Famously, in 1974

There’s a ton of pictures from that visit, as well.

How many kwh/year does one paycheck cover?

I don’t doubt the congestion is real, as consumption - especially data consumption - rapidly expands to fill its container.

I might suggest that some of the early adopters and insiders are receiving subsidy rates in order to goose Elon’s investor briefs on adoption. And the folks on the back end who are eating the exploding prices exist to pad Musk’s proposed future revenue estimates.

“We added 10,000 people a day for the last 30 days, even as we raised rates from $10/day to $100/day!” tells a very attractive story to investors without tipping your hand and revealing what the next 30 days will look like. But it also becomes a kind-of self-fulfilling prophecy, when it results in banks giving you another hundred billion dollars in low-interest credit to expand your network.

It’s sort of the problem akin to robbing Ft. Knox. Most people just don’t have a bag big enough to carry it all away. The Chinese economy is one of the few big enough to support the kind of multi-billion dollar data centers that can accumulate and process data at scale.

But even beyond that, a lot of the modern underlying technology for AI is in the process of relating the data and inferring the resulting answer. Where Altman’s whiners want to claim theft is in the raw data they’ve (illegally) scraped and compiled. Where Chinese firms have innovated is in the speed and accuracy of aggregating the data and returning useful results.

One reason why Altman keeps saying he needs another trillion dollars for hardware and electricity is that his models are shit and his approach is largely brute-force. His overseas rivals - DeepSeek, Moonshot, Stepfun, etc - have invested far more in the actual logical design of their systems. The end result is the kind of video rendering that rendered Sora obsolete almost as soon as it was released. And the kind of advanced coding that’s scaring the shit out of the engineers at Claude and Gemini.

That’s why dense urban communities prefer using ground fiber and big routing stations to cellar satellite, sure.

But now we’re talking about the real bandwidth capacities, not the pricing for connectivity.

You all acting like green energy has to be mutually exclusive to one another.

I certainly don’t. But I agree, there’s a lot of ideas that die on the cutting room floor because they don’t pander to a specific lobbying interest.

This is why satelite internet is a dead end.

Idk if I’d call it a dead end so much as a service of last resort. There’s definitely utility in a global network of always-on wireless communication. But because it’s expensive to deploy and saturated quickly, you can’t operate at the volume of a wired network or local wireless system.

So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.

I think you’ve answered your own question. The incremental value of satellites as part of a weapons system far outstrips normal business applications (nevermind consumer markets).

But you still run into the same constraints at a certain scale. Even if your transmission system is unassailable, it cannot support the volume of traffic of wired connections. So you’re still going to see drone pilots with enormous spools of fiberoptic wire moving along the battlefront.

This isnt a random usage fee, this is for areas they claim are too busy, so you gotta pay if you want to gain access.

Congestion pricing is the PC way to describe it.

Price gouging is the more honest term.

There was no world where SpaceX could support unlimited customers in a cell region.

You can charge a fixed rate and ration bandwidth during peak use.

Or you can charge a variable rate in order to maximize revenue during peak demand.

One maximizes utility while the other maximizes profit.

Had a friend who did maintenance work on cell phone towers. Where some people see danger, others see a fat paycheck.

The solar plant makes more power than any farm in the valley.

You’ll want to read the article. Solar farms in the valley have to deal with fog during the winter months, which drastically reduces the energy they produce.

flipping through the SpaceX IPO

Sooner, if you give Mecha Hitler another trillion dollars

Definitely likely. But what’s the $/kwh? And is it worth the price for the added year-round contribution to the grid relative to, say, natural gas imports or coal plant construction/maintenance?

One thing they note is the difficulty of building and maintaining wind farms in the region, which I found surprising. And wind has undercut fossil fuel power for almost a decade. The appeal of solar energy is that these panels are incredibly cheap and light weight, making this kind of installation possible at all. Virtually no moving parts. Comparatively little to maintain. Modular such that if one component fails, it doesn’t shut down the whole installation.

I think you might be surprised how appealing this setup is, even in remote locations.

quietly

😉

Liberal Democracy has always been like this. You can vote for what business wants to prove it’s popular. But a vote against is “mob rule”, so it gets ignored

Not saying this won’t ever be a thing.

I’m saying it

their carless decisions,

Idk if they was a tacit reference or accidental, but…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People

Reddit was so surprised I was back it assumed my account was compromised and permananned me.

Reddit is Ground Zero for Empty Internet Theory.

Its 6056 scans per device on average per day. Or roughly 4.2 scans per minute per camera.

Imagining a device hooked up to the on-ramp/off-ramp of the highway, and I imagine a camera could hit this easily.

Definitely seems accurate enough for a news headline.

It’s the back-end bit of “cities pushing back” that triggers my skepticism impulse. These devices are everywhere precisely because municipal leadership is so easily bought off (or outright installed) by the surveillance industry.

License plate cameras are scanning 13 times as many vehicles as exist in the world? Every month? That’s impressive.

Not that impressive. Each driver just needs to drive by at least one camera 13 times.