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Comment by kjksf | Hacker News Reader

You fail to make a distinction between following a process and abusing a process.

Amazon is clearly abusing the process.

It's clear to everyone and their mothers that Amazon is abusing the process.

Find me one comment that says "yeah, Amazon is totally right about that and SpaceX should not get the permits they are asking for".

Abusing a process warrants a bit different response than "oh well, the rules can be abused so it's just fine for Amazon to abuse them".

What makes it even worse is that Bezos publicly complained that this kind of abuse of process is delaying progress in space. It's on tape. You can watch it.

To me this is evil: knowing that some things are bad and doing them anyway when it benefits you.

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Yeah, seeking the limits of the law. When a human does it, we typically call them an asshole. However, when a company does it, it's totally fine.

It is almost like the primary value provided by a company is of being a social obfuscation layer to avoid moral responsibilities that would be obvious if it was replaced with an individual.

> social obfuscation layer

A veil, if you will

distortion field

> Yeah, seeking the limits of the law. When a human does it, we typically call them an asshole. However, when a company does it, it's totally fine.

The ideological campaign to turn pure greed into a moral virtue has been far more successful for businesses than for individuals. Probably because the millenniums of moral thought that condemn individual greed is a tough thing to displace, and human moral intuitions are less intuitive to apply to a composite entity like a business.

Big businesses, especially corporations, are artificial persons. This is completely unnatural and we as human have yet to figure out how to handle dealing with such "persons". I suspect that if they were to take actual human form, in much of the world they would be driven out of town and told never to return.

Another term that could be applied is 'bad faith'.

We're much better at calling individuals out on bad faith behavior than we are at companies.

We got used to companies abusing processes and not being punished. Just look at how all Big Tech companies systematically break laws and happily pays the fines for these crimes.

But if they pay the fine, haven't they been punished?

Whether punishment was sufficient is a different question.

Part of the social contract of punishment, is that you stop doing the thing you got punished for.

We live in a society where it is important that people follow the spirit of the social contract. Acting in bad faith is bad even if you pay your punishment or if the action uses a loophole keeping you on the right side of the law.

The world is too complex to fully codify in rules and punishments, abusing loopholes (or taking punishment as cost of business) is still reprehensible. I do agree we should try to increase punishment/close loopholes when possible, it’s just always will be a losing battle.

When they look at fines as just the cost of doing business, we are failing to resolve the problem.

> It's clear to everyone and their mothers that Amazon is abusing the process.

Not to me. SpaceX certainly claims so, but they are hardly impartial and I'm not familiar enough with FCC regs to make that judgement myself.

I think the OP may have be referring to the fact that Amazon also recently both filed lawsuit against the DOD for awarding the JEDI project to Microsoft[1] and Blue Origin filed a protest against the G.A.O. for awarding the lunar landing contract to SpaceX[2]. I think when take all 3 of these in the aggregate, it starts to look a bit like bad faith on the part of Bezos and Amazon.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/07/06/pentagon-sc...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/science/spacex-moon-blue-...

Don't forget BO sued NASA after losing the GAO decision, so four recent incidents

You don't need to be familiar with FCC regs, its a matter of common sense.

Say you buy a house somewhere and submit an application to the city to modify the kitchen or something. Your neighbor objects even though it is none of their business what your dealings with the city council on official matters related to your property are.

Clearly , you are "hardly impartial", now?

Wow - HN folks just go for this garbage?

Lots of good quotes from the pushback

" In fact, Amazon has not had a single meeting with the Commission this year about how it intends to resolve the Commission’s interference or safety concerns, but it has had 15 meetings in that same span just about SpaceX. While Amazon has waited 15 months to explain how its system works, it has lodged objections to SpaceX on average about every 16 days this year."

So you have one company actually launching and serving customers, and another who has done nothing, not even updating FCC on its plans in 15 months! And then every 16 days is lodging objections?

Let me understand this clearly - is it the FCC jobs to protect Amazon from being slow, or to advance consumer access to internet and communications? Because we should be pushing HARD for the folks actually delivering.

Personally I don't believe the (non-)progress Amazon's plans have any relevance with whether their complaints about SpaceX are abusive. "Amazon files more complaints than SpaceX" is similarly irrelevant.

I consider the complaints abusive only if they are entirely without merit and are just taking FCC's time for nothing (which they might still be - but just SpaceX saying so is not enough for me).

You realize the blue origin complaints are that SpaceX plans are too "speculative"?

The blue origin plans as an example have no clarity on so many key elements its not even funny - but SpaceX is not protesting them saying they are speculative.

