This seems on par with the process - SpaceX submits a proposal that is open for public scrutiny, and Amazon, which has the incentives to do so, submits feedback on that proposal.
Whether the feedback/concerns from Amazon are warranted, that’s up to the FCC to decide. If they decide incorrectly, that’s when I’d start to bring the torches.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
" 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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This seems on par with the process - Amazon submits feedback and the general public who are sick of Amazon's practices submit feedback via pitchforks and torches.
We are within our rights to call out Amazon before, after and during FCC review.
This isn't on par with the process. Amazon don't want Spacex's application to even reach the public's commenting phase. From the article:
> Amazon's request would prevent the commission from seeking public comment on SpaceX's application, SpaceX said. "The commission should recognize this gambit for the obstructionist tactic that it is, reject Amazon's request, and quickly put the amendment out for public comment," SpaceX said. The public-comment process will allow "any issues [to] be fully vetted," SpaceX said.
And they are establishing a pattern with this and previously JEDI. At some point, someone has to call their nonsense and blacklist them from gov't procurement for their bad-faith approach.
I disdain the owners of both but Bezos (fairly) seems to get a bit more ire here. The Verge’s piece elaborated that SpaceX hasn’t decided between two configurations and want approval for both even though they will only choose one, so everyone else has to plan around two different configurations.
I’m not sure if that’s standard procedure but it does seem a bit unfair to add double work for everyone else.
I'll take the eccentric billionaire actually tackling real issues and making actual headway. People here are too narrow minded and have quarter to quarter short term memory disorder, seeming to forget that Musk and Tesla are the sole reason we have had the progress and momentum towards actually greener technologies, not simply greenwashed corporate nonsense that was churned out year after year without any was actual progress. Bezos is literally the greedy avatar of Edison in this race, who's only advances are only made through parasitic monopolies, tyranny, and his own ego. He literally walked out in a cowboy hat to tell the world "thank you for your money peasants!"
"forget that Musk and Tesla are the sole reason we have had the progress and momentum towards actually greener technologies"
There are many things, that come to my mind with this statement, but I will just say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Because yes, he did gave momentum to the conservative car makers to get them to move their asses. But cars are only responsible for a tiny fraction of CO2 - and the whole green technology was kind of a thing before, with lots and lots of research about it all around the world. And implementing that research.
Long before Musk was known outside a small bubble.
It is just, that we are increasingly starting to see the effects of climate change that makes people act.
I respect Musk for what he contributed. But I feel that glorifying him in this way, puts down all the other work in a unbalanced way.
"Bezos is literally the greedy avatar of Edison in this race, who's only advances are only made through parasitic monopolies, tyranny, and his own ego."
And I really hate to defend Bezos, but I do not think the success of Amazon comes out of a parasitic ego. But rather smart and efficient logistics. Incorporating robots and automatisation wherever possible. While exploiting the workforce, yeah, but Musk has not really a great record in that realm either.
In the context of the statement, ("sole reason..") I call it tiny.
I mean cars are very visible, so any movement there helps with the public image that things can change.
But he still was only one player in a comparitivly small segment, when green technology is so much bigger than just "cars". And "green cars" was and is much more than just "Tesla".
Transportation is not just cars. However, if you can force a break in one area, that frequently opens up opportunities in others.
And such is the case here. But Tesla is not just going after cars. They’re going after the whole energy production/transportation complex, which really is the biggest single contributor to greenhouse gases.
It just so happens that cars was the weak point that could be most easily attacked, and Tesla went for it. But there is much more on the table than just cars.
a car which was specced for 80km/h and head-to-head collision with similar cars would save even more metal/ressources.
As well as leaving out stuff like: AC, car-grade entertainment computers (look at SV superfunds sites for how great chip production is), electrical seat-actuation, windows and ...
I did some sleuthing recently because I am quite sceptical about the whole "burn rocket fuel to go to space during a climate disaster" thing and found a study indicating that the current trend is going to cause more damage than CFCs.
"Future ozone losses from unregulated rocket launches will eventually exceed ozone losses due to chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which stimulated the 1987 Montreal Protocol banning ozone-depleting chemicals, said Martin Ross, chief study author from The Aerospace Corporation in Los Angeles"
"If left unregulated, rocket launches by the year 2050 could result in more ozone destruction than was ever realized by CFCs."
I think their, and the government's, motivations should be under heavy scrutiny right now. They're both externalising costs. The damage needs to be priced in. I think there's a lot of untapped research to be explored for alternative ways of lobbing things in to orbit.
> But cars are only responsible for a tiny fraction of CO2
I mean, yeah, if every billionaire tackles a fraction, then we saved ourselves?
> I respect Musk for what he contributed. But I feel that glorifying him in this way, puts down all the other work in a unbalanced way.
The thing is, beyond this HN bubble, most people need a leader of some sort. He takes credit for everything (and also the blame if things go wrong). I'd have a more funnier persona than Elon, but his cyberpunk style sells me too.
> While exploiting the workforce, yeah, but Musk has not really a great record in that realm either.
Cool and that tens of billions that you claim they dumped into research has done absolutely almost nothing for anyone at all. We don't have Amazon wind farms we don't have any Amazon solar panels and battery packs hooked up to our houses we don't have any EV cars from Amazon. We have a richer centric billionaire making really crappy low earth orbit rockets and stealing everyone's money.
If you take into account the total fuel spent, per item, Amazon delivery would have less.
