Just not the guy running the company or anyone investing in it. Because that math doesn't math. It's too expensive to put the satellites up. They lose money on every sale but I'm sure they'll make it up in volume.

I noticed your post is just throwing around big numbers ignoring the fact that the maintenance costs on replacing the satellites are killing starlink's profit margins and any potential growth it could have. The fact is they have to charge too much for the internet service limiting their market. So they have maxed out people who can pay that much money for internet and don't just have a wired option that's better. Exactly like I said they did.

Again you can throw out all the impressive sounding bullshit you want but it doesn't make their balance sheet look any better or justify the valuation on SpaceX. They're going to dump that shit into your 401k and they have structured the NASDAQ deal to make that possible.

But none of this matters. I am genuinely impressed to see you getting upvoted because it means that there is so much push to prevent anyone from questioning the validity of the SpaceX IPO that the bots have actually woke back up and have started modding is dead forum again. I didn't think I'd ever see them back with how dead things were. I'm sure it won't last but it's crazy how much money must be going into manipulating public opinion about the IPO if they're bothering with this dead forum.

Anyway better start picking out your favorite flavor of cat food because you ain't going to have any retirement income. All that money is going to go to make Elon the first trillionaire.

Our space launch program was nationalized for decades and decades. Yeah there were private contracts but the really expensive research that loses money was all done by the government and the private contracts were mostly just there to line pockets and to put money in certain districts for political reasons.

If you have something that is universally desirable and needs to be built at scale you generally need to do it with the government one way or another. This is why I transportation network is almost entirely paid for by the government. Even the little boxes of metal we putz around on the network with are mostly paid for by the government in the form of heavily subsidized gasoline and electricity.

It's not just a lack of outsourcing it's the fact that space travel, at least until very very recently, was a public good and a national utility.

Go watch the two Patrick Boyle videos on the subject he covers it in detail but they have basically maxed out their addressable market

Basically anyone who needs launch services is already either using SpaceX or somebody else and there is no additional people who need launch services on the horizon except maybe starlink except that starlink has all the customers it's going to get because there's only so many people in the world who have $100 a month for high-speed internet and don't already have wired or already have starlink.

Now if SpaceX created a magic rocket that could defy the laws of physics and do launches for a fraction of the cost sure go ahead. A drastic reduction in the cost of launching satellites and rockets would increase the number of customers. But there really isn't any sign of that. Even if they get that fully reusable rocket working exactly as planned the cost reductions aren't enough to create whole new markets. It's not a paradigm shift it's a solid improvement. And that again assumes all of musk's promises come true and he has a very very bad track record of making promises. I mean how many cybertrucks do you own? How many $40,000 so I have a trucks do you own?

Kudos to you for realizing the AI stuff is just a scam but assuming you believe the rocket company isn't a scam where is the addressable market that's going to justify the valuation? How are you going to get your money out of that company either in the form of dividends or stock increases? Is this a case where you expect the price to shoot up like Tesla did so that even though the company isn't fundamentally sound you'll be able to sell the stock off? In other words greater fool theory? If not where is the money going to come from to pay the dividends you're going to need in order for your investment to be profitable, again assuming you take out the AI stuff? Because the reason they are doing the AI stuff is that well, all the reasons I listed above. SpaceX and starlink are not profitable enough to justify the valuation and they do not have the growth potential to become that profitable even without the AI anchor dragging them down

If you want to communicate "nuance", maybe start by not using the word "immediate" when you mean in "a few decades".

It's a bunch of text files. Code snippets and log extracts. How large can it possibly be? They could probably serve the entire thing with an older Raspberry Pi and a 32Gb microSD card. If that's outside the budget, they can save the money by firing the person who says that less than $100 worth of hardware is outside the budget.

Because they eventually come back down. That is a huge problem because it becomes a very large Capital cost to keep starlink in business.

On paper it's nice for SpaceX because it keeps having to send rockets up but in practice since the two companies are owned by the same people and since they're only so many people in the world who give a rat's ass about satellite internet and can't afford it it ends up just being a sunk cost.

One of the core things that was supposed to make SpaceX and starlink profitable was that it would become so cheap to send rockets up because of musk magic that the capital expenditure of replacing the satellites wouldn't need to be factored in so much. This did not happen. It is also why the SpaceX IPO docs keep talking about ai and not rockets. If you're investing in a rocket company that only ever claims to be an AI company then you should have already figured out something is deeply deeply wrong.

I don't think anyone even the musk faithful is going to buy into SpaceX except for a handful of people who think that they can greater fool their way into some quick profits. But I don't think anyone's going to have a choice. Again if you go watch the youtube videos from Patrick Boyle on the topic of SpaceX the way the IPO is structured it is part of nasdaq's top 100 so every single major index fund and investment fund is more or less forced to buy it. There are rules to prevent this but there's so much money to be made on this scam that NASDAQ waived the rules for SpaceX.

