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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.
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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