When applying for RDOF you say what service tier you are targeting and instead of shooting for the minimum 25/3, Starlink applied for 100/20. When they didn't reach those speeds[1], they were ineligible but not just because they didn't hit the required speeds on their existing network. There are more details here[2] but the jist is that Starlink bid to supply 100/20 internet to over half a million subscribers and the FCC was required to assess if Starlink was reasonably, technically capable of supplying those speeds by 2025. Starlink reportedly argued that once they can properly launch Starship, they can surely hit the required speeds. As of yet Starship hasn't had a successful launch. On top of this, the statistics that were available at the time showed that Starlink transfer speeds were already trending down and the network is a lot less utilized than it would be in 2025. There are technical challenges that need to be solved before Starlink is remotely capable of meeting that obligation and the challenges don't appear to be resolved yet. Giving Starlink money is a gamble and the FCC would rather play it safe.
RDOF rules set speeds of 25/3 Mbps as the minimum allowed for broadband service delivered by winners. However, participants were permitted to bid at four different performance tiers: 25/3 Mbps, 50/5 Mbps, 100/20 Mbps and 1 Gbps/500 Mbps. When the auction closed, the FCC noted 99.7% of locations were bid at 100/20 or higher, with 85% bid at the gigabit tier. That means Starlink will need to provide speeds of at least 100/20 in order to meet its obligations.
1. https://www.fiercetelecom.com/broadband/what-do-starlinks-la...
Starlink (and Musk in general) have been over-promising and under-delivering for years now. Starlink claimed 150Mbps back in 2020 and that speeds would double to 300Mbps by the end of 2021.[1] Instead, speeds have halved.[2]
At this point, T-Mobile is likely serving more rural high speed internet customers with greater speeds (T-Mobile has 4.2M home internet customers and Ookla's stats show 34% to be rural for 1.4M; Starlink has 2M customers and assuming two-thirds are in the US and of those 83% are rural would make for 1.1M).
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/news/elon-musk-promises-to-double-...
[2] https://www.ookla.com/articles/us-satellite-performance-q3-2...
Related, "Tesla FSD Timeline":
* https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38625380 (earlier today)
To be fair FSD is the hardest software problem that man has ever attempted.
That's not being fair, that's making excuses. If the problem is that hard, don't be running your mouth about you'll have it done in six months, and charge people money while you work out the bugs.
Never did Musk say "We'll have it done in six months".
This: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/ (linked in the GGP to your comment) links to this tweet from Jan 23, 2017 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/823727035088416768
When asked the question "At what point will "Full Self-Driving Capability" features noticeably depart from "Enhanced Autopilot" features?"
Elon responded "3 months maybe, 6 months definitely"
Also, lots of examples of "this year" stated in various Januarys, and multiple instances along the lines of "complete autonomy in 2 years" going back 8 years.
I suspect his statements are carefully made to not technically meet the legal definition for fraud, but colloquially he's absolutely a liar.
They're probably not carefully made, but fraud requires knowledge of falsity, and short of an internal report saying "this feature won't be ready before XYZ," it is going to be extremely difficult to prove Tesla knew the claims were false.
The other thing you'll run into is reasonability of reliance--at this point, with so many deadlines repeatedly blown through, it would be hard to demonstrate that a reasonable person could rely on a representation that a promised deadline would be met.
I would think it would be hard to find a reasonable person who takes anything Musk says seriously anymore and yet plenty seem to.
The reason people follow Musk is that even though he over-promises and under-delivers; the under-delivered product is still better than the alternatives (or at least was for a while).
People are not complete fools and can learn to discount over-the-top rhetoric; sure, some people are harmed by believing everything verbatim, but those people also fall for scams, etc, etc.
His statements are parsed as statements of intent more so than actual timeline commitments. We'll have FSD in 6 months = FSD is our main priority at the moment. And sure it also makes for PR/free advertising. Is it scammy? Probably. But he likely got more out of people by pushing this false narrative than would have been otherwise accomplished.
I have real trouble with "the ends justify the means" arguments.
It's the behavior of a con artist.
Even if that's the case, he could have had the same, or better, effect without the lying. The lying is clearly aimed at gaining investment money and preorders, though, not at some bizarre attempt at motivating engineers.
It would be dumb to be caught "lying" over and over and Musk is not know to be dumb. Consider the possibility Musk is using reflexivity to accelerate progress. When people become convinced something is possible and work towards that goal their strong belief changes reality because there is a feedback loop between reality and beliefs.
Do we assess a person's intelligence by what their frothing fanboys think of them now, or is that only for rich celebrities?
Hater or fanboy does it matter? Do you not understand the concept of reflexivity? Intelligence can show truth. Intelligence can support some existing bias and hide truth. How does your intelligence serve you?
When someone's entire argument is "doing x would be dumb, and we know this guy isn't dumb", I see value in pointing out that this is a rather circular logic
I suspect you did not understand what I said and your bias affected your judgement. Please explain what you think I meant.
I had to look up reflexivity, as I was not previously familiar with it. I fail to see how it salvages your claim, and suspect you're fixating on this bit of economics trivia because you dislike that I made fun of the thing you said, and think I'm trying to get into a pissing contest about "intelligence", and like most ridiculous children who get into pissing contests about intelligence, seem to think that asking me to explain a concept with which I may then admit unfamiliarity might score you some points in such an undertaking. That about right?
That is not correct. My words above require intelligence to understand and my ability to explain them in simpler terms is limited. This explanation from GPT4 is good. Hope it helps.
------
The reply you've presented suggests a debate about the intentions behind Elon Musk's public statements, specifically regarding whether he's misleading people for financial gain or using a strategy known as "reflexivity" to motivate progress.
1. *Lying for Financial Gain*: The first part of the reply posits that Musk might be making false or exaggerated claims ("lying") to attract investment and preorders for his projects. This view implies that Musk's primary goal is to secure funding by convincing investors and customers of the feasibility and near-term success of his ventures, even if those claims are not entirely grounded in current realities.
2. *Reflexivity to Accelerate Progress*: The second part of the reply introduces a different perspective, suggesting Musk might be employing a concept known as reflexivity. This idea, often associated with financier George Soros, posits that market participants' beliefs can shape market realities. Applied here, it means Musk could be making ambitious or seemingly unrealistic statements with the intention of inspiring his teams and the broader public. The underlying belief is that if people are convinced that a challenging goal is achievable, their collective effort and belief can actually bring that goal closer to reality, creating a positive feedback loop between belief and outcome.
The reply seems to be wrestling with the notion of whether Musk's statements are purely manipulative for financial gain or part of a sophisticated strategy to create self-fulfilling prophecies that drive technological and scientific breakthroughs. It reflects on Musk's reputation for not being "dumb," suggesting that his repeated bold claims might have a deeper strategic purpose rather than just being simple falsehoods.
The former seems to clearly be a more parsimonious explanation of what we've seen. After all, what is often at stake, as in the case of the linked article, is financing based on concrete promises of progress, and the claims made by Musk are never about problems no one else thinks are possible to solve at all, so the reflexivity position here seems more like a defensive motte rather than a meaningful strategic analysis
It would be dumb to be caught agreeing with anti semitic tweets, and telling advertisers to "go fuck yourself", yet here we are. Your argument is invalid.
Intelligent people have faults and make mistakes like the rest of us. What sets them apart is they are often better at seeing this and fixing things. Did Musk not make amends for that tweet? Do you think advertising should control social media? Do you genuinely believe Musk is dumb?
I believe Musk is smart, but also bipolar and narcissistic, and likely often on stimulants, which makes him regularly do dumb things.
Compared to a same aged person does Musk do more dumb things each day? Perhaps his few dumb things get amplified by his haters?
Any normal person that manages to earn themself what Musk has earned might that affect their personality? Maybe make them more narcissistic etc? Large wealth would not affect your psychology?
Regarding bipolar: It would not surprise me but is there evidence? Did he admit it?
Of course wealth affects one’s mental state, this is pretty well studied.
Also “earned” is a bit generous, he’s had a lot of “right people, right time, right place” in his life (not to mention a great start from the emerald mines).
Also why look at dumb things per day when what matters (to me) is the enormity of dumb actions? He bought Twitter for way more than it was worth because he had a hissy fit. He’s “concerned” that AI isn’t allowed to say the n-word. He did a live public call with Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, and Vivek Ramaswamy. I could do one simply dumb thing every day for my entire life and not live up to the sheer stupidity of this man’s actions.
No, he did not make amends. He never even apologised for it.
