Liz

Tada!

https://open.substack.com/pub/ryanmcbeth/p/tracking-the-start-and-spread-of?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Oh whoops, I just realized "try to avoid social media" is a rule. If you want me to link directly to the sub stack article let me know.

This is exactly the problem with Signal. I used to use it a long time ago, but they progressively made it worse. Finally they got rid of SMS, and refused to back down to the outrage. I looked back at the history of a messaging service that got worse with every update and switched to the default Google messenger, because it can do both SMS and encrypted messaging.

I did more digging and:

1. Starlink bandwidth is better than I was expecting.
2. I can't find the video that did all the math, but basically by using a low Earth orbit network you can get information long distances faster than you can with cell towers and fiber because you're significantly reducing the number of repeaters you need without significantly increasing the distance the information has to travel.
   "Traditional" satellite internet uses satellites that are much higher up, which is where the high latency comes from. The LEO means comparatively lower latency, though the advantage over ground-based networks only works over significant distances. It also means you need more satellites to make a functional network and you need to replace them more often.
   The higher cost to orbit made the old model the correct way to do satellite internet, and now a bunch of billionaires are betting they can replace satellites cheaply enough to make money off a LEO network. Rural customers might be a happy accidental revenue stream, but the most enthusiastic customers will be people sending market information between servers on opposite sides of the globe. To them, billions of dollars can be made by getting information a millisecond before everyone else, so they're the ones who have the biggest interest in using the network.

It's not gonna be high bandwidth though, just low latency over long distances. It's primarily for stock exchange information.

Uh, no, it's so that everyone has the ability to make the choice for themselves. We could force everyone to live in padded cells for their own safety, but we both agree that's ridiculous. We're just arguing over what is and is not an acceptable trade-off between safety and agency.

Oh. Well then, nevermind!

Who wants to eat a microchip?

It's my understanding that they actually could do that at this point, commerical flying is a controlled and predictable environment compared to driving on the road. Ten years ago I was hearing anecdotes from pilots saying the only thing they do is takeoff and land and even then the computer could handle it just fine if they let it. Maybe the autopilot in a Cesna sucks, but it's pretty much fully automated in an Airbus.

At the very least, they would prioritize the driver, because the driver is likely to buy another Tesla in the future if they do.

I mean, don't call your service something it's not? Words should have meaning? Tesla's Autopilot is very impressive, but it's not fully independent, and that's okay. Honestly if it had an accurate name people wouldn't attack it so much. Other manufacturers are gaining similar capabilities but no one is complaining that their cars aren't perfect either.

A lot of these things were proudly unprofitable, which is basically their way of getting around anti-trust violations. If they had a revenue stream to make the business profitable (outside of investors handing them more cash) then they'd be hit with anti-trust lawsuits for offering services at a loss in order to drive the competition out of business. But instead they just convince investors to hang on long enough to achieve the same goal, then raise their prices when they've got too much power to fail.