People get so excited about a reusable rocket but like I've mentioned before I could keep my old 94 Honda Accord running if I really really wanted to but past a certain point it cost more to keep it running than it was worth. There is a reason why NASA gave up on reusable rockets and that's it. You can't put something under that much stress and keep sending it up into space over and over again without a shit ton of expensive maintenance and if you skip the maintenance the rockets just blow up and if you don't skip the maintenance you might as well have just built another rocket.

The thing I keep seeing though is the faithful don't show up on this website or any other forum that isn't heavily moderated to prevent them from seeing wrong think. The right wing has completely retreated into safe spaces and anyone who is still on board with Elon Musk has joined those safe spaces and the right wing with them because they pretty much have to protect themselves from reality in order to see Elon Musk as anything but a skeezy grifter getting ready to steal their retirement money.

> With UBI you get a fixed income from the government regardless of any other income you may or may not make. The idea is generally you replace a lot of the existing benefits (income support, pensions, the whole lot) which have to be applied for, administered, policed for fraud and etc with UBI, and you then bump the taxes a bit so people earning some target income basically see no net change, thereby ensuring that you don't just print money, and the overall change to tax receipts vs money spent is basically zero.

Yeah, but it sounds like GP understands the implications of that, and you don't.

The government can, and will, vary the level of income from time to time. There will always be an incentive to lower it, but almost never to increase it. Increasing it reduces the number of people in the labor pool. It also will feel victim to the current prejudice against those who do not work. If there were forces likely to result in it increasing, those forces would already be applied to, say, the minimum wage, which hasn't changed in nearly 20 years, not even to keep up with inflation.

That means anyone reliant upon UBI to live, such as those currently receiving social security/pensions, disabled people (who frequently need far more money than most to live on because of the costs of maintaining their disability) or other benefits (unemployment etc) will end up with an unlivable quantity even though they have no other sources of income.

So instead of UBI being a way to eliminate these benefits in favor of some means-test-free utopia, what it actually is is a scheme to remove benefits from those who need it most, forcing the disabled and the elderly to work, and ensuring there's little or no safety net for those who lose their jobs.

Which is probably why the Epstein class, which has never shown any signs of being "pro-great-unwashed" in the last 20 years, is so in favor of it. Introduce it, raise the cost of living, and get everyone to have enough economic anxiety they'll put up with Amazon level labor standards and Walmart level wages. If we're lucky. Now they can run their corporations the way they want.

It's fucked up. UBI is as much of a con as genAI. It's just people are so eager to see what appears to be a utopian escape route from the current system they can't see it's a trap.

The billionaires are planning on replacing us with robots and machines and AI. So they aren't going to need us to be productive in order to generate wealth. That's the entire point of AI.

The problem AI solves is paying wages. But what that means is you have a machine doing work that you used to have to pay wages for. That means the people you used to pay wages no longer have any bargaining power over you. They cannot threaten to withhold their labor.

Now they could threaten to start their own businesses but you have limitless money so you can just run them out of business.

And finally they could threaten to kill you but well, you have thugs and militaries and automated killbots and a surveillance State and drones that can bomb them into pulp.

I mean Christ they took out Black Wall Street with a freaking biplane and you're going to go up against guys with drones with your semi-automatic assault rifle that you modded to be fully automatic?

The ruling class know about all the things that the working class can do to interfere with their techno feudal hellscape future and they are taking steps to make sure you can't interfere with it. Meanwhile about 40% of the working class is deeply, deeply concerned about ethics and game journalism, trans girls in sports and satanic heavy metal music.

Personally I think we are boned.

... quite well: It's going to be chaos but in the end it's going to turn out good for everyone. We're just going to work less if the cheap bots do most of the work.

To support your point about a need for broad social&environmental improvements, consider: "The [critical of] RFK Jr. Op-Ed the Los Angeles Times Didn't Want You to Read"
https://www.yahoo.com/news/rfk...
        "... For decades, U.S. public health policy has been dictated by neoliberal principles that prioritize privatization, deregulation, "free" markets, and associated profits over public care systems. ... Illness is framed as a matter of individual behavior and personal failure--poor diet, sedentary lifestyles, or smoking, for example--rather than the result of policies that undermine rights to healthy environments. ... Meanwhile, social problems like poverty, isolation, and trauma are medicalized, treated as individual pathologies requiring individualistic interventions, like often-ineffective pharmaceuticals or psychotherapy that cannot touch root causes, while ignoring the necessity of investing in systemic, collective solutions. This diverts resources from community-based social care and prevention, generating profits for industry while leaving patients with endless bills and disappointments. ... For example, policies like universal childcare, housing-first initiatives, and direct cash transfers improve health outcomes while reducing poverty and economic insecurity. During the pandemic, expanded child tax credits and direct payments helped millions of families and brought dramatic health and safety improvements to communities--proof that public investments can make an enormous difference for public health. ... In this spirit, this approach to public health centrally prioritizes community-based, nonprofessional care services that have been shown to improve both mental and physical health while reducing medical needs and health care costs. ..."

Because right now that is literally the only thing I am looking for in a politician. If they are just not an open fascist then hey that's good news.

Also none of you fuckers give a shit about Trump fucking kids so you can piss right off with your infidelity bullshit.

