Yeah it is interesting that people are more willing to sacrifice the night sky then exert political pressure to get the horrible internet situation in the US fixed.

Also interesting how people who could not find the big dipper think that removing the streaks is "just basic image processing" without knowing anything how modern astronomy is done. Never mind that professional astronomers are complaining. Oh and of course you get suggestions like "you can just fill a 30 km bubble with gas in space and use that". As another commenter put it nicely "everything is trivial when it is somebody else problem".

A lot of arguments in this HN discussion boil down to "It's not that bad and it doesn't matter because this will earn Saint Elon enough money will fix it!"

That's like saying "Sure, let the giant industrial conglomerate dump toxins in the drinking water. That way it can earn enough money to build a machine to clean the water up and sell it back to us and everyone will be happy!"

Why not just not pollute the water in the first place?

> A lot of arguments in this HN discussion boil down to "It's not that bad and it doesn't matter because this will earn Saint Elon enough money will fix it!"

This is a forum for engineers (for a broad sense of engineer). We like to talk about technology. We like to speculate about the future and about politics. Starlink is a cool idea, so it's not surprising there's enthusiasm for it.

We should not be put in control of anything, ever. If that weren't already common sense, you'd just need to put half a dozen policy threads from Hacker News in front of a congressional committee to have them warning of the dire effects of engineer influence. Stuff we create should be heavily regulated when it attempts to "disrupt" society, like Uber or a lot of Silicon Valley startups.

Uncharitably, you might say HN has a ton of Dunning-Kruger about anything not directly technology related. I wouldn't put it that way: it's everyone's right to speculate about politics, the future, and values, but most people here don't actually think they should be put in charge of anything.

> Uncharitably, you might say HN has a ton of Dunning-Kruger about anything not directly technology related.

It's even worse. It is people thinking that because they are brilliant in some technical field (JS frameworks, or compilers, or machine learning or whatever) they are also brilliant in every other technical field (be it astronomy, high performance computing or medicine).

The path to fixing ground-based broadband in America doesn't seem obvious given how deeply entrenched the big ISPs are. It's probably actually much, much cheaper to build, launch, and operate a thousands-strong satellite constellation than it would be to dig out Comcast and its ilk, and quicker too. That's an extremely depressing fact (assuming it's correct, being a semi-educated guess), but it is what it is.

But there's another dimension, which is that Starlink is supposed to be funding the only company that's materially doing anything new in the domain of spaceflight technology. For a bunch of nerds who grew up drenched in science fiction and promises of humanity's bright future in space, who've instead seen decades of regression in capabilities, and who live in the same world where my first paragraph is true ... that's very meaningful, far beyond the "fanboy" slur.

Not saying I come down on either side of the Starlink should/should not exist fence, but I think the motives and attitudes of its proponents are often misrepresented and that's no way to have a productive conversation about it.

Firefly. And ouch

I don't think that opinion has significantly changed.