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I donno if this is exactly culture war or not. But it involves a major culture war figure.
I finally got Starlink on my isolated rural property. I'm having a guy mount it proper this week. So for now it's just on my north facing porch, maybe 3 feet above ground level, totally blocked to the south by my house, surround by trees. It's working 10x better than a competing satellite internet company Viasat, with a proper mounted dish pointed exactly where it needs to go with zero obstructions. We had some light rain on Sunday, and Starlink powered on through it with small micro-losses of connection regularly, where as Viasat was just totally down probably 80% of the day.
It's night and day. Starlink, on their best effort plan, pulls about 80 Mbps down, 10 up, with a 50 ms ping. Viasat pulls about 110 Mpbs down, 0.40 mbps up, with an 800 ms ping. So while Viasat seems to technically have more throughput strictly down, it's upload bandwidth and ping are off the charts terrible. I can also say, experientially, that Viasat speed test number does not reflect their actual download speeds. I'm lucky for Steam to suck down games at 1 MB/s on Viasat, and it was happily peaking over 11 MB/s, but mostly in the 5-6 MB/s range on Starlink.
To say nothing of the quality of service. I'm paying about $300 a month for Viasat, with an extra $15 a month for their "easy care" which gives me a discount on service appointments. Down from $500 to $200. When I had some roofers accidentally nudge the dish a fraction of a degree, that was $200 to have fixed 3 days later. Starlink just points itself exactly where it needs to point. And it's $110 a month. There is no small difference in the data caps either. Viasat has me paying $200 a month for 100 GB of "priority data", and $40 for another 30 GB when I run out. I typically have to buy two of those a month, hence the $300 bill. Starlink has a 1 TB data cap. I don't think I've ever used that much data in a month in my life.
10 times better, 1/3rd the price, indescribably more convenient. If this were being run by a public company, or a company with different stake holders, there is no way they'd have overshot the target in such a small market by so much. It would be minimally better, minimally less expensive, and it's hard to say how much they'd care about convenience. If it made them more money, they'd gladly make that worse to charge you for service appointments. I can only attribute the astounding quality of service to Musk's naive ideological commitment to the vague cause of "more internet for more people".
Which brings me to the culture war angle. It's been the subject of some number of headlines that Musk's financing of Twitter is an enormous albatross around his neck. He's forced into liquidating stock almost monthly to keep it up. I've seen a lot of talk that it might force his hand, and cause him to lose control of some or all of his companies. So I'm going to register a prediction here. Probably the first noticeable casualty of that, is that if anyone ever gets their hands on SpaceX, they are going to monetize the ever loving fuck out of Starlink. Jack the price up to $150-$300 a month, remove all the waitlist and oversell every area, throw harsher data caps on everyone, you name it. With the added culture war angle that if it ever occurs, SpaceX will almost certainly fall into the hands of Neoliberal Adherents, the Starlink mostly services rural red tribers, or grey tribers that have defected. So it'll be hard not to interpret changes in policy as being punitive towards political enemies.
Not bad, though outside of rural areas, internet prices are already much cheaper and far faster in most of the West outside the five-eyes countries (where internet prices are absurdly expensive) and population density is much higher. Musk spoke about bringing internet to far-flung places but how many people can afford these prices in rural India? Seems like he'd have to cut prices by 90% to make it viable.
Given how important it appears to be for Ukrainian efforts, I suspect that its true utility will be in the military domain and potentially B2B, too.
I haven't seen anything mentioning Starlink anywhere in coverage of the Ukraine conflict! I mean, there was that wave of stories covering the donation, most of which predicted it would bring vital help to Ukraine's military, but those were coverage of an American company being generous--and likely at the behest of the same company's talented and experienced P.R. team--and not technically coverage of Ukraine.
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Once the satellites are up, he can do this and still make money -- the marginal cost of new customers is nearly zero, and the dishes can be trivially geolocked so Americans can't just ship units from India for home use.
The dishes themselves are unavoidably expensive due to being quite a bit more complex than a normal satellite dish, but this opens up some sort of business model for somebody to buy a dish and set up a mesh network in each village or whatever.
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On the subject of Musk, I reckon he reveals just how much management skills are ignored and denigrated in society. In about half the Musk conversations I've seen, people say 'oh it's his engineers who make the brilliant inventions, he just does media, finance, (did you hear about his father's SOUTH AFRICAN diamond mine?) cult of personality'
If the quality of engineers is all that matters, why don't we just sack all the engineers at NASA, who've done fuck all after the Space Shuttle, which was itself enormously cost-inefficient?
Hiring the right engineers, putting them in the right places and managing their projects in the right way is essential. Few know how to do this right. Bezos's rockets aren't successful - but he's rich enough to get good engineers. If he knew how to pick them and manage their work, it stands to reason that his rocket company (founded in 2000, launching only small rockets that don't even achieve orbit I believe) would be more high-profile. Perhaps there's a separate skill needed for running rockets than running Amazon or he didn't spend enough time on Blue Origin or whatever, I'm confident that Bezos has a similar capability.
