Wasn’t Starlink marketed in the same way as the “banking the unbanked” principle, but for rural / less affluent areas? Starlink ain’t cheap so for who is it exactly? I wouldn’t pay €300 to buy a Starlink Kit AND pay €85 a month for internet if i weren’t affluent lol. Always found that interesting…
Discussion
Basically 95%+ of people who can afford starlink live in places with infinitely better and cheaper internet. Thinking you can finance thousands of satellites to orbit earth from revenue from people who are too poor to have broadband or proper infrastructure is the equivalent of thinking electric cars or dogecoin are not a retarded idea.
Starlink is a government subsidised surveillance program
Think private, independent, Tesla Phone network. No expensive hardware required.
Yeah now that you phrase it like that it seems clear Elon only gets into businesses where the government is the one that pays him directly or are subsidized by them by the latest gov control tactic
One Starlink dish can provide access to the Lightning Network for an entire village.
But at what cost?
For a group of 100 users, $5 buy-in ea for hardware costs and $1 a month for the service.
A long cables does the same at approximately one millionth of the price.
💯🎯👷‍♂️
No, we’re not going back to wires and trains. If wired infrastructure were economically feasible it would already be there.
It is already here. Most people online are using wired infrastructure
I’m referring to the billions who are not online.
Yes. Eg. the terrain of Borneo is unforgiving. Rural population lightly spread out, wireless connectivity is the 'cheaper' option all things considered.
In the interest of full disclosure, my company’s bread and butter was providing wired residential infrastructure, also Starlink. Issue are significantly different once you leave the city.
There are large high-end residential developments with multi-acre lots in metro Denver that cannot get Comcast to bring in cable service and thus are relegated to 15 mbps ADSL tech for internet. The reason is the population density in that development will never allow Comcast to recover the cost of wired infrastructure. This basic concept applies all over the world.
Astonishing how this con artist has convinced people who can read and write that putting thousands of satellites in space is more economical than A LONG CABLE. As long as it keeps the fiat gravy train going!
We already have LONG CABLES under oceans…. They held the internet just fine.
But ooooh land is not accessible lol
Agree with your overall take here.
But to be honest, it’s also good to know that there’s redundancy for a cable whose traffic can be controlled by government actors or which could be subject to terrorism.
I’m not sure how likely either of those scenarios are, but we have certainly seen stranger things.
You can get much cheaper redundancy by having ANOTHER CABLE! It's not about what you think is nice to have; it's about what you'll actually pay for. Like Tesla, SiaceX and all this retard's scams, Starlink only works thanks to government contracts --i.e. theft. They don't work because consumers pay for them
Ok.
But who do you see laying out another cable in the near term?
And won’t that still require permission from let’s say governments on both sides of the Atlantic (if we’re talking about that particular cable)?
There’s a reason the CCP is worried about Starlink.
Yep, he only pushes things when it suits him. See ESG!
This won’t be settled until someone does the math. My money is on the low earth orbit satellites being far cheaper than the wire and the labor associated with placing it, along with cell towers. Wired infrastructure is way more labor intensive. Musk’s cell phones will communicate directly with his satellites. They won’t need a Starlink dish.
My initial research indicates a low earth orbit satellite costs about $250,000, about the same as a 5G cell tower in the US. There are currently about 325,000 5G cell towers in the USA, not sure about the entire planet. Starlink thinks they can complete their network with 42,000 satellites.
I still think cables are much cheaper. Ultimately with all businesses, theoretical calculations are no match to economic reality. Can the business run profitably without resorting to government subsidies and contracts? All of Musk's scams rely on government subsidies and contracts and nothing about Starlink suggests it's going to be different.
Another simple analogy is flying cars. Tires are cheaper than flighting gravity and aerodynamics + weather, extra maintenance, etc. Still unconvinced? Then add engine failure, which means crashing for flying car (dangerous/uncontrolled landing at least), vs pulling over to a road shoulder.
Being physics possible is completely different to is it financially viable or even sustainable.
This is very simplistic and ignores all the trade offs that got us to where we are today.
For one example what if, instead of depegging from gold and creating the petrodollar which was then enforced by the MIC, what if nuclear power had proliferated everywhere? What if the MIC was just a nuclear MAD race?
What would the world look like with 5 decades of infrastructure build out, R&D, education advances, a skilled nuclear workforce etc?
