“I can complain about Starlink raising their prices, but it’s the only genuine option we have,” former Nebraska state senator and Republican Julie Slama told the Washington Post last month. “Once they have rural customers on their service with no meaningful alternatives, they’re free to raise prices at will.”
Yes, that is what everyone has been warning about for years and why we want the communication monopolies torn down… Fucking leopards running loose out here eating faces and they still just kinda shrug and go “wish there was an alternative to letting all the leopards run free eating our faces”.
To be fair, if you’ve ever had to use HughesNet, a leopard eating your face is a welcome change of pace.
Goddamn HughesNet. I had vehicle dealerships on that fucking piece of shit for their parts system and payroll. What a horrible service, for thousands of dollars a month.
Brother… You speak the truth…
“I can complain about Starlink raising their prices, but it’s the only genuine option we have,” former Nebraska state senator and Republican Julie Slama told the Washington Post last month. “Once they have rural customers on their service with no meaningful alternatives, they’re free to raise prices at will.”
Should we pull up the record and see who voted to allow that to happen in Nebraska while on the subject?
“We only have the option to use this hyper expensive private satellite service… because we spent all of the wired rollout grants/funding on bullshit.”
because we spent all of the wired rollout grants/funding on bullshit.
Oh, it’s worse than that. The grant money was the wrong party color, so it had to be disposed of rather than lead to a positive outcome.
But you see, if they took the grant money and used it for something that people liked, they’d have to admit that the party they don’t like did something useful! Can’t have that!
How could someone who knows all about computers and networking not predict the logistics problems for such projects? /s
That tweet is almost impressively stupid.
What the fuck does the download size of Wikipedia have to do with anything?
I can also fit some of the largest LLMs on my phone. Where is all that AI investment going to???
Bad example, maybe.
The world’s first trillionaire doesn’t get to call anyone else greedy.
Clearly it does.
The country that invented the internet… has the worst internet infrastructure in the developed world. Worse than some developing countries too. Astonishing.
astonishing
No, its pretty in character.
No, we in Germany are almost as bad for almost those prices.
That’s more astonishing to me.Is it really??
I used to be jealous of some friends with their 10mbit symmetric lines while I was getting a whopping 4mbps (down only) on cable. (Obviously… not recent).
While most around us (Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands for example) have either 10gbit fiber amd or cheap internet, Germany meanwhile has much DSl or coax commections. Fiber is getting popular and is subsidized heavily (you basically receive it for free to the house when signing a contract for some years) a good chunk of seniority are refusing it with “Well, DSL was already enough for me. I don’t need this new fangled stuff. And it costs 75-100% thab my current contract for more unneeded bandwidth. Nah, I’ll pass on the offer”.
Meanwhile the grandson in 30 years will be very “thankful” for a house in a good condition and having to order a telecom contractor to connect the house to fibre network for 10k €. Just because granny was (not unjustified) a bit cheap.
And this analogy can be expanded to the highest of governments in Germany.
Old rich people, disconnected from reality, ruling over the commoners and deciding their fates.
Just recently our local newspaper showed an example of it.
A divorced/widowed father with a grods income of 5000€ would receive more state child support than an equal family with an income of 3500€.Just why…
Quote from the paper (feel free to use a translator of choice)
Das Finanzministerium nannte Beispiele. Demnach soll beispielsweise ein Paar aus Pflegekraft und Busfahrer mit je 2.800 Euro brutto und zwei Kindern 2028 eine Entlastung von rund 632 Euro im Jahr bekommen. Ein Paar aus Erzieher und Elektrikerin mit je 3.200 Euro brutto und zwei Kindern bekommt rund 642 Euro mehr.
Ein Paar aus Lehrerin und Ingenieur mit je 5.000 Euro brutto und zwei Kindern kann mit rund 678 Euro mehr rechnen. Eine alleinerziehende Pflegekraft mit 2.800 Euro brutto und zwei Kindern soll mit rund 468 Euro entlastet werden, eine alleinerziehende Erzieherin mit 3.200 Euro brutto und zwei Kinder mit rund 471 Euro und ein alleinerziehender Lehrer mit 5.000 Euro brutto und zwei Kindern mit rund 496 Euro.(I really hope I understood the article correctly and not making a fool out of myself. But the idiocracy should be enough to see where it’s generally going here in Germany)
That is… frankly just nuts, and I’m sorry to hear it.
It sounds like the majority are still on the same connections I was envious of 30ish years ago, and the government certainly isn’t helping things.
It got certainly faster (16 to 50 mbps for me. Which is moatly sufficient) and most of the MSP cliemts I work with have a 100-500mbps to a rare 1gbps wire but it’s rarely a given.
the US didn’t invent the internet. yes the US made ARPNET, which is the underlying functions that the internet was built upon. but the internet that we know today wasn’t created in the US, the WORLD wide web was created in Switzerland in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). the world wide web, or the internet, uses a lot of the same protocols that ARPNET created. but ARPNET is not and was not world wide until Sir Tim used the same protocols to allow regular people to traverse ARPNET from around the world. the US built the underlying tech, but Sir Tim Berners-Lee and CERN built the internet on top.