There are many other filings also very speculative. Or that haven't even done debris mitigation work (they use a non US home state to try and avoid the work).

No fuss for any of these, but they are out of the woodwork if SpaceX does anything.

The mind boggling hypocrisy of it all is crazy. They have time to file 200 page complaints, bring big teams to complain. They expect us to believe they haven't evaluated the SpaceX approach before doing their own designs (one complaint, blue origin, despite tons of money, claims they can't / don't look at the spaceX designs).

The bigger point here is that this isn't even "using" the process. Amazon is free to submit comments when the proposal is open to public comment. They have chosen to interject themselves into the internal responsibility of a Government Agency by attempting to influence a favorable decision by submitting an unsolicited opinion on internal agency process, trying to force officials to do their jobs in the specific way that Amazon wants them to.

This is the part that is wrong. The responsibility of the agency is to review these applications, not to babysit and pander to the whims and fancies of Amazon because they feel they're important enough to be listened to as part of internal agency deliberations.

Amazon is free to submit their own proposals and COMPETE with Spacex. What they're doing here is an attempt to STIFLE COMPETITION by levying additional undue burden on the government agency involved in the process of reviewing their competitors submissions with the hope that this additional burden slows down the process significantly.

Another way of looking at this - if you can defend against the most motivated detractor, it seems unlikely there are holes in your plan.

Except by current Blue Origin precedent, the next step is to sue the FCC as soon as the FCC rules against them. Litigators with deep pockets can absolutely abuse the system.

Being able to defend against them doesn't really matter when their end goal is to tie you up in court long enough for them to be able to actually provide a tangible alternative.

Oh, you've got first-mover advantage? How about I force you into court for the next 6 years while I build a competing product?

Okay I’ll bite. Amazon is totally right about that and SpaceX should not get the permits they are asking for.

They have received unfair advantages from the government, and to levy those advantages to get more advantages is improper.

> Amazon is clearly abusing the process.

It's not clear to me. I'm actually quite worried about SpaceX's increasing presence in space put simply because Musk has shown very little care for risk - especially if it's to someone other than him (e.g. testing "self-driving" on public roads, showing exceedingly lack of QA and attention to detail in most products, and generally bringing the "move fast and break things" mantra into applications that are life and death).

For example, SpaceX Starlink satelites (just Starlink) account for over half of close encounters and are expected to account for 90% of close encounters in the future. [1] It only takes one major screw up there to completely ground the human race for the foreseeable future.

So how much do you trust SpaceX to not screw over humanity by setting of a Kessler effect? I don't at all, so in that regard I'm all for SpaceX facing the highest level of scrutiny in all things because I do not consider them a trustworthy enterprise.

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[1] https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-collision-al...

All of his companies are about reducing risk to humanity.

They're too low for debris to stay up.

This. A thousand time. People need to understand this.

People see ISS staying up in similar height for decades and do not realize that it actually needs engines to pull itself back up after it inevitably loses altitude to atmospheric drag.

SpaceX as a company definitely cares for risk. I think you are falling for Musk's media braggadoccio, but if you look at safety record of real world SpaceX operations, it is excellent.

They had no human fatalities ever, which is remarkable for a 19 year old aerospace company (obviously there weren't many launches with people, but accidents happen on surface, too; this is heavy industry after all). And they haven't lost even a dead payload in what, last 100 launches? And if you happen to watch the launches from time to time, you will know why: they do not hesitate to scrub if they do not like something.

This is the opposite of the mentality that brought us the Challenger and Columbia disasters and I am happy that someone can actually square this level of prudency with rapid technical development.

As for Kessler syndrome, orbital decay is very strong at Starlink heights. Even if the entire fleet were abandoned, the orbits would be clear within 3-5 years. Nothing stays long at this height without active help of engines. The thin wisps of atmosphere still present will slow it down and drag it back to burn.

Both Tesla and SpaceX have lost employees in small aircraft accidents. While not industrial in nature the push to rush and be places at times should be counted.

You are being downvoted, but the core idea isn't entirely wrong, it is only too crude and needs some further analysis. (E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides)

To actually start blaming the employers with some level of plausibility, I think you would have to show that rate of small aircraft accidents for their employees is significantly higher than average for similar unaffiliated group of youngish men who like to fly small aircraft.

There is some background nonzero level of death in flying small aircraft (or suicide, alcoholism or other common ills). Unless it can be shown that the levels of such ills among employees of some Acme.com is significantly higher than background noise, it is not fair to assign blame to Acme.com.

Even then there can be confounding factors, but that is a different story.

Near half of satellites are SpaceX satellites mate. Ofc they are half of close encounters. This isn't a good argument.

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