The average waiter in America makes $40K per year, compared to $9K per year for a Brazilian water (adjusted for PPP).

Brazil does not have any of the labor-saving tech that we're complaining about because they don't need it--labor is cheap.

Let's say a restaurant in America got rid of its tech and instead hired more waiters. Would each waiter get paid more or less? Obviously, each waiter would get paid less. The restaurant still makes the same amount of money, so the same amount of money is divided among more people. Mathematically, each waiter will make less money with less tech.

So if you really want waitstaff to be well-paid, you should want more automation, not less.

I don't want to live in a place where labor is cheap. I'll either be paid poorly or there will be a great imbalance of wealth.

The only real solution is to create better automation.

Vietnam and China still have one-party states but have transitioned to market economies. The fact that there are Chinese billionaires implies that they are no longer communist.

Cuba is still a traditional communist country--mostly because of sanctions. But they would love to become a market economy.

North Korea is the other one with both a one-party state and autarkic control over the economy.

Would I want to live in any of these countries? Absolutely not. I would rather be a median American than a median Chinese or Vietnamese.

Socialism without capitalism is communism--the state owns everything.

Capitalism without socialism is anarchy: if you don't socialize a legal system, law enforcement, and national defense, then you don't have a country.

But if you're saying the US is a successful communist country... well, I promised I wouldn't argue.

I promise that I will not try to discredit your answer. I'm just curious what people think.

But if you come back with "the communism I have in mind hasn't been tried yet" then I will definitely make fun of your answer.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48500225

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In fact, I'm not sure how useful this test is without understanding the baseline.

SpaceX plans to launch 120 kW satellites, each weighing 1.7 tons. Let's be conservative and say it ends up being a 100 kW satellite massing 2 tons. Let's be conservative and say Starship can launch 50 tons to orbit for $20 million ($5 million more than a Falcon 9 launch).

50 kW per ton x $400K per ton = $8,000 per kW = $8 million per megawatt in launch costs.

That means a 100 megawatt orbital data center will cost $800 million to launch.

You need about 833 satellites for 100 megawatts, so let's round up to 1,000 satellites. Let's say one of these satellites cost $3 million (that's probably high, but let's go with that for now). That's about $3 billion for satellite manufacturing.

Bottom line: It will cost SpaceX $4 billion to launch a 100 megawatt data center.

Anthropic is paying SpaceX roughly $50 million per megawatt per year. SpaceX could sell access to its data center for $5 billion per year. Assuming the satellites last for 4 years, that's $20 billion in revenue from $4 billion in costs.

Please correct my math/assumptions, but this rough calculation shows that SpaceX could be right and Morningstar could be wrong.

I agree. If building data centers in space is cheaper and takes less time, then that's a win and a clear reason to do it.

Costs for terrestrial data centers keep going up and costs for space tech keep going down. At some point, they will intersect.

Terrestrial data center costs are only going up, while space tech costs keep going down. It is plausible (but not guaranteed) that they will intersect at some point.

1. AI demand continues to grow. 2. SpaceX's orbital data centers are profitable.

If both of those are true, then their current valuation is absolutely justified. I'm confident #1 will happen.

#2 is the big bet, and IMHO this is just an engineering/execution problem. All they need is (a) Starship to work reliably, and (b) a manufacturing line that can build a data center satellite at low cost.[1]

(a) is the harder of the two, IMHO, but they are well on their way. Once they successfully recover and refly a Starship upper-stage, they will iterate step-by-step until launch costs drop to the level they need.

Now assume that SpaceX succeeds. What if AI demand continues to grow and SpaceX orbital data centers are profitable? Think of their moat: they spent 10 years and billions of dollars developing a fully reusable rocket that happens to also be the largest rocket in the world, and that costs 1/10th of what other rockets cost (per kilo to orbit). Plus, they have an assembly line that can build data center satellites cheaply, and they start fabbing their own AI chips.

How is anyone going to compete with that? There are a bunch of data-center-in-space startups, but none have their own rocket--they're going to have to pay SpaceX to launch them. Blue Origin is developing a rocket as large as Starship, but it's not fully reusable--they will never get the cost down to Starship levels.

What's interesting is that all the AI companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, and even Microsoft and Google, are mostly leasing their data centers from someone else. They think compute is a commodity and the value is the trained model. But if SpaceX has the cheapest data center with the most capacity, they will be able to extract profits from the AI companies or (why not) compete against them with their own model (Grok).

In 10 years we'll see whether SpaceX succeeds or fails. If they fail at this, they will retrench back to a launch company (assuming they are still in business). But if they succeed, they will be a massive company, and the synergy between their businesses will be so obvious that everyone will say, "of course they succeeded!"

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[1] Don't be distracted by claims that "cooling in space is hard" or "radiation is a deal-breaker". Neither of those are insurmountable problems--they are just engineering problems. Crucially, they are problems that are easily solved by getting mass to space. If you can get mass to space cheap enough, those two problems are trivial to solve.

The difference between “We the people” and “The King of the Belgians + 20 other leaders” is stark: one is united, the other is not.

No one wants Europe to be authoritarian, but it could stand to act more united.

The EU works by consensus of its member states. It does not have a strong executive that can, hypothetically, drop bombs on Iran without a vote in parliament. But it also can't defend Ukraine as fully as it needs to.

Russia is economically tiny. If the EU wanted, they could flood Ukraine with enough firepower to reverse Putin's invasion, even without intervening directly. They don't do that because not all member states agree, and without consensus, the EU cannot act.

In some ways, America is the opposite: it acts before it has consensus. One administration invades Afghanistan; the next one pulls out. One administration signs a treaty with Iran; the next one bombs it. It's the move-fast-and-break-things of foreign policy.

China and Russia are dictatorships. They pursue their interests and they act consistently. Despite their economic disadvantages, they get their way internationally because they are not afraid to act.

As an American, I would rather have a strong EU that sometimes disagrees with us, than a weak EU that cedes the field to China and Russia. But a bigger EU isn't the solution. The EU needs to act as one, or it will become irrelevant.