It's not only the pollution. The world is "unwillingly" giving up space spots to a company that can use those satellites as technological weapons. What happens when a Chinese/India/Russia(Insert any non-Anglo "bad" country) decides to emulate them , I would happily bet my left kidney the _commentariat_ here would not be so happy.
Would they provide a usable broadband alternative to the broomstick-up-butt treatment I get from the telcos?
Hell yes I'd take them. Oh they'd steal my data? Well, so does everyone on this site and the telco I have now.
Consider this, Mr Geopolitical power. Do you want the US with this weapon, or sit on our ass and let China deploy one now that SpaceX has shown how powerful it is?
This is the single greatest Western soft power weapon since the iPhone. And you're begrudging it? Come on.
I am latin-American Mr "I think Anglo is the world default", in our region the US has been a much more pernicious force in history than China,by several orders of magnitude. I understand we are just simple apes that love to think tribally (the logical part of our brain is shut off) but I would expect one is aware enough to understand there are other "tribes", specially when worldwide one's group does not reach double digits as % of population.
It is correct that Starlink is not motivated to act for your benefit, any more than for this individual. Your interlocutor has long experience with such things. So do we, really; are Starlink's incentives aligned any different from AT&T's?
A few years back, AT&T took a half $billion from US taxpayers to build out fiber to rural neighborhoods. One comes to within 1/10 mi of my house. But they were not obliged to light any of it. They did not. That fiber sits dark, more than a decade on.
This is not the US. This is a privately held corporation answerable to nobody. Whose benefit do you imagine they will exercise their power on behalf of? Yours? US voters'?
> This is not the US. This is a privately held corporation
Just like all other ISPs. As well as tech companies.
What's your point? That Starlink is bad because it isn't a government-owned entity? Or are you opposed to the idea that a non-government entity can provide a strategic advantage/soft power to the US government?
Asking because neither of those two points seem to be able to withstand much scrutiny.
My point is simply that anyone expecting Starlink will treat you better than AT&T does, and to act on behalf of the US, is very unfamiliar with both history and Elon Musk.
A hell of a lot of Tesla customers paid $thousands for self-driving, since, what, 2016? Tesla just laid off its whole self-driving department. What are the odds they will now issue refunds? Care to bet?
> My point is simply that anyone expecting Starlink will treat you better than AT&T does
The situations are totally different. AT&T made money from LOCAL infrastructure that they had a natural and enforced monopoly on.
Starlink infrastructure is inherently global, their main goal is with minimal effort and cost to connect as my people as possible to distribute the global fixed cost. SpaceX has little intensive to involve itself as deeply in local politics. On a global scale some politics will go in their direction, others away, spending lots of money in each government is not really a very practical strategy.
The US government can force companies to do things sure, and if you have extreme security consideration that goes beyond having a VPN go threw Starlink then Starlink is not for you.
Starlink will not have a monopoly on anything, they have an essentially global outlook and they are trying to offer a uniform standard service from Stockholm to Santiago. So I do actually think its a fair assumption that costumer experience has a chance to be better.
> Tesla just laid off its whole self-driving department
Those other constellations do not, in fact, exist. Until they do, for most rural subscribers Starlink is the only game in town: a de facto monopoly even by strict legal definition, whether or not so governed administratively yet.
> Tesla just laid off its whole self-driving department.
I had to check since I hadn't heard of this. All the sources I checked were about 200 low-level employees who were mostly doing manual annotation of images to help improve the algorithm. Not developers themselves. Definitely nothing about laying off "the whole self-driving department".
"Most of the workers were in moderately low-skilled, low-wage jobs, such as Autopilot data labeling, which involves determining if Tesla’s algorithm identified an object well or poorly, according to one source."
They are closing the entire San Mateo unit. If I were among the "self-driving" staff remaining, I would be updating my résumé.
Curiously, all those dumped were "terminated for underperforming", which will make finding work elsewhere hard, unless other companies see it as a cynical ploy to dodge regulations on normal layoffs.
I don't understand the significance of the San Mateo city in this context. I don't work in this industry. Were there higher level programmers included as well, instead of work akin to Amazon Mechanical Turk?
Do you have a source for the underperforming thing? That'd be next level incompetence for them to lay off 200 people for that reason all at once. (not saying it's impossible obviously!)
> A hell of a lot of Tesla customers paid $thousands for self-driving, since, what, 2016? Tesla just laid off its whole self-driving department. What are the odds they will now issue refunds? Care to bet?
Refunds for what? Every feature I bought the car with is still there. Even got the FSD beta access last month after being on the waitlist for a while. Updates still keep getting pushed, fixes and adjustments still get deployed on a regular basis. The self-driving program isn't ending, the development is still ongoing and alive, so I am not sure why I should be expecting a refund for that.
Also, get your news right. The people they recently laid off were mostly working on labeling data, they were not actual self-driving engineers. Labeling data is a pretty common and manual type of a task. I am actually surprised they've been doing it in-house for so long, as opposed to contracting it out. Not trying to justify that layoff, but claiming that it indicates the end of their self-driving program is ridiculous at best (and disingenuous at worst).
> anyone expecting Starlink will treat you better than AT&T does, and to act on behalf of the US, is very unfamiliar with both history and Elon Musk
You can make that statement about literally any company, and it is always a fool's errand to guess instead of evaluating that specific thing in question. You can say the same about Google, but I've been a happy Google Fiber/Webpass customer for the past few years. I can say nothing but good things about it, after many years of terrible experience with Comcast/Xfinity, and a few much better (but still worse than Google Fiber/Webpass) years with WaveG (WA area fiber provider).
In this specific case with Starlink, you don't need to guess either. If you live in an area where they provide service, you can sign up and compare it to any currently existing internet solutions for areas with no high-speed internet (rural and far-from-major-cities areas), which is the primary use case that Starlink was designed for.
Back to the original point about "private tech company as a soft power for the US government is a ridiculous idea." In the present day, we got Ukrainian Vice PM tweeting[0] his expression of gratitude towards the US government and Starlink for providing connectivity during their current crisis. What is this if not a proof of that soft power US can exhibit through private tech companies?
Either you paid extra for FSD, or you didn't. If you didn't, you won't get it. Everyone who did still doesn't have it, despite public statements ("next year, for sure") every year since 2016.
A mass layoff sends a message. Everyone left, there, certainly got it, and are updating their CVs. (I wonder what they will say they have been up to.)
You do get self-crashing, anyway: You can watch those frame by frame on YT.
And, yes, the same is true of any big corporation. But many people have announced in public that they do expect different, and need the correction. Comcast, the "Most Hated Corporation in America", is a curious choice to have substituted in for AT&T.
Anyone who imagines that Starlink did not get back way more than full value for that Ukr gesture knows nothing of PR.
US corporations are significantly controlled by US laws. These laws can do things like stopping them serving enemy countries. (The recent Russia sanctions are an example)
I think I see your point, here: that, being a US company, the US can give it directions regardless of what the company would have chosen to do; and even in places the company is not compelled by law, it may be in their interest to stay on good terms with the feds where for a company based elsewhere it might not.
It seems like they're keeping a ~10 km buffer zone around each satellite which does add up. Between Starlink, OneWeb, and Kuiper a bunch of shells have already been taken.