Fuel spent per item is more or less the same upto the nearest warehouse, whether that is Amazons or walmart.
Fuel spent per item from walmart to home is more because you have one car going to amazon for the item and a bunch of others. However, with Amazon, it is one truck delivering hundreds to a neighbourhood.
Ao, in almost all cases, delivery by Amazon is better for the environment, or at worst, same as that of alternatives.
I love when people complain about how Tesla receives tons of government subsidies, ALWAYS neglecting to mention that they're dropping the bucket compared to what the other gasoline car manufacturers get in subsidies every year...
> His big trucks deliver a few packages daily to one, or two, households.
20 people in your neighborhood take a 2.5 ton car to the store and back, or one truck drives around multiple neighborhoods and drops off packages. I don't think delivery is a clear cut loss
I'm sorry but better energy storage and electric cars for the middle class isn't going save us. It's not progress, it's a distraction along the way to ecological collapse.
If electric cars are part is the solution, we need demand for infrastructure (mostly charging, but also maintenance expertise). Middle class-driven Teslas are sufficiently present to have induced building infrastructure, from which other classes can profit.
If electric transportation is not part of the solution, you're right about that being a distraction.
You're right it's going to be the industrial level where we're actually going to feel the effects, so i think I will still go with the person who's making a giant electric gigafactory to make electric cars not polluting entirely everything.
Maybe. It's always possible that as a civilization we are saddled with too many never-going-to-progress-until-we-stop-doing-x technologies. Maybe it's not a distraction, but using a market to develop a capability that will save billions.
Isn't Musk the guy who crashed bitcoin after making a pile of money claiming it was dirty? How much pollution does just one of his mega-sized moon-mission rockets eject? Just for his personal (yes) entertainment.
Rich sportsmen buy expensive cars. Super- rich businessmen play with rocket launches.
As the joke goes: "How to become millionaire in the airline industry? starting as billionaire". That speaks to the risky nature of airline business.
Rocket business is even riskier. The market is small and is absurdly difficult to enter. Musk almost got bankrupted when Spacex failed to reach orbit after three tries in 2008. He went all in.
Of the current crop of newly launched rocket companies -- Rocket Lab, Astra, Firefly, Relativity -- do you spot any super rich businessmen?
About the same if not less pollution than every other rocket that's launched into space... For a fraction of the cost plus we get to reuse the materials.
It's a bit of a stretch to say they haven't decided; one depends on Starship being approved for launch (and working) in the right timeframe, and the other just uses Falcon 9s.
I don't think regulators should force companies to be conservative in unrelated technical development when it doesn't have any material impact on others.
The Starlink constellations in this proposal are large, and any future development by others will have to account for the orbits of these potential constellations.
That's 30k new objects to plan for, and with two configurations at play, that means accounting for essentially 60k objects in motion, effectively doubling the work someone would have to do to plan their deployments.
Space is, but low earth orbit isn't. At least not when you want to fill it with millions of circles (not points!) that must keep certain distances from another.
> fill it with millions of circles (not points!) that must keep certain distances from another.
This is, at best, misleading. The objects that have to keep clear of each other are (effectively) points, and they can share orbits with different phasing. The most obvious real-world example of multiple objects sharing an orbit is geostationary orbit.
According to Wikipedia [1], LEO is up to 2000km, though e.g. the ISS is at about 400km; geostationary orbit is 35,768 km. Minimum difference in orbital length is 2 pi times 33,768km.
So the obvious case for geostationary orbits is significantly better than for LEO.
Nevertheless, LEO isn't bad. A height of 400 km translates into a circle of about 42,655 km (orbital length of ISS according to NASA). That is enough to park several satellites in without them being parked bumper to bumper.
It's not like Starlink is,going to exhaust all viable orbits.
No, but it is worth noting that there are about 7000 satellites in orbit right now, of which a little over half are actually operational[1]. Starlink intends to increase that number 10 fold by launching 30,000 of their own. It will have a significant impact on which orbits are available, it will cause extra work for everyone who operates in space, and (in my opinion) the benefit of "broadband internet everywhere on Earth" isn't so big that people shouldn't think about whether it's worth it. Especially given the fact there are other competitors in the market who'll be wanting to launch their own constellations too.
We could end up with many tens of thousands of internet provider satellites, and the market probably isn't big enough for more than a couple of companies providing that service. At the very least there should be rules demanding that each company makes their satellites interoperable with all their competitors, so if one company withdraws from the market someone else can take over their orbiting hardware so we're not left with immense amounts of space junk.
> We could end up with many tens of thousands of internet provider satellites, and the market probably isn't big enough for more than a couple of companies providing that service. At the very least there should be rules demanding that each company makes their satellites interoperable with all their competitors, so if one company withdraws from the market someone else can take over their orbiting hardware so we're not left with immense amounts of space junk.
This.
Also, I would expect that there should be some kind of worldwide organism supervising this nowadays, not just the US FCC. I mean, LEO is a whole Earth thing, not just one nation's.
Buildings on land don't move. You don't have to plan for the scenario where your neighbor's house shifts it's location a few degrees and runs into your house, or where your neighbor's house will be in 2 years.
These constellations aren't stationary, they move based on their orbital parameters, and to properly predict their orbits, you'll have to account for their future movement for the next while (depending on expected lifetime and how close they come to your intended orbit).
Saying this is like buying a plot of land is missing the level of work and complexity that goes into orbital mechanics.