"Dumb" isn't the word I'd use; "incurious" is better. It's not that he's racist or antisemitic, I believe, but rather he doesn't have enough knowledge of history to recognize classic antisemitic tropes (or signs that someone is an outright Nazi) combined with some beliefs close enough to racist that he's liable to agree with antisemitic creeds without recognizing them as antisemitic tropes.
My post above requires some explanation so here is GP4 explain it.
------
The reply you've presented suggests a debate about the intentions behind Elon Musk's public statements, specifically regarding whether he's misleading people for financial gain or using a strategy known as "reflexivity" to motivate progress.
1. *Lying for Financial Gain*: The first part of the reply posits that Musk might be making false or exaggerated claims ("lying") to attract investment and preorders for his projects. This view implies that Musk's primary goal is to secure funding by convincing investors and customers of the feasibility and near-term success of his ventures, even if those claims are not entirely grounded in current realities.
2. *Reflexivity to Accelerate Progress*: The second part of the reply introduces a different perspective, suggesting Musk might be employing a concept known as reflexivity. This idea, often associated with financier George Soros, posits that market participants' beliefs can shape market realities. Applied here, it means Musk could be making ambitious or seemingly unrealistic statements with the intention of inspiring his teams and the broader public. The underlying belief is that if people are convinced that a challenging goal is achievable, their collective effort and belief can actually bring that goal closer to reality, creating a positive feedback loop between belief and outcome.
The reply seems to be wrestling with the notion of whether Musk's statements are purely manipulative for financial gain or part of a sophisticated strategy to create self-fulfilling prophecies that drive technological and scientific breakthroughs. It reflects on Musk's reputation for not being "dumb," suggesting that his repeated bold claims might have a deeper strategic purpose rather than just being simple falsehoods.
Tell that to the disembodied pulverized head that was attached to somebody who took his claims at face value, and try explaining to his widow that her late husband was a complete fool to fall for it, so it's not Musk's fault.
The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash: A reconstruction of the wreck shows how human error and emerging technology can collide with deadly results
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/t...
If you're not following Musk every day, and maybe just know he's the Tesla/rocket guy, why wouldn't you take him seriously?
Somehow, this sounds like shifting blame from the liar to others ...
I wasn't assigning or shifting blame for anything. I was just expressing that I am baffled by the reality.
And I think it's safe to say that sycophants bending over backwards to carry Musk's water like DoesntMatter22 aren't reasonable people, don't base their opinions on facts or reality, and shouldn't be taken seriously.
What I've said is completely factual. Surprisingly a lot of people like who won't actually prove that he said that. Because the fact is that he didn't.
That enables fraudsters, of course. Also, what about people who don't spend all their time on the Internet, on HN, reading about Elon Musk? They buy stocks and cars too.
The civil tort of fraud (criminal fraud is different) generally requires either knowledge of falsity or reckless indifference to the truth.
Or recklessness as to falsity - like not caring whether the statement was true or false.
Does it? Is there no "average person should be aware" level?
This question was not asking about when FSD was going to work but when Enhanced Autopilot would noticeably depart from FSD. No where in there did it say "FSD will be working completely in 6 months".
They did in fact diverge, no where was that a statement that FSD would be complete by then.
It's ironic you are calling him a liar when your response seems to either be completely dishonest itself or you are not aware of the subject at hand.
In October of 2016-
So you're technically right- he said three months, not six.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will...
I don't see any direct quote of him saying what you are claiming. Please post that quote if you can find it
Quote came from a conference call.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5SfDmL0sv3w
At ~6:20.
Thank you for posting this. More proof of what I said. He did not say that they would definitively do it, he said exactly at the timestamp that you gave: "Our goal is".
So clearly didn't say that it would happen for certain
Announced goals still need to have a connection with reality or they're lies.
I never understood someone so determined to ignore all the evidence. Yet when confronted doubles/triples down with excuses.
Confronted with evidence that nowhere supports the claims. We really are in bizarro world here, rife with sloppy thinking and fuzzy smears. Certainly Elon shoots off his mouth and has underestimated timelines, but the specific claims being made about those mistakes go way beyond and into lala land.
It’s called the sunk cost fallacy anyone who owns a Tesla and Tesla stock has been extremely susceptible for years now
There is no proof. He never said it. People keep posting other quotes but none where he says what they claim.
If you have proof of a direct quote where he says that FSD will be done withing 6 or 3 months for certain than please post it.
Otherwise, attacking me is dishonest
Those don't count because Elon had this fingers crossed when he made those tweets. /s
2017 was before the infamous "funding secured" tweet, so I imagine there was no care in crafting his statements.
lol... but he has been saying "it'll be out next year" for many years
but please, keep defending in bad faith
I watched a panel discussion on self driving cars in 2015 with several legit experts in the technology (I believe Sebastian Thrun was one of them). There were also some CEOs. The experts all said there’s no way the tech would deploy before 2025, potentially later. The CEOs were saying 2018 or 2019.
The experts had a clear view way back then, the CEOs just don’t want to listen.
Waymo deployed cars without safety drivers to Tempe in 2021.
I'd argue even waymo is still far away from FSD. Driverless cars on a restricted set of roads with a remote operator monitoring things (and the ability to quickly resolve issues), is nowhere close to what I (and the general public I would argue) understands as fully self driving.
Sure, if you set the goalposts in a place that's unachievable we'll never reach them.
- even human drivers cannot safely operate in all locations/conditions
- all self-driving cars will need a mechanism for cops to talk to a human
You just moved the goalposts in order to set up a straw-man argument!
One can quite reasonably point out that level 5 autonomy has not yet been achieved without moving the level 5 goalposts.
The goal is to replace a human driver in every situation where a human driver could or would drive, with an equivalent or (ideally) better safety record.
Are you suggesting that Waymo is there? I don't think the evidence would support that. Even if we relax that goal a bit so the self-driving car can disengage and refuse to drive in, say, the most difficult 20% of situations, I don't think we can say Waymo is there, either.
IDK, the Waymo cars that drive around SF meet my definition of full self driving. They handle a ton of weird traffic patterns, pedestrians, pickup zones, and very dense urban environments much better than I think you realize. Unless you live here, you probably aren't aware of their capabilities.
This is always a game of boundary-setting. In one way that's true, in another way Waymo is 21+ years behind[1]. People have been setting up 'particular vehicles' to navigate 'particular areas' for decades. If the Waymo "self driving car" is an expansion of older site-specific tech, then there's nothing new under the sun. If their car is can be put anywhere then it just being able to drive in Tempe isn't proof of that.
IMO the truth is more with the experts. Each new location seems to require a lot of tuning to get right and function in a way the company is happy with. If a "self driving car" is one we can drop anywhere and have it drive we are still waiting on that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ParkShuttle
Oh, come on, these kinds of false analogies don't help to elucidate, only to confuse.
There is a universe of difference between something like ParkShuttle (its own right of way, using magnets in the road to detect position) and modern autonomous vehicles. Saying modern autonomous vehicles have environmental constraints is valid, saying that makes then no different than a "people mover on wheels" is not.
So my analogy is false huh? Then say a true one!
The point is that "deployed to a limited area" is not what people are thinking when they talk about a "self driving car." Of course ParkShuttle isn't the same as Waymo (or any other modern self-driving car) - but the question is how far we've come!
Are you claiming Waymo is ready to drive anywhere in the world? I do not think that's Waymo's position. So where are we? Cut through the rhetoric and tell it like it is - or join the rest of us who are speculating from the sidelines with incomplete information.
By the way, Particular Vehicles have been safely serving Particular Areas for decades: airport driverless shuttles. Slowly expanding from there is the right way to go, not "New York to Palo Alto by 2017", as Musk promised.
Yah, without any evidence to back it up my personal suspicion is that we'll arrive at a local maxima of "full self driving on highways and instrumented roads" in ~20 years. I think the area has a lot of potential, but so much of the hype (and stock price) is tied up with "a car that can drive better than a human everywhere" which seems impossible for anyone to produce.
Just like with IoT we'll eventually arrive at a boring, useful state...it will just take a while.
Sure but the panel discussion was talking about consumer release of self driving cars, which really requires level 5 capabilities in a wide variety of conditions, not just ideal weather.
Experts are wrong all the time. The experts said that solar prices would come down but were off by nearly an order of magnitude in how long it took.
With something this hard it's extremely tough to tell for sure when it will happen and often progress goes in chunks where it seems like it's going to happen but then doesnt.
I agree with all of this, but if the problem is too hard for the expert, why would I listen to a billionaire/CEO?
Experts have a narrow, deep view while CEOs have a wide, shallow view.
If the expert works in a lab developing new experimental solar panels they probably don’t see a clear path to mass production.
The CEO might know another manufacturing expert that does see a path to production and have enough high level understanding to know the methods are compatible.