You think we’d only have got to electric cars in the 2010s? You think we’d have found our way to cloud computing of today in that environment? Wars and conflicts probably would have looked different.. Everything would really, definitely including flight.
In any of these thought experiments you’re forced to ignore all of the trade offs that led to the point in time of the thought experiment.
If the basis of the argument was “we’ve had abundant nuclear power around the world for 30-50 years” and flying cars is still impractical it’s a very different to flying cars being impractical in the current reality.
I agree.
My only issue is free (infinitely cheap) power solves every problem. Maybe every problem ever (if you can spare a little time too).
Patents delayed 3d printers for decades. Lots of like examples of this stuff.
I’m pro-nuclear - the issue is always can governments be trusted for long term safety and storage of contaminants. Did the delayed focus prevent more catastrophes? Don’t know. Are governments more trust worthy now? Don’t know. Does Earth need nuclear to handle human population growth - sure, no other option.
If you throw in technology to store significant power for portability (e.g flying car batteries) - then you’ve hit the holy grail. As long as the weight isn’t too great.
My point was more around a good salesman can obscure the practicality of something in a present world, and sell turds as golden wings.
I’m not sure I agree that free energy does solve every problem.
If anything I’d expect it to unleash a new wave of problems that we will have to handle.
The current AI debate is a good example of this. The groups wanting a moratorium or bans are the same who would have thwarted nuclear in the past. They ONLY see the potential bad outcomes and catastrophise everything to the extremes - they can’t tell you HOW AI will end humanity but they are sure it will so we just shouldn’t try and instead let’s regulate it and control it and limit it and make it the domain of the state..
It’s likely problems will manifest specifically because of the course of action the central planners / statists insist upon (no-one thinks it’s a good idea to train ChatGPT to be woke) and they’ll never factor in how their efforts led to those mistakes. Same could be said of nuclear.
This is why we need proper free markets and the death of the state as we know it. Problems will arise, people will work out how to solve them but having arbitrary rules interfere has a distortion effect that we can’t truly reconcile.
Humanity needs these struggles to progress, not fake made up climate change and systemic racism bullshit to focus brainwashed children on - technologies which will progress us as a species and make us flourish all the more, regardless of what challenges they throw up for us to address.
You guys are in big denial here. Cables internet are super easy to censure by states, to have a border less internet on earth, satellites is the way.
You also forget how SpaceX drastically reduced the cost to access to space. SpaceX is so much better than all other space company because it’s the only one that is not entirely
government funded. By blindlessly mixing Musk and Fiat policy, you are just as delusional as Fiat bros
Musk has certainly profited from Fiat policies đź’Ż, the fortune he has is a joke and will only ever exist in a Fiat world. Some of his projects would certainly not exist without Fiat subsidies. But everything is not so simple. Some of his work did improve the state of the art immensely. For Space and for vehicles.
Arguing EVs are "uninventing" the automobile is also just the No True Scotsman fallacy, writ large.
The internet was developed as a U.S. military project originally, and then further developed by taxpayer-funded universities, and the web was created by a guy on the taxpayer's dime -- Tim Berners-Lee -- at CERN.
Arguing a product is only legitimate if it comes about by purely private market forces is the height of ideological nonsense.
We desperately needed something like starlink whether it’s government subsidized or not. I prefer buying a service from elonmusk instead of Jeff bezos. At least I know there is one billionaire doesn’t support woke ideas and he doesn’t need to be a charity guy. He is a business man that exploits the game and being successful at it.
Sounds like you're ngmi
Definitely underestimating how much of our budget those of us in a rural areas (which are much closer to metroplexes than you might think) we are willing to spend to get modern luxury the internet provides. This includes areas where even cell signal doesn't come through. Starlink is a game changer. Also has the potential to vastly increase the spread of wealth to those areas through telework. It's revolutionary.
Long cables are much much cheaper than satellites. Maybe if people weren't wasting their money on another retarded idea from the grifter who brought us dogecoin, ruined Twitter and is hell-bent on uninventing the automobile, you'd have more broadband internet and less living vicariously as the teenager that got away with not growing up.
Serious question here for someone who lives in a rural area, and wants to set up sovereign computing, solar, and bitcoin mining here on the farm. What is a better alternative than StarLink? If you have minimal upstart capital.
The government bureaucracy for being an internet provider is absurd (as always), this is what explains the lack of internet in rural areas and weird places. I don't know about the Elon satellite stuff.
#[8]​ definitely retarded ideas