If you need to illuminate the same area of the earth, which would make sense if you're also looking to serve the same populations, then you'll need to either be at a different altitude or have neighboring or intersecting orbits, which will need to handle the orbits of all other objects. That's why the level of complexity increases a fair bit when you need to plan for two large-scale configurations.
And the Falcon rockets are already approved and working now right? So they have a viable way to launch them anyways, it's not like their hands are tied.
> so everyone else has to plan around two different configurations.
Which just requires choosing a different shell (altitude). It takes me more effort to write this post.
It's more work during launch and orbit raise, but at that point you don't have to worry about hypothetical or future satellites, only the existing ones. Space is big, it's easy to avoid millions of satellites, as long as they're actively powered and you know where they are.
I could care less about the attitude or acumen of Jeff or Elon personally.
From a business perspective though, it's absolutely bonkers to see Amazon wasting such an immense amount of resources in an attempt to slow the competition down, rather than speed their own up.
It's like watching a child flip the monopoly board after realising they can't buy any more properties and remain on top.
It’s not necessary, but it probably helps. It’s also a great american tradition (though by no means unique to american), and so is calling for the state to help you not being nice (and then people wonder why US unions are antagonistic…)
Please. The only people who say that are making cushy salaries. Head on over to a place like /r/povertyfinance and tell the people there with a straight face that "Wealth ≠ success"
While wealth (or rather, being "wealthy") is absolutely a success, it is not the only way to succeed nor is its definition "not being poor".
As such, I'd like to believe people at places like /r/povertyfinance would still consider themselves successful if they moved beyond their financial challenges through a ton of work even if they don't end up wealthy.
Market winners are libertarians. Everyone else are socialists.
One nice unintended side effect of Bezos' tantrums (demands for more cake and ice cream) is the implicit recognition that governments create markets, are the source of all wealth.
As a taxpayer, I'm overjoyed that we're bankrolling SpaceX (and everyone else). I want sat phones and vacations on Mars.
Then in 10 years, when Musk is a trillionaire, I'll be even happier when we claw back his windfall thru repeated radical cashectomies.
Once Musk is reduced back down to billionaire status, award him a Presidential Freedom Markets™ Medal. And maybe rename some buildings.
Amazon always claims to focus on its customers, and ignore its competitors, this is supposed to be an important facet of the "Its always Day 1" philosophy.
These actions, along with Amazon's complaints about Jedi contract seem to imply that amazon has now entered day 2.
PS: I understand that the circumstances around the Jedi contract are different. I'm just trying to make a point that Amazon is now focussing more on its competitors rather than its customers.
It is quite short and basically alleges SpaceX failed to fulfill various requirements when filing its amendment. Mainly, it alleges SpaceX submitted two different configuration options and the Commission's rules require them to settle on a single configuration option to submit.
Are those legitimate allegations? I have no idea. I'm not an expert on FCC amendment rules, and I doubt many here are either. But it seems kind of misleading to call that "because it can't compete" when the filing says something completely different.
But it seems kind of misleading to call that "because it can't compete" when the filing says something completely different.
Well, it's not like Amazon is going to say "we're 3 years behind SpaceX so we need you to slow them down"
It's also not a good look for Amazon when it has has significantly more contact with the FCC over SpaceX than in providing its own details in response to FCC questions
But this is just SpaceX's side of things, so I'll take it with a grain of salt. Also Amazon may fully expect the FCC to reject their request and simply wants that precedent set for when it needs/wants to submit a similarly flexible plan for their own deployment.
"In Configuration 1—SpaceX’s preferred scenario—the amendment proposed herein would revise the pending application in three main respects to fully leverage these new capabilities:
1. SpaceX will more evenly spread capacity by latitude by targeting multiple inclinations, ensuring better, more consistent global coverage even as it continues to operate at lower, more sustainable altitudes than most other NGSO systems.
2.SpaceX will nearly double the number of satellites deployed in a sun-synchronous orbit optimized for key throughput demand times and service to Polar Regions, resulting in additional capacity for those chronically underserved areas such as Alaska.
3.The revised orbital planes will enable “single plane” launch campaigns, not requiring long dwell times in a low parking orbit waiting for orbital precession to spread satellites into other planes. These satellites can launch, be checked out at low altitude, and can all quickly go to their on-station positions.
Configuration 2 utilizes a smaller number of satellites per plane than Configuration 1, yet also spreads capacity more evenly by latitude for more consistent coverage across the globe. Neither configuration requests any additional spectrum or results in a significant increase in the potential for interference to any other spectrum user, including other NGSO licensees and current applicants. Although SpaceX proposes to rearrange the orbital parameters of its Gen2 System, it will slightly reduce the number of satellites in the constellation. Moreover, SpaceX will continue to leverage the inherent advantages of operating at lower altitudes than most NGSO constellations. Not only will atmospheric drag at these altitudes ensure that any debris quickly disintegrates in the atmosphere and pose no further danger to space operations or life on the ground, but operation at these altitudes is also consistent with a key recommendation from the astronomical community to minimize any effect on astronomical observations. "
Amazon entered Day 2 as while back. Its customer service has been a shadow of its former self for years now. It also took them years to resolve the problems stemming from commingling their inventory with 3rd parties.
Are those co-mingling issues actually resolved now? I still avoid purchasing anything on Amazon where receiving a counterfeit or slightly not-as-described item would be consequential. I haven't personally had a bad experience, but have read enough anecdotes and reviews about it over the past year or two that it has strongly shaped my Amazon purchasing habits.
