It was about that time I noticed this “Lazarus Group” was about 8 STORIES TALL, and was a crustacean from the Paleolithic Era!

They were victims of being convinced to do that, yes.

We could have solved the telephone lines globally, though. The USA gave a beautiful example of how to get it done in one of their sadly few historic commendable examples set for the rest of the world. The fact that it was not done more broadly was due to people not demanding more and better from their governments that could easily have done the same; it gets cheaper and easier every year. The lack of Internet connectivity in remote areas is a problem, but more importantly, it is a symptom of a bigger problem of government neglect in infrastructure. Starlink is a big, inefficient, expensive, polluting, astronomy-interfering, high-maintenance, unilateral private international remedy to a symptom. It’s very easy to get distracted by problems that are really symptoms of other problems, especially when media is quick to point the cameras at those symptoms, and much less so at the bigger, tougher societal problems.

Solving this particular problem with physical lines to everywhere that is possible is surely dramatically less costly than launching satellites to cover the same area. Fiber lines are also functionally permanent infrastructure; they are physical appreciating assets akin to real estate. Satellites are depreciating assets with relatively short lifespans, and are active components frequently requiring both routine and emergency maintenance while fiber cabling is just a hunk of inert matter that stays the same functionally forever. With something so inefficient, wasteful, and problematic to other industries, it is insightful to weigh the pros and cons to consider if it is still worth doing. Extreme measures like these may be appropriate for military or even seafaring purposes, but rural Internet is a stretch when there are cheaper, cleaner, faster, more permanent, and overall better alternatives. Even at sea, technology like this serves much more appropriately as a stopgap until something more practical can be put in its place, but Starlink’s monopoly in this market combined with a friendly and protective domestic government to operate in ensures that better, more permanent solutions will never be pursued.

I often find it beneficial to try to take fresh perspectives on issues like these, taking a step back from the world we are in and acting as an outside observer. In this case, maybe something like this: We have had conductive wire for well over a century, and fiber optics for well over half of one, but we are launching satellites into space, a hostile environment that none but a handful of humans have ever been and can only recently even dream of going one day, repeatedly in perpetuity, to connect locations together, often even locations on the same continent. Then, the complex and costly devices we’ve deployed in vast numbers are very soon irrevocably destroyed.

In that context, if the problem could be solved by doing little more than digging a whole bunch of long shallow trenches, its a pretty hard sell to convince me it is better solved with an unending amount of the highest-tech machinery and industry the world has ever seen. We’ve dug rivers and moved mountains for thousands of years, sometimes just for the bragging rights. This is no problem! We already saw fit to build roads to all those places, and fiber is of comparable infrastructural value while much less costly and lower-maintenance than roads.

I dont know exactly how much trenching would be required, but someone does, because it is the exact same number as they already did to run the phone lines, possibly less due to dramatically superior fiber length limits. That was a massive success that can also not be wish-washed away. It never gets built because the people that would have to build it bought and bribed the people that can make them, and now from Starlink, as well; that is the problem that needs solving.

When we finally do run those fibers, if ever, they are good for decades, and repairing them is a trifle compared to anything involving shuttle launches. The Starlink constellation is grievously costly in uncaptured externalities. I am perfectly fine with solving non-critical problems,such as Internet access at sea, so long as they cover all of the costs of something I consider a tremendous waste, including the environmental cleanup from burning tons of rocket fuel.

Furthermore, future tech was only one of multiple proposed solutions to Internet access at sea. We can do it right now, badly, with existing technologies, and it would improve with time, like every human endeavor in history has when motivated.

I believe that you are viewing the value proposition as it is on its face, but that company (among many) is benefitting tremendously from government subsidy and structurally ignoring those externalities. Even a child knows that it is wrong to make a mess and leave it for someone else to clean up, but every time we let a company burn something or throw something away without paying the real costs of doing that, we’re rewarding that misbehavior. I would not be even slightly surprised if Starlink was in the top 5 of corporate air polluters; launching a rocket takes an amount of energy that is incomprehensible to the average person, and they have to do it repeatedly forever, or Starlink not only stops working, but their “infrastructure” in space becomes worthless. A buried fiber would still be there after the people that placed it are dead.

