“The silver lining to all of this is that Trump promised to stop the persecution of crypto people,” Mr. Medjedovic wrote on Signal. “Like, half of the people involved in this resigned/stepped down recently.”
Very interesting that he gives praise to trump after all this hassle from the US government. Why is the US even involved in this? It's a canadian dude and a canadian exchange.
One web needs ground based gateways, which isn't really an option in warzones. These gateways will be immediately targeted. The only option is to used space based lasers for relay. Of which, spaceX is the only entity on the planet with this technology.
Love or hate Elon, he's been able to turn himself into a very powerful figure on the world stage through technology alone. If you think him having complete control over Starlink is a national security risk, he's just getting started.
Unfortunately with European employement laws, I don't see them being able to compete. If you tried, you’d face fines, lawsuits, and maybe even criminal penalties for making your employees work the 80+ hour weeks that Elon requires from all of his companies.
Europe craves work life balance, Elon craves technological power. He's convinced some smart people their life is the company. Europe just doesn't have that culture, and it's mandated by law that you can't have that culture.
I've never understood the fetishization of long working hours. If there is a job where you can meaningfully work 80+ hours a week, the same (and often better) results can be achieved with more employees working fewer hours. If the work can't be split like that, it's probably demanding enough that you can't sustain more than 20-30 productive hours a week in the long term.
It's possible to mix reasonable hours of demanding work with additional hours of meetings, routine work, and procrastination. Maybe it's cheaper for the employer than managing the work better and hiring additional people for the routine parts. Maybe there are some social and organizational benefits to the employer when the employees have no life outside work. But long hours like that don't lead to superior outputs.
It made choices that turned out to be good in retrospect. And it's young enough that it hasn't turned into a stagnant bureaucracy yet.
Technology is not magic. If you can do something, others can do it as well, if they want. Established organizations often fail at that, because they don't want to be successful. They might want to be successful in principle, but in practice, the personal interests of the people in charge override the interests of the organization.
in 2001, Eutelsat transitioned into a private company, Eutelsat S.A., and later became Eutelsat Communications S.A., headquartered in Paris, France.
In 2023, Eutelsat merged with OneWeb, a company founded in 2012, to form the Eutelsat Group.
Essentially, just as old as SpaceX.
So, how does one ensure a company continues to make good decisions? Have a very flat structure, and have alot of smart people work insanely long hours. If you hire twice as much people to match the 80 hour weeks, you no longer have a flat structure and >> "the personal interests of the people in charge override the interests of the organization."
You are right, technology is not magic, you've just got to want it more than anyone else. SpaceX wants it, Europe would rather have their maximum of 48 hours a week. Which is actually halarious, i don't think i've worked under 48 hours a week in my entire adult life. 50 is usually expected, 60 if you want good performance reviews and 70 if you want a promotion.
And before 2001, Eutelsat was an intergovernmental organization. You can't get rid of legacy baggage just by rebranding yourself. You need to get rid of existing stakeholders, directors, and managers. And to discard the existing organizational structures and organizational culture.
It's not possible to keep making good decisions indefinitely. Every organization eventually regresses towards mediocrity. Maybe incentives ruin things, maybe administrators learn how to game the system, or maybe the environment changes and the way the organization operates is no longer adequate.
I don't really follow what you are arguing here. You starting with long hours is the same as hiring two times the amount of people, then you say that the european companies are all to old to innovate? There are plenty of european startups in the space race, they just can't compete... because europeans have a distain for "Fetishizing long work hours"
If you do demanding work, a full working week is 20-30 hours. Even 40 hours is too much and cannot be sustained in the long term. You can do more in the short term, but you'll eventually burn yourself out. Longer hours are only possible with routine and/or fake work that doesn't really make you more productive.
All organizations eventually stagnate, because humans have their own goals instead of being mindless cogs in the machine. SpaceX is still young enough that it may not be showing clear signs of stagnation, but it's hard to see that from the outside. Google is a few years older and clearly suffering from conflicting interests.
>If you do demanding work, a full working week is 20-30 hours. Even 40 hours is too much and cannot be sustained in the long term. You can do more in the short term, but you'll eventually burn yourself out. Longer hours are only possible with routine and/or fake work that doesn't really make you more productive.
This line shows me that we will never agree. If i showed this to my boss he would laugh... and so would my entire team.
