It's not that expensive. The Starlink Mini is around $200, and service is $50/mo for 100gb.
I've been somewhat skeptical of the addressable market (doesn't fiber + cell tower network offer good enough coverage?) but I know so many people who have put it on their RV, their boat, or are using it rurally that I've started changing my mind. And the service really is better than cell phone networks, which are far too patchy to provide reliable service at decent speed.
And you can put it on standby mode for $5/mo, so you're not even really locked into $50/mo if you're occasionally doing travel where you want to stay connected.
And in places like Africa, they've had to tightly rate limit new customers because demand is so high.
Yeah, as an RVer, I can tell you that you would probably be surprised by how much of the country does not have readily available cell service. And even if it does, they might not have it on your network.
I was paying more to have SIM cards for all of the big three, and getting much less out of it
The markets are additive. The great thing about Starlink is that it is GLOBAL. Meaning if you want to offer it for ships and planes (where there are no alternatives) you might as well also offer it to RV. And to rural people. And to the military. And you can do so in every country on the whole planet at the same time.
Having a few 1000s of sats to cover the whole planet is crazy efficient.
If you look at just the satellites, the build + launch costs are about $2.5M ea, which is impressive to be sure. But they only last 5 years, so that's $500k per year replacement costs. Then if you look at their capacity, they still can't meet their FCC / RDOF broadband designation speeds, but let's be generous and say they can serve 1000 simultaneous users per satellite (their current ratio, let's say it's good enough, incl. oversubscription ratio). So that already means 50%-100% of the entire monthly Internet bill from a consumer is going to just be replacing satellites. Let alone everything else to be an ISP.
This is very basic math. They need to launch more satellites if they want to hit their RDOF throughput goals and serve customers in the remaining areas. The most valuable extra-rural areas were low hanging fruit and already drying up.. the future addressable market is more dense and competitive suburban areas, which further limits the number of users per satellite because everyone shares the same spot beam spectrum.
But as you know well--having your personal connections to SpaceX it seems as you always defend them on HN--Starlink is about Golden Dome not consumer internet, so the private markets will fund it.
Yes and unless you're paying Starlink say $300/mo, they are taking a loss to serve you internet. Cities are especially difficult for them because more users are in the same spot beam so everyone shares the spectrum and they need even lower oversubscription ratios.
Yeah I don't know about the math. I've seen numbers that differ significantly from yours, but none which make it profitable at a reasonable price. I am sure he will continue to drop launch costs and I assume satellite improvements will make them able to serve more people, maybe orbit longer as they get smaller.
100 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €29/month in Europe, $39/month in the US.
200 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €49/month in Europe, $69/month in the US.
400+ Mbps down / 20-40 Mbps up (QoS higher priority), unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €69/month in Europe, $109/month in the US.
A good high-speed fiber connection is obviously better quality and value; but if you don't have one, then Starlink is absolutely the most competitive option you're going to get.
I don't have a lot of data points, but in metropolitan France at least I think you would always be better off with either a fiber or a 5G subscription, because it will be cheaper for more throughput, and because fiber is very widespread.
In Germany I think you are still better off with a cable subscription which also seems to be widespread in my experience and is cheaper than Starlink even if it's not as good as French deals (I only take in account offers without a contract for fairness, but if you don't mind you may be able to get even cheaper offers).
It's odd because I no longer really like ChatGPT. For chat-type requests, I prefer Claude, or if it's knowledge-intensive then Gemini 3 Pro (which is better for history, old novels, etc).
But GPT 5.3 Codex is great. Significantly better than Opus, in the TUI coding agent.
I don't know about Opus, but Codex suddenly got a lot better to the point that I prefer it over Sonnet 4.6. Claude takes ages and comes up with half baked solutions. Codex is so fast that I miss waiting. It also writes tests without prompting.
Why not? It's a physical building with lots of equipment that produces products shipped to its customers.
Its products are sequences of electrons, instead of atoms. But so are power plants. And in the context of what happens when they're hit by missiles, a factory, data center, and power plant all behave the same.
They have not; a social media post does not satisfy the requirements of 10 USC section 3252.
