Medieval peasants had SOOO many holidays.

Holidays meant “you don’t have to work for the lord who owns your land”, but since they were subsistence farmers in the middle ages, that meant they still had to tend the animals and do the work on their own plots. They were absolutely still working during their “holidays”.

Refineries are generally built on land. And the petrochemical industry does not fuck around with direct safety (indirect, not so much)

If I screw up my visa to El Salvador, they send me home. If I screw up my visa to the US, they send me to El Salvador…

And this is why the rule says “no fire, cigarette, lighters, etc etc or things resembling them”.

If you have a second person running at you, the third is going to kick you off the site.

Yeah, but that’s mostly because it’s lumpsum. Over time, it’s not much at all.

Russia even did something completely new. They’re letting new recruits write off private debt!

As in, you owe me 76.000 euros for, I dunno, a fancy car. You join the military, and suddenly, you don’t owe me anything anymore. Yay for you (and sucks to be me. Good thing I can always enlist if I get into financial trouble)

Dutch people already fucking hate animal feed producers, because they’re the ones actively backing cattle farmers in their opposition of nitrogen regulation.

The nitrogen issue is a huge problem for basically every last bit of nature we have, and thanks to the cattle farmers lobbying, it’s limiting the building of roads and houses.

The animal food industry is directly and indirectly costing the Dutch people billions of euros.

This just further confirms they’re fucking assholes.

Starlink is already making more money than it costs to expand and operate, you are wrong.

Honestly, there are no realistic, reliable figures either way. There are plenty of guesstimates, and they show a profit now, but that with a very significant investment in growth. And that investment comes in large part from external sources, which means that when the happy time ends and the satellites fail at the same rate as they’re currently launches, they need to either make WAY more money, or rely on external funding.

and counter to your beliefs over the next 10 years I’d wager the starlink network will balloon to many times its current size, 20,000 plus satellites

Definitely, they’re on track to stabilize at around 36.000 with the current launch cadence. That’s where every new satellite is a replacement. But that doesn’t count money, which is the problem, and will be more of a problem when expenses replace growth.

and that cost will continue to decrease as the Falcon 9 program continues to improve and as starship becomes operational over the next few years.

Eh, I wouldn’t be too sure of that. Falcon 9 costs haven’t gone down in years. Falcon Heavy is supposed to be cheaper per ton, yet somehow is almost never used for Starlink or anything else. Starship isn’t even projected to be cheaper than Falcon 9 (I except in what are basically ads).

I love when someone publishes a paper that’s basically “Why is [super basic thing]?”.

“Why do we like looking at pretty things” is a pretty amazing question to ask.

“Top surgery makes you a top” is an amazing take.

When I calculate the “time of fun per euro spent” I’m always shocked how cheap videogames are. Even something like the new Doom, which is 70 euros for 16 hours of play, comes down to €4.40 per hour (or just under 14 minutes per euro). And we consider that ridiculously expensive for a “short” game.

Try doing anything for < €5 per hour.

Then I look at something like Warhammer total war, and I’m up to 132 minutes per euro spent

On https://satellitemap.space/ you can see the numbers pretty accurately under “status over time”. The current launch cadence is steady since mid 2022, and the burn rate is climbing to match. It seems to have a 5 year delay, but it’s possible the new satellites will last a little longer.

Which means that by mid 2027 earliest and mid 2029, the current “investment” in “growth” will have become the regular maintenance spending. And up to that point, maintenance costs will continue to climb to consume the entire investment budget.

Yeah, the big problem is that by definition most people live in the places where most people live. Urbanisation is over 80% in Europe and the US (and European countries hold a much looser definition of “urban” than the US).

To increase service to most people, you need to upgrade the entire world, which is expensive.

I’m not 100% sure they are not profitable.

I am. They’re reporting a profit right now because theyre calling the cost of new satellites as “investment” and not expenses. In a few years, when every satellite launched is a replacement, those “investments” become running costs, and there goes the profit.

I’ve got this rough theory that we can get decently historic pieces from around 50 AD (but only in central italy, nowhere else), around 1200, 1800 and then from 1900 to now. Everything else is even more of crapshoot.

Anything between Commodus and Charlemange is especially cursed

I do historical reenactment, so I have a hobby that involves researching the age of a certain embroidery stitch, for example.

I’ve learned to just switch off that part of my brain for games and movies, or I’d cry a lot more. I just project them to an alternate reality where they totally had nylon in 1200.

Signed, and why the hell isn’t this already a law?

That gigabit per second, without any datacap.

Twitter guy is ordering 1000 gigabyte worth of data, or slightly over 2 hours of internet in Sweden at full speed.

Yeah, but the 5000 people that applies to can’t afford the entire network.

And they first batches of the current network are at their end of life. That means that with the same level of investment, growth will slow down, which is terrible for venture capital.

And orbital mechanics is a bitch. You can’t add more speed to a certain area (like a city with a lot of people) and less to the empty ocean. So there’s a harsh density limit to your subscribes.

perpetually burning up satellites in the atmosphere is a pretty shitty business though.

Exactly. The business isn’t remotely sustainable. All that money being invested into new satellites will, by next year, need to be invested constantly to keep the network at the same size.

Starlink needs run as fast as it can, just to stay in the same place, and the investment money is finite when people see it’s not going to grow.