It's Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk | Hacker News Reader

It's Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk

paulkrugman.substack.com

It is rather bold to suggest we take companies from its founders regardless ( or as a result ) of political expediency.

While Krugman has never met anything he wouldn’t nationalize, it’s legitimate and traditional for national entities to enforce communications carrier controls in the national interest.

Absolutely. It’s not socialism to nationalize a company that’s gone and made itself instrumental to national security and/or foreign policy. Especially when said company seems to interfere with either on a whim, often against (or perhaps I should say, not always entirely aligned with) America’s interests.

The defense industry is already the most socialized industry in the US today. Do we want Raytheon deciding that they want to sell cruise missiles to whoever they want? Of course not. Do we let Lockheed-Martin just sell F-35s to whoever they want? Of course not. In fact it is the US the government goes out and sells them to other countries!

SpaceX only survived because of government investment and intervention. The majority of their income continues to be provided by the US government. Why shouldn't the government cut out the trillionaire middleman?

unprecedented times may call for unprecedented actions

The oligarchy is out of control

right? We can't even get a treanous president elect in prison with video footage of the treason.

Bold, yes. Important? Also yes.

The state has no problem taking the property of poor people with the intent of delivering public utility. When the richest man in the world can unilaterally intervene in wars and buy up media megacorps to control information transfer, eminent domain starts seeming important.

It's rather bold for an individual to hijack control of US foreign policy.

Um, we did take starlink away from Musk.

That's the point of StarShield. That's the point of government in general. We have the FCC and rules around space launches.

If the current US admin wanted Ukraine to be able to use something like starlink despite Elon's personal beliefs, then it would.

Elon is taking the blame because he is being allowed to take the blame. It's a distraction.

Trump wants Ukraine to stop hitting refineries because apparently he has only just now realized that blowing up refineries in Russia affects gas prices, which was the entire reason that Biden prevented Ukraine from doing such things. Which implies the hilarious caveat that Trump at some times has been more beneficial to Ukraine simply by not understanding the global economy and second order effects.

But Trump desperately wants to massage gas prices for a few weeks, which is why he does the stupid things like suddenly leaning on Ukraine as hard as possible and buying a pitiful amount of Russian diesel.

Allowing Starlink to limit Ukrainian utilization has absolutely nothing to do with any the bullshit "But ITAR" claims of weird people who don't seem to realize that wasn't a problem previously, somehow. It's about putting more pressure on Ukraine to not blow up refineries.

If there was an ITAR issue, then it wouldn't have taken months of coordination to purge the Russian Starlink terminals.

Our government is holding Ukraine's arms behind it's back against a literal invader because the American public does not care about Ukraine's basic sovereignty nearly as much as they care about an extra 25 cents per gallon of diesel. That's it. Oligarchs or not, that's the core issue causing most problems in America. People don't pay attention, don't give a fuck, don't learn, don't think, and then complain that everything is going to shit.

If you don't want to do these things, you have to elect different people. For as much money as there is in our elections, they are still decided by vote, not price. A lot of work each election goes into convincing people to stay home, entirely because voting works

"Well, I'm on the phone with my computer security service, and as I understand it someone compromised my IP address and is using it to download child pornography. I might just be a random target. But this could be an attempt to Qanon me." - Paul Krugman, Jan 2020

Reply on news.ycombinator.com