They are required to notify Congress (they have not), prepare a report with specific sections (they have not), and the reasons must fall within a set of categories outlined by statute (this does not).
There will be a court fight and they will lose, just like they lost the tariff battle, because of poor competence.
(Trump's post on Truth Social was actually fine. He said the USG would stop doing business with Anthropic, which is within its legal right. Hegseth's follow-on post is the problem. It is possible that Trump did not expect or want Hegseth to do that, that this was meant as bluster to bump along the negotiations; Hegseth has a recent history of stepping out of line within the administration and irritating people like Rubio.)
If the USG can mandate that everyone who works for a company that ever took a federal contract be genetically engineered, then I think they can tell people to not use Claude.
It's not either of those. Anthropic put a lot of effort into getting FedRAMP approved so the DOD could use them; they are now being punished for that, and the government at present has no other good options. Other options could of course be developed, but other vendors may question how unreliable and untrustworthy the current DOD leadership is as as customer.
Trump was impeached before and nothing happened. He can continue to ignore congress. I wouldn't be surprised if at this point he abolishes congress, and even jokes at a press conference saying "I am the Senate".
He was impeached by the House but that does nothing without the Senate carrying out its trial, which requires an onerous 2/3rds vote. Obviously without the trial in Senate, nothing happens, and nothing ever will until one party gets 2/3rds control.
In the US elections cannot be canceled even when Martial Law is declared. That does not mean a certain someone will not try to simply ignore the Constitution given his track record of simply ignoring the Constitution
The US President in 1944 was someone who wanted to have elections. In 2026 this is not the case anymore. How much of a difference it makes, nobody knows.
Elections won't be canceled. They're too important for the perception of legitimacy. Virtually every country on Earth now has elections. Russia, China, even North Korea has elections.
The modern playbook isn't to abolish elections, it's a combination of blocking opposition candidates, suppressing votes, intimidating voters, and lying about the results. That's what to watch for.
It's fairly easy to abuse a state of exception to cancel elections. Ukraine has done it, and it's been, along with banning opposition parties and attempting to imprison critics (Arestovych, etc.), a critical step in their government consolidating power.
It’s absurd to claim that Ukraine (I’ll assume you actually mean “Ukrainian leadership”) is somehow “abusing” a constitutionally mandated state of emergency.
>I’ll assume you actually mean “Ukrainian leadership”
What else could I possibly have meant, genius?
But yes of course they've taken advantage of it. Russia yeeting them out of its own territories and then invading The Ukraine is the best thing Zelensky could have asked for.
Ukraine's constitution doesn't allow elections when martial law is in effect. The US constitution has no such clause, nor anything else that would allow for delaying or canceling elections.
That's not to say it can't be done, but there's a huge difference in difficulty between doing what the country's constitution says, and doing the opposite. Especially in a country where elections are run by sovereign governments not under the control of the central government.
My point is about difficulty, not how “fine” it is. It’s really easy not to hold elections when your constitution says you can’t. It’s a lot harder when your constitution says you must, and also gives you no power over the governments who actually hold those elections. But obviously you’d rather grind your axe against Ukraine than actually discuss what you said before.
What are the states going to do with their local election results when the officials in Washington ignore them due to some manufactured state of emergency?
He already tried to get specific states' election outcomes discarded from the count on Jan 6, 2021.
Could you be more specific on who the officials in DC would be that could ignore the election results? The Clerk of the House, I assume? They have a fairly limited role, and it would probably be a short-lived disruption. The members-elect themselves seem to have all of the power, if my civics knowledge is correct.
I've never seen more enthusiasm about US politics than from Europeans (like pavlov there in Finland) and Australians. It makes meaningful discussion very difficult, online.
I lived in the US for years (including Jan 6 2021) and I’ve seen how this playbook was executed in Russia.
From my POV, Americans are hopelessly naive about their institutions holding up when it’s been demonstrated so many times that the guardrails are gone. It’s one of the reasons I left the country - I feel safer living next to Russia than in America.
I think that is a valid point, though I would like to see some meat in these proclamations of doom.