Musk interviewed and decided upon the first thousand or so employees at SpaceX himself, he clearly did a pretty good job of it. I recall from the same book that he was poaching people off the F-35 program, people who were basically solely devoted to a single bolt on the fuselage or something of that nature. The established space launch companies were all stifling bureaucracies.
Similarly, Napoleon's soldiers did all the fighting but the general himself was indispensable. Napoleon picked out the Imperial Marshals, planned campaigns, often decided where battles would be fought and made the critical decisions in combat. That's the essence of military genius. Musk has business and project management genius, achieving impressive results fairly quickly. His wisdom and political skills are more dubious - Bezos might have the upper hand in that less obvious domain.
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Are price increases(which are the most obvious route to monetize) really culture war in this economy?
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Who are "Neoliberal Adherents"?
The sorts of people running companies steering hard into ESG and DEI. Making the right mouth sounds about equity, and creating special programs to advantage the usual minority client populations while generally being terrible for everyone regardless.
In my experience, "neoliberal" is basically a sneer word among woke people to characterize more moderate social/economic positions (e.g. Hillary Clinton is a neoliberal because she loves global corporations too much, etc.), so the fact that you seem to think it means the opposite basically confirms my belief that there is no consensus on who neoliberals are, other than that they are bad and control everything.
I think it means, basically, "pro-globalhomo".
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It's the ideology of the world order. What you're describing is tribes of neolibs arguing about what it means to be a neolib, but they all are within it, none of them fundamentally disagree with the direction of the modern social project, they just bicker about how committed or practical methods of advancing it are.
Compare Islamists, or Dengists.
People call it that for lack of a better word to describe modernist globalism. But what ideology is the "party of Davos" if not neoliberal?
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Neoliberal is definitely not woke. Neoliberal is Reagan and Thatcher and maybe Tony Blair if you're stretching it. Only in fringe online circle (like the reddit neoliberal sub) does neoliberal have anything to do with woke. When the average person uses neoliberal, usually in a pejorative sense, they mean "Those bad people who supported free market reforms at the expense of unions or the coal miners (or whatever)"
If "neoliberal" can mean Reagan and Thatcher, then it can also mean woke. This is like a Rings of Power fan complaining about being unfaithful to the source material.
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I think it's use by that subreddit has led to a lot of people on Reddit thinking that that is actually what neoliberal means.
For a big part of my life, the only person I had ever seen purposely identify as a neoliberal was Scott Sumner.
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The confusion comes from the fact that the word mostly gets used by far-leftists to refer to people like Hilary Clinton, which gives everyone else the impression that the term means something like "deep Democrats who want to regulate everything to death". I basically never see it used for people like Reagan or Thatcher except in exactly this scenario of explaining what neoliberal really means.
I always got the impression that the dissident right thinks of neoliberals as "socially liberal, economically conservative". Ergo, allowing corporations more latitude to exploit workers and push for stuff like LGBT, abortion, etc. because "they want the labour force completely atomised from traditional social relations and derive all its identity from its career and place in the firm". This is a very common line among right coded tankies. I suppose there's some truth to it, but I suspect the "real reason" why wokeism is pushed so hard is no single reason at all. There is no Machiavellian scheme behind any of this, just some people (especially from the urban middle class) with whom there is legitimate purchase of wokeness because they see it as the next wave of progressivism which has already been the dominant ideology for decades, companies and public figures that parrot whatever's the most fashionable in elite consensus, activist types who will themselves to believe in this, casuals who just about believe the first thing they see in the headlines, and dissidents who are frustrated with it all.
I suspect the exact opposite. No one was seeing wokeness as the next wave of progressivism at the beginning, even pointing at it would get you accused of weak-manning or nut-picking. Even if you were paying attention to nothing other than /r/ssc /r/themotte, you could see wokeness bubbling up towards the top, the attempts to hand-wave it away going from "it's just a couple of crazy kids on tumblr" -> "it's just a couple of crazy kids on university campuses" -> "it's just some Karens in HR (but Damore had it coming, BTW)" -> "it's just a couple of cynical CEOs insincerely mouthing woke slogans" (<-- you are now here), you could see it seizing the reins of power, and imposing itself on the masses.
I think the only reason people come up with these mundane non-Machiavellian explanations, is that it allows them to position themselves as non-supporters of wokeness, without becoming it's opponents. It's the most comfortable spot for a lot of people, as declaring yourself as a supporter requires you to commit to some amount of self-flagellation (not to mention having to answer for all the crazy stuff being pushed by governments, companies, ngo's and activists), but coming out as an opponent gets you branded as a rightoid, even if you're otherwise an outright communist, and there's nothing worse than being a rightoid.
