[afavour]

People will object to what you're saying but IMO there's a core truth in it. One person in control of this many things is capital B Bad, no matter who they are. Like the fact that he gets to decide whether Ukraine is able to use Starlink or not, this level of centralized control feels like a time bomb. Compared to technology like GPS it feels like we're backsliding.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/world/europe/elon-musk-st...

[pokstad]

How is it any less bad for someone else who didn’t build the thing to decide what is done with it?

[tsukikage]

The more people have to all independently agree that something is the right thing to do, the harder a lone nutter has to work to get a nutty thing done in the face of common sense.

It's certainly no silver bullet - bad actors have historically taken charge of companies, industries, governments, even entire countries and carried out insane and/or malicious policies with terrible results; a process which is demonstrably ongoing in huge chunks of the world right now.

But having at least some checks and balances on power generally works out better than having none at all.

[TrapLord_Rhodo]

>The more people have to all independently agree that something is the right thing to do, the harder....

It is for anything to get done.

I mean come on... This is giving the world access to the internet. They have worked on "Cloaking" the devices to ensure they are not interfering with astronomy, have utilized materials that are sure to burn up in the atmosphere, have contributed code to NASA to be able to track these objects.

What happened to people that they are so cynical nowadays? Is it just me, or does everyone just hate everything nowadays? Any kind of technological advances/ Space fairing adventure is met with criticism like this.

To the OP's comment, "How can one man controls so much?" Because without that man, this wouldn't exist for another 10-15 years. Also, "Control" here is "We don't want our satellites used for offensive operations and WAR...." This is the exact kind of man i would like to be in control of such resources.

[tsukikage]

It all sounds great, doesn't it? Benevolent dictators are great right up until they aren't. Putin was super popular when he was first elected; he stabilised the Russian economy and made life hugely better for most. Then he made himself a little echo chamber of yes-men and eventually came to believe his own propaganda; look where we are now. Certainly he's getting something done, but it is no good thing. Might things have turned out differently if he didn't have completely uncontested control?

Britain's first-past-the-post voting system is designed to create strong governments that can get things done. They certainly got things done: after parting ways with their biggest trading partner, a decade of mismanagement by increasingly brazen kleptocrats has completely tanked the economy. Might things have turned out differently if extremists couldn't unilaterally make enormous changes to a population's way of life?

Meanwhile, well, Trump. Aren’t we glad the system checked him from turning the most hare-brained of his ideas into reality?

Perhaps this is unfair; examples from politics are like shooting fish in a barrel. Let's look at super intelligent businessmen.

Just recently, a maverick who thought he was smarter than everyone else built a super innovative submarine. Might that story have had a different outcome if he'd had some sanity checks from someone whose opinion he actually respected?

Another one founded a cryptocurrency exchange and a trading firm, and decided he was smarter than everyone else and so it was fine for him to just quietly make huge bets using other people's money. Might that have had a different outcome if he wasn't given unconditional access to a $65bn credit line with no oversight? He's still claiming he did nothing wrong and is an effective altruist to boot. It's for the courts now.

Musk himself hasn't the best track record here; just look at Twitter. Musk's other holdings have teams of people whose full time job is to interact with Musk, translating his proclamations into sensible things; with Twitter, however, we get to see the man unfiltered. It's quite a sight.

There’s risk/reward to consider here. Experiments are good; change is risk, and no change for the better can happen without risking change for the worse. But if your experiment is of globally significant scale with potentially global consequences, maybe running it by some people willing to honestly speak their mind first isn’t such a terrible plan?

[inemesitaffia]

You're repeating a meme about people around Musk

[tsukikage]

...oh, has someone made a meme now? Truly, we live in the dystopian sci-fi future we deserve.

[afavour]

Because those people can be held accountable for their actions. e.g. if the US military decided to decommission GPS tomorrow morning the democratically elected government would be able to force them to change track.

Moreover these institutions are set up to make it very difficult for one single person to make a unilateral decision. Which is a good thing.

[robertlagrant]

This would work if governments were empowered on a granular level, but they aren't. If you've decided (Republican|Democrat)s are evil then you'll always vote for the same party, and there is no accountability.