I have lost faith in Amazon a while ago. I base my opinion on their amazon.com online shopping experience. The ratings are regularly gamed, the "Amazon's Choice" label is completely unreliable, the quality of products sold by Amazon under their own brand (Amazon Basics) is highly suspect, they're not price competitive any more, I won't buy baby or health care products due to poor warehousing practices and commingled inventory. Several years ago shopping at amazon.com meant you'd likely get a price competitive, good quality product with reliable reviews. Sadly that situation doesn't exist any more.
From what I read on HN, its customer service must be very variable regionally. In the UK, I often knowingly pay more to buy from Amazon, because it continues to be my experience that if something goes wrong or isn't up to scratch, worst case they'll refund and send Hermes to collect it, no questions asked.
Also Audible, a subsidiary of Amazon, has very good customer service and a notoriously generous return policy. So it veries depending on business group as well as region.
Walmart and Costco come to mind for a lot of the sort of shopping I do. Single category retailers often provide better experiences (think Zara, Home Depot). Aliexpress has way wider selection across the board and very cheap prices (though with very long delivery times).
I tend to use Amazon more for the intersection of things that are somewhat niche and that I'd like fast delivery on.
Honest answer - maybe. Amazon is so rampant with fraud parts[1] and shoes it's hard to know there as well. Best to buy "nice" things elsewhere than Amazon.
For me 100% no-go on Amazon is anything that goes in or on your body, like lotion and vitamins. Coin-flip you get a fake since almost anyone has the means to produce fraud.
If you know exactly what you want, you're better off going directly to the company's website or a retailer specialized in that category. Pretty much every such company has e-commerce these days and the risk of getting scammed is basically zero.
I’ve tried doing that. I often end back buying it from Amazon. Why? The company is often selling for the same price, with an outsized shipping charge, longer delivery time, and no free returns.
I don't know if Walmart has the same extent of 3rd party fulfillment that Amazon does, which seems to be the source & cause of the commingling issues. Walmart always seems to be either the supplier or it's 3rd party; don't know if this true though
> I don't know if Walmart has the same extent of 3rd party fulfillment that Amazon does, which seems to be the source & cause of the commingling issues.
This reads weirdly to me; I'd describe Amazon's situation as "they provide first-party fulfillment of 3rd-party sales.
Amazon and Apple have both taken ordinary products (the computer, the book, the cell-phone, the convenience store) and commoditized them using the power of the internet. No foul play yet, but the issues start when they begin gaslighting the little guys: Apple's biggest concern is their development ecosystem right now, and Amazon's biggest concern is antitrust commissions. Frame it however you like, but they still 'compete' with their traditional analogs, be it indirectly or directly. The mindset you're encouraging is the one that drives Tesla shares to $1k a pop, solely because "they're not like other auto manufacturers!"
>Amazon always claims to focus on its customers, and ignore its competitors
That's not what Amazon claims. The actual Amazon leadership principal is: "Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers."
I also don't see how this is "focusing more on its competitors". Amazon had previously identified a plan for Kuiper to serve its customers, and SpaceX interfered with that. The tactics to do so are debatable, but I think it's easily arguable that this protest is in the interest of serving its customers.
Even with his billions, Jeff Bezos is such a sore loser. This is just like him whining and moaning about losing JEDI to Microsoft. A contract literally written for Amazon to win.
Elon Musk is trying to push the boundaries of what humans do, yet he's got this remarkable jealous space cowboy as a thorn in his side. A hundred problems and now this. I can't imagine the weight on his shoulders. What a sick joke.
Amazon has its hands in too many pies anyway and needs to be split up. It's doing real damage to small business and consolidating too much leverage under the hands of the esteemed powerful few.
Bezos is a power player and he's dangerous. He's rubbing shoulders with politicians, has a snazzy place near DC to wine and dine them, and has a media outlet to publish hit pieces on his enemies. Total menace.
I'm not really a bezos or amazon hater, but fact is that amazon uses an anticompetitive business model in almost every endeavor they engage in and this needs to be stopped.
I generally like amazon. They've made so many of our lives so much easier. But when they ban sellers from having lower prices on their own sites, wield regulatory agencies against competitors frivolously and things like this, it is unacceptable and this behavior needs to be strongly disincentivized.
Also, this anticompetitive stuff is counterproductive, there's a reason they've only ever sent their owner to space while spacex has sent astronauts and is working on their second gen vehicle already.
Competition leads to better results for everyone, but helping everyone isn't their goal.
They don't just want to win, they want everyone else to lose even if it means less progress is made overall, because it means they get to be the biggest of the survivors.
It's fine of your goal is to help yourself and only yourself. Hurting others as a strategy is not acceptable. Imagine a sprint where the competitors could kick each other.
Amazon is also very connected in Washington. Hell, Bezos owns the Washington Post. Witness the litigation they got the government to investigate Apple for ebook and got a settlement, when Amazon was the elephant in the room.
Yeah this was truly an abomination. Everything Apple got in trouble for was undeniably illegal and the verdict was justified - but I'd argue the outcome wasn't. Even as an Apple customer, I'll state the "iBooks experience" is clearly shit in almost every way compared to Amazon - yet they get slapped down and Amazon doesn't. The 800-pound gorilla became the 8000-pound now.
