The word “we” is doing heavy lifting there.

The ones that had enormous numbers of people having public meltdowns because they had to wear a few grams of paper over their mouth and nose.

No, you just defend his worthless shit to the death. Pull the other one. It plays “Jingle Bells”.

You’ve got your head so firmly placed up your ass you’ve adapted to breathing methane directly.

Like hundreds of millions of people use it every day ??

[citation needed]

It’s adorable that you think the USA has “oversight” over its megacorporations.

I hated Donald Trump in the '80s already. I thought he was a dishonest blowhard and was amazed that anybody believed anything that came out of his mouth.

I hated Elon Musk from pretty much the moment he showed up as the “darling awkward little geek bro”. He always struck me as inauthentic and a little bit stupid. (I was wrong on that last point, mind. He’s a lot stupid.)

…

I don’t even know where to begin to unpack this.

I guess I’ll start with the “nefarious shit”. Nefarious shit like taking periodic snapshots of your screen (against your will) to feed an AI? That kind of nefarious shit?

I’m sorry, Mr. Aneurysm: You’re a “feminist” who “doesn’t use Google Translate”. And who somehow thinks that your “radical feminism” is a topic suited to a thread about STARLINK in a group called ENOUGH MUSK SPAM.

I meant what I said before. The kiddie table is thataway. Go to it. Adults are talking here.

If you can’t figure out my possible nationalities by a quick application of common sense, it explains fully why you want to keep sliding manosphere bullshit talking points into an anti-Elon Musk group: You’re too stupid to live.

No amount of you pretending to speak Chinese via Google Translate is going to change this. Now piss off, little child. Adults are speaking. Go toddle off to the kiddie table and play with the rest of your breed.

Huh. Aneurysms that make you write in Google-translated other languages. Cool.

I’m very sorry to hear about your aneurysm and how it’s impacted your ability to say anything that’s even vaguely related to the group you’re posting to. I’m also very sorry to hear about your getting hit in the head by a shovel as an infant, thus causing you to say really stupid things as well.

Thoughts and prayers and healing vibes your way.

I’m very sorry to hear about your aneurysm and how it’s impacted your ability to say anything that’s even vaguely related to the group you’re posting to.

Thoughts and prayers and healing vibes your way.

I’ve heard rumours that there’s places out there that have so many of these they have to sell them!

The only problem there is that you then have Linux running which is one of the most actively user-hostile things you can run.

And this is in a world where every major software vendor is turning their software against you. It’s still less hostile a user experience than Linux.

I trust Huawei a fuckton more than I’d trust Google or Apple or Microsoft or …

And by the time I’m in the market for another phone/PC it won’t be just Huawei making HarmonyOS phones/PCs.

The fact, however, that the authors think the threat is superintelligent tells me that they’re actually the “fear-hyper” crowd of AI enthusiasts. They’re the crowd using fear of TEH SINGGOOLARITTEE to sell people on the idea that degenerative AI is “close to being real intelligence”.

And it’s not.

And it never will be.

Which makes the rest of the article just scrap heap material now.

Yep. Spitting facts like degenerative AI.

Hallucinated facts.

That’s the main problem, yes. Starlink is not going to be useful to anybody living in a city. There’s no need for expensive, low-grade Internet when you can for a fraction of the price just get physical connection. I mean … your apartment building is not going anywhere anytime soon, right? So that’s 60% of your prospective market gone. (The people who travel and want to use it, and the weirdos who orally service Kaptain Ketamine, are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the market size Starlink needs to pay for operations so they can be ignored for analysis.)

So about 40% of the planet lives in rural areas, and that’s the only market of any size that’s going to be a credible one for Starlink. The people who live on the edges of that already have technology available to connect. My uncle, living way off in the boondocks near Vanderhoof, for example, has a direct microwave link. He’s not going to be using Starlink; it’s literally an order of magnitude more costly than what he’s got. Similarly most of mainland China (well in excess of 80%) has 5G coverage with 100% coverage due by the end of the 2025. That’s a sizable chunk of that rural market gone too! So cut away that 40% to … let’s be generous and say 20%. (I’d actually guess closer to 15%.) That’s who’s left for needing a Starlink-like service.

But that’s not the only problem …

Oopsie! It turns out that worldwide about 10% of the world’s money rests in rural areas. (In the USA it’s actually closer to 8.5%, but let’s be generous again. It won’t matter.) The very people who would be the target market for Starlink can’t afford Starlink. So even if all of the 40% rural inhabitants around the world had to use Starlink, most of them wouldn’t because it’s too expensive. And Starlink’s prices aren’t dropping; they’re doing the opposite.

In the mean time, as shown in China, the alternatives aren’t sitting there idle. While Starlink balloons its operational costs and maintenance costs, other countries are also spreading 5G coverage, or microwave relay coverage, or fibre networks, or, or, or. They’re going to cut into Starlink’s revenue either by taking customers away or forcing prices down.

Starlink is not a viable business.

Closer to the latter than the former.

I wouldn’t discount people with brains coming up with something Starlink-like that is viable enough that it could at least eke out an OK profit, but Musk can’t do anything right.