Silicon Valley runs on 80-hour weeks, sleepless nights, and a culture that glorifies obsession. It's a system that burns hot — and burns people out. Many of the engineers and founders who fuel these breakthroughs walk away in their 30s and 40s, exhausted but occasionally leaving billion-dollar companies in their wake.
Calling building the biggest rocket in the world and the largest sat company in the world, that both launches, manufactures and operates the most sats in the world, while being the only company that can deliver humans reliably into space and also has a private space flight business. Claiming that ist 'stagnet' is an absolutely absurd claim. Oh and that was the Falcon Heavy.
Starship is even bigger and more powerful and has the most advanced rocket engine ever designed.
Just because they haven't yet managed to create a fully reusable vehicle, doesn't mean its 'stagnet'. A fully reusable rocket is insanely hard to build. Lets alone all the new infrastructure required to do it. And the first stage has already proven re-usability. If all they were shooting for was a much bigger Falcon 9, they would already have it.
And maybe try to actually compare it to the competition. Ariane 6 for instant was financed in 2014. And had lots and lots of work done before it, the engine that is in the Ariane 6 second stage has been in development since the late 90s.
SpaceX only had the resources to seriously invest in Starship around 2020 and even then it was nowhere close to top priority.
I know its fashionable to shit on Musk, but common, at least have some perspective. They are by far the biggest most successful space company in the world by such a wide margin that its not even funny. The competition has not yet even replicated the Falcon 9. And Amazon is struggling to get even an inferior version of Starlink up. And Boeing can't get their human system to work at all.
Tesla was dominant in EVs until Cybertruck. Now they no longer lead sales numbers in China or Europe or Mexico or Japan or Korea. Elon himself said that Starlink would fail without Starship. Or is believing what he says situational?
Tesla drop is not only related to Cybertruck. That didn't help, but they have other issues. But so do many other car companies.
> Elon himself said that Starlink would fail without Starship. Or is believing what he says situational?
Elon is well known to make dramatic statements to motivate people. He said that many years ago and the company is totally fine, Starlink is doing well. SpaceX still has the cheapest launch by an order of magnitude.
I'm not personally into aerospace, but a couple of my friends are in high profile, international (multi-agency) missions and from their feedback it is my understanding that SpaceX does not have "superior outputs". What SpaceX has is 1. tons of funding 2. less regulation. Does this mean more throughput? Yes. Is the output better? No. Shifting the costs onto the environment and private pockets does not imply that the work is higher quality or that their policies are better.
* The dictate of fail fast and iterate quickly, along with simplification of mechanisms and ample compute power.
* Not being mired in the bureaucracy of committees and government bodies to answer to
Yes, being enabled by a billionaire with a dream made a huge difference. But that's not a guarantee, as there's been 3 such billionaires and only one SpaceX.
Or... incredibly long work hours and all of that just falls into place? Have you ever read any books about spaceX? His "surges" are what made spacex great.
True, bad wording on my part. But I stand by my point that the magic came from rapid iteration rather than an ossified and bureaucratic management team that was risk-averse.
Musk wasn't even close to being a billionaire when SpaceX was founded. He is a billionaire because about 10 years after SpaceX was founded Tesla and SpaceX at the same time took off.
And other people as rich as Musk tried their hand in the space industry.
Because the USA is a big economy where people speak only one language. Would Elon Musk be able to create same success if he started Starlink or SpaceX in Norway?
What about France? ArianeSpace was the SpaceX of the 80s (they had >50% market share of commercial satellite launches). There were plenty of other innovative European companies if you go back several decades. These days? Not so much..
IRIS2 is literally being shot up this year and will work with good ol' regular 5G, instead of relying on expensive specialized terminals like starlink. [0]
No need to bring anti-worker propaganda into this.
> Europe craves work life balance, Elon craves technological power. He's convinced some smart people their life is the company. Europe just doesn't have that culture, and it's mandated by law that you can't have that culture.
The problem is cultural yes but they have plenty of low cost labor willing to work overtime and put in long hours. It's called Eastern Europe. The bigger problem is an overly bureaucratic Brussels and a lack of imagination among their leadership. Britain can probably do well in this area, maybe the French too if they get their head out of their asses. The day they stop sending their top ML companies like Huggingface and Mistral to the US for funding is the day when the Fifth Republic finally spreads realizes their potential.
