Just make sure they're sealed adequately and drive them across the ocean. After all, Elon Musk says that a Tesla will float (for a while). :-)

Alternatively, the Boring Company could build a tunnel under the Pacific ocean from the Bay Area and just drive them over there. At one mile per week, they'll be done in only about 47 years. :-)

In many California cities, it costs almost that much just for a permit to have amplified sound at an outdoor concert for a few hours, on top of the venue fees. $1,000 a day for public advertising is priced like a fee, so of course they treat it like a fee. $100k per day would shut that down.

I suppose that's one way to keep the (probably mostly single male) software engineers and IT people doing what you want them to do, but I feel like digital managers would be more effective. :-D

Not really. Attacks on tumors often trigger metastasis. Useful choices are removal of the whole tumor, burning out the whole tumor, or poisoning it in a way that will also affect the mets. Any partial local attack that is likely to just make the tumor spread.

I do accept it. CO2 is 0.042% of our atmosphere. It has not been shown that CO2 is primarily or even significantly contributory to the greenhouse effect, however.

Even if it would, an increase of 500ppm (which would make the atmosphere itself terminally toxic to most mammal life) would only increase the global temperature 0.18C (according to original calculations I had chatgpt just do), which is hardly consequential in and of itself. And CO2 isn't going to increase that much from human action alone.

Nothingburger.

Almost all of them are deceit through omission, deception, or outright fabrication. So much of their data is falsifiable, particularly when it gets to the media as some sensational datapoint - like "The Gulf of Mexico is 110F! Climate change disaster!" or some such nonsense - when they're getting the data from the reading from one buoy inside a single marina. Happens all the time.

The thing is, there hasn't actually been an increase in extreme climate events. There's actually been a decrease.

Our infrastructure has simply become more intolerant of them, because we haven't been maintaining it or building it towards the possibility of exceptional weather. The result is more damage and more death, but it isn't caused by an increase in either the frequency or the severity.

You can quite quickly see there's a strong correlation between solar activity and the status of our severe weather events, too - it's well known and established fact - so I'm unclear how this in any way relates to (human-caused) climate change. Someone explain this to me?

How so? I haven't had a phone call I've answered in years. A phone is useless. An internet connection is useful.

There are plenty of discretionary services that require support. Do I need a phone? No. Do I need cable TV? No. Streaming services? Nope. Amazon? Nope. Can I shop in stores instead of online because the online CS sucks? Yes.

People absolutely will pay more for better service. There is a reason I bought a BMW. It was the service center in town. The Audi service center treated me like a replacable comodity. I switched housekeepers to one more expensive simply because the previous one was rude. I switched landscapers because I didn't want a truck with a politcal flag swinging around my yard.

I shop at Ace hardware over the big box stores because they have staff that answers questions.

Service might not matter to you, but it does matter to many of us.

That's fair for mandatory spending. For discretionary spending I think capitalism will weed out those unwilling to support their customers.

So sure, the single choice internet provider serving you can do that, but the place selling you jeans can't.

Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be completely eliminated by AI advancement. "Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone," he said, singling out customer support roles. "That's a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you're on target and AI, and that's fine." The OpenAI founder described the transformation of customer service as already complete, telling the Federal Reserve vice-chair for supervision, Michelle Bowman: "Now you call one of these things and AI answers. It's like a super-smart, capable person. There's no phone tree, there's no transfers. It can do everything that any customer support agent at that company could do. It does not make mistakes. It's very quick. You call once, the thing just happens, it's done."

Tell me you have never called customer support without telling me you never called customer support.

And to be clear, that 680 Watts would presumably be the sum of all the multiple servers involved in responding to the query, the network switches, the routers, etc. It sounds high to me, but it isn't entirely implausible.

No, I meant exactly what I said. If the query uses as much power as running a 40-Watt light bulb for 17 seconds, but it takes only about one second to respond to the query, then that's the equivalent of drawing 680 Watts during that one second.

The caveat, of course, is that if you screw up and accidentally miss a payment, you likely get hit hard with interest, so this can be risky. Also, if you can't pay it off at the end of the interest-free period because you didn't plan for that well enough, again, you get hurt badly. So it's a calculated risk.

By wireless, I of course meant cellular (and point-to-point wireless, to some extent), not LEO satellites. That said, the same limitations that make traditional wireless ISPs suck also affect Starlink; they're just not serving nearly as many subscribers, and their subscribers are far less mobile, and mount permanent antennas outdoors, all of which make a huge difference. But still, those limitations will eventually start to be a problem.

Starlink's main problem (and, indeed, the main problem with wireless ISPs in general) is the ability to scale to a large number of users per unit of area. There's only so much spectrum. At some point, as the number of customers increases, bandwidth per customer decreases.

Right now, with O(2M) users in the U.S., Starlink service is still good enough for most people, meeting the minimum legal bandwidth threshold for broadband (100 megabit down/ 20 megabit up) for downloads most of the time, in most places, but not always, and not in all places. And apparently it averages only about half the minimum for upload speeds, on average. Now ask yourself if it makes sense for the government to subsidize adding another 2 million people, which would likely mean halving the speed.

Also, paying to put in fiber objectively increases available bandwidth for decades, and possibly centuries. Even if paying money to subsidize Starlink results in an increase in the number of satellites launched, the satellites last only about five years, so unless the government is willing to spend that money repeatedly, any gains are likely to be very temporary.

Like I said, Starlink is great, and I love that it exists. It has a lot of uses, and it has the potential to revolutionize a lot of things, like Internet service on airplanes and cruise ships, Internet service in RVs, cellular phone service out in the middle of nowhere, and so on. And it can be good enough for basic Internet service right now, given the current subscriber base. It can probably handle a decent number of additional people in rural areas without causing too much trouble. But it can never realistically be a solution for the problem of poor urban neighborhoods having massively worse service than rich suburban neighborhoods, because it just can't handle enough customers per square mile, and that is unlikely to change in the near future. That makes it not a great choice if you're trying to figure out how to spend limited subsidy money, unless your only goal is to cover rural areas, and it probably doesn't make sense to do that, because they'll get decent Starlink service even without the government subsidizing it.