Starlink operator SpaceX is fighting Virginia’s plan to deploy fiber Internet service to residents, claiming that federal grant money should be given to Starlink instead. SpaceX is already in line to win over $3 million in grant money in the state but is seeking $60 million.
Starlink is poised to benefit from the Trump administration rewriting rules for the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant program. While the Biden administration decided that states should prioritize fiber in order to build more future-proof networks, the Trump administration ordered states to revise their plans with a “tech-neutral approach” and lower the average cost of serving each location.
“But I want a monopoly! I demand a monopoly! I’m not rich enough. I’m afraid I will run out of money and starve!” - The Goblin
It seems like the best solution would be to confiscate Starlink and nationalize it. Same with Space X. We paid for all of it, it should be ours. He can still work there, but he’ll collect a government salary, and expect to answer to a boss. Or get fired. Either way, I don’t care.
He can keep Tesla, that will be bankrupt in 2 years anyway.
It seems like the best solution would be to confiscate Starlink and nationalize it.
Not in the land of the Star-Spangled Banner, I’m afraid. That would be socialism. Orange Führer wouldn’t like that.
This is absolute insanity. To think that fiber and satellites are even on the same playing field is absolute brain damage.
The problem I see is that we’ve already paid for fiber
Yep, $400bn wasted on fiber “deployments” that never went anywhere while telcos pocketed the cash, and that was as of like a decade ago.
And across the pond the french government spent 20bn to have the government build out fiber and now basically everyone in france has super cheap fiber internet.
Paying companies to do stuff that’s against their financial incentives doesn’t work.
We just got fiber 3 weeks ago. I pay for 600Mb/s and it is honestly the best internet I’ve had. I was afraid that we wouldn’t get it, but I was astonished when a salesman stopped by. I signed up that day. Lol
Didn’t work. They are laying fiber everywhere as we speak. So happy to kiss Comcast goodbye.
So happy for you! I’m still stuck with shady cable as they cancelled the 2024 rollout.
I swear Cable internet was propped up by hidden fees and promo pricing.
Starlink is literally his plan to rule the world. If you singularly control access to the internet for everyone, you’ve won the information war… against everyone. The good news is his Nazi addict ass will likely die young from a chest-cavity attack.
Good luck having that shitty tech win over Europe, where fiber is proliferating particularly quickly. We all know satellite internet cannot come close to the speed and reliability of fiber.
Plus we hate Musk.
It’s good for remote areas and at sea, it’s shit everywhere else
I’m so fucking tired of living in this god damned dystopia.
Don’t worry, it ends eventually.
all bleeding stops 🙄
i hope elon dies and starlink goes bankrupt
I hope some hero gives him the UnitedHealth CEO treatment.
I’d rather Starlink just be independent from Musk. There are people who just can not get a good Internet connection and rely on it, and other Satellite Internet companies are awful.
I hate Musk as much as the next person, but Starlink is brilliant and works well. If they got rid of Musk and stopped being dicks like they are with this, it’d be okay.
I don’t know how much Musk can be separated from Starlink. Not only because Starlink, as part of SpaceX, is privately held but also because the main reason they now have a superior service to offer is that they got fucktons of money from government customers, which is also tied to Musk’s action
A big part of Musk’s involvement with politics is because everything he does, from EVs to rockets to, now, big energy-guzzling datacenters for AI, needs a lot of government backing, if not in terms of direct contracts at least in terms of regulation and incentives.
Even his direct involvement with Trump wasn’t because he suddenly became a Nazi (he’s probably always been one, according to his own family) but in order to become even more entangled with government investments, even trying to control NASA directly.
And not only US governments. I remember Musk suddenly being everywhere in Europe pitching Starlink. Meloni’s government in Italy was grilled for allegedly agreeing on a big contract with Starlink.
Id rather all this space trash burn up and we just spend the money on providing internet via land.
It’s still a good thing for cell coverage in remote areas for hiking emergencies though. The few satellites that currently do that are stupidly annoying and expensive to use. You have to carry specialized equipment, and if you use Garmin, you pay a yearly fee for the privilege of signing up for the low tier plan, then a monthly fee for the service, and then pay by the text message after the first few. Starlink just added T-Mobile so if you have a newer phone and use T-Mobile you can skip all of that and message out in emergencies without all that nonsense. Hopefully more brands will be added soon, but I don’t know.
Life is not safe. Adventure even less so. The loss of the night sky and the risk of Kessler syndrome is not outweighed by a slight convenience allowing influencers to stream video and hit social media while pretending to get away from it all.
It’s not for streaming. As far as I know it’s just text messages. Absolutely agree we should not be using screen time when out and away. We just need that little bit of safety.
There are also hand held radios, strobelights, flares, and PLBs that do not require more satellite infrastructure.
People being lost in the wilderness is not a new problem. It often happens because people don’t bother to consider that they might get lost and plan appropriately.
Sorry, but not everyone gets to come home, especially if they don’t do a little planning.
What a weird hill to die on. Is it about letting people die or about influencers livestreaming?
What about comms during catastrophies? Small villages or off-grid houses? Remote research installations?
I swear, Lemmy is becoming more reactionary by the day.
There are several grave environmental and civil problems with Starlink and other proposed massive constellations:
- The threat to the ozone layer (when these low-orbiting sats start re-entering en masse in the next few years, we’re going to have more aluminum in the upper atmosphere than ever before - a known problem)
- Overcrowding of LEO - the choicest orbital space over this planet is finite. Satellites in low orbit have tremendous kinetic energy and do not (cannot) fly in formation, as they spread out vertically; not that Starlink is designed to. Kessler Syndrome catastrophe or not, the risk of collisions is increasing rapidly. As some researchers have put it, LEO is the “Wild West” right now, and it definitely needs to be regulated by international treaty.
