[Starlink] Starlink no longer available to the Ukrainian army?

Fri Oct 14 16:09:42 EDT 2022

If there is one increasing amount of sadness that has grown and grown
in me over the last 200+ days,
it's now the bickering over who should get paid what to support the
deaths of tens of thousands
on both sides in the ukraine, and further increasing the risks of
nuclear conflict, for the sake of profit.

War, as Butler said, is a racket.

https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html#c1

I am painfully aware of the fragility of our information channels
connecting people together. It wouldn't take much
to sever much of the fiber connectivity of the world, and considerably
less to completely destroy all our space infrastructure.

In war, much technological progress can be made, and certainly seeing
the array of cobbled up but effective weaponry is an example, and the
many uses of high speed battlefield communications... but it was my
hope, in the worldwide co-operation and mutual aid that led to
resolving the covid crises, with "only" a few million deaths - that
somehow, humanity would find more and ever better ways, to carry
civilization forward, and indeed, into the stars, instead of risking
billions more.

I spent a lot of time, in nicaragua, victim of a proxy war between the
USSR and the USA, and it wasn't until the surrounding states barred
landings of ammunition and fuel from both sides, and those ran low,
and a magnificent lady, with family
on both sides of the war, ran with broken legs, for president, and
won, in the brief period while the ussr, was distracted by its own
dissolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violeta_Chamorro

Some can point at how SDI helped bankrupt the USSR, and for all we
know, perhaps the lack of money there,
will help end this conflict, but regardless, what Smedley wrote so
long ago, is weighing on my mind.

"WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most
vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one
in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what
it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group
knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very
few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make
huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the
conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made
in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their
huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war
millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of
them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in
a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened
nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many
of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were
wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are
victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly
is exploited by the few -- the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of
blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones.
Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic
instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking
taxation for generations and generations. "

On Fri, Oct 14, 2022 at 12:41 PM David Lang via Starlink
<starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> If spacex is providing the high-end/business grade service to all terminals
> that they normally charge $4500/month for, reimbursement should be based on
> that.
>
> Base it on the normal service pricing, not on cost-plus (if it were based on
> cost-plus it would be an utter windfall for SpaceX as they are still in the
> stage of building the service, and so there is a much higher spend rate to
> expand the service at this point than the ongoing maintinance of it)
>
> while the satellites do support that area, they also support the rest of the
> service, and if they weren't supporting Ukraine, there wouldn't be any fewer
> satellites launched.
>
> I've seen too many games played with 'fully loaded costs' (sometimes backfiring
> on the people tinkering with the numbers), and so it's something I watch out
> for.
>
> lies, damn lies, and statistics, 'fully loaded costs' tend to be heavy on
> statistics ;-)
>
> David Lang
>
> On Fri, 14 Oct 2022, tom at evslin.com wrote:
>
> > Putting aside the timing of Elon's complaint about cost right after the spat over his Ukrainian "peace plan", It is certainly reasonable for Starlink to get paid like other weapon suppliers who didn't give out free samples to prove their usefulness, Given that they should be reimbursed based on loaded cost plus profit like anyone else. I'm sure the other suppliers allocate their overhead costs when pricing weapon systems. They'd be out of business otherwise. The satellites are part of Starlink's fixed overhead so a portion of their costs should be allocated to service provided in Ukraine.
> >
> > All that being said, it would be terrible if Ukraine got less than the best support that can be provided.
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Starlink <starlink-bounces at lists.bufferbloat.net> On Behalf Of David Lang via Starlink
> > Sent: Friday, October 14, 2022 1:28 PM
> > To: Kurtis Heimerl <kheimerl at cs.washington.edu>
> > Cc: Starlink list <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net>
> > Subject: Re: [Starlink] Starlink no longer available to the Ukrainian army?
> >
> > Having now read more info on this, less significant than the $80m total figure is the $20m/month figure he quoted. With 15k dishes as the figure that they sent (separate from whatever has been purchased on the commercial side), that works out to 1.3k/dish/month, which is very high.
> >
> > now, not being able to deploy reliable ground stations inside Ukraine could be driving up costs, plus the ongoing battle against jamming. But in his tweet he also cites satellite costs, which should not be allocated as "Ukraine related"
> > costs (and I don't think the cyberdefense and jamming defense work should be
> > either)
> >
> > David Lang
> >
> > On Fri, 14 Oct 2022, Kurtis Heimerl via Starlink wrote:
> >
> >> This thread (https://twitter.com/dim0kq/status/1580827171903635456)
> >> strongly argues that Starlink is largely paid for their service, at
> >> least on the consumer side. I imagine there are significant
> >> operational expenses in dealing with the various actors involved but
> >> not on the basic model.
> >>
> >> On Fri, Oct 14, 2022 at 9:06 AM Juliusz Chroboczek via Starlink
> >> <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> In essence, once you give something away for free, not even setting
> >>>> the expectation that it’s a “freemium” model, it’s very hard to get
> >>>> out of it. If you then claim your costs are way higher than what
> >>>> analysis work out, eyebrows raise way above the hairline.
> >>>
> >>> Uh.  Hmm.
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> >> Starlink mailing list
> >> Starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net
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> >
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-- 
This song goes out to all the folk that thought Stadia would work:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dtaht_the-mushroom-song-activity-6981366665607352320-FXtz
Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC