I’m sorry, but credit for what? For being born privileged and buying talent? If you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em, right?

Yeah, I guess he deserves praise for being a good liar and basically selling pipe dreams?

What do you mean little to show for it?

Well, now that you bring it up…

Yes, absolutely. And power too

The agency that landed people on the moon so long ago most of the people involved have died if old age, and the event will soon pass out of living memory?

The one where when they let a single rocket explode, one time, rocked the nation, because their record was so close to flawless?

The one that constantly gives us new sources for scientific data?

Yeah fuck them. They never made a dick rocket.

You mean the NASA who landed people on the moon?

So let’s assume you aren’t a moon landing denier and use that as a baseline, NASA is clearly capable of things given the right circumstances and budget.

SpaceX benefited from his reputation and money, because they sure as shit didn’t benefit from his technical acumen.

Business wise he is successful because he’s rich and influential and that works to mitigate how shitty he is at actually running an organisation, that doesn’t mean he has skills as a business person that means he has money and influence, in his case originally from the mine, then from buying and bullying his was in to businesses that were technologically sound and boosting them with his money.

You could make an argument he’s a relatively good investor, but he’s an actively bad CEO.

Let’s say I bought you a car, I paid for it in full and then gave it to you, and in return you sometimes drive me around.

Let’s say I get tired of this arrangement, should I repossess the car just to drive it into the ocean? What would be the point of that? Sure, it’s rightfully mine, but what good does it do to destroy it?

“IT BELONGS TO US” is not a very compelling argument for arbitrary distribution.

I hear you, why can’t we be in that timeline?

First of all, it was performed the way that nobody knew what to even do with those privatization vouchers. They didn’t directly give anyone stocks, just vouchers for part of a company etc. Those had to be exchanged for stocks.

People didn’t know what to do with them, people had problems feeding their families, and people were offered some money for them. And people thought that’s what capitalism is, you get offered money for something, you give it. Nobody scams you, right?

Since those oligarchs happened to all have right friends, it’s without any doubt not a mistake that those stocks could even be sold.

And - attention - another history lesson. All the Soviet propaganda against religion led to everyone becoming “kinda church-loving” in the 90-s initially. All the Soviet propaganda for scientific view of the world led to thousands of sects and charlatans, together scamming most of the population. All the Soviet propaganda for honest and labor ethic led to most people not even considering such scams really scams, because in Soviet propaganda doing business was treated same as scamming someone.

So nobody even thought what’s happening is wrong. And the part of the population which did understand was those who got the shorter stick. People losing themselves in a bottle or a needle, people literally dying from hunger, people having to do crime or prostitution or mercenary work to survive. It was an unholy kingdom where for a part of the population it seemed they are almost the middle class now, just like in those American movies and ads, and the other part saw those ads and those people daily, but could barely survive.

And then, after a few years, the former part grew some understanding that Russia is approaching fascism, and the latter part, which already lived it since 1993, was so broken that it obeyed the fascists after they gave it a bit of a life without hunger and depression in the 00s.

See, there is a layer of the Russian (and general ex-Soviet) culture, in vibes and emotions, showing things as they really were, but it’s horrible to look into that. It was plainly impossible for a normal person to accept some group of people like Anatoly Sobchak’s daughter as opposition. After real opposition figures were being marginalized, jailed and even murdered for a few years. After the Chechen wars. After the way that privatization happened, and the 1993. Nobody would follow people who are just a subset of the same evil, except playing clean because it’s in fashion.

Then, of course, such a decision, so to say, made by a whole country leads to madness.

And this is what we live since then. Those stormtroopers on crutches storming Ukrainian positions - they know that their orders come from the evil itself. They are not fighting for something or against something, only to feel that evil as more material, or take their share of the suffering, or prove something to themselves. It’s a whole society of depressed people who need to prove something to themselves, because everything around is both evil, fake and dirty, one yearns for purification. It’s desperation of the better kind of people, whether you believe it or not. The worst kind finds ways not to die. It’s even natural for humans, like best shown in Japanese culture of honorable death. In European military cultures honorable suicide was a thing, well, in 2022 a few Russian generals shot themselves. I’ve read about them.

It’s really disgusting to be of the “fat” part of the population of these two.

I’m not sure our idea of happiness aligns.

I didn’t realize how temporary and disposable Starlink’s satellites were. They incinerate 4 or 5 a day by de-orbiting them into the ozone. Here’s a pretty good CNET article that talks about how they “dispose” of them. IDK, doesn’t seem sustainable. They also mention the bandwidth gains are being diminished with the influx of new users, so their solution is more temporary satellites.

You are right in how wasteful it is, especially since it turned out a lot of those satellites don’t even make it to 4 years.

However there is zero risk of space trash with Starlink. They orbit so low, it’s basically within the atmosphere still. They need to constantly boost themselves, otherwise they fall down and burn up. So these satellites are coming down within years all on their own, even without any controlled disposal.

It’s insanely wasteful, but it keeps SpaceX in business launching every week, which is kind of the point. But at least there isn’t a Kessler syndrome waiting to happen.

Starlink provides service to areas where fiber is impossible. Like the middle of the ocean and actual rural areas where fiber runs could be tens of miles or more between homes. Those are area where no one will build out fiber unless the homeowner is paying for it themselves, the various government programs would never cover those actual rural areas despite what they claim. At best they might cover city outskirts for new infrastructure, where fiber nodes are already relatively close by. They’re never adding fiber to existing rural farms and ranches.

They are not a 1:1 service comparison. You would need to compare It to other satellite providers, and there isn’t a comparison because all of those are dogshit in comparison to Starlink.

There’s a reason it’s as popular as it is so quickly despite satellite internet in general not being new. The low earth satellite constellation means a massive difference in capability compared to conventional geostationary satellites. Multiple second latency, slow downloads nowhere near advertised double digit Mbps speeds, single digit Mbps upload speeds and often monthly data limits as low as 50GB per month are what the conventional satellite providers offer.

If only we could adjust the plot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes to where it’s mostly just cleaning up dead starlink satellites.

In any case, highly recommended as a fantastic anime. And for those that haven’t seen it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZESIHA0qK3U

That’s a dubbed trailer, but those of you looking for a Japanese language trailer know where to find it or probably have already watched it lol