There are more guns than people in the US, and in nobody's wildest dreams does ICE (or the entire federal government, for that matter, including the military) have enough personnel to subdue even 10% of the population rising up. And while I think it is somewhat valid to assume the military leans a bit conservative, in my experience it is more of a true conservatism and not MAGA. I was in the military, and the vast majority of soldiers would 100% refuse to suppress US citizens.
Everyone thinks the adults are not really in charge in the GOP right now, but I think that's absolutely not true. They are just okay with the chaos right now because it's not impeding business and keeps people distracted. If MAGA gets too spicy and causes real civil unrest, we're going to find out very quickly who actually runs the show. And it ain't Donald Trump.
He doesn't, it's literally enshrined in the constitution. If he decides to violate that, it's him violating the constitution yet again, not proof that he has a say.
It would also probably be the last straw for a lot of people who has been limping along on the belief in free elections.
More importantly, this isn’t a “who’s going to stop me?” sort of thing like having ICE violate people’s civil rights. The power isn’t there. ICE does what Trump says because the law puts them under his control and he metaphorically signs their paychecks. If Trump orders state governments to do something with elections, that carries no weight. There’s no legal obligation or tradition to comply, no paychecks involved, nothing that would compel them to do it unless they actually wanted to. He’d have to use force, and it would be a gargantuan effort that would spur great resistance.
With a malevolent agent in the bully pulpit deliberately swamping the American zeitgeist with hostile nonsense ("flood the zone with shit"), it has become every American's duty to be on guard to avoid propagating the regime's bullshit. We are indeed at war, an information war of the US elites against We The People. So buck up.
I'm not american, and further, whether a department name change is a primary name change, or an alias slapped on, seems pretty low on the list of things to care about.
Is your argument that you're not involved enough in American politics to have responsible opinions about it, even though you're involved enough to comment in the first place?
I agree this in isolation is low stakes. The problem is the volume. The memetic assault is everywhere you turn, and propagating it helps the regime. And yes, it's far too easy to do accidentally. That doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate others calling it out.
Is your argument that you're not involved enough in American politics to have responsible opinions about it, even though you're involved enough to comment in the first place?
I wonder who or what you're replying to here. Certainly, it has no relation to anything I've said in this thread.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate others calling it out.
Again, who are you replying to with this?
I said "take it easy", not "don't ever bring that up".
You said "I'm not american" as the lead in to your comment. What was the point of saying this other than to disclaim the responsibility I invoked? (which technically wasn't even directed at you directly)
For the overall argument, you called out a comment for calling out a comment whose only contribution was to promote the term "DOW". If it had been a substantive comment that someone jumped on for merely using the term, you'd have had a reasonable point. But it wasn't.
This team politics, the me-vs-them, this red-vs-blue that your country, and you, and everyone upthread was precisely what I was commenting on. It's sad, it's destructive, and both sides of your little game have created the situation you are in today.
Jumping on a guy because he corrected someone, and immediately presuming it had an entire slew of politics attached, instead of it being a mere technical correction, is prime example of everything wrong with the US today. Everything.
Me vs them. One word means a political stance. The wrong thing said, accidentally, you're the enemy. It's literally sad. I stand, as a Canadian, watching my brother make horrible life choices, and I want to help, yet I just see more anger and hate and discord.
None of this serves any of you well, it all serves your enemies. Right now, your acts, and the act of the guy super-upset that someone said DOW, serves your enemies. 90% of this is fueled by state actor controlled bots and comments, and you guys eat it up as manna.
So yes, I have an entirely reasonable point. The guy literally might have had no idea. I certainly didn't. You don't even know if that dude is american or not!
DOW is all over the news.
The presumption is wrong. The anger is wrong. The hate is wrong. The attitude is wrong.
On both sides. Of both sides of your little squabble.
I don't care who started it. The entire lot of you need a parent to come into the room, and tell just that, and that you both should go to your room.
And if you don't watch it? If you don't stop stepping out of bounds. If you don't halt it.
The rest of as are going to have to.
And that would be the saddest thing of all. For all of us.
