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Comment I'm sure somebody realized it (Score 4, Insightful) 100

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.

Comment It was also nationalized (Score 2, Insightful) 100

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.

Comment Re:They have to keep sending them up (Score 1) 100

Low latency AI edge computing. There's several military applications, such as directing drone swarms or even providing AI to individual drones.

Perhaps, but I suspect Starlink (etc) already fills most of that use-case, and for the rest, they'll want that compute to be physically located inside the drones themselves, because otherwise the drones will be susceptible to jamming or spoofing.

Comment Re:UBI was proposed in 1968 (Score 1) 199

Why would you think there won't be jobs AI "can't do"? Have you used AI lately? It can do little stuff nicely. But when you throw something complex at it, you have to hand-hold it and give it many follow-up prompts. This is no different than any other type of automation ever.

There will be jobs that AI can't do. How many? Enough to keep 5-10 billion humans employed? What makes you so sure there will be?

Clearly AI has progressed considerably over the last 5-10 years. It's anyone's guess how much further it will progress -- maybe it'll plateau right where it is now, or maybe it will keep becoming more powerful as better algorithms are discovered. I'm not qualified to predict that, and neither are you, but the AI people certainly seem bullish about it.

You actually think money actually "just appears"?

Sorry, I thought you would understand that I meant that the resources that money represents appear, once you've solved the automation problems that currently make mass-production difficult. That's why you can buy a pocket computer today for $300 that would have your cost you billions of dollars twenty years ago, if you could have obtained it at all.

I bet you'd have more interesting conversations if you made a good-faith effort to understand what the other person was saying, rather than just jumping straight to the part where you get to throw insults at them and tell them how dumb they are. Doesn't that get boring?

Comment Re:They have to keep sending them up (Score 4, Insightful) 100

Maybe they want us to believe that they will be a vertically integrated AI provider with data centers in space. I am highly doubtful about the latter; there certainly are business cases for having AI datacenters in space, but they are edge cases.

I have yet to hear of a remotely plausible business case for putting data centers into space. The only benefit is 24/7 solar power, but that benefit is more than offset by the cost of launching everything into orbit, plus the cost of keeping everything properly cooled, plus the cost of radiation-hardening everything, and finally the cost of maintaining hardware in space (or, more likely, the cost of periodically having to write off the entire investment and build and launch new replacement hardware).

Unless Musk is trying to corner the market for AI-generated kiddie-porn (or something similarly illegal that needs to be operated beyond the reach of Earthly authorities), his ground-based competitors will undercut his pricing by a factor of 100, and he therefore won't have a viable product to sell.

Comment How would you make your money back? (Score 3, Interesting) 100

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

Comment Re:UBI was proposed in 1968 (Score 1) 199

But new categories of work will emerge, just as has happened in every past wave of automation.

Certainly new categories of work will emerge. The question is, will hiring and paying human beings be the most economically efficient way to fill those new positions, or will those jobs be done by AIs instead?

Previous waves of automation allowed people to move "up the food chain" and do jobs the machines still couldn't do, which was fine (at least, for the people capable of doing the new jobs), but if we get to the stage where there aren't many jobs left that the machines can't do, then we're out of luck -- it's unlikely that our tech-bro overlords are going to hire people simply on humanitarian grounds, if they can get an unquestioning machine to do the same work cheaper.

The third fantasy is that UBI is possible. It's just as possible as a perpetual motion machine, and for many of the same reasons. Money doesn't just appear without consequences and side effects.

I agree that UBI is unlikely, but only because the billionaires don't like sharing and therefore won't support it. The money does "just appear" when you have mass automation doing the work to make it appear, but it will go into Bezos' checking account, not to the general public.

Comment They have to keep sending them up (Score 0, Troll) 100

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.

Comment That comic makes no sense (Score 2) 38

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.

Comment Will he step down if he loses an election? (Score 4, Insightful) 38

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.

Comment Steroid use is pretty safe (Score 2, Insightful) 119

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.

Comment Thanks for proving my point about nuance (Score 1) 113

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.

Comment Re:Well duh (Score 1) 82

The theme parks are still packed, at least from what I've seen.

Yes, and that's the problem for Disney -- theme parks can only physically accept so many people per year, and they can't (easily) build more of them. So theme parks can't be more than a small amount of their total income; to really make the big money, the Mouse has to ship products that can and will be purchased by everyone. In practice, that means movies; ideally good movies, but at a minimum, popular movies.

Comment Re:Sounds peachy (Score 2) 65

It's still a new code base and one that can access hardware so it's understandable that people would be nervous.

At the very least it should probably be something that has to be enabled in settings. And maybe it does I haven't looked into it. There are too many examples of security vulnerabilities that can bypass permissions. That's what the grandparents is worried about

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