Because the American people were stupid enough to vote for them.

Yeah, and you could rent VCRs long before that.

Only silly Americans think geopolitics has anything to do with “liberals”. This is realpolitk, son. Trump has made the US an unreliable ally. It will take time, but the rest of the world will detach from the US. We aren’t going to build a military industrial complex in a day, but it’s going to happen.

In the first Trump term people thought it was a blip. Americans got scammed into voting for that clown. But after Jan. 6 he revealed to the world who he really was. Then y’all voted him in again. You proved it wasn’t a blip, Trump represents who you really are.

The US can’t be the arsenal of democracy when it doesn’t really believe in democracy anymore. The arsenal of democracy will be elsewhere in the future.

Yeah, so everyone is moving away from dependencies on the US. Not likely anyone will want their comms dependent on a system a US President (or Elon Musk) can shut down for leverage in a trade deal.

Who is going to pay the money for there to be a reasonable return on that value? I don’t have Starlink, I have no need for it, since there’s a cable coming into where I live. Sure there’s people that live in remote places that it’s useful for. But that’s not a lot of people.

There are military applications, but Musk is a flake not military wants to be dependent on him. Every country in the world is spending a lot of money to end their dependence on the US defense industrial complex, so there will be alternatives for military purposes.

Maybe it can work in vehicles? But if the price is too high people will just use 5G or just go without access for a while.

Starlink is just a product to fill in some edge cases. It will probably make a steady profit, but there will be competition from Europe and China before too long.

It used to be Microsoft would hire the best and brightest people straight out of university. Most of those people went in thinking they were going to fix the problems. Usually management would grind them down and they’d give up and go work elsewhere. But they did have some talented people and occasionally those people would be able to make improvements.

Microsoft always sucked, but occasionally they could put out something good. There was a lot of inertia and a lot of half steps backwards for every step forward kind of thing going on. Mostly treading water, occasionally improving.

But now they’ve gotten rid of a lot of people so they can throw more money into the AI money pit. Microsoft is in a constant decline now. The people that worked there that would fight the good fight to improve things (and every now and then win a fight) probably aren’t there any more.