In this case yes, but in this case we have to assume the research side has achieved it's goal (its proven a material exists with the desired properties), now it is a manufacturing problem. If the lab can't produce the material, the manufacturing lines have nothing to manufacture with. And that seems to be the case with FSD. CEOs make wild claims, but the tech isn't there. The material has not been proven to exist in a lab with the desired properties.
Like a CEO saying, I have a material that can protect wearers from nuclear fusion blasts and it will be on the market in 6 months, but the experts in the field have yet to actually prove that material exists and create it in a lab.
Sure, agree in this case.
But the point is that we are all equally capable of being wrong. Especially when we step outside our area of expertise. CEOs are just another type of expert but their domain is organization. We have to consider the source’s experience relative to the domain in question before we can decide if their prediction is trustworthy.
In this case the actual CEO we all know we're talking about is a serial confabulist who publicly agrees with anti semitic conspiracy theories and tells his advertisers to go fuck themselves, so your abstract hypothetical arguments generously giving some unspecified billionaire CEO the benefit of the doubt don't hold any water.
It’s unfair to put words in my mouth to make your own unrelated point. It’s your choice to interpret my words as a defense of Musk.
If I wanted to defend Musk I would do it explicitly. You don’t need to read between the lines.
He also does dubiously claim to be an expert in many fields, although despite the success of the engineers working for him, his greatest personal expertise appears to be sycophant creation — competence can only propel one so far.
Although one should never believe the ravings, useful work does surprisingly often nucleate around them, just not to the degree or with the speed promised.
citation required
Sure, but I'd trust experts in a field over a bunch of CEOs who have a vested interest in claiming something will be ready sooner rather than later.
Even CEOs who are an experts are by their very nature too biased to take at face value.
Many experts predicted price declines with pretty fair accuracy. The large groups of experts that were making these forecasts for purposes of global planning for mitigation of climate change were often intentionally conservative because the danger of planning with that assumption outweighs anything you lose by making more conservative predictions.
Not many people, even experts, predicted the success of ChatGPT even five years ago - and most have moved their timeline for AGI up significantly because of its release.
AI is a hard field to make predictions in.
Do you have sources on those predictions moving up “significantly” because of ChatGPT? Predicting words that sound good together, as a result of a prompt, based on a pre trained set of data is vastly different from AGI.
Right but "hard to predict" does not mean "it will happen whenever I want it to happen". You can't look at a very hard problem, where a good sample of the world's experts say it will take more than 10 years to solve, and just say "I bet we can do it in 4 years" just because you want that to be true.
I dunno, AGI seems like a hard problem too.
FSD is a substantial subset of AGI: driving is full of edge cases where you need to be able to reason about unusual conditions or behavior by other drivers, understand what someone like a flagger or police officer is saying, etc.
It is not obvious that even level 5 FSD will require either self-awareness or a theory of mind: adequate modeling of the possible behaviors of nearby actors in the immediate future may be "all" it takes, and current systems are struggling with that.
Of course, if one were to define FSD in terms of being so capable that it could also likely pass the Turing test (or whatever better replacement we come up with as a measure of AGI), then, by definition, it would be close to as hard a problem as AGI itself.
I said “substantial subset” precisely to avoid this kind of tangent. My point was simply that there are a lot of edge cases we have no clear path to solving which are masked at the current level by punting the problem to the human driver. We are a very long time from being able to build cars without manual controls even if we might hit the point where a majority of driving miles are automated long before then.
Cars without manual controls are closer than you think. The Waymo cars do just fine without a human driver in the seat, and before they got suspended, Cruise was just starting a pilot program with vehicles without manual controls called the Cruise Origin. Sale of such a vehicle to the general public is a ways off but for a taxi service we're pretty close.
Cruise reportedly had human interventions every 4-5 miles. I haven’t seen a similar figure for Waymo, who are generally believed to be considerably better.
"Substantial subset" is precisely the claim here that I have my doubts about. I think it is entirely possible (for the reason I gave previously) that AGI is at least as far beyond level 5 autonomy as level 5 autonomy is from the current state of road vehicle automation.
Not necessarily -- we can have AGI, but it might be too resource-intensive to put in a mobile platform like a car.
We will know that AGI is more likely to be solved when FSD is easily solved.
Safe AGI is a hard problem. AGI is, sadly, not hard enough.
This is important to consider when judging Tesla's engineering capability, but not when judging Elon Musk's highly optimistic promises.
Either Elon is aware of the fact that FSD is really hard and he's lying repeatedly about being able to deliver it "later this year". Or he is not aware that FSD is as hard as you say and needs to "hit the books" and understand the problem better. I don't really see an "out" here after so many missed promises.
Software timelines are notoriously hard to forecast because you're essentially trying to predict how long it will take to do something nobody has done before.
So you look at what's left to do and as long as you don't run into any unforeseen issues you say, looks like about six months from now.
Sometimes you don't run into any unforeseen issues and it turns out to be about six months.
Sometimes you do, and then it takes longer. So a year later you found an unexpected problem that delayed you by a year. Someone asks you how long you think it will take again, that issue delayed you by a year but that was a year ago, so you say, looks like about six months from now.
Eventually the estimate will be true but nobody knows when because nobody knows how to make an accurate estimate. Because you have to know how hard it is to do in order to know how long it will take, which nobody knows until after somebody has actually done it.
Just reminded of the an old trope for estimates, either:
- less than 3 months
- 3 months
- 6 months
Anything less than 3 months - is an accurate estimate. Otherwise, 3 months is the amount of time it takes to do _anything_, right? If it's a really hard problem, then we say, okay, it's 6 months. At the end of the day, those 3 months and 6 months means "NFC", which goes back to the estimation technique that everything is either a "1", "TFB", or "NFC". 3 months = TFB, 6 months = NFC
On a more serious point, we (as software engineers) generally feel we can solve almost any problem with 3 months worth of resources and effort. 3 to 6 months sometimes (IMO) can be a bit of the scariest estimate to give or receive.
For reference & more on NFC/TFB/1 estimation technique: https://pm.stackexchange.com/questions/26218/how-to-implemen...
Perhaps. Of course, we all know for a certainty that this had almost nothing to do with you're describing. The people how were actually designing the software knew that it won't happen in six months. I doubt Musk wasn't aware of that, so the only alternative that he was lying.
who in their right mind would look at any problem in any field with the title of "hardest problem" and then put a schedule to it?
Apparently 1700 AI experts in the field just recently did:
https://research.aimultiple.com/artificial-general-intellige...
Check out for more predictions by experts:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
A deluded narcissist?
Especially if that is true, maybe don't promise a solution before having it working?
One would think this would be a good reason to not promise that you'll have solved it within a timeframe that's not even remotely realistic
can't be that hard if he claimed he could finish it in 3-6months.
Possibly, but then don't make promises and have the audacity to charge for it
There's a lot of water you're carrying there, Stan.
At this point anyone who takes his claims at face value is a fool
Is it legal to cheat the foolish and ignorant?
Actually, no. That's why there are laws against pyramid schemes, and false advertising.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/investor_protection_guide_py...
Unless you're running for office. In that case you can lie to your heart's content about what you're offering.
For good reason: We can't have politicians regulating the speech of the critics and opponents. Nothing is more protected in the US than political speech, esp (afaik) by someone running for office.
Who said anything about regulating speech?
You could just prosecute a politician if he didn't deliver what he promised, you know.
Outside politics (and depending on the context) this is called breach of contract, fraud, misrepresentation or, say, false advertising or consumer protection violation.
It's also colloquially called "holding someone accountable".
What you’re asking for is a dictator. Politicians can’t unilaterally decide what happens by design. I think what you mean to say is that you want to prosecute politicians if they don’t vote in alignment with their stated goals, but even that is loaded in the US.
Let’s assume we’re talking about a liberal politician.
If he or she ran on banning guns, introduced legislation to ban guns, but some conservative added a rider to ban abortion, should he or she be prosecuted for voting against their own bill? Because that kind of nonsense happens all the time.
No, I'm asking for the judicial system to prosecute politicians who make promises that they don't keep. Like they prosecute politicians in other instances of illegal behavior.
To be clear, I'm not saying that currently, it is illegal for politicians to make promises they don't keep. I'm saying it should be, in some form.
Obviously not. I'm not advocating for putting politicians in prison willy nilly. But we should at least prosecute the obvious, egregious instances of the kind of wrongdoing I'm talking about.
Besides, the whole concept of a "rider" is stupid, corrupt and should be illegal as well (just like it is in other areas of the law). Then you wouldn't have that problem.
Who will prosecute them? Another politician or someone appointed by one. It's politicians all the way down.