Framing the argument here as "both sides" team sport is not appropriate. Did these "state actor controlled bots" also create the term DOW? No, the needlessly-divisive propaganda is now coming directly from the White House itself.
I'm a libertarian who sees both leftist and rightist thinking as two halves of a complete analysis. This situation isn't "red-vs-blue". Rather this is social-media-psychosis-red vs everybody else.
If social-media-psychosis-blue was in power and similarly attacking our society, I would be calling that out as well! But they aren't, and they haven't really been in powerful national political offices, because so far the blue extremists' main political success has been to just sandbag the Democratic party. (ostensibly because blue extremism runs counter to the parties' sponsors' interests, confining professional blue extremists to culture war topics that most people see through)
As I said, the fundamental dynamic with the original comment is that "correcting" to "DOW" was its only point. If you just casually heard the term in some [likely government] news media, you're not going to rush out and repeat it as a correction for someone saying DOD.
But sure, we can't really still assign a known motive - maybe that commenter was pointing out the "war" part to try and highlight what this administration shamelessly wants to use "AI" for. But the easy way to avoid being jumped on is to include some constructive context for what one is actually trying to get at, rather than leaving readers to apply Occam's razor themselves. So either way, that response to it was not unreasonable.
There is so much ensnarled in US mind-think here, it's difficult to respond cogently. Every fiber of your response is keyed to knock down "the other guy".
Let's start with this.
Framing the argument here as "both sides" team sport is not appropriate. Did these "state actor controlled bots" also create the term DOW? No, the needlessly-divisive propaganda is now coming directly from the White House itself.
You are literally framing the argument as left vs right, whilst trying to pin this very mode of thought upon me. This is because you cannot see the world any other way. Meanwhile, at no point did I ever, not once, say the correction was wrong. Not once.
So mired in this horrid quicksand, this "thought-scape" is your political world-view, that if someone says "Don't say that in such a mean way, be nice to one another", your immediate thought is "OMG! Siding with the enemy! Attack!".
The entirety of US political culture is now as that of an abusive family. The son that grows up with an alcoholic, abusive father, and is beat, yet the cycle repeats with his own son. It is learned behaviour. It is difficult to stop. Even desiring to do so, the son fails when he is the father. And you and all your brothers are caught in it.
The post I replied to painted "the guy", and you have painted "the guy", as someone on a mission to aid "the other team". His mere utterance of a single word, to correct to a name he believes to be the "new name", is viewed as you as a "bad thing".
And this is the problem I speak of. Not correcting someone back. The thought process and the mode of correction. As I said, the anger, the hate, the emotion. And it is emotion laden, not thought driven. It isn't logical, it's reactive emotion.
And yes, it only serves your enemies.
I'll be very blunt here, and I am speaking over decades, not right now. History is vital to comprehension of something like this. When the rest of the world looks at the US. When Canada, the UK, Europe, and all friendlies to the US look at the US?
We can barely tell the differences between your two political parties.
Viewed from the politics of another nation, your left and right are functionally identical. There's zero difference.
The above sentence should make you happy. It really should! It is a true sentence, and what it means is that there is more that binds Americans together, than that which pulls it apart. Yet I am willing to bet that your hackles bristled at such a concept.
And the very fact that they did, is the problem here.
--
Let's discuss state actors, because you seem unaware of how it works. The entire point is not any specific action. It is not about this administration. In fact, the current administration is a product of this decades, yes decades long propaganda by state actors.
The entire point, the easiest way to think of it, is that it amplifies any angst, concern, hostility against "the other team". Surely you are aware of Cambridge Analytics, well that's child's play in comparison, and what I am describing is not secret, or new information, it is well documented, well known, and simply is.
As your two sides become more hostile, you make poor choices out of panic, anger, angst.
Look at what happened with the last US election. Each side terrified about the other gaining power, and so one side hides that an octogenarian might be suffering from old age. Hiding this was a morally repugnant act. Meanwhile the other side chooses someone that much of their party felt they had no other choice but to go with.
Neither party should have chosen either these two. Each is choosing people so aged, so old, that they are barely capable of running the country. I wouldn't want an 80 year old person in charge of anything of this scope and size, yet each of your teams think this is just grand, great, a wonderful choice.