That is way too generous to Elon, whos more of a celebrity for nerds than a real boundary pusher. Nothing hes done has truly moved the needle on our capabilities. I respect that he had the vision + charisma to actually make electric vehicles popular but nothing he's created comes to the all conquering giant that Amazon is. Amazon has also changed the lives of basically everyone in the developed world, which definitely cannot be said of Tesla or any other Musk company. I don't really have any love for Bezos, but he definitely deserves more respect for his achievments than Elon
> Amazon has also changed the lives of basically everyone in the developed world, which definitely cannot be said of
How so? This is way too generous to Amazon. Buying things online faster is not a life changing feat. Neither are home assistants like Echo or Alexa. Maybe I'm missing something.
I'd argue that buying things online with no friction is pretty life changing. Lots of people barely go to stores anymore.I don't use an Alexa, but for people who do I think its a pretty big shift in their lives. This is not even to mention AWS which has been a huge factor in the creation of the modern internet. Also for better or worse Amazon controls the economies of many small exurban towns in various parts of the US. Not all of its impact has been positive of course, but the impact is objectively enormous. I would say after Google, its the most impactful of the FAANGS
This is slightly off-topic but it always seemed to me that FAANG has a vested interest in making internet access as fast, cheap, and highly available as possible (commoditize your compliment). So I wonder why they went in together on some kind of consortium to make that happen. Google tried their hand a few years ago and didn't get very far, and now it seems like it's Amazon's turn. It would make more sense to me if they pooled their resources together, but I guess that's easier said than done.
Note that Google has invested in SpaceX around the time when Starlink was starting out, and that they're putting starlink ground stations at Google data centers.
Autonomous System, it has to do with internet traffic routing. Some real networking person might come and give a better definition than this, but my understanding is basically that where the "internet" is a series of connections between networks and protocols for routing traffic between them, one AS is (as bgp, the routing protocol, views it) one of those networks.
It feels like Amazon interest is more because Blue Origin needed the workloads rather than Amazon was really keen by itself.
Although they are now planning to launch the first sats with other providers, they seemed content to wait for BO despite the progress oneWeb and starlink were making.
Google loon , fibre and were really hobby/limited projects without any real serious intent to take it to scale.
Google invested a $ 1 Billion in one of its investment rounds in SpaceX partly to get starlink going . So they are still pooling resources in some sense, just not directly doing it.
Facebook project seemed to get not get anywhere due to the backlash on limited access to only 100 sites etc. They did recently invest in indian teleco Reliance Jio, so perhaps they are doing something still.
Facebook wants to monopolise the internet connection - they have no interest in sharing with advertising competitors.
In the Phillipines when you get a phone plan or data plan, it includes free Facebook (I haven’t been there for a few years but I presume it is still the same). Many people use the word Facebook to refer to the Internet.
They don't want to just satisfy their interests, that want to be the ones who profit the most from satisfying their interest.
It's about getting a bigger share of the pie, and they're fine taking longer to get their slice if they can keep everyone else from having some and take their shares instead.
To some extent this is just how the business of government contracting is done. That said, I don't think it's right and Bezos is clearly worse.
I doubt we'll see any more of these lawsuits from SpaceX for two reasons. One, their technology and execution advantage has become so overwhelming that the government can no longer justify stiffing them in contracts, no matter how many nice steak dinners the competition buys for the procurement people. And two, Elon now has the ability to raise nearly unlimited money from private investors for practically anything he wants to do, and doesn't need government money as much anymore. Which ironically lets them bid lower and get more contracts.
Check my other comments, I am well aware of these lawsuits.
That is why I specifically said:
> I have not seen a single lawsuit or complaint filed by SpaceX against BlueOrigin or Amazon.
I would argue SpaceX lawsuits prevented monopolistic process by NASA and Dod and allowed competition. BO profits from that and was able to compete and lost.
I think these are qualitatively different from the lawsuits BO is launching.
The human species as a whole. No living human will see a self-sufficient Mars colony, so it’s rather difficult to say it’s just for the rich or whatever.
These are precisely the areas where government has a role to play but more often than not, this is precisely where FTC, FCC and rest of the alphabet soup seems to fail.
I can't guess why Bezos does what he does but have to give him credit for not going the Soros route...WP aside of course.
If I were him, I'd avoid anything Musk (who sucks all the air out of the room) is involved in. Build the worlds biggest telescope, work on advanced propulsion technology for launch or interplanetary spacecraft, there's a lot of cool things out there. I doubt that the first investor in anything really cutting edge is going to make a profit, so look for the wow factor.
This is Eric Berger's take as well - for example, second stage propulsion, in-space manufacturing for his Dyson cylinders vision, lunar habs would be so much cooler.
In the space launch and satellite industries there is natural monopoly characteristics. Amazon loves this kind of businesses, be it AWS or delivery they like to use their size in that sector as competitive advantage.
They are not trying to be cool, for Bezos this is just another enormous money making play.
One guy is in it to change the world. The other guy is in it to enslave it. I understand Bozo's MO. He wants access to 100's of billions of Tax Payer money over the decades for himself and his cohorts.
I am thinking that when the first humans go to Mars, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk should both be on board and both locked in the same room together for the duration of the voyage.
I bet you could make a fortune doing pay-per-view streaming from that room.
A good friend of Bezos' (like his brother maybe) needs to pull him aside and tell him how pathetic and sad this tactic is making him look. He's ruining his reputation among people he needs to recruit, like engineers, who might not otherwise fall for the false Bezos-is-mustache-twirling-capitalist narrative.
Bezos actually seems to be a fairly good person with good motivations in general. But he's also extremely competitive and willing to hit below the belt like Bill Gates was famous for doing.
Elon Musk is doing the Steve Jobs thing, where he out-competes his rivals by creating better products. Bezos should switch over to this approach ASAP, for the good of himself and everyone else.
If you judge someone by how they treat people, Bezos is not a "fairly good person." Whether it's warehouse workers, businesses that "partner" on Amazon, or corporate employees, Bezos treats people like shit.
I also question whether he has "good motivations." He wanted to dominate commerce. Not just books, but everything sold. This is not a good motivation and Amazon should be getting busted up.
Anyone who has has worked on such massive projects as Bezos is going to have some failures along the way. It doesn't matter how good a person they are, there will be some accidental collateral damage along the way, at the very least.
The average person has had much less negative impact in their life than Bezos, but they have also had almost infinitely less positive impact as well.
In other words, it doesn't really make sense to zoom in on the failures Bezos has had without putting them into the context of his successes.
And I've never really seen a clear-headed examination of Bezos' positive and negative impact. My guess is that he's doing extremely good overall, even if his negative impact is a bit higher than would be ideal.
This is similar to how many people claim that technology, or even social media, is an evil force in the world while completely ignoring the massive good it has done for people (grandparents living richer and more connected lives with their grandchildren, communities of people supporting each other, political organization, etc).
Jobs and Musk may have outcompeted their rivals, but both have been notorious for taking advantage of employees as well as anti-competitive practices in multiple cases. Not to mention Musk taking advantage of customers with misleading and at times unsafe products like self driving.
Honestly, I think the main difference between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos is their PR. Elon Musk portrays himself as an affable nerd who posts memes on Twitter, whereas Bezos has forgone a hair transplant and embraced the Lex Luthor look.
In the early days of SpaceX, they filed a lawsuit asking the government to dismantle the company that was their main competitor for EELV[1] and no one blinked an eye. I don't think it hurt their recruiting at all. If you eventually[2] get good results from your product, it seems like people are willing to overlook litigiousness.
The SpaceX lawsuit against Kistler was nothing like the Blue Origin efforts to kneecap SpaceX. They were fighting for survival in a biased competitive environment against a lazy, unproductive, but politically-connected rival.
Blue Origin is just rolling rocks downhill on the enemy camp, hoping to get lucky. Because hey, it's easier than putting payloads into orbit, right? They need to lead, follow, or GTFO the way.
Contract protests are pretty common, although they don't always make it to the Court of Federal Claims. OTOH, filing a lawsuit saying that the government should shut down another launch provider even when you're not competing for the same contracts (yet) seems like more of a kneecapping effort. Like I said, SpaceX and ULA both filed lawsuits before they ever made it to orbit so I don't think that criticism applies exclusively to one company.
One obvious difference is that Blue Origin has less at stake, because they can't fail. Musk famously put his last $40M on the line in 2008 to keep the company afloat, while Bezos is basically Citizen Kane.
"You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years."
You are taking things out of context. ULA was a government formed monopoly and the Dod basically wanted to hand them a block contract that would basically give them a monopoly for very long time.
SpaceX would have been excluded from Dod flights for basically a decade or more, even within a few years they had the means to compete.
This was clearly a totally anti-competitive and this is why SpaceX won and since then such large block contracts are no longer done. The Dod still hands out too many launches at once but what they tried with ULA initially was far, far worse.
Personally, even ignoring the vast differences in the competitive landscape between then and now, I think there is a substantial difference between a) objecting on antitrust grounds to a merger that even the FTC itself tacitly admitted was likely to have strong anticompetitive effects^[1], and b) the incessant nuisance lawsuits brought by Blue Origin against (directly or indirectly) SpaceX. And I think that's true even if you disagree with my characterization of them as "incessant nuisance lawsuits".
> Elon Musk portrays himself as an affable nerd who posts memes on Twitter
Because that's what he is.
> whereas Bezos has forgone a hair transplant and embraced the Lex Luthor look.
I'm not sure how you that makes sense. Are you saying that if Musk were bold he couldn't be an 'affable nerd'.
> In the early days of SpaceX, they filed a lawsuit asking the government to dismantle the company that was their main competitor for EELV[1] and no one blinked an eye.
Because the government was clearly engaging in totally unfair monopolistic behavior (the government having formed ULA and simply handed it all space launch contracts) that was against the rules government has for itself and SpaceX won this lawsuit.
Since then DoD launches have been handed out with a commercial competition.
SpaceX also filed a law-suit against NASA for engaging in highly anti-competitive favor granting to a competitor for the COTS program. This was recognized and since NASA has done a very good job at commercial selection.
The thing is, people (who are knowledgeable) judge you based on the details of what you do not the broad facts (X filed a lawsuit). SpaceX filed lawsuits against unfair competition and most people interested in space were aware of these unfair practices and wanted them change.
BlueOrigin in contrast profited from the progress SpaceX produced and was able to bid for all NASA programs since. There was competition, they lost, complained and lost and the sued the government (and will certainly lose again) based on what everybody understands to be terrible claims, delaying the whole government moon program.
Amazon in turn has engaged in a years long campaign trying to stop or disrupt Starlink while their own project is and was half a decade behind. Their claims are highly questionable and at times just flat nonsense and have been dismissed multiple times. However each opportunity they come back new reasons to complain. This leaves people who are observing this with only one conclusion, Amazon doesn't care about the details of Starlink proposal and their ongoing efforts with FCC, rather they are simply trying to disrupt and slow down competition.
