Yes. This exactly. Starlink is not an economically sustainable business today without government largess. It might be in the future, but that feels highly questionable to me. That Starlink solves a problem for you (where you’re effectively paying a subsidized price), does not presuppose that there is actually a large enough organic market to sustain the business, without those subsidies.

I am not sure if that is correct. Costs driven by the diseconomies of scale of a centralized provider trying to service ALL of a vast and low density area are immense to point that the business may not be viable. If this wasn’t the case, service delivery in the low density areas of Detroit would look a whole lot different, for instance, and those places still have a lot more density that the rural areas Starlink claims to be building its business around.

Well then, outside of regulatory shenanigans, this might suggest that it was not presently economically viable for existing telecoms to extend traditional Internet upgrades to certain low density rural areas in the US. And if that it is the case, then hundreds of billions of capex dollars poured into starlink satellite internet is likely NOT going to find a customer base to provide enough demand or margin to justify those capex investments, especially once government subsidies / tax-payed funded contracts dry up. Hence, SPCX is a capital destroying malinvestment machine.

Providing a solution to a problem that loses money doesn’t mean the problem isn’t real, it just means the solution isn’t likely to be around that long in the grand scheme of things.

Anyways, addressing the marginal cost of energy would be far more effect way to improve the economic is extending services to low density areas. It would be, quite objectively, one the best things we could do for the economy at large and for human flourishing in general.

For instance, we’ve had 18 years of Elon Tesla, it might be time to start judging the company by its performance rather than just the weight of Elon’s ambition. Also electric cars only make sense in areas of high density (which the US is largely bereft of), powered by a nuclearized grid, but whatever…

Actually it’s a little bit different. There are just some countries where Google does not care enough to serve ads (though there might be some regulatory reasons for this in background). Albania is one such country that has nodes in many VPN services.

👆🏿THIS. There are also countries where if you set your VPN to them it blocks ads on YouTube…

Elon certainly gets credit for ambitious and “thinking big” but neither of these is the same thing as “economically viable.” Nor does that scale of ambition or vision mean that a big idea will be viable at some point in the future, or at all.

My issue with SPCX is that Internet and phone calls are things that have already been solved - they just feel shitty in the US being hamstrung by legacy regulation and infrastructure. Go to any major city in Asia or Africa and you’ll find a competitive market offering of blazing fast unlimited internet and cellular service for a few dollars a month.

There are places in the world where internet access is lacking but if we really care about human flourishing the issue in those places is more often access to power (and therefore refrigeration, clean/modern cooking technology, nocturnal lighting, etc), which SPCX does nothing to address (I do not consider this to a “fault” of SPCX, just a statement that challenges that assumption / narrative around product market fit)

Fundamentally I question the logic of hundreds of billions of dollars of investment to deliver satellite internet to places where either a) internet is already solved or b) the would-be rural customer base has far larger problems while also lacking the money of SpaceX kit. Especially when we already have a globally scale supply chain to deliver internet and cellular to places at very low cost. A technology being new, does not presuppose that it is actually better.

Also most, or really all, of Elon’s moon shoots have yet to pay off in terms of free market economic viability. Tesla is not a viable company without subsidies. SpaceX is not a viable company without subsidies. Humanoid robotics are simply not economically viable. What does the Boring Company even do and where is the hypertube, or whatever he’s calling it now?

Also, that Musk’s companies are not at the forefront of agitating for broad and rapid American nuclearization, is very telling to me. This is a fundamental base input all of his companies would benefit from massively and that is required for the logical extension of all of his “vision”but he’s happy to sell us all stories while sucking up our tax dollars.

And China IS nuclearizing so I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon is living in Beijing come 2035 once he’s conned America for all he can get.

How does one publish their relay list as a kind 10002? I’m not sure I understand here.

#Asknostr
#Plebchain