Hopefully some skepticism can finally be focused on the concept of giving a single billionaire unfettered control over who is allowed to access the internet, and what they are allowed to do with it.

The whole endeavor to “arm” Ukraine with Starlink has always been a shameless attempt to dodge any future criticism of the company, by claiming to be a “military asset”

Probably doesn’t help that all fish are now chock full of PFAS

I see a connection between elon’s increasingly ‘wacky’ persona with the start of the cozy financial relationship he has with saudi arabia. imo, he’s serving as a captured asset for oil giants to further their influence and interests in the west, in a similar vein to all the recent acquisitions of popular US/UK sports teams by the middle east.

The ‘eccentric’ behavior, to me, is 100% intentional. A layer of security is built when your rivals, regulators, and the general public are unable to predict your next move. A ‘white noise’ is created: for every midnight decision to change your company logo to dogecoin, intentional and sinister actions slip thru, such as the banning of twitter in turkey during their recent elections.

This strategy of wrapping yourself in layers of ambiguity was explored by Adam Curtis in his doc Hypernormalization, describing how this has been the central tactic Putin has used in Russia for decades.

that’s a great vision, but we don’t have to trade ground-based astronomy for space-based astronomy. that would put us in a ‘dark age’ of astronomy for the rest of my lifetime, until all these yet-to-be-launched telescopes get built.

The number of telescopes capable of doing astronomy will get smaller, the available hours on that scope will need to be shared among all academic astronomers, and therefore, the number of people able to do astronomy will get reduced.

Having a few telescopes floating in space is not a solution. Not when there is so much space unexplored. Mankind does not own the night sky, only a few billionaires do.