Thursday Night Links

• The strangest thing about talking to South Africans is how free they are. Despite their government’s Hutuist resentment and explicit racial discrimination, Afrikaners enjoy far more practical freedoms than Americans. South African “community safety patrols” routinely use firearms to defend themselves, individually and collectively. Not only are the police not interested in stopping this — they routinely rely on community safety patrols for intelligence and tactical support against criminals. Likewise, you would expect a community overtly segregated by European language and ancestry to face a crackdown, but Orania is thriving. The state isn’t getting any friendlier toward the white minority, but it is getting less and less competent to persecute them. Efforts to resist the post-apartheid government with violence have been fruitless — but by quietly building capacity for pro-social ends, Afrikaners have carved out meaningful sovereignty that the South African government has neither the will nor the means to disrupt. [Exit]
• A singular Starlink satellite costing $100k to build and launch is operated for five years. Will it pay for itself, and how quickly? In five years, a Starlink satellite will perform 30,000 orbits. In each of these 90 minute orbits, the satellite will spend most of its time over the uninhabited ocean, and perhaps only 100 seconds over a densely populated city. During that brief window, it can transmit data and earn revenue as fast as it can. Assuming the antenna can support 100 separate beams, and each beam can transmit at 100MB per second using advanced coding such as 4096QAM, the satellite generates $1000 of revenue per orbit, assuming a subscriber cost of $1/GB. This is sufficient to earn the $100k deployment cost in only a week, greatly simplifying the capital structure. The remaining 29,900 orbits are profit, once fixed costs are accounted for. Obviously these assumptions can vary a lot, in either direction. But in any case, being able to deliver a competent communications constellation to LEO for $100k, or even $1m, per unit offers a substantial business opportunity. Even taking into account its ludicrously low usage fraction, a Starlink satellite can deliver 30 PB of data over its lifetime at an amortized cost of $0.003/GB, with practically no marginal cost increase for transmission over a longer distance. [Casey Handmer]
• I'll give you one example of what I think is going to happen. I think we're going to end up running fossil fuel plants in reverse basically. And instead of burning fossil fuels to generate workable energy in the form of electricity, we are going to use electricity to strip carbon out of the air to make liquid fuels that are not fossil fuel, that don't have carbon in them. And there was no way the physics and the economics worked for that up until very recently with particular solar power getting as cheap as it is and that cost curve continuing to go. And now, there's a bunch of companies that are pursuing low CapEx, high OPEX unit economic strategies that enable them to ride that cost curve down in a way that nobody had really conceived of before. This is going to change the world. It is going to be so big it's hard to imagine all of the facets of it. [Alex Rubalcava]
• For almost two decades, we didn’t have many real cases on monopolization, and so lawyers could easily discourage private suits by suggesting they would be expensive losers. Antitrust is outdated, the courts will strike it all down, antitrust is a dead letter, et al. But after Google was declared a monopolist, the floodgates started to open. Monopolization is once again illegal. And it’s become clear that judges, contrary to conventional wisdom, are quite open to antitrust suits. (Just today, a judge smacked down Ticketmaster on an important procedural motion.) [Matt Stoller]
• I wrote the whole article expecting bitcoin to fail at being a currency, but that charade ended almost immediately. What exists now is an expensive, power-hungry, distributed, online gambling system. The house still always wins, but it’s not totally clear who the house is, which is how the house likes it. Gambling has always been fundamentally a drain on society (a “tax on the uneducated,” someone once told me), but it’s always very popular anyway. Bitcoin is casino chips. Casino chips aren’t currency, but they don't “fail” either. [apenwarr]
  
• This is just an extreme version of the universal experience of being the parent of more than one child. The moment your second kid is born, or sometimes even before they’re born, they begin teaching you how little impact you actually had over the life trajectory of your first kid. The differences between them,9 despite the fact that you do almost everything the same, testify to just how much of parenting is actually a powerless process of watching a new being discover and disclose to the world what it is going to be. In one way, this makes what’s going on even more existentially dramatic — you’ve produced not a blank slate that you can program, but an alien intelligence that will produce a whole new universe. The other thing is that despite being a tiny bit demoralizing, this is also tremendously liberating: your actions can only change who they are on the margin, so you can relax and do things that are fun for both of you. [Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf]
• In 1919 Gary led the steel industry's successful battle against the strikers, denouncing them as Slavic revolutionaries seeking "the closed shop, Soviets and the destruction of property." By 1923, however, he was the leader in building a big-business coalition to stop a widespread movement to impose strict restrictions on immigration, especially from Eastern and Southern Europe. Industry needed the manpower, he argued. He told the National Association of Manufacturers that the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was wrongheaded because "restrictions upon immigration should be directed to the question of quality rather than numbers." He told his stockholders that its quota provision "was one of the worst things this country has ever done for itself economically." [Elbert Henry Gary]