Presidents aren't kings, so even they cannot guarantee their proposed policies will actually be enacted into law. That's the sticky bit.
It's legal to do lots of shitty things. But is it immoral to do so? Yes.
I regularly get 150+ Mbps on my Starlink terminal. Don't really care that they didn't hit the ambitious goal of providing 300+, it is already more than 15x better than the next best option available for me.
T-Mobile has a three decade head start (maybe four if you count their Sprint Wireless acquisition's history), so hardly surprising if there is currently more T-Mobile home internet users than Starlink users. But I also doubt that their rural base is as large as Starlink's currently is. Mobile broadband speeds heavily depend on the strength of the signal available in area, and in many rural areas, the 5G coverage is extremely spotty, or non-existent.
Yeah there's a pretty common routine of SpaceX & Tesla having some of the best results in the world for what they are trying to accomplish AND being much worse than what was promised.
And that's one of the (many) frustrating things with Musk: he fairly consistently overpromises and underdelivers. Even if that underdelivering is better than what you can get elsewhere, it still leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
Can we please just call it what it really is? Lying. He's a pathological liar.
How many startups start by telling investors, employees and customers, "We're going to fail"? They know the odds are that's going to happen. Are they pathological liars?
No one can predict the future. Musk is what plenty of entrepreneurs are...over-confident. That's part of the profile. That doesn't make him or any of them liars.
I think plenty of entrepreneurs emphasize that they are scrappy underdogs, that it’s a long shot, and that it’s going to take hard work. That’s you know, the optimistic side of the truth that they’re going to fail. I’m sure Musk has said things like this. He’s also just lied about stuff. He’s remarkably careless about what he says/tweets for a CEO. Might have something to do with his drug use, who knows.
Careless? Oh yeah. A bit of filtering would improve the public's perception of him. But when you've gotten to where you are because of who you've always been *and* it's worked out well, very well, there's simply no incentive to change. At some point it's simply unreasonable for anyone to expect it to happen.
There is a huge amount of space between saying that "We're going to fail" and promising something will be done in "6 months".
The real world describing this is delusional. Which I don't think he is (or was at that point anyway).
I'm not seeing that space. In fact, given what we know about startups, "in 6 months" has better odds of happening than pitching and ignoring the high risk (i.e., failure is inevitable).
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, simply asking you to show me the space you speak of.
No, engineers and software developers tend to be overly optimistic about the ability and speed to do things, and it’s integral to the task of building cool shit. It’s simply not lying. It may look that way to those on the outside, and you can say it’s irresponsible not to recalibrate, but even the adjusted estimates are optimistically recalibrated. The estimating well is poisoned by vision. Lying is something very different.
He's not one though. He's a business executive, so someone who in theory who would have the job to reconcile those lofty dreams with reality.
However, I'd bet quite a bit that the actual engineers and software developers were that optimistic and certainly didn't believe they could achieve FSD in 6 months (they'd be horrible incompetent engineers if they actually believed that).
1) It's not just engineers and software developers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy#Empirical_evi...
2) Musk is particularly bad about it & does it in places that directly financially benefit him.
Telling people that if they fork out 15k now they'll have full self driving in X timeline, completely missing it and then doing the exact same thing for years on end seems less like the planning fallacy and more like fraud, but I guess we can just wait to see what the courts decide on the matter
It definitely does, although I don't understand why.
One thing making bold forecasts does is motivate your people. JFK told us we'd get to the moon this decade which is absolutely nuts. Would we have got there as soon if he had said we'd get to the moon eventually?
To the other responder: JFK also had no tangible justification to say we'd get there so soon, and the most likely outcome was that he was going to be wrong. Does that make him a pathological liar?
Maybe because it's a kind of lying, and people who do it on a regular basis are untrustworthy people?
Remember that he didn't phrase it as "we will do this", he phrased it as "this is our goal". He referred to it as a goal we're choosing, not as an inevitability.
Musk isn't goal-setting, he's making promises. The difference between the two is critical. One is being a leader, the other is being a liar.
If that's lying, then the c-suite of every large auto manufacturer does it on a fairly regular basis.
In general, they don't seem to get as much negative attention in the media, and I'm guessing that's because they pay a fair bit for advertising.
Except Musk was goal-setting, and there's literally a comment upthread that responds to this factual correction by stating that published goals need to be held to the same standards as promises. Can't win against critics willing to bend reality and forgo consistency of beliefs...
I think there are some lines you shouldn't cross. Like having people pre-pay a bunch of money for FSD, claiming it's going to be ready in a certain amount of time, but wildly missing that deadline and not offering to refund people's money.
And certainly there's a "pile on" element as well. Musk is, to put it mildly, a controversial character in general. It's easier to take someone you already don't like, and criticize them more harshly for other faults than you would for someone (like JFK, perhaps) that you otherwise generally like. Maybe that's not fair, but it seems pretty human-nature-y.
Another point: is there a way to make bold forecasts in order to motivate your employees, without making it feel like a promise to your customers? If so, Musk generally fails at that.
You don’t think there was any consultation between JFK and NASA before he gave that speech?
A simple search for more information provides this. Kennedy asked Johnson to consult with NASA.
Johnson consulted with officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Its new administrator, James E. Webb, told him that there was no chance of beating the Russians to launching a space station, and he was not certain that NASA could orbit a man around the Moon first, so the best option would be to attempt to land a man on the Moon. This would also be the most expensive option; Webb believed it would require $22 billion (equivalent to $166 billion in 2022) to achieve it by 1970. Johnson also consulted with Wernher von Braun; military leaders, including Lieutenant General Bernard Schriever; and three business executives: Frank Stanton from CBS, Donald C. Cook from American Electric Power, and George R. Brown from Brown & Root.
JFK was stating an experts opinion in a speech not spitballing random estimates that were changing yearly in order to make him and the US seem awesome.
It's pretty obvious why it's such a big deal recently.
For the record, I am ecstatic with my Starlink service, no bad taste whatsoever. I upgraded from a rural wireless broadband service that gave me peaks of 10Mbit, for pretty nearly the same price.
Perhaps, but he does deliver. As a rural internet customer who has been told for a decade now that "fiber is coming to our area" by the local telco, I am more than happy to give Musk the benefit of the doubt as one of the cleanest players in a filthy industry full of lies and graft.
However if Starlink can't compete with mobile broadband in medium (and sometimes even lower than that) density areas they don't really have much of a market. While there are certainly quite a few people in the developed world living in remote areas who don't have any better options for > 50/5 Mbps besides Starlink are there really enough of them to justify such a massive investment?
T-Mobile Home Internet launched in April 2021, not 30 years ago
That's just a brand name of their 5G service. They have been providing hot spots for close to two decades. Their customer base goes back about 3 decades (easier to upsell your existing clients on a 5G hot spot than start from scratch to build a customer base like Starlink had to), and Sprint's (whom they acquired/merged with, and gained a lot of valuable wireless spectrum from) customer base goes back much further than that.
Your anecdotal experience is not a refuting of statistical data from the overall population of users. Starlink consistently does not provide that level of service to a large swath of its users.
Yeah, the median is about 65 Mbps. That is still more than 6-10 times better than what a lot of rural areas are limited to.
As a Montanan with T-Mobile, I promise that those "rural" T-Mobile ones are not the same type of rural that Starlink can serve.
Hell I work at a farm on the coast near Silicon Valley in San Gregorio (designing a farming robot) and Starlink is the only decent internet option we’ve ever had.
What speeds do you get?
Edit: That's weird. San Gregorio is like 15-20 miles from Cupertino. Here in Jackson County, AL, Farmers Telecom Coop has gigabit or half-gigabit fiber to much of the county.
Bay Area’s fiber and broadband network is a joke. That it’s the tech capital of the world makes it so much worse. Things are improving - I got fiber in 2020 - and speeds are trending upwards with some local completion. AT&T and Comcast are finally getting a bit better with speed. Coverage still sucks. Number of available options still suck. Not to mention weird collusions between Comcast and apt management companies and other anti-competitive behaviour. Then there’s PG&E using various excuses to block using their poles to expand the network.
It’s terrible.
As a non resident, perhaps it's a good thing. Advanced people eat dogfood with slow connection.
There is something to be said for this. Didn't Marissa Mayer refuse to get broadband at home for a long time to make sure the tech she was managing was usable on dialup?
Yep, completely terrible. My only high-speed choice in a well-developed neighborhood in San Francisco is 1000/35 from Comcast (not like I ever see that 1000, though). AT&T's fiber trunk is a block away from me, but they want $20k+ to run that fiber to my home.