Why?
Because "OMG no, the other guy!"
Both sides are making choices, not with the goal of "What is best for my country", but instead "If the other guy gets in power, the entire country will be destroyed, so we must fight the other team, THEY are the enemy of the true America!". Meanwhile, 99.9% of the decisions made by an administration are functionally identical regardless of the party.
Whether team red or team blue in the last 50 years, the wars continue, the foreign politics is mostly the same. The US has been withdrawing from the world under each team, bombing the middle east under each team, and the list goes on. The debt isn't a problem because of the current administration, it's a problem because of all of them. Every administration for the last 50 years.
There are a myriad of ways to resolve this problem.
There are a myriad of ways to make it worse.
Making presumptions about someone because of one word they say, and jumping down their throat about it, is not how to make it better.
It's how to make it worse.
It's everything that's wrong with America today.
And I know you cannot see it, for your reply shows you cannot.
Look again at my words:
So cut the guy some slack.
Did I say don't correct him? Did I say he shouldn't be corrected? Did I argue whether or not the point was wrong or right? Nope. Not at all.
Instead, I simply said to take it easy in correcting someone.
In the lingo and context of my words in this reply to you, I was saying "Don't make it worse".
Your response was "OMG but he was purposefully aiding the other team!", without any knowledge that it was so.
My response was "be nice to one another, in how you argue".
--
I have written this response hoping that you may grok of what I speak. That you might understand that it is the way you are carrying your argument that is the issue. Not that you have a dispute. The presumptive, hostile response. The immediate assignment of motive and judge/jury/executioner attitude of "Nope, he said a word because of the other team!" thought.
It's all wrong.
It's wrong if it is them or you.
It's wrong no matter who does it, or why.
It doesn't matter who started it.
Go back to your room. You, and everyone else in the US.
Go back to your room, be quiet, and think about it.
I'm not the one writing ever-longer screeds. Perhaps you need to reflect on your own anger here?
Factually, you have written a lot of things I do agree with. I'm not new to this rodeo. I've been around the left-right gamut. Reading Moldbug is actually what started the end of my rightist-fundamentalist phase.
I've never been friendly to this entrenched corporate power structure that backs both major parties as if they're sponsoring racehorses. I had been both sidesing up until June of 2020. I'm not sitting here going "How could anyone ever vote for Trump?!?!". In 2016, I was telling my blue tribe friends that he had a good chance of winning, as they stood there aghast.
But after an abject failure of a concrete term in office, where the guy basically never stopped divisively campaigning? When faced with a pan-political national emergency, his response was effectively dereliction of duty?? If he had merely led us during Covid, like any other President of the past thirty years (and like most state governors tried to do), I suspect he would have had a shoe-in second term.
So voting for more of that in 2020 or 2024? That is embracing the exact hot mess of crazy that you're condemning here. Obviously the people who voted for him did not feel that way. From everything I've been able to surmise this is due to their media sources making them think the Democratic party is just as crazy. But from what I've seen much of this is based around sensationalizing some otherwise banal realities, and the Democratic party itself is nowhere near as far gone as the Republican party - the prominent members are still basically milquetoast status-quo-supporting bureaucrats who pay some lip service to the extremists, rather than having been taken over by a strongman primarily pandering to the extremists.
For example, one concrete data point:
> We can barely tell the differences between your two political parties.
Do you think a President Harris would be threatening war with Canada? That should be pretty pronounced and quite pertinent to you, right?
Your first sentence is bizarre, considering this post is longer than you last. And really, more engagement is a bad thing? Come now.
I feel you're still not getting it though. Because it's not about which side is worse, or who started it, or who's right about something, or who voted for who. It's about how this is discussed, how this is handled.
That's the biggest problem there is.
And yes, I said "barely", and it's quite true. A Democrat could easily be elected just as unhinged. An independent. Yet this sort of highlights my point.
If you stand Trump up against any other US president, just as with an ape or a human, he's literally identical on 98% of things. And really, it's more like 99.9% from an external viewpoint. Yet just as with an ape, that small amount can result in startling differences.