- Light and radio pollution - aside from exacerbating the accelerating ecological damage from light pollution, this extends even to orbiting assets like the Hubble Telescope, which is already seeing interference from Starlink sats. I don’t see why SpaceX or any corporation, let alone nation, deserves to monopolize any part of the global environment this way. Astronomy and upper atmosphere research don’t need to justify their existence, particularly not in this situation… and yes, stargazers on this planet deserve the right to a “clean” night sky.
- Corporate squatting - Starlink is approaching the point of outnumbering all other extant satellites from all other nations, since the start of the space age, combined. Why do they get to crowd everyone else out?
- Vulnerability to the space environment - when the Sun acts up, Starlink sats have been disabled before, and in numbers. This is a threat to satellites in general (obviously), many of which are not shielded properly, but launching bunches of these satellites at once increases the threat sharply. I’m sure you’d agree that orbital debris is not something we should take lightly.
I could go on, but I trust you get the point. I don’t object to temporary small-scale deployments of satellite groups during catastrophes, but we simply don’t need the permanent deployment of tens of thousands of satellites that the US, Europe and China intend to launch for global internet coverage - that can be almost entirely achieved from the ground.
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Well, thats fine. We should talk about where he is right now.
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I will string together old coathangers and twisted, unheated solder before I use starlink.
If you figure out the right protocol you could probably catapult a series of twisted pears from house to house.
The way the internet is going, bashed and bruised fruit salad sounds preferable to the actual data anyway.
The visuals are priceless. Screaming, agonized pears flying from building to building with California raisins singing in flight amongst them. I think i just found a reason to play with AI video generation!
Previously i’ve only accepted AI into my life as a thing to use when I get asked ‘stupid business jargon management /HR question’ at work.
but I’m tentatively prepeared to allow this, it might be raisin the bar.
Hey, we just need someone to innovate the shielded twisted pears, that will give us a much better fruit salad than the unshielded twisted pears.
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Musk is a domestic terrorist.
Musk isn’t American; he’s an international terrorist
But he is, he has both US and Canadian citizenship in addition to S. African.
He cheated after coming here illegally. Then did a bunch of sex crimes and destroyed american jobs. No. Sorry but illegal immigrants to the torture prison.
I don’t make the rules; i just write fanfic about them being enforced evenly.
That doesn’t change the fact that he’s an American citizen. That’s what I was correcting.
Oh, so the government doesn’t kidnap or murder citizens now?
I’m not sure how that’s relevant. The OP claimed he wasn’t a citizen, I corrected that.
No, said it was foreign or internatuonal or something.
Which it is.
As an American, I do not claim him.
That’s fine, but he’s still a US citizen according to the law.
Reminds me of the German Telekom and their unceasing effort to slow down state subsidised fibre deployment.
The subsidies are primarily for towns left behind with bad ADSL (it was below 30mbit average and is now afaik 100mbit), that want to build their own local fibre nets cause nobody else does.
They seem to watch for construction permits and then swoop in and build a few fibre adsl distribution boxes or elevate a street or two with fibre to raise the average speed in town just above threshold. The local net looses the subsidies and usually stops construction or if already built only commercial customers are still allowed to be connected…
they hate you. always remember. they hate your entire existence. they’d literally crush you in a hydraulic press if they could. giving you pain is the only way they feel a semblance of happiness.
I don’t think they hate us, it just that they love money more. They can, and do, inflict untold misery and suffering so long as there is money at the end of it.
no. there’s no end to the amount of disdain they have for you. they’d do it for free too; they just don’t have to.
People who disagree with you are people who never spent time with the ultra rich. I’ve had the pleasure to hang in those circles and it was absolutely eye opening the complete disdain that social class has toward the working class. It’s so fucking crazy that one has to see it for themselves to truly appreciate the hate they have for everyone not in their economic circles.
Preach on brother, but I also understand why the plebs don’t believe you
They are genuinely inhuman monsters.
Isn’t it that they just don’t care?
Nope. It’s active and malevolent.
I don’t care about most everyone on the planet, even if I had their resources I couldn’t summon up the fucks needed to be actively malicious in the way that they are. Not caring is Howard Hughes buying a TV station so he could watch whatever he damned well wanted, not filing a lawsuit because a state is improving it’s utilities which only vaguely undercuts you if even that.
Capitalism breeds innovation and advancement, folks!
Also didn’t Rupert Murdoch also stifle fiber adoption in Australia because better internet would cut into his TV and print empire there?
Why is it always this same recurring cast of 100 same rotating cunts over and over ? If we get rid of them, can we at least have fresh new cunts, this batch is extremely stale, LUIGI !!!
🧱🧱👽 🔫 🧱🧱🧘 🔫 🧱🧱🦵🏼 🔫I was reading a (non-fiction) book about Gallipoli, a battle that was fought in Turkey in 1915-16 during WWI. At one point, an Australian journalist by the name of “Keith Murdoch” shows up and starts contributing to the Allies’ failures and eventual withdrawal. And I was like “wait, is that?” and the answer was “yep”. Keith Murdoch was born in 1885 and was Rupert Murdoch’s (full name Keith Rupert Murdoch) father. Aside from helping to fuck up Gallipoli, Papa Murdoch led a smear campaign against Australia’s greatest WWI general (who just happened to be Jewish) and got him removed from command. The Murdoch name has been a stain on humanity for a long time.
Kinda. Murdoch killed the NBN because Foxtel was not in a position to compete with fibre.