Apparently Comcast has been experimenting/offering higher upload speeds for a while now, but it's still not available where I am.
There is a slim sliver of coast that has farms, then mountains, then the valley.
The mountains are sparsely populated and heavily forested. Driving up and out of the valley you enter into a different world complete with legends of murder cults.
Its a car and motorbike mecca. Drive down the coast from San Francisco. Climb up the mountain at San Gregorio or further south, stop at Alice’s to look at the superbikes and super cars, and drive back down into the valley.
I'll say! In high school and college I had a 1991 Mitsubishi 3000GT VR4 and I grew up on Highway 9 in Ben Lomond. I went to college at Santa Clara University and continued dating someone who lived off Highway 9 in Boulder Creek. I got to rip it over HWY 9 a few times a week! Such a lovely drive. Tho I lost a dear friend to a car accident on that road and I slowed down a lot since then.
You are benefiting from the rural broadband subsidies being applied well. A coworker of mine has lived in various rural Oregon towns through his career and regularly gets faster, more reliable, and cheaper broadband than I do in Portland. Not only that, but it's run by municipalities or coops and so you can often get to know the operators personally!
I think something that's often overlooked is when the Starlinks or TMobiles of the world win these subsidies: rural communities lose the potential to provide decent local tech jobs and offer customer service those of us in cities can't dream of.
If we're going to subsidize things, let's subsidize publicly owned infrastructure!
I've lived in lots of locations around the Bay Area over the last 20 years and I didn't have fiber until a year ago when I moved to Oakland.
According to three speed tests with the command line speedtest application I am getting these speeds with Starlink:
Download: 59.79, 88.52, 104.76 Mbit/s
Upload: 6.45, 11.42, 15.79 Mbit/s
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A3.pdf
That argument is a red herring. The RDOF program is concentrated in specific geographic areas. Starlink onboarding subscribers in other areas doesn't really have a bearing on this program if they can't prove they can extend that to the areas in scope and hit the service levels they bid at. It might even hurt their argument if performance degrades as they focus on areas outside the RDOF locations.
More traditional offerings have a much easier time demonstrating they can do that, even if they haven't started physically building yet. It's very easy for them to say x amount of fiber capacity at this location will meet the program specs, and this is how fast we can install it.
A rule of thumb is that big infrastructure projects are always significantly behind schedule and budget. Fiber rollouts are big infrastructure projects. They'll be late, almost guaranteed. Therefore demonstrating that they can hit a schedule is very difficult.
While this is true to some extent it is also true that an infrastructure project finishing on time/budget is not news so you will hear about those.
It is difficult, but the program (theoretically, since the program isn't at that stage yet) has checkpoints to address failure to actually deliver.
This stage was to focus on if the bid accepted based off of the short-form proposal was progressing and likely to deliver as described by reviewing additional information provided in the long-form application. That is going to be easier for tech with an established delivery history.
Your counterargument hides a major flaw.
It is true that more traditional offerings have an easier time demonstrating that they should be able to do that. But decades of traditional telecoms failing to hit promised targets demonstrates that they are unlikely to perform as promised.
That said, regulatory capture has let them regularly get away with the argument that you describe. Regulators motivated by politics and corruption have pretended to believe them. Non-incumbents therefore struggle to navigate their higher bar.
Can't disagree there.
That is why I actually like the approach in the RDOF. It has regular progress check-ins built in, instead of the seemingly no strings attached grants given historically. This stage two review was "are you likely to succeed based on progress since stage one", but there are further delivery checkpoints that come with penalties and bonuses for under and over delivering.
I live exactly 13 miles away from T-Mobile HQ (one city over) and their service was unusable. I know, I know, anecdotal. But funny!
When I was living in Seattle I found the service to be shockingly bad. I "upgraded" to 5G and my service got substantially worse. I'd often have "full signal 5G" and barely be able to watch videos in Capitol Hill. I worked in SoDo and I found multiple dead zones between the train station and my work (just a few blocks).
For a while I was tweeting at them regularly with screenshots, but got bored of the "DM us so we can resolve this right away" bots and realized I was screaming into the void. I ultimately wound up switching to Verizon.
Interestingly, T-Mobile service was far better in the 3 other major cities I lived in, but it's still pretty embarrassing that their service is so bad right in their own backyard.
You’re giving me PTSD here lol
I activated a tmobile hotspot for when I spend time in the San Juan Islands, because on at least one island TMo is the only provider.
The service and hotspot were quite reliable.
While at home - a rural area of northern CA, my fiber provider (which is also the backhaul for Verizon - my primary cell provider) went down for a couple days. The TMo hotspot was reliable, performant and served up both the work I needed to do and streaming TV just fine.
$50/mo with no penalty to activate/deactivate made me a fan. Years ago, TMo sucked a lot in the Santa Cruz area.
"under-delivering"
Delivered millions of EVs that everyone said would never work, dragging the entire car industry out of its stupor.
Delivered a vast electric charging network and made it available to the competition.
Delivered the best satellite internet.
Delivered rockets that NASA uses.
Delivered the most payload to space, more than even China.
Gee, imagine under-delivering that badly.
over delivering compared to the world, under delivering compared to where Musk wants to be
"under-delivering" was paired with "over-promising". Elon has done some cool stuff, yeah. He promised cooler stuff and so far it hasn't been possible for lots of reasons. So you are both correct.
I get 300/30 on starlink. I’m not sure why ookla’s data says otherwise.
Because you are not everyone who uses Starlink? Just because you get good speeds, it doesn't mean that the average Starlink user does as well.
Did you consider that your experience may not be representative?
Starlink also just launched in earnest a couple years ago, and is experiencing meteoric growth rates of ~100% a year.
It doesn't take very many doublings for this comment to go down with "why would anyone want Dropbox."
At those growth rates, they shouldn't need the 900 Million. So this decision by the FCC shouldn't make a difference.
As a matter of full disclosure, being from Wisconsin, (home of the great FoxConn boondoggle), I now find myself firmly against corporate welfare. Giving a guy who's supposed to be the richest man in the world a billion dollars to provide me internet service? Nah, that doesn't smell right to me. Something's off about that.
Bezos got a tax credit for his kids.
These things are for people to deliver. Not people who don't have money to deliver.
That's why the billionaires kid working at the grocery counter gets paid the same even though he's chauffeured to work in a Bentley
As a SpaceX shareholder since 2006, I can confirm that they’ve been turning the impossible into the late, very consistently. There is no more impressive company anywhere
Lucky.
<<Starlink (and Musk in general) have been over-promising and under-delivering for years now.
It's not even 2024, and the targets are for 2025.
How long has T-Mobile been ramping up their program to achieve this 1.4M vs. 1.1M, and how much does the government subsidy ACP cover for this 1.4M in order to have those customers under T-Mobile? And it seems they are being fined $200M for not complying with the subsidy's rules [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tmobile-fine-idUKKBN27K25...
On the over promising and under delivering topic, one of my favorite is a site listing some of Musk’s promises and grandiose statements.
https://elonmusk.today/
How dare they during a globally-disruptive pandemic?
Iirc the cable and telcos promised more, pocket more, and delivered practically nothing.
Starlink delivers a usable service that far exceeds hughesnet and other crappy alternatives.
Granted this is a five year old take and I haven't followed things, but as a rural in flyover country starlink is amazing.
These are future speed metrics, not current speed thresholds. And the performance metrics have been a constant shifting goalpost. You can read FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr's letter on this matter here: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A2.pdf This is most likely political.
I read that letter, and was unconvinced that it's anything more than the FCC not wanting to gamble with nearly 1/16th of the total RDOF grant money (for that round) and would rather give it to a company that can be reasonably expected to hit the obligatory throughput.
If Starlink bid for 25/3 they might have made it.
You can arrive at your own conclusion. I think its pretty obvious whats happening here (the commissioners voted along party lines right down the middle). And theres no other company thats even close to Starlink now or in the medium term future. So I dont know who would practically fill this spot.
For below comment: This is for "rural" connection. You're not laying wire for that regardless of what Comcast wants you to believe. They can barely service what they have and the cost/benefit of laying 30 miles of wire to reach someone in the woods is never going to make sense.
I'd rather the federal government just roll out fiber and not put Starlink and Elon in a position of power. That fiber will always be in the ground and available. Elon has shown himself to be unworthy of any position where trust and good judgement is required. If it costs more, that is a premium worth paying. Fool me once.
https://www.internetforall.gov/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
https://spacenews.com/senate-armed-services-committee-to-pro...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/30/elon-musk...
https://www.cnas.org/press/in-the-news/elon-musks-control-of...
https://babel.ua/en/news/98461-elon-musk-partially-transferr...