The web is a layer on top of the internet. They’re not the same thing.
the web layer is the most important part of the internet. without it it wouldn’t have taken off like it did in the 90s. it is the key part that made the internet the internet. without it, the internet we, you and i, wouldn’t be communicating right now.
I just can’t imagine having such excessive wealth and not saying “eh, whatever” when someone tells me I’m losing money on some internet fees.
You fucker, you could make the world at least a tiny bit better for billions of people at virtually no expense to you, but you just keep playing your stupid fucking rich manchildren games with your billionaire parasite buddies.
Keep grinding bro, maybe this way you’ll get used to the feeling of having your bones crushed in the grinder.
It makes more sense when you realize his wealth is all smoke and mirrors based on a shared lie.
That’s the thing with massively wealthy people (which until recently meant billionaires and near-billionaires). They’re not interested in making the world better for others. The one thing that makes them happy is… more billions added to their wealth. Why? They don’t know… but they must have it. But the happiness is only temporary - until they become unhappy again and crave even more billions.
You don’t get that wealthy in the first place by not gobbling up every fucking penny you have a chance to. You think he’s just going to take the dub and stop?
It’s not evem really losing money it’s inventing in the infrastructure youre using to make money.
How else you get to inflate the stock price?
You got to get the returns on it.It isn’t just the company leader. It is the brigade of product managers, pricing accountants and more that are involved in these types of corporate consensus decisions.
There is a fleet of people who see their bonuses, commissions, and rev share increasing.
Greed is contagious.
That’s why you’d never attain that wealth.
I know, he’s better than me by a factor of his net worth divided by my net worth. So around, what, 100 millions times?
Not better, just a hoarder.
It’s why there are no good rich people.
We’ve noticed that our service no longer works properly, so we’re going to charge you more for it.
You should only be a Starlink customer if you have no other feasible choice.
Sending money to a clown and NOT expecting a fucking circus, are we?
“High demand” meaning underprovisioning.
This is sooo on cue, right as my AI loving IT colleagues are talking about getting starlink, only to have a backup internet connection in case of an outage.
Ah great. My Starlink hardware just arrived.
I wasn’t charged any high-demand surcharge though. I probably wouldn’t have ordered it if I had to pay one of those.
I don’t think my area will have high demand for Starlink anyway. Even their fastest options are slow. There are options for like 5-10x the speed around the same price in my area. The only downside: There’s like a 50% chance of lightning frying my modem each year, and it takes like a week to get a tech on site.
Starlink is a great backup connection. It’s cheap to just keep in standby mode (~$15/month, IIRC). An unexpected, heavy surcharge might be a deal breaker though
I believe we’d rather see honest waitlists.
Billionaires will kill us all, while millionaires scream and yell. Thousandaires defend them both, while we all suffer in hell.
That’s great, gonna have to print it out on stickers and place them around town.
dramatic much?
Over promise and under deliver, the musk way. Fucking clown ass Nazi piece of shit. I know there’s not a lot of viable alternatives, but if you’re using a Nazi service, I lack sympathy when the Nazi raises your prices.
Meanwhile the airlines rolling out “free Starlink WiFi” without so much as an asterix about who provides and controls the bits you’re sending through it.
Imagine how much data musk will be able to glean getting free access to travelers internet habits and probably a lot more.
If they’re offering “free Starlink WiFi” they are telling you who is offering it. If they are offering “free inflight WiFi” they are hiding it
They must always know where we are, but we must never know where they are. Funny how that happened while lawmakers stood idly by.
stood idly by
funny way of saying ‘actively participated’
I was just on a flight with that, and it was ass. I got a few text messages in and out, but that was about it.
I think most of the data going to and from your phone is gonna be https, I doubt it would provide much value tbh
Unfortunately there’s still plenty of unencrypted traffic from normal usage (e.g. DoH is still fairly rare).
I mean, I guess you can get a list of domain names accessed, but accessible data is still quite limited imo.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather avoid it entirely or use a VPN if I’m on such a network if I must.
Some places have to use starlink sadly, like the ones in remote zones and islands in the middle of the ocean
Geo makes more sense for theses use cases. Yes you’ll have more ping. But for data dumps it matters not.
What makes sense is the quality of service offered at the price point. There’s a reason why Starlink outcompeted Hughes so badly.
Yeah, but as this article points out, the price point is a lie.
The price point has been very much true, it is just early on the enshittification curve.
With these price hikes, we’ll see.
My point was that Hughes was really bad.
So basically:
His companies are hilariously insolvent, so he rolls them all together and does the biggest IPO of all time to raise money.
But he still needs more money.
So then he tries to do a corporate bond issuance… doesn’t go super duper well.
So he still needs more money.
Welp, ok then, jack up fees, whatever, not very original, but does at least kind of work.
Any takers as to whether or not he’ll still need more money?
If you guess correctly, you get a free Neuralink installed in your head that you can send OTA bluetooth firmware overrides to nearby devices with your brain!
Or well, maybe it works… maybes its the opposite of that. Whatever.
… But you can recharge them with your solar roof tiles! And then get in your Tesla Roadster! And then take a Starship ICBM flight to Hong Kong or Moscow or Buenos Aires or Rome! And then take the hyperloop to Antarctica!
Yeah, none of that is a sign of a thriving business empire if you ask me.
Not sure I want those to actually thrive though.