The thing about this added coverage in remote areas is that they will only “never be served” by fiber because nobody wants to pay for that, not that it can’t be done.

If you consider the monumental infrastructural and ecological impact of launching thousands of satellites instead of running lines, digging that 750km fiber trench starts looking way better.

I believe this is a case of externalizing costs and privatizing profits. In this example, for instance, we all have to breathe that rocket exhaust but it doesn’t cost Starlink anything. Digging hundreds of long trenches likely creates dramatically less air pollution and other externalities than even a single satellite launch.

Regarding the “unservable” locations, such as the ocean, those problems can be solved individually, such as with drones, signaling relays, fixed wireless, and other technologies, some of which have not been devised yet because of market pressure from Starlink. Blanketing the planet with satellites so some boats can get online feels a lot like using explosive ordinance to kill a mosquito, and I’m sure we could do a lot better solving these edge cases than this global orbital network owned by private enterprise.

We keep giving them the money before they do it and then don’t do anything completely within our power to hold them accountable when they don’t? Sounds like regulatory capture to me.

I’m talking about before then. Describing the failures of government systems at this point in history seems a bit like diagnosing why a car that’s at the bottom of a lake won’t start. We have to back up and look at the whole scenario to see why not to blame the engine or even pop the hood.

You can see a real life major success case in my previous example. It was not at all profitable to run telephone service to rural communities below a certain size at all, but it was mandated and they did it. We did subsidize its deployment, but they also did do it.

These systems can and do work, but other systems that they require have failed. It may not be practical or even possible to make every such system that society needs be immune to this sort of tampering, so until that is figured out, if ever, we must protect things we need that are susceptible to it, and put a stop to the bad behavior, not just what it caused.

JINKIES, a clue!

didn’t want to

That’s what regulations are for. We let them have their regional monopolies, and they build out service everywhere, even the nonprofitable builds. Then we just stopped doing that when the bribes got big enough, and this problem came into being. All those shacks in the middle of nowhere have phone lines because of this regulation, which is totally still on the books, by the way.

Alternatively, we could reinstate NASA’s funding, and come up with an actually sane way to get Internet service to remote areas that doesn’t involve what is essentially “space littering”. Putting thousands of satellites into space for something that can be done way more practically on the ground makes every future thing you do in space harder, and severely hampers land-based astronomy. They have to track every nut and bolt in orbit for as long as they stay there, or one of those things will blow something to smithereens, even if it is small, like a literal nut or bolt.

We’re letting private entities potentially trap our children here on Earth by failing to regulate and enforce what can be up there. If you envision a future with space colonies and exploration, SpaceX and Starlink are not how you get there. I’m sure its doing a great job letting yokels in the swamp watch foxnews.com though, so there’s that.

It was the wrong kind of evil that doesn’t make them any money and hurts sales.

This is what happens when you societally refuse to “pierce the corporate veil”. The criminals actually performing the illegal activity wear articles of incorporation like a costume or disguise, then when they get busted, they throw that costume in a dumpster and get a new one.

I think we need Fred, Daphne, and Velma to find out who this criminal really is.

Microsoft is really testing Xeno’s Paradox with this repeated firing of large percentages of their workforce.

I guess I don’t see a good reason to trust either, and setting up a scenario where those are being compared like I must is a false dichotomy.

In this “personal data economy” hellscape we’ve created, harvesting people’s private data is the default. Unless a product is advertising protecting your privacy like their marketing job depends on it, rest assured, they’re doing the opposite. Any company that does not have an explicit policy against data profiling is actively doing it or is gearing up to.

Probably because that stuff would fail if you carried it around in your pocket with your keys and folded it 8000 times, too.

We’re slowly but surely making each of the Star Trek technologies. Some of them like the teleporters with a “Heisenberg compensator” component are a little out there of course!

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The distinction is in the understanding of what you are doing. “Script kiddie” is considered derogatory because running scripts written by someone else does not require understanding of how those scripts achieve what they do. It is a distinction between hacking a system and turning on a machine and standing nearby while it hacks the system.

Given that definition and distinction, using an AI model to do this is merely changing where the scripts came from. It may work, but the person doing it is still a “script kiddie” by the common definition.