(disclosure: starlink customer)
That's an insane statement given the unprecedented success of SpaceX.
That doesn’t negate the fact that he wields power against others when it meets his needs. He’s effective, I don’t dispute that, but still needs a metaphorical cage built around him to protect others.
He "wields power against others"? What are you talking about?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38127745
For someone who is such a fan, do you not know who your hero is?
That's a bunch of cherry-picked gossip. You could make another list with a lot of people saying positive things about him.
The success of SpaceX is placing Musk in a position to decide where America's allies have access to the internet and choosing what region of the world can be cut off just through meeting politicians he likes.
Surely there is no risk the US will be cut off.
I don't follow
As if this were a trivial task
This is in comparison to launching satellites into space. I think most people would agree it's probably more along the lines of "trivial" when compared to that.
Neither are trivial, the two just scale very differently.
I do see the benefit in resilience of building out fiber even to moderately unprofitable (from a unit economics point of view) regions, just like we also build roads to communities that will never "pay the investment back" in taxes. But there are cases where it just can't be justified.
But it's also not a simple either-or: There are other technologies than fiber and satellite; there can be more than one high-throughput LEO provider; we can have a few GEO satellites for redundancy (although with significantly worse latency) etc.
Outside of truly rural areas the question with fiber is how long is the payback period, not "will it be profitable". Especially if deployment is integrated with routine highway re-pavement projects (roads need torn up and redone roughly every 30 years, after all), the majority of the cost becomes the fiber bundles themselves - perfect for even a smaller county or city government to handle with a modest bond issue.
The "payback period" might well be infinite (with non-zero interest rates), in which case we're talking about a subsidy, not an investment. (Which might still be a good idea! It won't "pay for itself", though.)
I worked provisioning internet for the Telco that serves basically all of Northern Canada. 33% of Canada's landmass and only 0.3% of its population.
We're not talking about cities or even towns here, we're talking about very rural customers. Have you been to rural Alaska, or Montana or Wyoming?
I have, and you drive for hours with no cell service, let alone wires in the ground.
You are seriously underestimating the expense to run fibre to each of these customers. Some of our communities it was well over $1mil per customer.
Indeed, satellite or long haul fixed wireless will be the only option for some locations. I have been to rural Montana and Wyoming, but not Alaska.
Customers will have to pay for their own StarLink where the FCC won’t. Perhaps we should not be subsidizing folks where it costs $1M to deliver terrestrial connectivity to you. Cheaper to pay them to move.
They are not going to move. Period. I know this sounds snarky, but in all honesty if you had been to Alaska you would understand.
Or serve them with fast, reliable internet that is not terrestrial, and does not cost anything remotely close to $1M.
I've seen subsidy numbers of $200k. I'm pretty sure a million is possible.
It's a letter from one FCC commissioner, of which there are currently 5. He dissents from the decision the commission as a whole came to. There are a lot of companies on the ground that could benefit from that ~$900 million so a single company replacing Starlink is not necessary. The main concern is if the FCC give Starlink money to reach 100/20 and they don't do it (because there are legitimate technical issues to solve before it's possible for Starlink to supply over half a million people with 100/20), it's wasted money. The FCC didn't think it was doable on that time scale.
Doing some math, currently each satellite launch sends up 22 satellites at around 2.8 Gbps per satellite. For each launch, Starlink adds ~61.6 Gbps of capacity. If we cut that up into 100/20 slices, each launch supports 616 customers at 100/20. To support 650,000 subscribers at 100/20, it would take about 1055 perfect launches.
I don't think the FCC was wrong when they said Starlink could not reach 650,000 people at 100/20 by 2025. There aren't enough days to launch one rocket a day to even try to catch up.
you're ignoring over-provisioning which generally is ~10x
The terms of these subsidies only allow 4X oversubscription.
ok, so that still cuts down the amount of launches by 4x which takes them from 1055 launches to 260 launches. Over 2 years that would require doubling Starlink's launch cadence which is a lot, but does seem plausible.
So to make the 2025 deadline they would have had to perfectly launch more rockets than they ever have before...sounds like the FCC made the correct choice.
SpaceX has done that every year since 2020. In 2020 they had 26 successful Falcon 9/Heavy launches, 31 in 2021, 61 in 2022, and 91 to date in 2023.
They need to do 180 a year to put enough satellites up to even try to hit the 2025 deadline. That's not even counting any satellites which may fail between now and then and need replaced. This is a major reason why the FCC didn't think they could have met the 2025 obligation to reach ~650,000 subscribers with 100/20 and rejected their application.
They're upgrading Vandenburg to do 100/year and Kennedy/Canaveral to do a ~daily cadence.
That will be sweet when they can get it done and reliably launch Starship! Starlink isn't bad, it just wasn't capable of meeting the RDOF deadline according to the information available at the time.
Sure but the assumption made already say, that SpaceX uses _all_ capacity for this program (and nothing else) and it doesn't require any double hops (I would think you need to at least add a factor of two for the up/down thing). And that you can see all satellites all the time. So it was a _very_ conservative assumption. And it would still require ~all launch capacity of 2024 and 2025. SpaceX calculations is extremely optimistic to the point of being delusional.
At least without Starship, which I _personally_ think that they will manage to iron out their problems of the course of next year. But even then _this_ timeline they won't be able to keep
The calculation above assumes all satellites are available to provide bandwidth to the customers. That means essentially the 260 satellites need to be above the US (let's ignore that the visible horizon is different across the US). Now starlink are LEO, so 260 essentially we need to divide the 260 by the fraction the globe area the US is.
The 260 is a significant underestimate. It's likely 4-10x more
Oversubscription where?
ISPs are not buying anywhere near that much transit bandwidth.
Did you miss the other dissent which would mean 40% of the commission disagreed with the decision?
DISSENTING STATEMENT OF COMMISSIONER NATHAN SIMINGTON
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A3.pdf
Where does that dissent say 40% disagreed? It only uses the term majority.
There are 5 FCC commissioners (as @I_Am_Nous's comment points out). @I_Am_Nous references one dissent. @hnburnsy links to another. That's 2 dissents. 2 out of 5 dissenting is 40%.
Well if you want to really dig into the numbers here and get down to the gnat's ass of uselessness, Simington was confirmed with a 49-46 vote which means that less than 50% of the Senate agreed with him being on the Commission and hence he shouldn't even serve because he couldn't garner a majority of Senate approval. So, while 40% of the Commission disagreed with the decision, we should recognize that 20% of that 40% comes from someone undemocratically serving on the Commission and hence should be ignored. Meaning that, in actuality, only 25% of the democratically appointed Commission (1 out of 4) disagreed with the decision, not 40%.
All of that to say: this whole point you're making about "40% disagreed" or "20% disagreed" because the decision wasn't unanimous is really fucking dumb. The decision by the Commission is the decision, it doesn't matter how many dissents there are.
Verizon was able to lay fiber all over rural New York in a pretty short amount of time due to a New York law for similar rural funding. Places that couldn't even get cable have fiber now. Just laying fiber is an alternative to satellite.
Do want to point out buildout requirements that are actually enforced in NY would be strongly compelling. Spectrum was heavily fined and had their license suspended on cable for failing to meet these commitments a few years back. Other states just dole out the money without punishing the companies that cash out dividends and use it for mergers.
Farmer's Telecom Coop service map, Jackson County and nearby, AL.
https://connect.farmerstel.com/front_end/zones
Yes, it's fiber. Yes, to the home. Currently, 93Mbps down, 83 Mbps up (but I have the cheap service). And the service is a crap-ton better than that of Spectrum in NC.
That's what I read too: you're not democratic enough elon
So basically now 15/16th of the money goes into a void to never actually get service to anyone.
Anecdotally, my dad lives in a rural area with no cable/DSL broadband available.
Cellular broadband only got him 10-15 Mbps. He was excited when Starlink was available. I think he was pretty early on the preorder list. Once he finally got access to Starlink (Feb 2022) the speeds were close to the advertised ~100 Mbps.
Now the price has increased and on average he's back to getting like 15-20 Mbps down.
Luckily, the EMC that services the area received some rural broadband grant money to roll out FTTH and that build out has been pretty quick. They have already run fiber down his road and said that service should be available in a couple of months. The EMC is offering 2 Gbps down / 1-2 Gbps up (!!!) for $100/mo.
So this money is actually being spent effectively when it goes to the right place. Starlink made a bunch of promises that they couldn't fulfill and the money is being redirected, as it should be.
I feel like in 90% of Starlinks use cases it is only the best option because they are the most motivated to succeed. Running traditional wired service is the more practical and permanent solution but the telecoms have made far to much money by taking money then not delivering.
