Yes, when SpaceX gets added to the index, it's going to skyrocket for just that reason. The other reason why SpaceX stock is going to skyrocket is because of the "infinite potential". After all, Elon is going to be God-Emperor of Mars, and how much is a piece of that worth?
The OP knows this and wants a window to profit from this squeeze. For the general public index owners, the sooner it's added to the index the better, minimizing the time that traders can front run this squeeze ahead of them.
Perhaps better it's not added to the indices at all, but as long as it's inevitable, the sooner the better.
Being added to the index is literally the only thing causing "the squeeze" according to this description though so how does that benefit either the author or the index holder?
If the stock was added to the index at a normal period then all the shares would be available.
The author wants to buy ahead of the indexes and benefit from the squeeze; he wants the normal rules of waiting a year before SpaceX is eligible to join the indexes to apply.
It's substack, not ycombinator. The article is obviously not targeted at ycombinator.
And I don't think he's doing a pump and dump. He's just doing the very human act about ranting about things that affect him. His self-interest colors the piece.
Mars is a thin cover story to get the engineers to feed the War machine. "National security" / nuclear threat is a great excuse to get politicians to sell out the country.
I thought it was obvious that "God Emporeror of Mars" was a satirical answer. There are a whole bunch of new markets that cheap access to space open up. Like Bezos' dream of in-space manufacturing. Or Musk's dream of data centres in space. Or power gen in space. Or the "cis-lunar economy". Or space tourism. Or He3 on the moon. People will buy SpaceX stock for the potential, even if that potential is pretty much worthless and the chance of SpaceX capturing the gains rather than some other company is fairly low.
"National Security" is just one more in a big list.
No, those other "dreams" were either developed or refined by,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Advisory_Council_o... as pretexts to pursue a space militarization agenda. The history is clear but the New Space propaganda is being fed to the younger generation.
That seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face. SpaceX is more important than whatever issue you disagree with Musk about. After graduating with a degree in aerospace engineering in the aughts, I switched to software because the practical alternatives were building missiles for Raytheon or going to GE and trying to figure out how to make gas turbines 1% more efficient. SpaceX jump-started a commercial aerospace industry that was utterly moribund as recently as when Hacker News started up.
Sorry to burst your bubble but SpaceX is Raytheon now. You should look at what they're doing with Starshield, SDA, Golden Dome, NRO, etc. The commercial stuff was small potato stepping stones made more palatable to engineers, but the pivot has already occured.
To be clear, I have great respect for military work. I used to work at a defense contractor. But in terms of building a career, it's a heavily regulated industry with little room for growth. SpaceX is doing defense work, but it has not pivoted to being merely a defense contractor. SpaceX's valuation is triple that of Raytheon and Lockheed put together. The market expects it to continue pushing forward on commercial space.
What’s your basis for saying that? It makes no sense. Even if Golden Dome was a trillion dollars, which it isn’t, that wouldn’t support a $1 trillion valuation. Defense contractors average around 10% profit. Raytheon got $24 billion in government contracts in 2023. Its revenue is about $90 billion, and its valuation is $277 billion.
Funding for Golden Dome was $24 billion in 2025 and 13 billion in 2026. Even if SpaceX got all that money, it wouldn’t move the needle on SpaceX’s valuation.
Traditional defense contractors have low profit margin because of the cost plus pricing on the contracts. They literally are only allowed to charge the cost they incur plus some fixed profit percentage. As such, they have incentive to drive up the costs, so that their profit, while low percentage, is on high base.
SpaceX wouldn’t need to so that. Companies like Anduril already are trying to win contracts on fixed price model, and if they succeed, they’ll have much higher profit margins than Raytheon et al.
The estimates that have Golden Dome at anything close to a trillion dollars are posited on the assumption that it will be much more expensive to build than the administration believes it will take. If it ends up as fixed price bids and costs less than people think, it will be well under $200 billion.
That's right.. and Golden Dome (which is definitely a mult-trillion dollar program if space based weapons are employed) has a bunch of convenient oligarch properties like built-in planned obsolescence with orbital decay that amplifies a launch monopoly.
The best time to move your docs to your repo was 30 years ago. But now that they are written by LLMs, tomorrow's LLM will be able to write an even better doc than today's LLM. Nothing is gained in caching them now.
Unless you're doing something wrong, the "why" is already captured in your test suite/type system. While you can fairly call that documentation (that is the point of it!), the linked story is about natural language documentation. That can be extracted from your tests/types at will, and as models keep getting better extracting later will be better than extracting now.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure future historians appreciate when you document that John, when trying to determine how to figure out how to exchange data in your application, took a drink from his Diet Coke that happened to have a fly in it and as he spit it out eureka struck: Data can be pushed to the client like a firehose.
But let's be real, that's never going to happen. No matter what format you give someone, they're not going to write that kind of thing down. They will, however, encode why a firehose approach is necessary to both document it for future readers and to ensure that the program doesn't accidentally (or possibly on purpose by an eager junior dev) move to, say, a pull method that won't meet the business/technical requirements. Which LLMs can extract a natural language version from.
And, really, that's the only "why" that actually matters to other developers trying to get their job done. The forest, while perhaps full of fun stories that I am sure are entertaining to read, doesn't matter all that much.