Without getting too spaced-out with the the Bezos-Musk dynamics, I personally hate the idea of having private companies getting on the SpaceX bandwagon and clogging up outer space with thousands of satellites.
I personally hate the idea of holding back rural connectivity, mapping, and the general advancement of space-based science and industry in order to preserve the sacrosanct emptiness of certain orbits. Why should your desire for empty orbits outweigh other peoples' desire to put those orbits to productive use?
Their nimbyism is silly. Nothing is going to hold back this next period. The entire planet will be connected soon and that's when the internet moves out of alpha and into beta. Complaining about a few thousand satellites will seem quant in ten years :P
There are hundreds of real world applications that benefit from connectivity.
For example Self driving would really benefit from connectivity for deeper learning models to get to level 5.
Telemedicine , remote learning all have huge potential with connectivity all around the world. Education in developing countries which suffer from lack of infrastructure can (and already does) benefit from tech driven learning
It is easy to say you don't want connectivity everywhere when you don't experience that lack of connectivity a lot of the people do.
It is hard to imagine the kind of applications that will come just like it was hard to imagine what came with web 2.0 /1.0 before .
Also a lot of pressure on urban migration would really reduce with global connectivity. I already know many people moving or considering to move to a rural location with better quality of life only because of starlink.
Good point! And it make me think... Why do WE (western people or US peaople) want global connectivity ? To bring some "civilization" all around the country (humanist reason) ?
In that case, how will people in "poor" countries will be able to use it ? Self driving cars ??? Even for the few that can afford it (in the next 10 years), you'll obviously will need a decent road infrastructure...
Telemedecine ? Super !!! But is there enough doctor and basic med supply (and cheap enough) ?
So, I guess that the real use will be for internet... In the best case for news and education. But in that case, will it be "cheap enough" for the people in these countries to afford it ? Or will it financially available only to tourists and remote worker ?
Telemedicine works in developing countries because it is easier for a specialist to consult remotely when there are so few of them and being in all locations is not feasible.
For primary care, it helps in preventive care more than cure. Earlier detection of issues can make handling them a lot easier.
You need telemedicine precisely because there are few doctors to go around, and care can be expensive.
There are already few well funded startups offering this along with medicine delivery in India for example, who are doing well. 4G and mobile penetration makes it possible, it doesn't cover everyone but it makes a difference to a large chunk of the population.
A significant portion of the planet's popularion still doesn't have access to reliable high-speed internet in their homes, let alone where they want to.
Your desire - sure! - but ONLY at YOUR home ! And space is not yours...
It looks like noboby learned from air or sea pollution, where SOME people pollute for their own benefit a ressource that they don't own... and then let the others pay to clean it
For the same reason that we generally believe that my right to clean drinking water outweighs your right to dump toxic waste in a river, even if it is useful to you.
Some doors are very difficult to un-open, and caution is warranted when making sweeping changes to space that may do any number of negative things, including make future spaceflights more difficult, make ground-based space research impossible (increasing the price of future space research and making satellites the only way to do get good data), etc.
What you demand is not clean drinking water, rather that nobody is allowed to use the river at all because you like to see the water flow.
You are basically saying 'nobody is allowed to put a boat on this river because I like nature'.
> caution is warranted when making sweeping changes to space that may do any number of negative things, including make future spaceflights more difficult, make ground-based space research impossible
And that why FCC exists and they have mostly agree that this is not actually a problem.
Nobody has a larger intensive not to make future spaceflight harder then SpaceX.
And the idea that all ground-based space research is impossible is equally nonsense that has often been disproven.
Even in your dystopian nightmare, the reality is that within a few years the orbits SpaceX used would be clean again or that based on government order SpaceX could de-orbit 99.9% of all sats in a week.
So how about we allow boats onto the river and figure out if its really the end of civilization to do so.
How many years until a solo hobbyist launches a rocket that crosses the Karman line? I bet as soon as three years and not longer than five years. Ground-based research isn't your only tool in the near future.
This door is trivial to un-open. If we decide the Starlink constellation is a net negative for humanity, we just need to refrain from launching any more of them. The existing ones will deorbit themselves within a few years at most.
If they're on LEO, what's the big deal? Starlink's satellites have a lifetime of around 10 years before they get pulled back into the atmosphere by gravity.
> before they get pulled back into the atmosphere by gravity.
Irrelevant to the point, but: It's more that they get pulled further down into atmosphere by... atmosphere. With just gravity alone, they'd stay perfectly in orbit.
I think they get pulled down by the combination of atmosphere and gravity. As you pointed out, gravity alone is not sufficient. But also, if there's only an atmosphere but no gravity, they don't get pulled down.
Not quite true. For example quite a few orbits around the moon are unstable and you will end up crashing into the surface. This is due to essentially all celestial objects not being spherical.
I agree: space is a SHARED place... why should some US corp. be able to pollute it ????? And why should US citizen ONLY have something to say about it ???? I can understand that the US may decide what is above its territory, but I surely dont want to MY french nights with Musk or Bezos satellites... and moreover without my consent !
Satellites aren't pollution. They have a 10 year service life then fall back down to Earth.
Do you also complain about buildings ruining your french nights? Or billboards? Or traffic noise? Should we ban all automobiles and buildings and outdoor lighting? Should we ban all combustion engines to ensure there's no amount of smog in the air as well?
