I never actually bothered to check what my bandwidth is supposed to be, since I'm connected to WIFI like 90% of the time and don't do anything bandwidth-intensive on my phone anyway.

Looks like I'm currently getting 30ms, 15Gbps 4G+, but that's only because I have about 1-2 bars of reception right now.

I only went over the quota once with my previous provider when I moved and didn't have broadband for a week, but I think they just started charging per GB at a higher rate.

Looking at my provider's plans I could get 5G+ with 750GB, 5000 minutes/SMS for about $14 if I was a heavier user.

There was some legislation a few years back that opened the mobile market to competition.
I don't really know what that entailed, but now most communication companies offer cell service, ISPs, cable companies, satellite TV, etc.

I currently pay a bit under $7 per month, with a 250GB plan.
That's the cheapest, most limited plan I could find from a big company, because I don't actually use my phone or data on it that much.

As far as switching is concerned, they just sent a courier with a SIM card the same day and my number was transferred to the new provider within an hour of changing the SIM.

No, you get 12 plane trips, you seem to have missed the percent sign.
My point is, I think putting up satellites that provide global internet coverage to areas that were previously inaccessible, including improving the bandwidth in these airplanes, for longer than the 2 years parent claims, is worth the cost of resources and emissions, and maybe the concern over those resources might be better directed at an issue that is many orders of magnitude greater, like air travel.

If SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 every day, its emissions would be equivalent to around 0.015% of the fuel used by commercial aviation in the same time. (Based on numbers pulled from ChatGPT)
Are vacations worth the cost of resources and emissions?

Maybe it's supposed to indicate its expected meteoric rise?
Only meteors don't rise, the usually fall, never got that term of phrase.
So maybe some other attribute of a meteor, like heating up rapidly possibly disintegrating?

This, the AI stuff, the superconductor, a bunch of other stuff, all reminds me of this quote from William Gibson's The Peripheral.

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they'd changed things just by being there. ... But science, he said, had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before, nanotechnology that was more than just car paint that healed itself or camo crawling on a ball cap. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable. She felt him stretch past that, to the future where he lived, then pull himself there, quick, unwilling to describe the worst of what had happened, would happen. She looked at the moon. It would look the same, she guessed, through the decades he'd sketched for her. None of that, he said, had necessarily been as bad for very rich people. The richest had gotten richer, there being fewer to own whatever there was. Constant crisis had provided constant opportunity...

"...I'm an investor and I kinda like helped put the company together, but I'm not involved day to day at all..."

https://youtu.be/mC-0XqTAeMQ?t...

Last time I switched banks (like 8 years ago) was because the central branch of one of the largest banks at the largest city in my country was phasing out tellers in favor of ATMs.

Russians seem to manage with Baikonur which is about the same latitude as Lyon, plenty of places in the EU that are closer to the equator than that, including ones where the launch path would be over water.

I think you underestimate the effect of image generating tools.
I used to work in VFX and animation as a 2D artist. I went into early retirement, so I'm glad I don't have keep up or compete with these technologies, but I have friends who work in various related fields, in games, in film, and they're feeling threatened.
One friend works at a games startup, and they're using a lot of AI generated images for concept art.
I have illustrator friends who are getting less work because for a lot of people AI generated images are good enough, so they're not going to pay extra for an album or book cover, or pay licensing fees to Shutterstock when they can get something out of a session with Midjourney.
A lot of the jobs that were done by juniors in these fields can now be done as well or better with AI, so there's probably going to be a period where people who would have previously developed their skills on the job are not going to find these entry-level jobs or at best be trained as prompt jockeys.

As far as I know SpaceX wasn't founded with the intention of landing rockets using retro-propulsion, it was founded with the intent to make space launch more economical in general.
They started with the one-engine Falcon 1 and intended to make a Falcon 5 before eventually scaling up to the Falcon 9, going with 9 engines mainly for economies of scale and redundancy.
They even tried parachute landings for the booster before they went for retro-propulsion, so I don't believe that was the plan from day 1.

What you mean to say is, it took SpaceX 13 years from being founded to landing a rocket.
As far as I know the actual development for reusability started about 5 years prior to the landing.
It's been over 7 years since that landing, and Ariane are suggesting it will take at least another 10 to replicate a method that has already been proven.

Starlink is intentionally in low orbit for lower latency.
They've already deorbited a quite a few satellites, both experimental and some that failed to reach the target orbit, but if one was unresponsive it should dorbit on its own in a couple of years due to atmospheric drag.
They also intend to iterate on the technology quickly, so fast replacement is part of the plan.

How about Dr. Strangelove?
You have to admit, it has quite a ring to it, at least compared to his original name, Merkwürdigliebe.

Qt is pretty good.
I've used it with Python, but it works with plenty of languages.
You just need a few lines of code to set things up, but once that is done you can load UI files created by the Qt Designer and access their widgets based on their hierarchy in the form.