It's a good saying but the literal meaning is not entirely correct anymore.
Climate change has changed the math on tree planting in a few ways.
For example tree planting in your area today may backfire vs 30 years ago:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/forest-preservati...
These people would argue against the weekend on economic grounds too if we didn't have it already, everything seems unimaginable until it becomes real. Its like trickle down economics, you can make the "economic" argument fit whatever you want to appeal to the oligarchy.
Not necessarily. It's straightforward to make it revenue neutral.
You make it revenue neutral for the average tacpayer. If you want UBI to be $1000/month, you increase the average tax by $1000. The average taxpayer still benefit because even though they don't get more money, they have a safety net.
People making less than average get more UBI than the tax increase, and those making more pay more.
Most people get more money because the median income us a lot lower than the average.
Right, but people with lower incomes spend, and mostly on necessities, I think the idea is that most of those necessities would become more expensive (naturally or artificially due to price-fixing) if the poorest suddenly had more financial power. In the system as it stands, it seems to me like it'd just result in a bunch of money going to grocery giants and their suppliers, landlords, medical, etc.
Most of those are commodities, where the price is set by the cost of marginal supply.
Housing prices should go down. Housing is expensive in places with jobs and cheap in places without jobs. UBI gives people the freedom to move from the former to the latter.
Yeah this is the downstream effect I had in mind. You could say we'd increase supply to meet the demand but that hasn't really worked out with housing for example
Is it straightforward to get Congress to make it revenue neutral? And to keep it revenue neutral? I don't think so. Politicians find "free money for everybody" to be too easy a way of getting votes.
China did 92 launches in 2025. If they only need to put up 500, and if they can put up 22 per launch like SpaceX can, they have the capability now, let alone 5 years from now.
That looks like a very cool option and effort. Like the Chinese balloons that overflew the US in the last (few?) years, it would likely be challenging to shoot down. Otoh, it might cause some diplomatic disagreements about overflight.
There are a number of competing theories in international law, with varying
criteria, to delineate the upper limit delineating airspace versus outer
space. This debate is unsettled. [0]
There may also be some technical challenges having to do with beamforming rf to the vehicle. Starshield like Starlink has the predictability of orbital vehicles for tracking. It would be interesting to understand how a ground station focuses on the solar glider.
There might be less societal objection to "satellites in space orbiting the planet" than to "planes flying continuously over the same area," even if both can be used for similar purposes. I'd assume it'd also be easier to disrupt suborbital systems like that than satellites, but I could be wrong.
To shoot something down at 70,000 ft (21 km) all you need is a conventional military jet fighter, and a long-range rocket, or even a MiG-31 with a conventional cannon. At best you can make these birds cheaper than the rocket + flight time.
Something that flies at the upper edge of the stratosphere, at 40-50 km (160,000 ft) would be hard to reach with currently available means. You can of course fire a THAAD at it, but you can fire a THAAD at a Starlink satellite as well.
Exactly; it's a limited and very expensive capability. Nobody would want to spend it on a $100k stratospheric flying vehicle, if the latter existed. It does not exist though, if you do not count weather balloons.
> Many people believe that the US annexing Canada is a higher probability than either China or Russia doing so. All three are very low probabilities.
I believe those people are being a bit silly, and their position probably comes from a strong dislike of Trump as a person, and not a genuine belief.
Russia annexed a warm-water port and then shortly after attempted to incorporate Ukraine as part of a plan to remake the USSR. The only thing keeping China from taking Taiwan is the United States.
The US has no desire to annex Canada, and it also has no need to. If Canada proposed statehood or even a territory agreement with the US, I genuinely don't think it would even pass a vote.
The US doesn't have a desire to annex Canada; that's very silly. And the reason Russia doesn't have the capability is because of Canada's alliance with the US.
Starlink is redeploying to 300 miles. Many consider Kessler to be impossible at 300 miles. Any unpowered satellite at a 300 mile orbit will deorbit within a couple of months. But a collision means fragments which deorbit faster because they have a higher surface/weight ratio, and because orbit disturbances lower that time considerably. Any single disturbance that raises aphelion lowers perihelion.
Would collisions cause debris to be ejected into a higher orbit? Although I guess as long as the debris does not pick up any significant speed boost, its orbit would be elliptical and would just collide with Earth (burn up on re-entry)?
which has a chart of apogee/perigee of debris. There seem to be examples of debris with _perigee_ above the collision altitude but the vast majority stayed beyond.
I'm not sure every satellite would be exploding in the traditional sense with hot gases expanding.
There would be disentigration when satellite pieces rip through other satellites.
How many satellites carry compressed gas for orbit adjustments?
Maybe there is some compressed gas pushing against liquid fuel and oxidizers, but I don't think the fuel and oxidizers would explode. Shooting tanks of gasoline with regular bullets do not cause explosions like movies would have you believe. Well, maybe pure oxidizers might, would there be enough heat generated by the tank being punctured?
Militaries have to always behave like there is a war coming soon. They might not believe that one is coming soon, but they have to behave like it is. If they don't, they won't be prepared when one does happen.
This is politicians rearming militaries, not militaries rearming themselves. You're right that militaries want to arm, but they've been trying for a very long time, and just been denied, and denied and denied some more.
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