But your parties? The differences are barely noticeable.
> Your first sentence is bizarre, considering this post is longer than you last
Half my post was trying to explain some context where I am coming from. I was addressing the general tone of your post, and pointing out why I was not going to pick through each point line by line trying to tease out nuance. What's bizarre is for you to go here, as it seems exactly like a condemnation "keyed to knock down "the other guy".
As far as both the parties ? I just said that I have long acknowledged the commonalities. I had never voted for a major party candidate in a national election until I voted Biden in 2020. Doing so required swallowing a lot of pride, and I considered it as voting conservatively due to getting older. I can certainly imagine Trumpism's core message of "burn it all down" as being highly appealing to younger me - remember how I said I was telling aghast friends in 2016 that Trump had a good chance at winning?
You also dodged my direct question of whether a President Harris would be threatening war with Canada. Details like this are precisely why there is something here worth fighting for and not merely "both sidesing" it as merely a communication style.
Trying to move on to constructive topics, you say this is about "how" is it discussed. How exactly do you think the bare repetition of partisan propaganda should to be discussed, regardless of the actual intentions? Do we need to treat every commenter with kid gloves, detail the actual wider context, get lost in the semantics of whether it is a "legal name change" (even though the legality is not the actual reason to reject the name!), all the while hoping they will be receptive to those points, etc?
Because the way I see it, a comment that is merely a "correction" in terminology is nothing but flamebait - essentially the same thing as tone/terminology policing by the blue extremists. It's exactly the type of thing that needs to be shut down quickly if we're trying to have constructive discussions.
So when I write at length, it's worthy of note. When you do, it's for "reasons".
When I shorten my responses, I'm now "dodging" questions, is that it? So no matter my post length, I'm in error?
And I directly answered your question, by saying there is no appreciable difference between US presidents, predicated upon party lines, when viewed externally.
There is no other way to answer, for no one on this planet, even those scornful of Trump, ever expected this 51st state nonsense prior to his term. No one. At all.
I know nothing of Harris, and even if I did, comparatively, Trump's behaviour in this respect was a surprise.
Do ypu think any Canadian thinks this will be isolated to this single administration?
No, the thrust of that remark wasn't about the length. Seriously, go back and read your own tone. I said I agreed with a lot of what you wrote, factually. But it felt like you were trying to beat me over the head with a barrage of points - that same team sport dynamic you're bemoaning.
> Do you think any Canadian thinks this will be isolated to this single administration?
I don't know - I cannot answer for what Canadians think. I would hope not, but if you do then it is not really my place to dissuade you from thinking so.
As an American I hope that the reaction to the Trumpist destruction will be some long-overdue major reforms (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092688) and accountability for the current regime that might engender trust and repairing of relationships over time. But I was also hopeful that my fellow countrymen wouldn't be foolish enough to vote for a candidate with a proven track record of "death to America", so I'm probably being overly hopeful here.
Uh, what?! You really, really aren't getting it. Discussing a point isn't the issue. Debating with someone, your position, isn't the issue.
It's the presumptive assignment of "this other side is the enemy" and "he said a word, thus he must be the enemy" and all that blather which I've described repeatedly up-post. And yes, you were complaining about length, else you would not have mentioned it.
I can tell you won't get what I say, no matter what I write here.
All I will close with, is that while I see you are working on ways to resolve some issues, the single biggest issue is money. You need to remove almost all campaign funding from elections. Capping all funding to $1000/person, and $1000/company, along with lots of other things (such as, no "gifts", no donations, etc) would make an enormous difference.
Not only would it make it easier for grass roots, new parties to rise up, it would also remove all dependence upon mega-corps to successfully run a campaign.
You should put that at the top of the list.
In a lot of countries (including Canada), if you go to lunch with a politician, you cannot pay for his lunch. Nor he, yours. That's illegal.
Well I do consider the Trump regime my enemy. By all measures their goals appear to be to drastically harm the position of the United States. And not in a positive-sum competitive way like another country, but rather outright negative-sum looting and destruction.