Everything is performative wishes as long as guys like you keep voting for Trump and telling us you didn't. You're not the silent majority you're the silent minority with voter suppression making sure you get to pick your guy. Or rather billionaires pick your guy and you follow along.

I will remind everyone that the $22 an hour minimum wage for fast food workers which is boosted wages for all workers in California was signed by Gavin newsom. And he absolutely could have vetoed it.

Never let perfect be the enemy of good. Newsom is a huge step up from where we are right now.

If done properly under a doctor supervision. Every single sport is using steroids they're just pretending they don't. And we pretend with them. In wrestling they call it kayfabe.

I noticed it when I noticed that the trans women athletes were getting their asses handed to them if they had been on their hormones for any length of time. It's because the hormones that correct their medical condition also conflict with the steroids they need to be competitive and they quickly get to a point where they can't compete. It's why trans women in sports is a complete non-issue.

The reason I bring this up isn't for more dumb woke politics but to illustrate that no matter how tiny or insignificant the sport seems, like women's College swimming for Christ's sake, the athletes are taking steroids.

The main opposition right now to steroids is that it's not fair because it should be a natural competition. But like most drugs making them illegal just puts them underground and makes them less safe.

And if everybody is taking the steroids and taking them under medical supervision then at the very least the playing field is genuinely level.

And if you don't like it there are leagues that are certified steroid free that do actual testing methodologies that catch anyone doping and kick them out. It's not actually hard to do and we know how to do it. If you look at the steroid free bodybuilding competitions though you're going to find those guys are a hell of a lot smaller. They are however a hell of a lot less likely to die in their thirties.

We could for example allow steroids in the broader bodybuilding competitions but use the tactics for catching abusers to catch people who are not doing it safely. So you could have people no longer dying in their 30s but still competing the way people want to see. There would still be health problems from that kind of steroid use but if you cut it off around your mid 30s or your career ends inevitably you can undo most of the damage. Kind of like how some sumo wrestlers go on diets after their career. Still a shitload of damage to their bodies but you can mitigate it.

Some satire similar to the logic fossil fuels sometimes uses against renewables:

(begin satire) Smoke alarms are a leading cause of deaths and fires in the home. Every years, lots of people are killed falling off of ladders to change smoke alarm batteries. False alarms from smoke detectors cause numerous kitchen injuries as people using kitchen knives are startled and accidentally cut themselves or stab nearby family members. Smoke detectors wired into home electrical systems can short out and burn down your home. Radiation from smoke detectors causes cancer. Many firefighter deaths are attributed to responding to smoke alarms. Worse, the Dihydrogen Monoxide used by firefighters responding to smoke detectors is itself a dangerous substance responsible for thousands of deaths annually. The answer to all this ongoing carnage is simple -- keep deadly smoke alarms out of your home if you want to stay safe! Brought to you by the American Association Of Cosmetic Undertakers, For-Profit Burn Care Centers, and Companies Rebuilding Homes After Extensive Fire Damage. (end satire)

For a more accurate picture about smoke detectors, consider what the National Fire Protection Association has to say:
https://www.nfpa.org/education...
"Smoke alarms save lives. Smoke alarms that are properly installed and maintained play a vital role in reducing fire deaths and injuries. Fire spreads fast--working smoke alarms give you early warning so you can get outside quickly. ... When working smoke alarms are present in your home, the risk of dying in a home fire is cut by 60 percent, according to the latest NFPA research."

Also reading comprehension.

I'm talking about the entire electric grid the entire human race. In this context the word immediate is still 10 to 20 years. In the sense of a project of that size the word immediate still applies. But it doesn't mean it happens in 2 weeks like how peace with Iran happens in 2 weeks.

This is the problem we have. Any sense of nuance goes out the window and you have to be so damn fucking blunt with everybody.

There was a push called The Green New deal that was going to be this huge jobs program to transition to clean energy and energy independence. A bunch of dumb lefties in US House of Representatives did a preamble bill which is just a bit of flowerly language that doesn't mean or anything or do anything and included a bunch of mentions of social justice. It killed the entire real bill. People hate social justice so out the window went everything with it even though the nonsensical preamble bill was just there to cater to the left wing base... It meant nothing and it did nothing and the green New deal which was a huge jobs bill that would have had a lot of benefits for everybody involved died.

I don't know what the fuck you do with that. When something is stupid as a bunch of dumb Congress critters doing something dumb and turn the public against the bill that benefits the public that easily. It's that inability to understand nuance or read between the lines that's dooming us.

Human beings have not adapted to modern living.

AI video technology is still nowhere even remotely near just "click a button and take what it spits out". I don't know how to break this to anyone here, but you're not just going to go to some video generation site and turn out Woodnuts without extensive skill about AI video tools themselves and a wide range of traditional video production tools, and without spending weeks to months and significant financial expense on the project.

Even if / when this changes, video production is still always going to be limited by the human at hand. Most people's movie ideas, plotting, scripting, directing, etc frankly will be terrible. The slop in this case is the human, not the tool.