WhiningCoil
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User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
So, Bing's AI response to "Starlink Customers" was
1.5 million customers Starlink has "well over" 1.5 million customers worldwide, including consumer users and businesses. Around 80% of Starlink’s customers are located in North America, while 18% are located in Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. Starlink's Roam plan alone has over 300,000 customers subscribed, which likely nets SpaceX a minimum of $30 million in revenue every month.
Although I see a more recent PCMag article says 2.7m customers. Assuming they are all paying the same $120 a month I am, that puts them closing in on $4B in revenue per year. If I did my math right (2.7m * 12 * $120 = $3,888m).
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I also am not entirely sure how the economics of Starlink work out. Supposedly it's profitable. But I don't know how many red numbers have been moved from the "Starlink" column to the "SpaceX" column. However they do the accounting, the fact that Starlink gets to take advantage of Falcon 9 launches virtually at cost is enormous. The fact that SpaceX has dropped the $/lb cost by almost a factor of 10 helps a lot too.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I mean, I'm on Starlink, and depending on usage, my upload varies from 10 Mbps to 20-ish Mbps. Right now it's 17.90 Mbps. I've never noticed. It's been life changing. Satellite is the only thing available where I am, and the competition is dog shit. 700 ms latency versus 20 ms, maybe enough bandwidth for SD video content versus the 320 Mbps down I just measured. It was straight up impossible for me to do Zoom meetings from home half the time. I don't know how the FCC arrived at 20 Mbps up being the litmus test, but I think it largely fails to capture the enormous improvement Starlink is over all the competition. I live in an area where subsidies have been promised for rural broadband for over a decade, and absolutely fucking zero has ever come of it. The money goes somewhere, and nobody ever gets internet.
I'm not shocked Starlink got cut out, they threaten to end someone else's corrupt grift. I can draw no other conclusion.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Watched it live with my daughter this morning. She wasn't alive before SpaceX was landing rockets. She was very excited about how cool the rocket looked taking off and the engines firing. The significance of the tower catching the rocket was lost on her. She's seen so few rocket launches, it's just immediately taken for granted, like they all do that and always have. In a way it makes me optimistic about the new space age she will live in. She wants to visit space one day in that childish way kids who see a rocket take off always do. But that might actually be a thing normal-ish people get to do in her lifetime, unlike mine.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Yeah, its been an adjustment. We already ate lots of fish and chicken because thats ehat my wife likes and she does the shopping and cooking. Whats harder are all the animal byproducts in everything. Its basically forced us to vegan stuff when it comes to prepackaged foods.
She doesnt go into shock thankfully. Presents more as IBS and stomach pains. At first she barely noticed her diet changed, but lately shes been asking about missing beef which breaks our hearts.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I mean, on the face of it that makes sense to me. Twitter revenue used to be purely ad based, so people who tried to earn money off Twitter got paid based on how much ad revenue they brought in. Now Twitter has subscribers, and people can get paid based on how much they keep subscribers "engaged". I mean, the alternative is even shittier, isn't it? Twitter opens up this new revenue stream from subscriptions, and just fucking keeps all of it regardless of all the work the people creating the content on the platform do?
Youtube has similar revenue sharing models with respect to people who subscribe to ad free Youtube. Once upon a time, when I actually gave a shit about Youtube and it's content creator economy, I heard content creators were really happy with the revenue they got from paid ad free Youtube watch time. It was more consistent and reliable than ad impressions.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Things have been kinda shit lately. 4 year old daughter got diagnosed with Lyme Disease and then Alpha Gal Syndrome, which has really sucked. The Lyme got knocked out (hopefully) with 30 days of amoxicillin. The Alpha Gal is basically permanent, although there is this kind of woo-woo acupuncture treatment which supposedly works. If it were just me, I'd be stubborn and refuse to try some bullshit I think is fake. But kids change you, and you're willing to do anything to help them, so we may end up trying it. Who knows.
