funneled to the likes of Time Warner and Comcast who never even followed through on their part of the deal. Now, SpaceX is getting funneled the cash.
I'm super thankful that WA State supports and gives assistance to counties building out public LUDs for fiber access, many paying attention to rural communities first. I escaped Comcast two years ago because of it.
It shouldn’t be all or nothing. It should be diversified.
Yeah, there are rural locations where Starlink makes sense but also there are a lot of urban places that it would never work in.
Problem with Starlink is that the satellites need to be replaced every 5 years or so.
That, and if they could pull heavy copper wiring to the furthest rural reaches of the country in the 1930s, they can pull fiber along side it today. The poles and right of way is already there. Satellite is a fine stop-gap while it gets done, but there’s no excuse for it to be the permanent solution.
You cannot actually serve hundreds of millions in the US even if you invested the 75B it would cost to give every household a satellite it just can't support the bandwidth.
Fibre is an investment that can be used and upgraded for decades. Starlink is a subscription service forever to a private company.
A society grows great when old men plant fiber whose speed they know they shall never download from.
To quote Dan Harmon out of context: "If you ask a toaster, "What's the most important thing in the world?" it's going to tell you, "Bread." And if you ask a toaster its opinion of bread, it's going to tell you, "It's not toasted enough."
On one hand, Musk.
On the other hand... Telecos.
You can either give billions more to the world's richest asshole, or you can give billions to companies that already received that money last time and did absolutely fuckall with it.
Lose-lose
I mean there is a third option: municipal fiber
But then the gub’ment is your ISP but at least it’s not making billionaires money.
I’d suggest the best case scenario to me would be a fourth option like a community run co-op of fiber to the premises and have it be grant funded. But who am I kidding, that’s almost to socialist for rural America like where I live.
Fiber all the way, especially if it is owned by the community. That would simply ensure that Musk nor TelCos can't fuck around with people. Fast speed, no data caps, low prices, and not being at the mercy of some wealthy jackhole would be wins across the board.
Also, if America has a 2nd Civil War, fiber will be much more safe than relying on sats - those can be shot down, or worse, Musk can cut off the good guys from having internet. It is simply harder to sabotage if the wires are underground and cannot be readily seen by hostile actors. As seen in Ukraine, the fucker has absolutely no compunctions against disabling the internet at key moments.
SpaceX should dump all their space plans and give back their grant money.
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