Dear David: I welcome dissent and constructive arguments on all the mailing lists I maintain here. I have thought recently about starting a new one, for systems level thinkers, about our space networking architectures going forward, and our earthly ones also, adhering to the same rules I laid out over here, in attempting to restore sanity and eliminate orwellian wordplay in the ECN debate: https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/ecn-sane/wiki/rules/
" What we see more often is that we sometimes lack the data to draw certain conclusions, because we don’t always have the time and resources to collect it. So we use our intuition when we have to (and there are some pretty darn good ones in this group), but we do have to be careful about what final conclusions we draw. Assertions and hypotheses for sake of discussion starters should be fine, and we shouldn’t be afraid to be wrong with those, lest we freeze before saying or trying anything. We will try to avoid Argumentum ad baculum, Proof by intimidation, Thought terminating cliche’s, Single cause fallacies, Regression fallacies, Proof by repeated Assertion, and Argument from authority". It would lower cross posting and raise the bar over what is too often found on other fora. I have also thought about starting one for politics.... On Tue, May 2, 2023 at 9:27 AM David P. Reed via Starlink <[email protected]> wrote: > > Maybe too far off-topic, but the idea that SpaceX has "less incentive" for > distorted accounting because it is "private" and not "public" is absurd and > laughable. Agreed. This has been a terrible ten years of too pure PT Barnum across the board, and the devils are coming home to roost, with the 2nd largest bank failure ever, yesterday. Robin Williams nailed what 2008 felt like, here: https://twitter.com/Exclusiventwrk/status/1653021540668112896 (it is a good laugh, try it) I have always looked upon the vast (and intimidating amounts) being spent on ideas such as uber as some kind of disease for which only a recession (and inflation) be a cure, and I fear we are heading for a huge commercial real-estate shakeout in the coming months, in particular, and multiple more banks failing, DC markets drying up, at a scale even greater than 2000 or 2008 were. I look askance at Amazon booking 30B in advertising revenue, when I cannot afford to buy anything... > > > But that has nothing to do with the SpaceX technology itself. So why are we > discussing it? They will survive or not based on what their cash flows will > be - and the closer one looks the less promising their cash flows are, just > as before with Tesla. That said, some level of PT Barnum is required for good ideas to succeed also. I think SpaceX´s falcon is now an unequivocal success, as is tesla. The balance sheets on TSLA seem to show that. Each individual failure of a starship component so far - with the exception of the untried "showerhead" cooling plate idea, seems fixible, to me, in very short amounts of time. Even launched expendibly, it is more payload to orbit that has ever existed before, and I am sure new uses for it will begin to arrive, if the problems are solved. Another launch or three will tell, and it is not my money being expended! (And far, far more entertaining than other projects) > > > > So, side note: > > > > Why does SpaceX "report a profitable quarter" and not release its full > historical book of accounts? And why would someone on this list cite that > number alone? (Any professional investor in Silicon Valley would be > unimpressed - you can make a quarter look profitable by really simple games). The principal number I am looking for, for starlink, is user growth, which they have not reported in a while. I would have expected them to announce cracking 2m users by now, on the growth trajectory they were on. > > > > Hell, Bernie Madoff's private corporation's accounting reports showed > *amazing* performance. BTW, I would vote for the "public stocks" as punishment for madoff-like shenanigans, but I think you are overreaching in associating musk´s efforts with Madoff´s pyramid schemes. Madoff cooked the books without producing products that people used and loved. > > > But more to the point,so does the Trump Organization. Honestly, can we keep the "T"-guy out of this list´s discussions? He doesn´t have a space program, what he has is the justifiable (if misplaced) anger of middle/lower america, and it is my fervent wish to somehow extract thoughtful people from both the "godless left" and "alt-right" (to use two triggering terms sufficient to annoy both sides) from a collapse into communism or fascism (still using triggering terms, unapologetically!) If y'all would like me to start a new mailing list where we could discuss politics with some hope of rational debate, I will do so! > > > It feels kind of like reading the National Enquirer to see all the > speculations about SpaceX's business operations - it's just a celebrity > "star-f***ing" game. google news, once the bastion of good information, now reads like the national enquirer *generally*. Even the economist, which I still read fairly religiously, feels very dumbed down from 15 years back. I would love to see plots of reading levels required from various publications over the past decade or two, because either I have grown smarter, or the world, dumber! I have reverted to using curated RSS feeds to get my news. > > > > Musk himself has been caught manipulating the books of all the companies he's > in control of, mixing their accounting, etc. to make himself look like a > great businessperson. But it's just a shell game as far as one can tell. > Maybe he's "great" in some sense, but that includes a lot of propaganda. I > stipulate he is a propaganda master, and great at pretending skills he > doesn't actually have. > > > > Private companies need bankers (even when run by billionaires like Trump and > Musk). Bankers are the target of these "reports". Look at Deutsche Bank and > Trump. It turns out almost all loans to Trump have not performed, yet > Deutsche still poured money into him. There are several other banks in bad straits, SVB a month or two back, First Republic this week, what next? > > > By creating an echo chamber of noise that makes SpaceX look like a "sound > business", the bankers are more likely deceived. No problem - blew up launch > pad, wasted a launch by not being careful about known issues - hey, looks > like a brilliant guy. The echo chambers in general - the top down leader/follower paradigm that started to emerge with twitter and facebook, the fact that google doesn´t index mailing lists, the vanishing of public conversation to silos not just from facebook and whatsapp, but to mastodon and matrix, all bode ill for better shrinking the world and keeping humanity intelligently talking to each other. > > > > So yeah, he has LOTS of incentive to distort accounting. So do a lot of folk nowadays. Shakeout coming. > > > > _______________________________________________ > Starlink mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink -- Podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7058793910227111937/ Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos _______________________________________________ Starlink mailing list [email protected] https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