I suppose a counterpoint to the 2nd paragraph would be that it's also comforting to blame a select few groups for the cultural crisis, but it's much more black pilling to believe that a sizable chunk of the masses isn't merely being misled, but is very much within its own agency when it demands more wokeness. And to some extent, what's most fashionable among the woke urban middle class does seem to direct the conversation. For instance, throughout the last decade, it was all feminism that was pushed so aggressively as the centrepiece of woke. Culminating into MeToo which went on until 2019. It's still being pushed of course, but the spotlight is on BLM since the George Floyd protests and the whole "Defund the police" campaign. I just cannot rationalise such a scheme without making it seem even sillier. There does seem to be some pressure from below.
Well, you're a bit behind the times, because even BLM fell out of fashion post-Rittenhouse, it's all about trans issues now, which will also fall out of fashion because of the medical scandal around transgender care for minors.
I sympathize with the pushback against being psychologized, since as you rightly point out this is something anyone can do to anyone, but in my opinion the mundane theory just doesn't hold water. If there was pressure from below, you shouldn't have seen accusations of of nut-picking in the past. If there was pressure from below you shouldn't see wokeness having to rely on censorship, shadow-banning, and algorithmic supression. If there was pressure from below, you should see that Harry Potter game bomb in terms of sales, and fuddy-daddy game journos struggling to explain it. Everything about these mundane explanations flies in the face of observable reality.
It seems pretty brilliant from where I sit. It's like fighting a hydra, for every head you chop off, two new ones take it's place.
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Lol another word butchered by the left. Milton Friedman basically the reviver of neoliberalism ain’t woke.
This is objectionably low-effort. Don't post like this please.
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Yeah, he died in 2006 at the age of 96.
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Is it really a culture war idea to suggest "If someone buys this company, they will try to monetize it over a shorter timeframe?"
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It's worth noting that United Launch Alliance (ULA), one of their main competitors, is a joint Lockheed-Boeing project rather forcefully spun off from lawsuits between the two major market players. In the interest of continued service (neither going bankrupt and ending production), they were effectively forced to work together in 2006. I think your prediction is right: a forced sale to one of the larger government contractors, followed by re-evaluating the continual loss-leader strategy Musk seems to like.
On the subject of Starlink specifically, I had a project to estimate the market feasibility of such a service before it started launching, and at least my result was that it probably can't be profitable at the list prices. There is a chance it could be selling to the government, but there aren't enough people in OP's position to pay landline ISP prices to fund the operating costs for the launches, the ground stations, and staffing.
The US at least has spent a ton of money running fiber to rural areas in the last few decades, which doesn't require too much ongoing upkeep.
My (Musk-skeptic) view is that Starlink exists to provide a regular payload for Falcon 9: despite promises that cheaper launches would increase demand, they seem to have largely flushed out the wait lists and have actually seen a decline in commercial launches in recent years. "Exponential growth" wasn't going to keep banner launch rates up without making payloads themselves. The satellites and ground terminals themselves seem to work, although not as well as originally promised: do they have cross-links like Iridium had in the 90s? How much power do the ground terminals draw?
The economics of private companies mean that its hard from the outside to view their profitability. On the other hand, I've long predicted that empire dissolving, and I've admittedly been wrong about the timeline for that so far.
My understanding is that the Starlink has three potentially profitable strategies, all of which depend on inter-satellite links to really be breakthroughs:
HFT without fiber latency. This is where clients will be able to pay eight to nine figure subscriptions per year, with major routes forming a high speed web between New York, London, Brussels, Singapore, and Tokyo.
Military/aviation. It's hard to put a dollar value on military contracts, but this is probably seven to eight figures per year total, since military already has their own communications web.
Worldwide consumer access with less than worldwide infrastructure. Note that once access (downlinks) are installed for the above contracts, the marginal cost to expand civilian access to the globe is almost nil. The cost of satellite launch may be spilt between customers across the entire broadcast range: Africa, Europe, Asia, all the ocean shipping and cruise ships, etc.
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I don't like a lot of things about Elon, but it can't be denied that projects he's involved in are ambitious, difficult, and — occasionally — successful. Say what you want about his means, politics, manipulation, fraud, etc., the man gets things done, and that's respectable.
Very often successful. What's the average success rate for startups.. 15% ? And how many Musk companies are still operational ?
And not by fraudulent or political methods - e.g. no amount of fraud or politics or manipulation can orbit payloads. And his company just tested the most powerful launch vehicle ever.
Sure, he's engaged in what's probably fraud (with Tesla autopilot especially), however, given his parentage, that's really not a bad track record.
Musk while he has problems, seems like a far better person than his father.
If Maye Musk is to be believed, Elon is basically a product of fraud.
Depends on how you define success. He's incredibly ambitious with SpaceX; I don't think he would say he's succeeded until people are living on Mars. Many of his projects have failed/are failing: The Boring Co., Twitter (IMO), Neuralink... again, he's incredibly ambitious. It should be expected that he fail at least a few times. As for comparing his projects to the average start-up, you have to consider that the perceived success or failure of a start-up is determined by the investors' view of its future. When you're the investor, or when you control the money, whether your projects fail or not becomes a decision you make. He's parlayed his success with PayPal (not a flattering story for Elon) into enough wins to keep going and that's it.
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