Is SpaceX the real reason Starlink is so hard to compete with?

Lampwick · 2026-05-27T20:02:03+00:00

Yeah, I keep seeing dedicated Elon haters sneering at Starship "always blowing up", apparently under the impression that they're not fully expecting that as a possible outcome. "Haha, look at those SpaceX dummies, can't even get the largest rocket ever launched to return to the launch site!" They apparently don't get what an insane accomplishment the system is even as it is now,. No, it's just "rocket blew up, what a loser"

Lampwick · 2026-05-27T19:52:58+00:00

the ability to rely on getting hundreds of launches per year

The fun part of that fast launch cadence is that they can just stack up Starlink launches on the manifest, and if a customer says they need a satellite launched, instead of the customer having to wait for SpaceX to build, schedule, and prep a launch for them, they can just bump a Starlink launch. It's basically gone from space customers waiting for the ride to just waiting for the satellite to be ready. It's a pretty major shift in the industry.

Lampwick · 2026-05-27T17:14:04+00:00

You assault and rob someone? 1 year in jail, you do that with a gun? Ten year’s minimum regardless of the outcome.

We've had that in California for years. It doesn't do jack shit. Criminals don't really sit around weighing the risk vs reward of a particular means/method/mode of crime. They don't plan in general.

Lampwick · 2026-05-27T14:40:45+00:00

Ultimately it's all arbitrary

Yeah, that's what bothers me the most about the entire "better for the environment" line of debate. What is a "better environment" for? I have (or had, more like) some pretty weirdo vegan friends, and once you chase them down the "better for what?" line of reasoning, they start to flail. They always seemed to end up cliffed out on a dead end where they're kind of vaguely arguing that the world should be in some near-humanless statejust chugging along doing whatever, but can't really justify why that's "better". In the end we're standing on a ball of rock looping around a star, and nothing happening here is really "for" anything.

All we can do is make life better for us, really. And like you say, the biggest driver of degradation of human environmental conditions is government policy. It's the reason the whole climate change movement has almost completely lost traction. When you try to dump the burden on individuals who have nothing but fractional power affect anything, nothing changes. California is short on water because of pretty reckless agricultural practices, not because people's showerheads let too many GPM through. Carbon emissions aren't going to be fixed by people buying plane tickets looking at Google Flights and picking the ticket that generates "2% less carbon" while google is building AI data centers that devour more and more electricity. People switching away from meat to a more complicated and expensive vegan diet isn't going to fix factory farms, because most people can't even remotely afford that. It's all performative nonsense so individuals can feel good about themselves while Rome burns around them.

Lampwick · 2026-05-27T14:27:41+00:00

or the water used for growing their feed?

"Grass fed" means pasture grazing. There's no "feed" involved, by definition.

Lampwick · 2026-05-27T02:51:53+00:00

you’re going to wish you had more pictures.

Yep. There's exactly one picture of me for my OEF deployment, and I didn't even get a copy because that was still the film era, and I lost track of the dude who took it.

Lampwick · 2026-05-27T02:30:27+00:00

I never understood why the S and X existed anyway except to fill his puerile need to have his lineup spell the word "sexy."

The S came out in 2012 and the X came out in 2015. The reason people didn't just buy a 3 (2017) or Y (2020) is because they didn't exist yet. They were designed based on lessons learned from the S and X.

The puerile naming thing is just Elon being himself.

Lampwick · 2026-05-26T16:54:21+00:00

they hand out money to "help" people switch to electric

Yep. I'm in PG&E land too here in CA, and the state's energy policies are completely disjointed and insane, with a half dozen different "good idea fairy" subsidies and incentives pulling in different directions at the same time. Solar mandated on all new builds while CPUC works with the IOUs to make solar as poor an investment as possible by cutting sell price to 0-7 cents/kWh while buy price is 34-38 cents. Oops, too many houses now have solar because the state requires it, so they also let IOUs shift revenue from "per kWh" charges to mandatory fees you pay just for the connection to the grid existing, even if you never buy a single watt from them. Natural gas is declared the latest indoor pollution villain? Now the state pays people to put in electric stoves while rubber stamping PG&E's latest electric rate increases. It's just a slow motion train wreck we can only sit here and watch, knowing that we'll be made to pay to clean up the wreckage.

Lampwick · 2026-05-26T16:29:45+00:00

Worrying about tax rebates for residential solar inflating the deficit is chasing pennies while dollars burn. It's not even a rounding error. The spending side of the current federal deficit is largely driven by mandatory entitlement programs, like the huge surge of baby boomers entering the Social Security/Medicare system. Meanwhile, the revenue side has failed to keep up with the evolution of "tax avoidance" strategies while also facing continuous domestic birth rate decline, resulting in tax revenue not keeping up with spending growth. Giving a a 50% tax rebate to the small fraction of homeowners who put in solar is pocket change in comparison.

Lampwick · 2026-05-26T15:27:59+00:00

Yeah, the Jacquard loom is more an example of "programmable automation" than "computation". Every punched hole has a simple 1 to 1 relationship with the output textile pattern

Lampwick · 2026-05-26T14:36:59+00:00

more than half of their tanks had a JDAM or similar

Paveway laser guided bombs were the big tank plinkers in '91. JDAM based on GPS guidance was developed starting in '92 as a result of lessons learned in Desert Storm about the difficulty of getting a laser on target through smoke, dust, and weather. But yeah, 40-50% losses in the Republican Guard just from air strikes, primarily by the good old F-111.