But that doesn't mean I consider its grassroots supporters my enemy. I understand, sympathize, and often share their frustrations! You should have been able to glean that from my few preceding comments. The problem is that they're stuck in horrible media bubbles telling them that anybody who deviates from the Party mantra is their enemy - and this has been going on much longer than Trump.
I have long tried to engage on the issues they claim to care about, often in person, seemingly to no avail. One stark example I have is an extended family member complaining about GPS satellites tracking their location through their phone. This is something I myself care deeply about, and also know a thing or two about as well. But trying to make the point to them that there are some understandable mechanics whereby you can start taking concrete steps to at least reduce the tracking? Zero recognition or interest!
The only conclusion I can see is that they use the vague paranoia and blaming "the government" as a group identity bonding mechanism. By deviating from the mantras, I declare myself as an outsider who in their eyes is merely part of the problem.
But anyway, that's my trying to explain where I am coming from, which hopefully addresses the thrust of your point. But from your past few comments, I've gotten the impression you're not really reading my explanations here. Rather you're doing the exact thing you bemoan - seeing me as the enemy, ignoring my substantive engagement, and only aiming to beat me down regardless.
And sure maybe this makes sense from the Canadian perspective these days - cut off ties, erect barriers to protect yourselves, and try to move on. I cannot say, and I wouldn't blame you! But don't lecture me about it with some assumed moral authority, especially regarding the response to a single-word non-substantive flamebait.
(As for campaign finance reform that was addressed in my point #3. We used to have a semblance of that before the Supreme Council invalidated it. My list wasn't really meant to be ordered per se)
... signal a particular vice. It's vice signalling. We generally think of war as bad and try to avoid it, most especially the people tasked with fighting said wars.
Nothing has changed about the performative-ness, in fact if anything it's gotten more performative and hollow. They just signal vices rather than virtues, so a bunch of rightist-flavored-Lenin's useful idiots think it is fresh or effective or anti-"woke" or at least different.
The "Orwellian newspeak" at least makes an effort to aim for positive values, despite falling short. That's the point.
Also, please define what you mean by "leftist". These days it seems like it gets applied to anybody who believes in Constitutionally-limited government and the rule of law. That used to just be called being an American, but social media is a hell of a drug.
The product is a service, and they agreed to a contract. Now they don't like the contract.
Is your view that contracts with the government should be meaningless? That the government should be able to unilaterally, and without recourse, change any contract they previously agreed to for any reason, and the vendor should be forced at gunpoint to comply?
If you do believe this, then what do you believe the second order effects will be when contracts with the government have no meaning? How will vendors to the government respond? Will this ultimately help or hinder the American government's efficacy?
Hegseth trying to play “I’m altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further” just shows this gang’s total lack of comprehension of second-order effects.
The 40k lines of code a day crows are amusing. In solving any problem solvable by code, there's a ratio of non-coding work to coding work, and codex et al all help immensely with the coding work but help less with the non-coding work.
Non-coding work is thinking about the system architecture, thinking about how data should flow, thinking about the problem to be solved, talking with people who will use it, discovering what their objectives are.
Producing 40k lines a code per day simply means you're not doing any of that work: the work that ensures you're building something worth building.
Which is why the result is massive, pointless things that don't do the things people actually need, because you've not taken any time to actually identify the problems worth solving or how to solve them.
It's a form of mania that recalls Kafka's The Burrow, where an underground creature builds and builds an endless series of catacombs without much purpose or coherence. When building becomes so easy when it was so hard -- and when it becomes more fun to build and watch codex's streams of diffs fly by, than to plan -- we forget the purpose of building, and building becomes its own purpose, which is why we usually so little actual productive impact on the world from the "40k lines of code a day" cohort.
I've been somewhat skeptical of the addressable market (doesn't fiber + cell tower network offer good enough coverage?) but I know so many people who have put it on their RV, their boat, or are using it rurally that I've started changing my mind. And the service really is better than cell phone networks, which are far too patchy to provide reliable service at decent speed.
And you can put it on standby mode for $5/mo, so you're not even really locked into $50/mo if you're occasionally doing travel where you want to stay connected.
And in places like Africa, they've had to tightly rate limit new customers because demand is so high.
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