Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by JoshCole 1485 days ago
If anyone is about to watch this video, I want to warn you before you do that saying this guy "has an agenda" is like saying that a flat earther "has an agenda" in that they will absolutely be giving you "facts" and whenever the "facts" disagree with reality they will give you "facts" that are designed to make you abandon reality.

If I were to state my actual opinion on him on Hacker News, I would be downvoted. If I were to try and express how I feel about someone else finding him at all reasonable, I would be downvoted. So in the kindest possible way let me direct your attention to the kind of techniques he uses.

At 7:16 in that video he posts a screen capture of an article headline. It is a screen capture? Honest right? Great data. Not so fast. The screengrab was photoshopped. He edited out part of the title. In particular, he edited out the price for SpaceX to launch a satellite to orbit. Why, you might wonder, would he do something like that? Well... he was lying about the price just before that, so it would be kind of inconvenient to let people see the truth, wouldn't it? Here is the article whose title he photoshopped: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/12/spacex-starlink-satell...

This isn't an uncommon thing for this liar. He regularly and willfully does things like this all throughout the video. You should be taking every number he gives with an enormous amount of salt. Dump the entire fucking salt container on this meal. He lies about the cost for SpaceX to launch, a material fact, but he also double counts the number of rockets they will need to launch, another material fact. He lies about the speed test results for SpaceX (by using numbers from months before the video, rather than the actual numbers). Since he lied about that, his reported numbers didn't agree with, ya know, reality. In particular they didn't agree with the reality of SpaceX qualifying for various government funding initiatives for rural internet. So if you want to believe him you're going to need choke down a helping of "enormous conspiracy" in order to get onboard his hate train. He also lies about the cost of competitors. And... it's bad. It is so bad that I have 0% confidence that he operates in good faith and I assume anyone who trusts this person is truly lazy, because he isn't trustworthy. Not even close to it, at all, whatsoever.

3 comments

If anyone wants to climb out of the rabbit hole rather than into it, someone wrote a multi-part essay debunking this video. There are /a lot/ of mischaracterizations, outright lies, and deception. It has three parts, because there was so many times that were deceptive as to demand multiple articles.

https://littlebluena.substack.com/p/common-sense-skeptic-deb...

Thank you for writing this. I thought I had heard of this guy before. I was about to write a lengthy rebuttal myself.
It wasn't me who wrote the long rebuttal. I watched this video months back and noticed the same thing I'm sure you did. I ended up finding this rebuttal to it way back then and because of how often a certain segment of the population who is adequately described as "misinformed and full of hate" has this guy as their 'source' for various conspiracies I tend to remember the debunking.
I watched the video, and agree with all of your points. He strongly implies that Starlink is no better than existing satellite providers. My parents live in a rural area where the best non-satellite internet is 3mb/s DSL. They subscribe to Starlink, since there are no other viable options that allow things like video calling or HD video streaming.

Viasat offers 30mb/s download for $199/mo with a 150GB data cap. HughesNet offers 25mb/s download for $159/mo with a 75GB data cap. Starlink offers ~100mb/s download for $110/mo with no data cap.

Viasat/HughesNet have geostationary satellites which results in almost unusable ping (300-600ms), compared to the 50ms ping from Starlink.

I don't have a dog in this fight.

But, hilariously, despite the channel being called "Common Sense Skeptic" (thought it might be a science-y channel), every video is an Elon Musk takedown.

"Has an agenda" indeed, haha!!