Not when you're 50+ miles from the nearest anything.
Don't think of people that live kind of near a town and still get LTE. Think of people that drive for hours and still don't get LTE.
It's permanent but it depends on what the word practical means. Often the cost of setting up infrastructure for such low density population means the infrastructure will never pay for itself, or that the same money spent elsewhere would service many more customers, so its not necessarily practical.
"and said that service should be available in a couple of months"
Thats telcom speak for "the check is in the mail".
no, it will be awarded to other applicants instead.
Not necessarily. This round of grants is closed. There is no guarantee that this money will be rolled into the next round. In fact, that seems quite unlikely to me.
When it says "at least $4.4 billion" that leaves the door open for phase 1 fund rollover. We'll see eventually. Maybe Starlink can get some money in phase 2.
1. https://rdof.com/rdof
I don't understand why you're just rephrasing my comment.
This letter is junk, to put it lightly. I lived in a rural area with copper lines that were destined to stay that way because of classist inaction by the FCC - one that rewarded cities with new, expanded internet lines repeatedly and required vast parts of rural America to be torn up for backbones that they weren't allowed to tap, or could only be tapped with inexpensive copper lines mandated through telephony requirements. To put it less lightly, 100/20 is still a joke and a clear discrepancy between what's offered in most US cities and suburbs. The Biden Administration is trying to fix that history with the FCCs mandate; I don't care about whether Elon's satellite business is worth it in the end. I do care whether rural people get stable, dependable, fast internet that doesn't become irrelevant the moment it's laid.
Just FYI, in case it makes a difference to your assessment of credibility, but this is the same commissioner who opposes net neutrality, wants to rework the CDA to deal with the way "the far left has worked to weaponize social media platforms", hopes to have TikTok banned in the interest of national security, and appeared on Fox News to talk about how "the far-left has hopped from hoax to hoax to hoax to explain how it lost to President Trump at the ballot box".
When you say it is most likely political, it certainly is, because Carr and Simington (who was rammed through the Senate at the last moment by the Trump administration) are pretty much the definition of partisan. People who were paying attention to the development of this situation back in 2020/21 saw it coming.
I find it impressive that the government is actually punishing a project for running late and underdelivering. They should expand this to all parts of the government. Can you imagine if the F-35 was cancelled the first time it fell behind schedule? The Space Launch System? The Littoral Combat System? The USS JFK?
So many boondoggles could be killed off before they spend money. Maybe contractors would have to start properly estimating costs up front. Or maybe nothing would ever get done again.
I do wonder what the FCC is planning to do with these funds if they aren't funding Starlink. Are they going to go towards a "safer" project like Project Kuiper? Or maybe dumping it into Inmarsat?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Abandoned_military_pr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancelled_military_pro...
F35 Survived but there are like 50 other planes that didnt in that second list
Bradley IFV is not on this list.
Former Bradley guy here. Like others have mentioned, it’s done far better then expected. It (along with any other IFV) are pretty much the ultimate Swiss army knife of a military vehicle. It can pretty much do almost any ground role even though isn’t insanely awe inspiring for any one. And the 25mm autocannon is prob the easiest thing in our existing arsenal we have to adapt for an anti-drone role.
And, no, that one set of photos from Ukraine of Bradleys damaged in a minefield has zero bearing pro or con given the 40 years of experience we have otherwise with it.
I find it quite amusing how proud American guys are defending their MIC... which took 15 years to produce Bradley. This thread is not about how good/bad M2 is. Please re-read the comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38632482
My friends in Ukraine fucking love the Bradley. It fills a lot of roles, being very useful for casevac under fire (much better than many alternative options).
Because the Bradley IFV was only a boondoggle within the almost completely fictionalized setting of Pentagon Wars.
Someone else pointed out the performance in Ukraine, but IMO this was already a settled point in 1991, when they collectively destroyed more enemy armor than the Abrams and only lost 3 vehicles to enemy fire.
Say what you want about the Bradley, and criticism of the military is very healthy! I think the war in Ukraine shows that while the project may have been wasteful the end result is still useful.
The Bradley is actually good. Did it have some initial hiccups? Sure, but all military equipment has.
These days? The Bradley fucking rocks. My friends out in harms way love them.
The Pentagon Wars was misleading bullshit and the Bradley IFV was a good idea that was slated to come in under budget (before James Burton demanded his tests).
The tests were a huge waste of money that conclusively proved that the Bradley couldn't survive an anti-tank missile, which is irrelevant because 1) the Bradley isn't a tank and was never required to survive one, and 2) the Pentagon already knew that; they'd tested the components individually already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gOGHdZDmEk
(28min 20sec)
And the f35 is honestly legit when it's all said and done. There's a reason why it's sold so well, and it's only getting better.
If the Marines hadn't insisted on adding STOL/VTOL capabilities wrt the F35B, the project would have been much more straightforward and successful. Even despite that crazy requirement, it's still a success for NATO exports.
Most of those weren't cancelled because they ran behind schedule, they were cancelled for political reasons or because the role they were designed for went away. Sometimes because some other project was overrunning their budget so badly that they had to be cancelled to free up the money for the boondoggle.
Those lists would be far more informative if they had some years associated with them. Many of the cancelled projects were prop-planes cancelled in the 1940's and 50's.
I think you may not understand what the government is.
The government is a collection of individuals. It is not a single borg instance. Some individuals within that collection are going to act different than other ones.
Also the government does a lot of funding through different mechanisms. Many miltiary programs are a cost+ program where they pay the contractor the cost of development plus a profit% so the initial budget is a bit moot since the point is to pay for a capability. That obviously doesn't apply here and the FCC wasn't offering a Cost+ program.
As if cost+ contracting hasn't been a major factor in projects going overbudget and behind schedule. Even with cost+ the contractor needs to provide an estimate up front of both the time and money needed. While it is understood that it is just an estimate, having projects come in for 5x or more of the original estimated cost is egregious. SLS for example was estimated to cost $1.5B, but instead costs $11.2B and still hasn't launched.
I wish it was; lol. The initial estimate was $18B [1]. I suspect you saw the $1.5B number for some sub-component of SLS. That's another common problem with government projects. The media will read some government report that says a new railroad will cost $1B and then report that the entire project will cost $1B while the report only talked about track cost and not about land acquisition, even environmental studies, or etc.
That said, yes SLS is over ($23B) the $18B budget and not done.
I do wish NASA would move closer to how DARPA does things where you payout a reward to companies that achieve some milestone. Somewhat close to what the FCC did here except the FCC is giving the money ahead of milestone. But there are pros and cons to this as government contracting is a pia so when you get into the situation of a single competitor it gets awkward.
Contractors not meeting their bids is a problem though. At the personal/corporate/government level I don't think people account for enough the fact that the contractor might not uphold their side of the bargin. Similar to how many people choose the cheapest insurance and then :surprise-pickachu-face: all their claims get denied.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Funding
SpaceX seems to have done well out of how NASA does bids for contracts. And that's for actual work done, not for fudgeable project milestones?
It was $1.5B per launch. But that figure keeps going up as they have to amortize even more development cost into each launch, and the total number of launches remains constant or even drops.
The problem with cost+ is that contractors can inflate the actual cost of things, and pocket the difference. Obviously they can't do this to an unlimited extent, but the cynic in me would have a hard time believing this isn't a common practice.
I mean there's almost certainly crime that happens in contracting but there is a real risk of being caught if you commit fraud. Do remember that companies such as Google do pay out literally millions of dollars to random people that send in invoices for work never requested or done.
Cost+ at face-value isn't that bad of an idea. An alternative to it is the government hiring a bunch of people to do a project and ideally the government only pays Cost in that case. For people that don't believe the government can do anything this is a pretty good trade off.
IIRC, the `+` part is capped at 15% profit so IIUC that's similar to an operating margin of 15%. Although IIUC, executive expenses and a ton of other things come out of the `+` part so it should be lower than 15%. But the point I'm going to make here is that an operating margin of 15% isn't really impressive and that's the best that the contractor can do.
It's much more likely that this stuff is difficult to do, and thus difficult to price out, than that somehow the managers of these companies are working with the finance people to secretly steal money from the government and hide it in their books, the government never catches it, and these very amicable ties between the government and defense contractors continues - and all of that is before we even get to what happens when you try to steal and your project falls behind.
It's way more valuable, usually, to get it done quickly and done well the first time, so you can move onto another project. You leave a few people on the original program pull in tons of super easy maintenance contract money for what essentially ends up being a skeleton crew.
Or, I suppose, you could try and inflate costs by a couple percentage points (not too much - you'll get caught and the risk here is MASSIVE), keep working on the same program, and hope the opportunity cost doesn't get too high.