Satellites are extremely far down on the list of public nuisances and don't serve any threat to our health unlike smog and carbon emissions.
Actually, a significant part of french people (and growing) are against traffic noise and visual pollution... they're called ecologist ! And combustion engine will be ban in Europe after 2035 IIRC. So I guess that maybe it could mean something on what "people" want in Europe...
And even more: some are against "renewal energy" like wind fields because of both!
Satellites are down on public nuisance BECAUSE there's not a lot of it ! But how will it rate when there will be 100 times more ? And then, we will have to live with it for 10 years maybe... and surely more (because you know: once it's done, it's hard to lose the investment)
Just to be clear: maybe it's not the worst idea... but we should ALL talk about it, and not only the US people
While there are some rudimentary frameworks for collaboration in space. It is still free for all.
Sovereignty in space above 50 km is complex and not really well established, countries have differing claims like bogota declaration etc.
Most countries launch satellites they don't necessarily tell each other.
There is nothing stopping a French company from doing the same as spaceX.
Infact OneWeb is owned by UK government partially and a Indian teleco Bharti Airtel. They manufacturer satellites in UK (a lot of satellites are manufactured in UK) and launch in Russia.
France or any other country does regulate and operators do respect who can transmit/use radio frequencies within their geographic areas.
That's the point: it looks like space is the new "Far West"...
Can't we learn from history and - for once - try to talk and agree on common rules and management together BEFORE doing something to a world shared resource ?
The resource needs to have real value before serious regulations effort is made . Potential value is never enough, for example there is no regulations for asteroid mining today, it would be waste of time to do it now, unless we could actually do it .
Satellites before starlink OneWeb were much lesser problem in terms of resources utilization .
Starlink growth is unprecedeted in part because there is little regulations stopping them , so the current model has its advantages
I agree: before now and the "cheap" satellites launch era, there were no need for regulation. But now the situation has changed so maybe it's time to slow down a bit and take the time to think ?
Moreover, there's more and more incidents in space, and it will only grow in the near future
In a way, maybe the "request for comments" should be lead by a worldwide org (ONU based) and not only a US one ?
My impression was that the low orbits used by Starlink and similar are the best place for this since it will all naturally deorbit on short timescales.
It's just space who cares if we clog it up some with more useful things.
~2d was intended to imply effectively 2d for human activities, even airspace is probably closer to a layered 2d cake than true 3d like deeper space. LEO may be closer to an extension of airspace due to orbits and gravity. Still, due to the exponential growth with respect to the radius, there is significant room in LEO compared to anything terrestrial.
How does this differeniate space and the ocean in your mind? Humans cannot survive in either without some sort of vessel to provide a suitable environment.
My GGGP point was about "clogging" space with satellites, not about habitation. Space is so large that 100K's of satellites is still not clogged. I believe the SpaceX and AWS constellations are planned to get us pretty close to 100k iirc
This is shortly after launch while the satellites are still tumbling. Within a few days they align themselves so that their sunshields reduce their brightness and over the next few months they will raise them selves to their operational orbit.
I think people who have night sky views pure enough for satellites to become a nuisance is probably in the global minority. One might even call it a privileged pov, given that most rural inhabitants of this planet struggle for basic network connectivity needed for their livelihood and the education of their children. I respect your sentiment, though - ultimately, the question is not whether we should do it; it’s who’s gonna stop us.
Well... bad night sky is really a problem in cities... where there's already fiber. But in most rural area (at least in France), the night sky is still "pure enough"...
I understand basic network connectivity problem, but I'm not sure that satellites are the right answer wrt the impacts
"ultimately, the question is not whether we should do it; it’s who’s gonna stop us". You're right... and I can't anything else but law... coming a world agreement on how to manage space around the world
Not OP, but I can think of two reasons – too many LEO satellites can actually hinder views of the night sky[0] and additionally, the risk of kessler syndrome[1].
I'm in no way equipped to give a scientific risk assessment of either, so I'll defer to others to share if they feel it's major concern. But whether these are present issues or not, they're worth considering and thinking about as we move forward with more LEO deployments. The latter issue especially, given that once it occurs, it'll be extremely difficult (nigh impossible?) to rectify in short order.
Kessler Syndrome is not really an issue at lower LEO, the atmospheric drag quickly (in ~5 years) deorbits anything without functioning propulsion and navigation systems.
The night view is a potential issue, but Kessler syndrome is not. These satellites will decay on extremely short timescales. Until many of them start blowing up and launching debris in higher orbit, we don't need to worry too much about this.
This is pretty dirty from SpaceX. They make this about Amazon by saying Kuiper ("Amazon"). Just because SpaceX calls them "Amazon" in their press release does not make this about Amazon.
Or am I missing something and is this really an Amazon endeavor?
"Kuiper Systems LLC is a subsidiary of Amazon that was set up in 2019 to deploy a large broadband satellite internet constellation to provide broadband internet connectivity."
They could have just said Kuiper ("Kuiper") or Amazon ("Amazon"). The parentheses imply that they choose themselves how they call it from then on, which they are indeed free to do. But it's clear the thing officially is called Kuiper, but they choose to refer to it as Amazon. Which is understandable from a PR point of view, but I still think it's a little dirty. I mean, get that whole Amazon webshop 'down' also, while we're at it.
Whether the feedback/concerns from Amazon are warranted, that’s up to the FCC to decide. If they decide incorrectly, that’s when I’d start to bring the torches.