And how does one accumulate a nest egg when every employer I have ever dealt with cannot afford (or outright refuses) to do better than paying late and/or less than agreed, if at all? Believe it or not, not everyone can live off their parents as adults.
As a former bell-ringer for the SalArmy across two time zones, the people who give the most are always the ones who look like they need it the most. No different from how the biggest tippers always themselves work in the service industry. The lower class isn't surviving because of WIC or unemployment insurance, or from the .ooooo9% billionaires part with in exchange for additional tax breaks, but from others out here in the streets.
People of the US are scared to address how the vast majority of taxes paid are not going to the general population of the US, not infrastructure or anything else outside of the private coffers of the biggest con-artists alive today or the largest and most expensive enterprise in all of human history- the US military and its 900+ bases thrust around the globe to better serve those same con-artists.
For anyone without a private jet maybe. Does anyone seriously think the FAANG corporate boards will ever in their lives have to undergo this? If the feds wish to be paparazzi, then we should all give them something to really behold.
> Does anyone seriously think the FAANG corporate boards will ever in their lives have to undergo this?
Yes, me. All of them will already be used to being hounded by paparazzi, and it would be very human for them to mistake that for normal. Two of them (Facebook and Apple) already use face recognition in their products.
Anonymity? They get their own Wikipedia pages and personalised conspiracy theories. Even “mere” multimillionaires like my first boss after graduating got that plus endless personal fan letters.
Anonymity is not the same as privacy. Mark Zuckerberg is known worldwide and has no ability to be anonymous. However aspects of his private life (his Facebook messages, for example) are far more private than the average person.
And we should all pretend that the internet resolves conflicts at any level? I think the widescale lack of communicating without empathizing pheromones is quite obviously making a shitstorm of the whole wide world. But keep culting with your bad self.
> I think the widescale lack of communicating without empathizing pheromones is quite obviously making a shitstorm of the whole wide world.
I rather believe that deep empathy for your own groups is the cause of many shitstorms. To quote from the article:
"For example, we often think of terrorists as shockingly blind to the suffering of innocents. But Breithaupt and other researchers think of them as classic examples of people afflicted with an "excess of empathy. They feel the suffering of their people.""
But the inability to infringe on the rights of others is not itself an infringement of any actual right. That is an impossible lesson to be learned by us here in the west.
And I realize anti-establishment innuendo is taboo here, but if yc is focused on bringing forth more products and services to the world, then doing so without understanding what things the world may honestly want or need, without some pretext of empathy for the source of those wants and needs, is as reprehensible as it is ineffective. When nobody today is satisfied, to the extent the richest man Bezos feels the need to upgrade his life partner, then we are not doing ourselves any justice in thinking technology can either save or replace dying virtue.
Basically SpaceX is doing what Steve Jobs first wanted to do when faced with the stubbornness of telecom giants - create his own cell phone / data network.
He was advised it would be too expensive. Maybe Apple and SpaceX should do a joint venture...
Can it really replace mobile networks? It's great for areas currently not served by 4G but would serving large cities (New York, SF, Seattle, London) really make sense via satellite?
I can tell you any more choice in the US would be a good thing. Our infrastructure is pretty much bottom rung unless you are one of the very few who can get access to fiber. I have literally a Google fiber drop installed in my front yard, but they can't be bothered to give me service. Google is no longer deploying new locations in my city.
This is an important point. Transit over StarLink looks like it will be faster than transit overland via fiber optic cable due to the speed of light being slower in fiber cable than free space.
That means that this isn't just a stunt, but an actual upgrade to our communications infrastructure.
Honestly, I’d love to see StarLink keep the latency advantage to themselves and acquire an HFT firm to extract the profits from the advantage. What are you going to do as a competitor? Build and lift your own comm sat network? The laws of physics are a hell of a moat.
If they went this route, they could run the compute at the edge; that is, in space, perhaps in another sat in a higher orbit. Thereby avoiding one trip through the atmosphere improving their latency advantage even further.
The real trick will be acquiring rooftop space at the exchanges for the uplinks.
Acquiring an HFT firm won't be worth it. Just sell it to the highest bidder. It's likely they will pay too much anyway (winner's curse) in which case Starlink just needs to sell it to the next highest bidder a year later. Much easier money (and less regulation) than trading yourself.
Nothing about SpaceX except marketing hype has to do with Mars, can we just stop it with the Mars talk? It belittles what SpaceX actually is about, which is amazing in its own right. Launch demand, cheaper LEO/GEO/GTO, and a willingness to push the industry out of the 60’s is almost unbelievable, as is the journey they’ve taken to get this far. Throwing Mars into the mix makes it all sounds like bullshit, because anyone who actually understands the challenges of Mars beyond the big rocket portion rolls their eyes and sighs.
I’d also add that competing with the likes of Comcast and Verizon could be very profitable in the long term. I don’t think we need to assume it doesn’t serve its own obvious purpose of being th first big step in getting that sweet ISP money.
Edit api: It makes sense for a lot of things that a demand actually exists for, like heavy loads, launching a number of different contracts in one reusable rocket to save on overhead, defense contracts, and more. Those will actually make them money, and are all technically feasible today.
Mars is the vision and it is going to take an incredible amount of effort to make that possible. We need to find uses for that technology here and now so that the costs for it can be brought down.
It is not just a matter of having a human put their feet down on Mars and then be done with it. How will we move around (Boring and Tesla btw)? How will we communicate there and back to people on Earth? How will we feed ourselves there? Etc..
IMHO, Starlink (on Mars) is an answer to the communication challenges we will face there. By doing it on Earth, we prove it out, bring the costs down, provide a better internet alternative to what we have now, and have synergies with his other companies like Tesla (communication without needing cell providers) and SpaceX (increase launch demand).
They are building a super heavy lift rocket that makes the most sense for sending humans to the Moon and Mars. Other roles can be served reasonably well by Falcon and FH. Outside manned tourism, exploration, and settlement there is little need for a rocket that big.
Also... marketing hype for who? We think the Mars stuff is cool, sure, but we are not SpaceX's customers. Their customers could care less. They care if their payloads fly to the right orbit.
I'm sure a lot of folks have heard of the Amish practice of young adults living among the normals for weeks or months, sampling modern life before making the decision to settle down back on the farm. I wish that was a common thing among everyone, with teens out of high school given a year on their own before college, to exist as legal adults while supporting themselves with whatever entry-level, minimum wage job. I would imagine the numbers of freshmen dropouts would drop considerably, with more young adults in general being more willing to apply themselves toward realistically achieving goals, having tasted how hard things might be.
But if parenting has much in common with management styles, there would need to be a balance equally between super cool bro and anal-retentive wretch.