I'm sure it happens, but I doubt it happens often.
The various FCC rural broadband programs in specific have been horrible about ISPs not completing the work and not having money clawed back.
Actually, no, they seem to have been acting as a (predictable) monolith for at least the past three years...
To be fair, defense is an existential risk for the US and its allies. NATO can’t really afford to not have a reasonably up-to-date combat jet. They also need to continually feed money into the military industrial complex so that suppliers don’t go under/downsize too much/etc.
Not disagreeing with your sentiment, just think that certain fields like defense, healthcare, etc have slightly different priority lists.
this is not a true statement for a huge country with oceans on 2 sides and nukes. it is a true statement about people relying on the us military to make money tho
Oceans are only a defense if you can float a navy on them. The British Islands got invaded a couple of times... until they built a big navy.
Having two oceans is great, but now you need at least two fleets.
Nukes are only worth something if you have a lot of them and can credibly delivery them in multiple ways. Now you need subs, long-range bombers and the fighters to protect them, and missile silos.
Now add in reliance on a global supply chain (many types of oil and minerals, grades of steel not made in the US, TSMC), and all of a sudden you need to be able to help protect your partners on the other side of the world.
Now sprinkle in a couple of crazy dictators with nuclear arsenals and huge armies of their own, and it's starting to make sense why the US military needs constant re-investment.
this is hyperbolic. there are various coastal defenses and naval deployments that are not nearly as intensive as you describe.
the "crazy dictator" theory is a conjuring of the govt and media in service of empire. they are acquiring nukes because they are afraid of being invaded by us!
Not all crazy dictators are dangerous purely because they have nukes.
Some sponsor anti-US terrorism.
Some are chomping at the bit to invade Europe (Russia) or Taiwan (China).
Some are just nuts (North Korea).
But now that these nutjobs have nukes, they’re all the more dangerous.
Don't forget satellites and SIGINT (which just might involve crazy submarines and big "scientific" radio astronomy dishes). Or cover stories about ships and manganese extraction worthy of James Bond.
That was the CIA's plot, which the Navy vehemently objected to. The Navy said it was farcically complicated, too large of a plot to keep secret and likely to fail. Both proved true. The Navy offered to recover Intel from the Soviet submarine using DSVs and ROVs, low risk operations they could have easily kept secret. But the CIA won this dispute and fumbled the submarine and got putted by the press.
The role of the long-range bombers in the nuclear triad is heavily questioned. It is not quite certain that you "need" them.
You need them anyway because almost 100% of the time you’ll be dropping conventional ordnance / paratroopers / perhaps drones in future.
The FCC didn't even give Starlink a chance to run late or underdeliver, they assessed the program and capability and decided it wasn't where they wanted to spend grant money. So they aren't being punished, they are being passed over for a better option.
What is the better option?
The FCC originally didn't want to include fixed wireless or satellite internet for RDOF consideration, so from that fact alone I believe they were intending it to be fiber optic. A fiber plant is pretty immutable, even if you end up upgrading the things connected to the fiber for higher speeds. Once it's buried, it's pretty reliable (unless a passing herd of excavators get hungry and smell the fiber buried underground) while a satellite system is hard to upgrade and subject to the unpredictability of space. For example, mission Group 4-7 deployed 49 satellites and a geomagnetic storm killed all but 10 of them.
The risk is just much higher with satellites than with buried fiber. If the FCC is trying to build more permanent networks, fiber in the ground is much more permanent.
Buried fiber is never going to happen for the rural folks serviced by Starlink. It's hard to get companies to put fiber down in well populated suburbs, getting them out into the country is pure wishful thinking, especially if you're only talking about a billion dollars.
Do we have to bury it? Why not just put it up on transmission lines?
It seems weird to me that we can run Cable TV to fairly remote locations but not fiber.
We can! Many rural electric co-ops run fiber internet on their power poles.
Nation wide buried fiber is never going to be profitable, so why bother involving the for-profit corporations in getting it up and running?
Plus they've shown themselves to be not trust worthy after they stole previous funds for fiber expansion.
Part of the issue is that some of these companies are the only companies in the US capable of this scale of manufacturing, which is expensive to maintain, and only the government really uses. In other words, they're too big to fail. If we penalize them, and they go out of business or even just downsize, and then we need something urgently, we're SOL. And so we keep ponying up so that, should we need it, we keep their manufacturing capabilities.
I looked a bit more into this program and its all a lot more complicated
1) The money was granted in 2020 based on an inaccurate map (leading starlink & others to get funding for covering places like Target's and major airports)
2) This Starlink-FCC debate has been a protracted process, since then the program has essentially failed (a third of the money has gone to companies that didnt deliver)
3) Since then significantly more funding has been given to states for broadband, making this FCC program relatively small
It seems like the FCC is clawing back as much money as possible to try and recover from the initial auction design.
https://communitynets.org/content/worries-mount-rural-digita...
This is, in fact, precisely the issue with government contracting. But not in the way you think.
For all practical purposes, every single government contract can be cancelled without warning and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Consequently, every single government contract is executed with that in mind.
This leads to all the pathological behaviors that everybody bitches about.
Read the article you are referencing
Falcon 9 is launching Starlink V2 at 22 per launch regularly for a while now
They are just using what SpaceX/Starlink has said in the past[1].
Regardless, to reach those obligatory speeds by 2025 they would need to launch an insane amount of satellites with no failures. If the FCC doesn't think they can do that, they don't get funding.
1. https://spacenews.com/spacex-goes-all-in-on-starship-configu...
Then why decide now that SpaceX won't get the money? Does another company get the contract? Otherwise would have assumed to simply check at/after the delivery date...
Because it wouldn’t do much good to decide once all the money is spent.
There are processes in place to gauge progress and viability along the way before handing over the bags with money.
SpaceX is hardly the only one who didn’t end up getting their share of the subsidies, it’s just the biggest with a very vocal person at the helm.
They decided a while ago (2022) that Starlink wouldn't get the RDOF grant. This was essentially an appeal to see if the decision would be reversed, and they upheld the original decision not to fund Starlink. It's not a check after deployment thing, it's a "check if they actually can deploy in the first place" situation.
There are two rounds of funding so it's possible unspent funds from the first round may roll over to fund the second round.
They didn't decide now. The program was created as a two step process initially. Starlink succeeded in the first round, but was denied in the second, more in depth, review that lead to the rejection. This was basically an appeal of that rejection.
The second round was designed to eliminate providers who didn't seem able to deliver on their promises even with the subsidies. It was made to prevent a situation where either party (but mostly the US Gov and tax payers by extension) was on the hook for unsuccessful delivery.
I'm not sure what happens with the funds that would have gone to Starlink.
F9 launches of v2 were only announced after the FCC denied the award last year, this is in the primary doc
I_Am_Nous wrote:
"Starlink reportedly argued that once they can properly launch Starship, they can surely hit the required speeds. As of yet Starship hasn't had a successful launch."
From one of the dissenting opinions:
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A3.pdf
The Commission decision does address this. Unfortunately the section is redacted of specific details, but it appears Starlink argued that it's second gen satellites would be launched via Starship and address these issues.
However, they didn't successfully launch Starship yet as they described in that plan, and only announced Falcon 9 would launch second gen satellites after they were already denied based off of the initial plan.
The dissenting letter unfortunately just says "no they didn't", but doesn't point to any documentary evidence. It's hard to accept it at face value when compared to the long form explanation. Especially when much of the "corrective action" taken by Starlink has come after the initial denial.
Given how much of the decision is blacked out, it's hard to give it any credibility, either.
Presumably the people who are relevant to the decision making are able to read the full reasoning and give it its due credibility.
Like the dissenting opinion did?
I just checked my Starlink and we have 150Mbps/6Mbps, by Speedtest.com, is that the same concept as the numbers you reference? Is the concern that if more users came online they wouldn't be able to maintain 100/20? I don't know much about the topic, FYI.
Yes, 100/20 refers to 100Mbit download and 20 Mbit upload speeds. Your is already below subsidy criteria.
Thanks for the excellent summary. I said this in previous stories (not as eloquently) and got an angry mob for not praising spacex. There's a difference between respecting what they're doing for launches and what they're doing for Internet. The former is extremely impressive and groundbreaking.
The latter is hitting the same problems everyone in the industry knew would happen. It costs too much money to maintain the launch cadence, speeds will suffer as the network gets congested, and latency will grow. All of these happened and are continuing to get worse.
Thank you very much for linking the FCC letter! It really improves the discussion to have it available.
Does this Starship launch related stuff impact his plan to begin colonizing Mars by 2022?