[afavour]

> If you've decided (Republican|Democrat)s are evil then you'll always vote for the same party

Which describes some voters but certainly not all. You'll notice power changes quite often in the US, clearly some voters are changing their minds.

In any case, what's the endpoint of this argument? Democracy isn't worth it because voters can get polarized?

[robertlagrant]

> Which describes some voters but certainly not all. You'll notice power changes quite often in the US, clearly some voters are changing their minds.

But not on individual issues like this, unless they are extremely important to many voters, and highly party-aligned (e.g. abortion). You vote for one party or the other, each of which having 1000s of positions like this.

> In any case, what's the endpoint of this argument? Democracy isn't worth it because voters can get polarized?

The endpoint is not thinking that democracy as it stands can reign a lot of things in, unless they become the issue for an election. Not every issue can become the battleground of an election, but there are alternatives to fighting.

[squigz]

Did Musk build Starlink? TIL

[numbsafari]

With his bare hands. Out of boot straps.

[jstarfish]

You're abusing the Kuleshov effect to make a dishonest point. Even your own link says something very different than what you are claiming: "Elon Musk Acknowledges Withholding Satellite Service to Thwart Ukrainian Attack."

Ukraine has always had access to Starlink. Musk proactively offered it for free when competitors' infrastructure was bricked by the Russians and basic communications were disrupted. He only decided "whether Ukraine is able to use Starlink or not" when it came to military operations, and rightfully so-- SpaceX would have become a military target itself. He's allowed to not want to declare SpaceX an enemy combatant without being labelled a despot. Russia started with a cyberattack and eventually started physically shelling ground stations. Being on the receiving end of a Howitzer is bad for business.

In no universe would doing otherwise have made sense in any goddamn context. Having his shit wrecked too would not have helped anybody. What he did allowed him to play the Red Cross card of neutrality, so SpaceX could continue operating in the area unmolested.

Musk sucks, but at least vilify him for things he's actually done and not invent made-up narratives.

[mlindner]

> Like the fact that he gets to decide whether Ukraine is able to use Starlink or not

That's entirely the result of Ukraine getting the service pro-bono and not signing any kind of contract with SpaceX. The US government has signed contracts with SpaceX and it's perfectly fine like that. All of the hemming and hawing about Starlink's somehow ability to go outside of US law is rather silly and not endorsed by reality.

[mensetmanusman]

The federal government considered Crimea part of Russia and does not allow spacex to operate in Russia…

[axus]

Which federal government?

[mensetmanusman]

The one that spacex has to listen to.

[inemesitaffia]

He decided to give them too. Did you object to that when it happened?

[baz00]

I suspect if he does enough fucking around he will end up doing some finding out. And he's doing a lot of the former and annoying nation state and union level entities.

[Dig1t]

The US government has literally unlimited money, like they can print as much as they want. They can just put up their own satellite network and use it to wage wars on the other side of the world. Why is it the responsibility of a private entity to enable death and destruction in a country on the other side of the world?

Side note: How the heck is the anti-capitalist camp somehow aligned with the pro-war camp now?

[mcpackieh]

> [The US government] can just put up their own satellite network and use it to wage wars on the other side of the world. Why is it the responsibility of a private entity to enable death and destruction in a country on the other side of the world?

The US military doesn't build their own hardware, they contract that out to companies. If the US government were buying a very large number of satellites, they'd be buying it from a company like SpaceX.

(Spoilers: they are! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities)

[afavour]

> How the heck is the anti-capitalist camp somehow aligned with the pro-war camp now?

I think both of those labels are way too generalistic. "I think people should cap out at a billion dollars" isn't anti-capitalistic. It's anti unrestrained capitalism.

Similarly, "we should aid Ukraine in defending itself against an invasion" isn't "pro-war". It's accepting of reality, i.e. there is a war no matter your feelings on it. And letting an aggressor do whatever they want is likely to lead to more war.

[leereeves]

Anyway, the anti-capitalist camp being aligned with the pro-war camp is nothing new. The Soviets were both.