European oligarchs have different priorities. They invest in land, art and gold, that's how you preserve capital over generations. That's why top european companies end up taking money from venture capital in the US.
The problem i have with this article is they use a "Hypothetical shoe" that retails for $100, but then directly quote a $220 shoe for the "American Made" side. Then use this as the entire justification for the price disperity. People absolutely pay $220 for "Chinese made" shoes too. It's all about branding...
Rockwell is price competitive with both kuka and fanuc. If you want to talk about 'Difference in manufacturing cost', why don't we start there?
Derek writes a lot of great fashion threads but he is a dyed-in-the-wool partisan and it comes through any time he touches on things remotely political. This doesn't mean he's wrong and it isn't even necessarily a bad thing, but it's important to keep that in mind and just remember that when he says something political he likely arrived at that political opinion first and is picking examples/hypotheticals to support it, and not vice versa.
Not a single NATO partner has consistently met the 2% GDP spend mandate historically outside the US. The US spends aorund 50-60B a year for our 40+ bases in europe. But this is offset by nato expenditures. For example, Germany gives us a $1B a year for our bases.
serious question... How does that not help? The USD is a stable currency because we have f35's and the most powerful military in the world. How does Germany spending over the next 10 years, what we spend a year change that? Our ally is stronger because trump has been pressuring europe to invest more in military, why does that not increase our military capability now that our allies are a bit stronger?
Previously we were spending on US weapons. E.g. F-35 or Patriots. We might phase that out.
Your allies might not help you with the next Afghanistan.
Germanies foreign reserves are nearly all treasuries. We might (naturally) diversify away. By taking on a large amount of debt we will simultaneously create an alternative safe asset (bunds).
One promise i would love to see him keep is turning the liabilities in europe into an asset. Instead of paying for european security, if we can charge them for security and sell them weapons and tech from our big contractors, the US wins.
Yeah, that's not happening. Summarily burning down bridges is a great way to stop people from mooching off you, but that's because they now know they can't rely on you to be a stable foundation.
If they can't trust us not to break our previous promises, why in the world would they trust us with their national security-critical business?
What threat to its integrity? The 40 bases that have kept peace for the last 80 years? The massive amounts of funding that we have sent to aid europe through USAID and other orgs? The tech, and drugs and discoveries?
We do not have to protect you forever, and us forcing you to step up military spending to comply with the UN mandates as there is an active war on your doorstep? Ensuring equal tarrifs from both sides?
I don't know why the US taking itself off massively taxing it's citizens and increasing government revenue through tarrifs, is called a "Trade war".
People seem to be so reliant on the US that the slightest sign that we aren't going to continue to hand out everything, people start getting hysterical.
Annexation of Greenland. It is part of Denmark as of now, even if it is not exactly a part of EU. The fact that you don't even seem to know that shows that you sre either arguing in bad faith or is ill informed.
> We do not have to protect you forever
Then leave. This arrangement benefits primarily the US.
> I don't know why the US taking itself off massively taxing it's citizens and increasing government revenue through tarrifs, is called a "Trade war".
You don't seem to understand how tariffs work either. Honestly, having this conversation with you is a waste of time.
> People seem to be so reliant on the US
Pehaps not anymore. We shall see. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
this could have happened if he tried to get this worked out behind closed doors. doing this shit he’s doing it would be a political suicide for any country to go along with it. if our former allies are no longer such, they won’t come to US to pay for shit - they will go elsewhere
unless the entire goal is to fund various militia groups within the middle east to cause chaos and ensure the ottoman empire cannot rise again and unite under allah while you fund a war to let the oligarchs plunder the natural resources.
Because nothing the OP stated is true... The difference between a superior product in war is the difference between winning and losing, not a cost control mechanism. a f35 would destroy a fleet of other aircraft, VTOL land on an aircraft carrier, and be launching a second volley before any other aircraft even had radar signature of the f35.
>We don’t want the US’ stuff anymore and the only thing that can save that relationship is full software control.
This is not how this works... You do have full software control when doing deals of this size. However, that does not mean that you have to provide software updates. The program in question is about find the different frequency's the russians are using so the f-16 can continue it's jamming capabilities. This is not "Full source control" It's whether the US should be using US Cyber Assets to be manually update the frequency's detected.
Very interesting that he gives praise to trump after all this hassle from the US government. Why is the US even involved in this? It's a canadian dude and a canadian exchange.
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