So to cheer everyone up we got a dog. Happiest I've seen my daughter or my wife in a hot minute. Just a sweet 5/6 month old rescue from a shelter. It was a bit of an impulsive decision, but the wife has been really longing for a dog for a while. So we were at the humane society visiting this one dog, and she seemed really sweet and got along well with our daughter. So I told my wife lets just get her before someone else does. $25 and some paperwork later, we came home with a dog. Some sort of lab or shepherd mix?
Picking my daughter up from school today, and she's so excited she's telling anyone and everyone about the new dog she just got. Spent the last 2 hours I've been working in my home office just drawing and coloring next to the dog's crate. They can't get enough of each other. Cutest damned thing I've ever seen. Highly recommend it.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I mean, there are downsides. It distorts capital markets, it picks winners and losers, if they do the same shit with shorts (buying tons of puts and then launching a government investigation on a company) it could be incredibly destructive. If part of it is regulatory capture, it basically grants monopoly/duopoly status to chosen companies, and then things gradually get worse.
That said, all that corruption is still better than African corruption. If smart corrupt leaders are constantly trying to figure out what is the most corruption they can get away with, while still performing their ostensible job duties, the system is still "working". If dumb corrupt leaders just go "LOL, what if I stole all of it?" because high time preference, we get the 3rd world.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Still, there was nothing even remotely close to J6 on the Democratic side.
I agree! Democrats caused way more property damage and loss of life, and terrorized a much broader swath of the population. Their political protest were nowhere near as orderly, civil, and pointed at exactly the people who were the problem as J6.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I mean, it's even more sophisticated than that.
Like, take Nancy Pelosi. Her family obviously has become fabulously wealthy off corrupt insider trading. And yet, to the best of my knowledge she's never taken money direction out of the public coffers. If anything it's been a "rising tide lifts all boats" type scenario where she knows a company is going to have their regulatory burden eased, possibly by her input, so her husband buys a fuck ton of call options. All the other investors in the company win, the people working for the company win, everyone relying on that company performing a valuable economic function wins, and of course the Pelosi's win. This is night and day from a scenario where the party that's been running South Africa just nakedly loots the funds for maintaining the power grid, and now they risk complete grid collapse after decades of neglect.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
There is smart corruption and dumb corruption. Russia is also corrupt, but it's not a complete failed state like the way South Africa is heading, or Zimbabwe went. America is profoundly corrupt, and likewise, it hasn't hit the same rock bottom most African nations plagued with corruption have hit.
You can have corrupt, even nakedly corrupt governments that enrich themselves fabulously, that still understand you don't eat your seedcorn.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I think its obvious that some political consultant told her to work certain key words into all her answers. "Doing the work" and variations of it is a common one. I know other politicians have followed strategies like this. But good god does Kamala give the game away with how artlessly she strings these vocab snippets together. It's only barely grammatically correct English, nakedly void of any informational value. A good politician at least creates the successful illusion of having said something, or evoking in you a belief that you heard what you wanted to hear.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Deaths. I expect there will be much haggling over the narrative. But if there are more post immediate flood deaths from dehydration, disease and exposure than not, FEMA irredeemably fucked up, no matter what the experts claim.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
The thing about all these "kids without parents" stories, is I mean, they aren't on their face unbelievable. Tragedy happens. But they'd be a lot more believable if it wasn't random twitter accounts, or photos of screenshots of text messages from some guy.
I wasn't 100% on board with the whole "FEMA is blocking aid" stories coming out until Elon Musk personally attested that an engineer on his payroll in North Carolina was being blocked. That is a concrete event with names we can verify. Would Elon lie about that? Or misunderstand or exaggerate? Maybe. But it's a starting point of a concrete claim that can be verified.
I have seen more videos of local sheriffs, helicopter pilots who'd been running rescue missions, etc coming forward and saying FEMA is blocking aid. Are these real sheriffs? Are these real pilots who really rescued a wife and then was blocked by FEMA from going back for the husband? Don't fucking know, but it's slightly better than "photo of a screenshot of a random text message".
I doubt I'll ever know how much of this was real and how much was fake. Especially since I'm already seeing the "It's all Russian misinformation" meme getting rolled out, and the precursors to "actually what caused excess deaths are all the people spreading misinformation". So fuck me I guess. We'll be arguing about how many died and who's fault it was until this passed out of living memory.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
At this point I doubt we will ever really know what happened in Western North Carolina. An oral tradition might appear describing how FEMA's incompetence (at best) caused hundreds of excess deaths. Stories of people dying of exposure, dehydration and disease because FEMA sat on their hands, and didn't allow anyone into the sparsely populated mountain/valley they lived in.
All the official statistics will be weird side stepping non sequiturs. X number of personnel were allocated. Y number of dollars were spent. They compare favorably to the X number of people and Y number of dollars spent in supposedly comparable natural disaster. Therefore all complaints have been debunked. Shut up.
And everyone will talk past each other forever. One day a politician might take up the torch of what really happened after Helene, but all those investigative resources will mostly get funneled to deep state cogs who will merely look at the aforementioned statistics about X and Y and declare the government innocent, after having pulled down fabulous salaries for a bloated staff that took excessive years to tabulate their report.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I have an undying love for a Godfather, though I rarely get them these days. It's just 2 oz whisky, commonly scotch, but I've had them with bourbon, whiskey, thinking about trying one with applejack now that I think about it. Then you add 1 oz amaretto. Stir, have over ice or whiskey stones and enjoy.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Does it really make sense to you that someone says "Yes, let's waste hundreds of millions of dollars just to say fuck you to incels"? And that everyone involved in writing that check nods their heads?
I absolutely think that. Because these people have been on a conveyer belt their entire lives where they have never organically encountered a normal person. They think isolated, downtrodden white males who feel like society has turned on them are a tiny minority. It's inconceivable to them that they represent enough of their audience to make or break a film. They thought they were picking on a tiny minority nobody cares about to the delight of all their neoliberal woke peers who are obviously the majority. Right? Right?!
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I doubt that FEMA is deliberately withholding aid, if for no other reason than that I do not see how withholding aid would benefit the Democrats politically.
Dead Republicans don't vote... at best. Most of the counties effected went 60% for Trump. In North Carolina, about 1 million voters out of the 6 million in the state have been impacted.
All the same, what we are seeing here is just the same passive aggressive indifference to the lives of people who vote wrong that the secret service showed towards Trump in Butler PA. It's the same attitude you Longshorman's Union Head mentioned if they force the Longshoremen to work. "We were moving 60 an hour, now we're moving 8." You can't force these organizations to save people they hate and want dead.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I'm still playing a shit ton of Mechwarrior 5, but I encountered a problem. The 32:9 UI Fix mod I'm using bugs how Arena fame is handled. Every mission I complete, it re-awards me all the fame I've ever won again, complete with pop ups with each rank I pass. It wasn't too bad the first time. Now that I'm rank 4, it takes an excessively long time. The root of the problem seems to be that the mod was authored prior to DLC6 which adds arenas. But I figured I could fix that myself.
Let all 114 GB of the Mechwarrior 5 modding toolkit download last night. Took a peak at the uasset files the 32:9 mod replaces, found the one that needed to be reimported where the Arena fame was bugged. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Opened it up in the mod tools, corrected its UI positioning for 32:9 again, pak'ed the mod. Only thing that happened was, I think some amount of unprocessed arena outcomes were queued, but in a bugged fashion. So when I first attempted to use my mod, it just spammed the fuck out of me with seemingly blank screens. I thought it was broken worse than before, but then turning off all mods had the same problem. So I just hit spacebar until they all went away, caught up on whatever unprocessed event queue was happening, and now it's right as rain.
There is something magical about being able to peak behind the curtain of things and change anything that annoys you on a PC.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Ah yes, the old "I'm throwing away my entire life and moving far, far away. What? You won't come with me? What? You don't want to commit to this fiction of a relationship that I'M running away from? How dare you do this to me."
I don't know what the fuck is in the water. But in my 20's I literally dated 3 women in a row that tried to pull this shit. I was happy, had friends, a career, was a part of my local martial arts community. I'd date a woman about a year, and they'd pull what I only now recognize was a shit test. Leave absolutely everything, because they randomly decided they wanted to live in South Carolina, or Florida, or Colorado, or Georgia. No, they didn't have a job lined up. But they had a best girl friend who lived there and it sounds so fun.
Every time "If you want to go, we can break up and you can go. I'm not giving up my career, my friends and my community." The first one treated me like I was some enormous asshole for this. The second realized how this would make her look, so instead she (probably) faked a severe mental illness and created this whole fiction about how I was abusing her. All our mutuals were scared of her once all was said and done, and she'd fictionalize events they were there for and knew to be false. The third complained to the end of our days that I didn't "let" her move.
A more homely buddy of mine has only had two relationships, and one of them pulled the same move on him. Up and moved to bumfuck nowhere corn state for seemingly no reason, and dragged him through months of anxious long term relationship before "they" just faded away. Then she moved back. The relationship was dead as a doornail though.
I blame romantic comedies. That shits worse than weebs who think Anime is real.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I think what's most remarkable is after 40+ years of having a reputation for having a problematic relationship with truth, Biden got rehabilitated into some sort of Washingtonian "I cannot tell a lie" figure. And people actually went along with it! I've said it before, but I'll say it again. It wasn't until TDS that I really understood Orwell's "We've always been at war with Eastasia" chapter. I remember reading that, and thinking he was just being cartoonishly over the top. But apparently I owe Orwell an apology. I never should have doubted him.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Roads around me get renamed from time to time. Decades go by and all the locals still refer to them by the old names, because that's what they called them for 30-60 years.
Once upon a time, the way the Soviet Union renamed cities and shit every time the political winds changed was looked down on with mockery.
Twitter has been renamed X for over a year now. I've yet to encounter a person who actually calls it X except with sarcasm.
Names are sticky, stop reading so damned much into it.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Yes, but not unlike the problem of schools (nobody cared when dumb kids were dumb when everyone was white, but thanks to Multiculturalism if too many dumb kids are non-white you need to stop teaching algebra or calculus to anyone, and abolish standardized testing, and remove all discipline) we now have a problem with the death penalty, or even imprisoning anyone. When the country was majority white, I'm not sure anyone really cared if people who obviously murdered someone were put to death. I'm not sure anyone cared if a bunch of poor whites from the same zipcode were always getting thrown in jail. Add a dash of Multiculturalism however, and suddenly we aren't allowed to have a functional civilization anymore. To many non-whites end up in jail or get the death penalty? Time to start depolicing and just letting people go. Sure they might murder someone you love a week later, but at least we won't be racist.
where are the jets and helicopters going out there? Where is the televised response and shipping in of starlink and other supplies?
I feel like this would be the perfect place for that Pawn Star's meme, where flooded Appalachians are begging for aid, and the Federal Government just goes "Best I can do is 100,000, 67 IQ third worlders"
Having just finished volume three of Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire, I'm reminded of how towards the end the Roman Empire was so depopulated by mismanagement and oppressive taxes (there was a specific anecdote about I think Diocletian temporarily suspending the taxes on having children), as well as civil wars, famine and pestilence that they just started letting Goths and whoever else wanted to cross their borders to raise the GDP of the regions. That these newcomers murdered all the locals and pillaged their cities barely seemed to matter. Did they pay their taxes? Uh.... not really... in fact they demanded thousands of pounds of gold as tribute. But a bunch of Roman bureaucrats got to embezzle money and take bribes so it all worked out in the end.
I've been balls deep in Mechwarrior 5 Clans. It's a bit rough around the edges. I don't think the meta is as balanced as MW5 Mercs got after 6 DLC or whatever it was. Also I'm not really sure they captured the raw supremacist attitude of Smoke Jaguar. It's still pretty amazing though. A peerless revisit of MW2's rough timeline.
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