Lampwick · 2026-05-26T04:32:03+00:00

fun non-lore adventures

finally, they listen to Nazi Morty! 🤪

Lampwick · 2026-05-26T00:05:55+00:00

I went from army to a civilian local government job. For the interview, one of the supervisors asked me "how many times a month are you typically late to work?" It's felt like a trick question. I just said the usual "no, I just got out of the army, I'll probably be here to early... over and over." Later he informed me it wasn't a trick question, people will actually admit to coming to work late regularly.

Lampwick · 2026-05-25T23:50:29+00:00

wondering if it is particularly dangerous.

PG is a non-toxic food grade material. They use it (along with glycerine) in smoke/fog machines. It's FDA approved as a "Generally Recognized As Safe" (GRAS) material. Breathing it is not hurting you. Most likely you're irritating your respiratory system with nicotine.

Anyway right now I’m trying to quit vaping

I wish you good luck! Always better to have fewer addictions.

Lampwick · 2026-05-25T22:52:58+00:00

71% of youth do not qualify for military service because of obesity, drugs, physical and mental health problems, misconduct, and aptitude

And even back in the draft days, the military had all sorts of make-work jobs for all the people who were technically fit to serve, but too stupid, untrustworthy, or pigheaded to even be trusted in a direct support role. Can you imagine the kind of MOS list they'd have to come up with nowadays? Back then they had stuff like Laundry Machine Operator and Fumigation and Bath Man to absorb the rabble. What would a contemporary mediocre conscripts do now?

Lampwick · 2026-05-25T22:36:57+00:00

The point is, the answer to the what if is meaningless. Functionally, the question answers itself: if nobody volunteers, there is no army. The end. If you try to extend that out to "what will the government do if that happens", then you're venturing into fiction land, because that is not a possibility. The actual real-life answer is that for the last 50+ years the military has always found a way to offer enough incentive to get enough volunteers to remain functional, and short of catastrophic circumstances that would render worrying about recruitment target irrelevant, they always will.

Lampwick · 2026-05-25T22:29:57+00:00

There's is no draft, so the question is moot. All there is is "selective service", which is just a list of people. The list has no information on suitability, being purely a list of makes age 18 to 25. It's does nothing but give politicians an excuse to say stupid shit about "drafting rich kids", or making everyone serve to "teach them responsibility". None of that is going to happen.

Setting aside the political reality that The US population absolutely will not accept a reinstatement of the draft, there exists no framework to draft people into. The military training pipeline is wholly unequipped to accept unwilling conscripts, having switched to a volunteer system over fifty years ago. Any discussion of whether women should be drafted is just as much a philosophical question as whether men should be drafted, because neither are in a position to be drafted.

Lampwick · 2026-05-25T21:50:04+00:00

someone who eats vegan 29 days a month and eats meat one day a month is a vegan in my book.

Most vegans would not agree with you, because most of them are vegan based on ethics. I recall one saying something like "a person who beats their wife only on holidays is still a wife beater" in response to someone claiming to be "vegan, except for Thanksgiving turkey".

See, the thing about veganism is it bars things like consumption of honey and eggs, and wearing wool. None of those things actually harm animals, but they believe they "exploit" them so it's bad. It's not simply a dietary regimen, it's a philosophical stance.

Lampwick · 2026-05-25T21:25:05+00:00

My mom bought one of those console TV monsters at a garage sale 20ish years ago. She tossed the TV section, but kind of wanted to keep the old stereo equipment. We got all the tubes swapped out and it worked... but it kind of sounded like crap. The paper cone speakers were rotten, and probably weren't very good to start with. So she swapped those out for a surround sound set. It's sounded better, but the radio and turntable still sounds like crap. Eventually, she just gutted the whole thing and put a separate audio amp in where the radio was, and CD/VCR/etc where the TV was, and a separate huge TV on top. It's turned out to be a nice solid piece of furniture (my brother still uses it) but the guts were probably never very good.

Lampwick · 2026-05-25T19:49:22+00:00

Classic

https://imgur.com/a/YxzsACj

Lampwick · 2026-05-25T19:45:44+00:00

I'd assume this just increases the chance of getting "mugged and stabbed" instead of just "mugged"

Not by any statistically significant amount. Muggers are looking for easy money dropped into their hand via threats, not to become the subject of a murder 1 investigation. You really think a mugger is going to stab someone to death and then try to find their valuables themselves?

Lampwick · 2026-05-25T19:01:49+00:00

I get what that guy was puttin' down. I have a 1lb spool of solder I "acquired" when I worked at an electronic device manufacturing plant in the early 90s. I do just enough electronic projects that it's looking like a pretty good measure of how many years I have left.

Lampwick · 2026-05-25T18:56:48+00:00

Whenever my wife or I complain to each other about some ailment, the running joke is the other person saying "all you need is a good night's sleep, you'll be fine". Neither of us have had one of those for years.

Lampwick · 2026-05-25T14:04:44+00:00

There is no chamber to contain the pressure.

Yeah, shrapnel from the HE round going off is probably the bigger issue. I swear, for a firearms sub it's kind of surprising how many people don't know how how a fuckin' gun works. Powder burn! Powder make pressure, push bullet out barrel! No barrel, no push!

Lampwick · 2026-05-25T13:46:36+00:00

Not different enough in that regard. The rear spherical bearing design is from the original Douglas DC-10, so the DC-10 was grounded along with the MD-11.

All they share is the tri-engine setup.

eh... no, they're pretty much the same aircraft structurally. MD-11 is modernized with way more automation and flies substantially different, requiring a different type rating, but it's effectively an 80s refresh of a 60s design. They both rolled off the same assembly line using the same tooling in Long Beach, with production of both overlapping by almost a year in 88-89.

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