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Comment by ajd555 | Hacker News Reader

very good itemization of what's happening, thank you for doing this. Unfortunately, one very important bullet point was missing: the world's richest man and arguably most influential in the white house controls a large internet satellite constellation and has acquired tremendous geopolitical power, even before having the president's ear. This is the single biggest threat out there I believe, as he has already had an impact on the Ukrainian front, and world leaders continue to placate him in fear of Starlink service being cut off in their country. I still don't understand how a private american company was allowed to obtain such geopolitical power, but this is by the far the most worrying point that needs to be brought up a lot more

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Basically, countries where private people are allowed to build things like Falcon and Starlink progress technologically and economically, and countries where they aren't progress, if at all, much more slowly. Instead, they suffer a brain drain of those people and then have to rely on the freer countries for things like communications services and weapons.

This article is about the US changing which group of countries it belongs to, much as China did 40 years ago. So you are likely to get your wish in the sense that US companies will probably not be allowed to build such things anymore, because they might pose a threat to King JD's power.

There's a multi-decadal controversy in sociology and political science over whether some countries are forced to adopt the regressive approach because of structural geographic factors they can't control (such as low population density or aggressive neighbours) or whether every country has a choice. The US definitely has a choice, FWIW.

[edit] Of course the anthropomorphization I've used here isn't a completely serious representation of states, they are a mass of interconnected people and not individual agents, but the metaphor is a valuable shortcut.

The US isn't a consciousness, so I think it's not meaningful to ascribe choices to it. Admittedly, I kind of did in my comment! But the reality is that these changes in course are the emergent outcomes of interactions between factions with different interests influenced by individuals with different interests and the memes that are most fecund, not the choices of a shadowy puppetmaster pulling the strings from behind the scenes like a Civ 5 player. That's why it's so common for societies to take obviously self-destructive courses of action.

> I still don't understand how a private american company was allowed to obtain such geopolitical power

Interesting way to see this, as you immediately went to a zero-sum approach of winner takes all, and the other countries must be brain dead. What I meant in this case was, how did the EU not foresee this and dramatically ramp up their internet satellite capabilities. Arguably, the answer is simple, as this was a rhetorical question: the EU approached this topic as they did a lot of things recently - no action, lots of regulation and facing the consequences or said inaction right now

A lot of that regulation was justified precisely by appealing to the principle that private companies should not be allowed to build things that would give them such power.

I don't think it's either a winner-take-all situation or a zero-sum one.

That's a good point - I see what you mean

The countries that allowed things like Starlink to be built also had regulations to protect democracy from the power of money, such as media ownership rules, campaign finance laws and high marginal income taxes. Those have all been swept aside.

It isn't clear that democracy is a prerequisite. The UK was a monarchy, albeit a parliamentary one, in the 19th century. The PRC was a one-party state with strictly limited political freedom in the period 01980–02015. Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century was a monarchy. Taiwan was a single-party state under martial law. Freedom of entrepreneurship and the resulting industrialization is clearly not dependent on democracy.

Do they? Pay in Europe is lower, but life is a lot nicer. If you aren't chasing the numbers and you aren't host to an American strain of brainwashing that makes you think it's the only free country, life in Europe is better.

It probably depends on what your personal situation is in Europe.

One country in Europe is currently being invaded by another European country†, resulting so far in about a million casualties and 16 million refugees. Both countries have established conscription and prohibited emigration for military-age men.

To me this seems like a bigger determinant of how nice life is than anything related to either pay or the level of economic and technological development. Perhaps you disagree.

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† Some might debate whether it's a European country, because much of its territory is in Asia. However, its capital, currently on fire due to large-scale drone attacks last night, is the largest city in Europe, and most of its population is in Europe.

When people say "Europe is a nicer place to live" they do not mean eastern Ukraine. I think you know this.

Even the political instability in the rest of it is less severe than the political instability in the USA. At least for now. I mean, 40% of Germany's land area voted for Nazis to come back, but every other serious party is saying they will not work with the Nazis, which is not how it would go down in the USA.

> When people say "Europe is a nicer place to live" they do not mean eastern Ukraine.

You can cherry-pick living situations from anywhere in the world. St. Louis, MO is probably a pretty nice place to live if you're living inside Jack Dorsey's house. If you want to make general statements about how nice it is to live on entire continents, you need to take the entire continent into account, not just the part of it you like most or least.

Fortunately for America, most of America is outside the USA, and is very unenthusiastic about the authoritarian tendencies growing in parts of it like El Salvador and the USA.

No worries various groups will create or increase their own space investments. Nothing spacex did was a miracle just well executed engineering, despite an whimsical idiot steering it from far enough.

Correction globally will take some time, but it will be a permanent one. You don't develop your own space program to scrape it in few years. Europe is there with pretty healthy space program, China may become more open to others, India is way beyond initial successful steps. Reusable rockets are great when they work, but again thats just (at this point well tested) engineering.

China just needs to sit and smile how US is handling them global leadership one big chunk a day. Maybe in 4 years we can send elon permanently on mars with 8 billion middle fingers raised as a 'salute', to start future setup that The expanse showed us or to die there miserably.

Isn't it predicted that if three or four companies do what SpaceX did, we get Kessler syndrome?

No, Starlink satellite orbits decay too rapidly to cause Kessler syndrome.

Not all of them want their satellites to decay quickly.

I was talking about what would happen if three or four companies did what SpaceX did, not what would happen if three or four companies did something else. I agree that there are things that three or four companies could do, or even one company could do, that would cause Kessler syndrome.

> Nothing spacex did was a miracle just well executed engineering

There were so many failures that I wouldn't call it "well executed". More like "work hard until it happens to succeed".

> I still don't understand how a private american company was allowed to obtain such geopolitical power,

No one else wanted to spend the money to sustain the organization needed to put those satellites in service.

It’s that simple. GPS is there because someone spent sufficient money developing it.

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