If you think the internet is a big deal, you haven't run into how happy the military is to have high bandwidth low-latency communications anywhere on the planet.
Starlink is nothing compared to the value Starshield provides, and the civilian product drives costs down.
With drone warfare being the next thing, the US probably can't afford to not have a company running a major LEO ISP.
There's something of a difference between the abstract presentation there and the much more tangible brand problem Tesla has. If this was a Ford nobody would believe it. They might argue it broke down. If it was a Toyota nobody would believe that.
But Elon Musk has made himself the face of Tesla, used that power in other contexts to go after critics, and the Cybertruck had a bizarre anti resale clause when released and Tesla have made a habit of features-as-a-service with remote software deactivations when other vehicles are resold.
So in the specific case here, the reaction very much represents a big brand sentiment problem attributable to concrete issues.
There's kind of a fine line between "that this went viral shows that Tesla has a brand problem" (a logically valid argument) and "that I found this believable shows that Tesla is bad" (what the comic is about). The top-level comment did not go super-far out of its way to distinguish between the two, which I think is generally worth doing if you're making an argument that sounds similar to a common fallacy.
More seriously, the correct reaction to a fake is to adjust towards whatever the fake is moving your away from. If the fake wants you to believe Tesla is a company that will brick your car while driving — adjust towards it being more likely that they won’t, because if it were, there would be no need to fake it.
Saying instead “huh, I guess my priors were right all along because of how many people believed it” is…yeah, an interesting way of thinking.
It happens every now and again on here: someone comes up with like a 2% improvement in aerodynamics, and people are unimpressed. Meanwhile airlines are basically scrambling to get it rolled into their next-gen purchases because it's the biggest improvement in costs in a decade.
You cannot possibly know that without knowing the operational lifetime of a plane and it's expected return. An airline doesn't buy a plane planning to break even on the purchase cost, for example.
Setting aside that you pulled that number out of your ass to argue against it, if something produces 400X it's purchase cost over it's operational life time, a 2% improvement takes that to 408X it's purchase cost for only a 2X increase in initial outlay, meaning it pays for itself 4 fold.
But very few innovations have that sort of effect on manufacturing cost to start with.
A substantial realignment in the economy is what's coming. The charge will be when the rate of vacated homes starts to uptick as their aren't enough capable people to live in them: right now the major metros have a lot of pent up demand, but those retirement figures imply a different reality as time goes on: eventually those people start going into care facilities, but their won't be nearly enough people around to supply the demand for the properties they're finally moving out from.
The real markets are absolutely not ready for that reality.
> right now the major metros have a lot of pent up demand
The major metros have the least to worry about from this. Those cities have high housing costs because of demand, or to put it another way, those cities have high demand despite high housing costs, and the economic factors that cause people to be attracted to cities aren't going to go away; density is devastatingly efficient and it's cheaper and more convenient for people to be close to things. But what this means is that as the population falls, that latent demand causes the less dense, lower-priced areas to depopulate. See Japan's crisis of rural depopulation, and how Tokyo isn't the one feeling the pinch.
If you did not commit a crime to receive the money, there is no reason for money laundering (at least in the US). The IRS does not care as long as you claim it. You don't need a fancy story or anything, just claim the income.
Starlink is nothing compared to the value Starshield provides, and the civilian product drives costs down.
With drone warfare being the next thing, the US probably can't afford to not have a company running a major LEO ISP.
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