Might as well ask is Chiropractors are real doctors, if there is a mathematical basis for the 2% inflation target, if nicotine should be treated as a controlled substance, does Bitcoin have any intrinsic value, and so forth.

Once you start actually digging you will either be mad, or go mad. Sometimes both.

America can be counted on to do the right thing, only after exhausting all other options.

Fun fact, the governing document since "3G" is the 3GPP standard. It keeps being revised and expanded, hence 4G and 5G in marketing speak, but it has all just been an evolution, not a revolution. If you look at existing bands 5G and 4G are pretty similar. Encoding is a little more efficient, and there is more flexibility to better handle coexistence of very low rate and very high rate users. As a user, unless you are trying to re-download your entire movie library, you will never notice.

Bigger additions were higher and lower bands, and support for line of sight wicked fast high frequency bands, but that is left to operators to use or not use as makes sense for their network. Honestly I think there was a lot of incorrect extrapolation done on data usage, and supporting 4k 60fps streaming by entire stadiums of people (exageration) has lead to some stupidity on spectrum purchases and inclusion of those short reach super high data rate bands. The good news is that we all get to pay for it regardless...

It's worse than just waiting for established players to up their tech game though. When private equity hands some charlatan a giant pile of cash to set on fire you risk not only that they lose money, but the interim the established players can be badly wounded or driven out of business. When the dust settles you either end up with wreckage of collapse, or a quasi or outright monopoly in the case of success. Subsidized services turn into hell for workers and jacked up prices for everyone else.

The private equity playbook focuses on monopoly creation, and we are in an ever less competitive world. Unless regulators manage to find their spine, we will continue to have tech bros using this playbook, and established players merging and acquiring their competition until we are all governed by B&L.

Buys PC for kiddo with high end GPU, kid just watches YouTube and plays Minecraft. Sigh.

In a capitalist system a monopoly is often the predictable outcome. Market power begats more market power until only one company remains.

Regulations try and slow and control this, but as we have seen since the 80's with various deregulation pushes you end up with regulatory capture, or companies so rich that buying favorable legislation/legislators become cheaper than innovating.

So do we break up Nvidia? Do we mandate certain market shares maximums and end up with two slow moving duopolies vaguely creating competition theater? Do we wait decades for them to rot from the inside and become easy targets for startups to attack as patents expire and managerial bloat supplants their engineering focus? Do we throw endless streams to government funding to keep strategic capabilities on-shore in the face of obvious competitive failure?

The defense industry is a great example of what happens when you force multiple suppliers and require they keep supply chains on-shore. Companies become so noncompetitive that their only customer is the pentagon, and no matter how badly they keep fouling up they must keep getting paid enough to stay in business.

Which windmill do we tilt at?

It adds to the degrading feeling over all. Want to sit with your friend/spouse/kid? That's a fee. Checked luggage? Fee, so everyone brings plumped up roller bags that overstuff the overhead bins. Over 5'6" and don't have foldable femurs? Sure, we have Economy Plus or First class or more fees (probably excluded from above). Want to fly out of an airport? Mandatory taxes/fees, another ~30% that should just be baked in. Want your plane to be fueled? Fuel surcharge fee. It is harder and harder to tell what the "price" actually does.

All the fees, small seats, and other degradations have added up to me avoiding travel, and dreading it when we do fly. Like many things the "price" is no longer available to compare. Too many fees are excluded, and each airline has different items included/excluded to the point where it is too much of a hassle to actually price shop properly. We need some floor to this spiral, some basic limits to ensure the race to the bottom doesn't go any further.. Human sized seats that a 6' person can comfortably sit in without having to fold their femurs up. One piece of luggage included to discourage everyone bringing overstuffed roller bags as carry-on, etc.

I think if this was done the increase in actual ticket prices would be less than the doom sayers will claim, and airlines might attract more business from folks like me who have grown to despise the whole process with a passion.

Only way to make this work is replace the board at the same time you bring him back.

Just add this to the list of reasons CEO's will list as to why remote work and WFH have to end.

GPS need to view from just about horizon to horizon, and to not lose satellites during banking turns, take-off (tilted back) etc. So while I am guessing they already are mostly pointed skyward, you can't easily shield your way out of this.

As received GPS signals are below the noise floor of the receiver. A good antenna as you describe might be able to get a front-to-back ratio of maybe 20-30 dB. A bad actor just need to transmit a jammer signal to overcome the noise-level signal as received, which just isn't hard with moderate ground based antenna gain and a crappy amplifier. If you want to design a system from the ground-up with such a threat in mind the approach would be to put a phased array receiver on the plane and actively track the satellites individually before sending the IF signal to the GPS to convert to ephemeris data, which would greatly increase the directivity and make a jammer/spoofer attack much more difficult. Once you have that figured out you just need FAA signoff to retrofit every flying plane out there. Easy peasy.

Getting to Mars is the easy part. Doing so without condemning the crew to a dozen possible deaths is that hard part. Starvation? Asphyxiation? Radiation? Boredom? I am not seeing a decent plan for how to keep a crew, let alone a colony, survive there, or to even have a point in being there. Part of what we stopped going to the moon is that after a few hundred pounds of moon rocks were collected (and once you beat the USSR there), it ceased to have significant real science value. The ISS has been pretty pointless, with little beyond ginned up high budget science fair projects to show for a couple decades of orbit.

All are exciting technologies, none are living up to the hype or projected adoption curves. I don't expect VR or Robotaxis to disappear as badly as 3DTV's, but I also expect the breathless optimism and hype to settle way down ("Individual car ownership will be BANNED within a decade!!!"). Bold promises will give way to valuable niche applications that while valuable, will be well short of hopes.

Automate long haul trucking? Likely, the cost motivation is huge and the environment more controllable.

Replace Uber drivers? Maybe, but not very soon, the edge cases abound, and public tolerance is low.

FSD/Autopilot meeting hype and promises? Never, the cars will wear out before Elmo delivers.

Heck, that is almost long enough to finally get a doctors appointment these days.

It is indeed perverse. The spectrum is a public good, and high auction prices are effectively a tax, since the cost is passed on to the consumer, AKA the public that should be receiving the benefits of that public good. Instead we pay extra for access to it.