[Starlink] a bit more starship news (David Lang)

Tue May 2 13:17:49 EDT 2023

Dear David:

I welcome dissent and constructive arguments on all the mailing lists
I maintain here. I have thought recently about starting a new one, for
systems level thinkers, about our space networking architectures going
forward, and our earthly ones also, adhering to the same rules I laid
out over here, in attempting to restore sanity and eliminate orwellian
wordplay in the ECN debate:
https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/ecn-sane/wiki/rules/

" What we see more often is that we sometimes lack the data to draw
certain conclusions, because we don’t always have the time and
resources to collect it. So we use our intuition when we have to (and
there are some pretty darn good ones in this group), but we do have to
be careful about what final conclusions we draw. Assertions and
hypotheses for sake of discussion starters should be fine, and we
shouldn’t be afraid to be wrong with those, lest we freeze before
saying or trying anything. We will try to avoid Argumentum ad baculum,
Proof by intimidation, Thought terminating cliche’s, Single cause
fallacies, Regression fallacies, Proof by repeated Assertion, and
Argument from authority".

It would lower cross posting and raise the bar over what is too often
found on other fora. I have also thought about starting one for
politics....

On Tue, May 2, 2023 at 9:27 AM David P. Reed via Starlink
<starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> Maybe too far off-topic, but the idea that SpaceX has "less incentive" for distorted accounting because it is "private" and not "public" is absurd and laughable.

Agreed. This has been a terrible ten years of too pure PT Barnum
across the board, and the devils are coming home to roost, with the
2nd largest bank failure ever, yesterday. Robin Williams nailed what
2008 felt like, here:
https://twitter.com/Exclusiventwrk/status/1653021540668112896

(it is a good laugh, try it)

I have always looked upon the vast (and intimidating amounts) being
spent on ideas such as uber as some kind of disease for which only a
recession (and inflation) be a cure, and I fear we are heading for a
huge commercial real-estate shakeout in the coming months, in
particular, and multiple more banks failing, DC markets drying up, at
a scale even greater than 2000 or 2008 were. I look askance at Amazon
booking 30B in advertising revenue, when I cannot afford to buy
anything...

>
>
> But that has nothing to do with the SpaceX technology itself. So why are we discussing it? They will survive or not based on what their cash flows will be - and the closer one looks the less promising their cash flows are, just as before with Tesla.

That said, some level of PT Barnum is required for good ideas to
succeed also. I think SpaceX´s falcon is now an unequivocal success,
as is tesla. The balance sheets on TSLA seem to show that.

Each individual failure of a starship component so far - with the
exception of the untried "showerhead" cooling plate idea, seems
fixible, to me, in very short amounts of time. Even launched
expendibly, it is more payload to orbit that has ever existed before,
and I am sure new uses for it will begin to arrive, if the problems
are solved. Another launch or three will tell, and it is not my money
being expended! (And far, far more entertaining than other projects)

>
>
>
> So, side note:
>
>
>
> Why does SpaceX "report a profitable quarter" and not release its full historical book of accounts? And why would someone on this list cite that number alone? (Any professional investor in Silicon Valley would be unimpressed - you can make a quarter look profitable by really simple games).

The principal number I am looking for, for starlink, is user growth,
which they have not reported in a while. I would have expected them to
announce cracking 2m users by now, on the growth trajectory they were
on.

>
>
>
> Hell, Bernie Madoff's private corporation's accounting reports showed *amazing* performance.

BTW, I would vote for the "public stocks" as punishment for
madoff-like shenanigans, but I think you are overreaching in
associating musk´s efforts with Madoff´s pyramid schemes. Madoff
cooked the books without producing products that people used and
loved.

>
>
> But more to the point,so does the Trump Organization.

Honestly, can we keep the "T"-guy out of this list´s discussions? He
doesn´t have a space program, what he has is the justifiable (if
misplaced) anger of middle/lower america, and it is my fervent wish to
somehow extract thoughtful people from both the "godless left" and
"alt-right" (to use two triggering terms sufficient to annoy both
sides) from a collapse into communism or fascism  (still using
triggering terms, unapologetically!)

If y'all would like me to start a new mailing list where we could
discuss politics with some hope of rational debate,
I will do so!

>
>
> It feels kind of like reading the National Enquirer to see all the speculations about SpaceX's business operations - it's just a celebrity "star-f***ing" game.

google news, once the bastion of good information, now reads like the
national enquirer *generally*. Even the economist, which I still read
fairly religiously, feels very dumbed down from 15 years back. I would
love to see plots of reading levels required from various publications
over the past decade or two, because either I have grown smarter, or
the world, dumber!

I have reverted to using curated RSS feeds to get my news.

>
>
>
> Musk himself has been caught manipulating the books of all the companies he's in control of, mixing their accounting, etc. to make himself look like a great businessperson. But it's just a shell game as far as one can tell. Maybe he's "great" in some sense, but that includes a lot of propaganda. I stipulate he is a propaganda master, and great at pretending skills he doesn't actually have.
>
>
>
> Private companies need bankers (even when run by billionaires like Trump and Musk). Bankers are the target of these "reports". Look at Deutsche Bank and Trump. It turns out almost all loans to Trump have not performed, yet Deutsche still poured money into him.

There are several other banks in bad straits, SVB a month or two back,
First Republic this week, what next?

>
>
> By creating an echo chamber of noise that makes SpaceX look like a "sound business", the bankers are more likely deceived. No problem - blew up launch pad, wasted a launch by not being careful about known issues - hey, looks like a brilliant guy.

The echo chambers in general - the top down leader/follower paradigm
that started to emerge with twitter and facebook, the fact that google
doesn´t index mailing lists, the vanishing of public conversation to
silos not just from facebook and whatsapp, but to mastodon and matrix,
all bode ill for better shrinking the world and keeping humanity
intelligently talking to each other.

>
>
>
> So yeah, he has LOTS of incentive to distort accounting.

So do a lot of folk nowadays. Shakeout coming.

>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Starlink mailing list
> Starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink

--
Podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7058793910227111937/
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos