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Might?
Last year you wrote,
more than three years AFTER SpaceX put people in orbit. SpaceX was then (and still currently is, though I'm excited and hopeful for Starliner this week) in fact the only American team putting people in orbit. Is there any explanation other than bias for opining with that level of ignorance? Was that incident still not enough to make it obvious to you that you're coming to your conclusions first and then trying to assemble facts to rationalize them afterward?
That should have been the point where the laudable idea of:
hit the uncomfortable reality of being proven wrong, smashed your broken epistemology to splinters, and gave you a chance to build a working one to replace it.
"I'll happily wear the DUM DUM hat for the rest of the day", though a tiny step (on the order of 1 day / 3 years, 0.1%) in the right direction, was clearly not a rebuild in progress.
The irony here is that, though I'd agree with many of your points above (as would most techies; e.g. "Elon time" is something in between a sad joke and an actual conversion coefficient at this point), I still can't actually trust your presentation of them to add anything on top the bare hyperlinks themselves, and even with the links I've got to worry that selection bias is a problem. How could I justify further trust as more than Gell-Mann amnesia?
Indeed, my past posts is why I said I could be considered biased.
No, but on the other hand, I think ignorance is self-justifying! It is our default state after all.
First of all, I hope I'm not coming across as believing I'm some sort of an expert. I have a mild interest on the subject, follow some of the news, and am going off on vibes. In fact a good part of the reason why I'm posting is to test Vibe Analysis. I'm pretty sure it's a valid way of analyzing the world - I predicted Trump with Vibe Analysis, I predicted COVID with Vibe Analysis, I predicted BLM2 with Vibe Analysis... the problem is that my wife is the only person that heard me making these predictions, and her memory isn't even that good so I have no bragging rights. Now the vibes are telling me Elon is about to crash, and if it's true, I want bragging rights, god dammit! If it's wrong, and I have to wear the DUM DUM hat until the rest of my life - I'm happy with that deal. My pride is a small price to pay for an affordable ticket to space.
Posting here is also a way to verify whether or not I'm receiving all the relevant vibes. It's a bit like my TransTrend prediction post (and it's follow-up), I felt the vibes shift, pro-trans people going from extremely confident to somewhat on the back foot. I wanted to plant a flag, and see if they'll try and take it, and they didn't... at least not in the same way. It was no longer "The Science is on our side, chud!" and a lot more of "oh, are you sure you want the government to dictate what adults can do with their bodies" or petty relitigatiion of Culture War history. Same with Elon - I think his companies are going to crash, I wanted to see if anyone is going to call me a retard for it, and so far the arguments in his defense boil down to him already deserving some sort of trophy... Fine! Give him his bloody trophy, I just want to know whether his companies are sustainable.
If I'm right I also want to warn you lot, so you don't suffer from splash damage of Elon's collapse. I'm planning on spending the foreseeable future bashing woke-supporters for being for "gender affirming care", I'm planning on establishing a goddamn museum, I don't want them to have "Oh yeah? Your side supported the arch-conman Elon Musk" as a comeback!
Sorry if this is too schizo, but I am, after all, the Tinfoil Gigachad... even if that tinfoil hat has "DUM DUM" written on it.
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@ArjinFerman
Looking at the previous thread that roystgnr linked, I see you arguing that HughesNet of all things has comparable speeds and prices to Starlink.
Speed is hardly the only important factor for an internet connection. HughesNet has latency in the 600-800ms range, making online gaming impossible and phone calls an intolerably laggy mess. It has hard data caps that make watching streaming video in any significant quantity a non-starter. And it has a horrifically slow upload speed, something like 3 Mbps, which would make my (and many other people's) work from home jobs impossible.
Starlink has none of these limitations. I gotta agree, into the Gell-Mann amnesia bucket you go.
Yeah, I know. My question is, do I really need gaming-rate latencies, when I'm in the middle of literal nowhere? I'm sure there are cases where the answer is a resounding "Yes!". Drone operators probably hate being fragged as much as gamers, and it's only so many times that your CO is going to take "lag" as an excuse. This is why I'm also willing to believe there is a lot more money in it, than a naive analysis of the civillian market would let on, and possibly how SpaceX was sustained for so long.
But for everyone else? Bro, move somewhere close to a cell tower. I don't know how things are in the US, but in Europe you pretty much have to go underground to escape cell coverage.
Either that or live with the lag, and that's the whole question here. How many people absolutely need to low latencies, because if they don't the ISP's that are in geo-synchronous orbit are going to slaughter you on costs. For every one of their satellites, you're going to need... scores? hundreds?
I had cellular internet (also p2p wifi at one point) before Starlink, and while they sucked less than high-orbit, they suck more than Starlink.
It is extremely impressive that in a few short years Musk has been able to offer a service... lets say an order of magnitude better than literally any legacy telecom in the world -- these are extremely big companies with all sorts of infrastructure already in place, and he has totally slain them. I do believe that in the next year or two you will be able to connect a phone to his constellation from literally anywhere -- this is also very impressive tech-wise, and it happened super-fast.
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It's not about need, it's about want, and even when it is about need HughesNet can't meet the need and paying $100 a month for Starlink sounds a hell of a lot better than your suggestion of... buying a different house in a less rural location?
Clearly. Look up population density for the US compared to most European countries and you'll understand, maybe. You also might understand (one of the many reasons) why public transit in the US is so much more difficult.
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