Don’t worry, we’re getting there. They just started dismantling what they refer to as the “administrative state”, but which largely deferred substantial questions requiring skill and non-partisan judgement to their respective experts. It was never perfect, nor free from partisan and/or economic concerns, but the replacement appears to be self-interested narcissists and sycophants and their personal fiefdoms, with precious little space for competence, logic, or integrity.
It was never between the left and the right or any other false dichotomies, but always between the Epstein-class and the actual human beings.
The question now is that do the normal people realize and act on the fact that the elevator to Epstein class was never working. Or even better, they don't want to become the zillionaire class husk of a human.
The current fight is within the Eppstein class (both right and left elites), between the old money (Wall Street) and new money (techno-fascists/feudalists of Silicon Valley).
The rabble is just taken for the ride, fooled by left vs right show and exploited along the way.
Heh, it would have been more precise to say 'the leaderships of both Republican and Democratic parties'.
Left & right is too imprecise, there is left/right on economic issues (worker rights, curtailing power of monopolies), and there is left/right on cultural issues (abortion, gay rights, ...).
The big coup of the rich elites has been distracting and redirecting the Democrats from economic issues to cultural ones (along the way losing the culturally conservative worker class).
I consider "this" right to be moral in a different way.
Now the right all around the world is hijacked by narcissistic greed that punishes any voicing of conservative moral.
In the US some republicans are daring to challenge the extreme narcissistic greed and a lot more are thinking about this privately.
I also mentioned the other dichotomies and perhaps the "right" could be hopelessness and the the "left" false hope.
As in "no point trying to curb the emissions or addressing any social causes, because the zillionaires choke hold of the planet" vs. the "eternal green growth and economy will save us and make us rich".
The Trump humangod class is not the right IMO.
I believe that power (via money or absolute power) corrupts and thus me must find a way to prevent individuals from becoming human-gods.
The left (without the "") pretends to know this but ends up being corrupted anyway and the right (the one that has some moral and spine left) seems to believe that they will not be corrupted by power.
You're still making a leftist argument here, even if you end up dismissing the left as "corrupt" without pointing to anything specific.
Maybe you have some personal difficulty identifying with the left? You're not wrong in your characterizations, you just seem to be using different labels to me.
Maybe this is a US thing? Because there barely is a left wing in US politics. Democrats are right wing, for one.
I'm from Finland and more aligned to the left I guess.
I'm trying to distance myself from though as I'm currently seeing everything as merely corrupt (by power) elite vs. normal people.
But yes, perhaps the thing I'm looking after is something like the real equality side, which to me doesn't seem to exist as even the left here in Finland seems to disregard the laws of physics and nature in terms of the impossible eternal growth.
Vas. definitely has degrowth as a part of their platform, and is often speaking against eternal growth and trying to get climate laws passed. They're only one party, and the last govt's more left-leaning SD was the best partner they could have had here, but Kesk. dragged down their efforts. Of course now, with Antti Lindtman, we have a right-wing SD, I agree that they aren't very clear on policy, and are fine with sitting around waiting to win the election on the current govt's failures.
What I'm trying to say is that I don't recognize your picture of the left within Finland. Which to be clear is something like Vas. + some parts of SD (Mäkynen, Kiuru e.g.).
Okay, I'm seeing a lot of old industrial/growth speech in the established left too, and the economic talk doesn't differ that drastically from the greens eternal growth vision.
I guess I'm thinking anything that doesn't hilight the tax free global narcissist pedi meta-zillionaire class tax evasion scheme to be one (or THE) root causes and also the easy fixes.
I talked to a lot of candidates from different parties during last spring campaigning and what I drew from proposing a "global fix the zillionaire-issue" was that new candidates saw this as a, perhaps unlikely, but a mandatory step in gaining a future for normal people.
And I talked to few front line politicians from the left and sdp and they didn't see any need for fixing the issue with individuals who've accumulated enough power.
Perhaps some of the top politicians also think this way but haven't realized that this is what the actual human beings want.
Or wanted a year ago, things are significantly worse for the normal people on both sides of the aisle.
I agree that Vas. also talks about economics within the growth framework, but that's because it's how the economy is measured, and how other parties work. And so in order to collaborate, you must at least partially adopt the framework.
But if you read Vas.'s party programme, you'll find a proposed millionaire tax, and a proposed progression to capital gains taxation.
I don't remember if an exit tax is a part of the current program, but it was at least discussed during the previous govt. (iirc, Kesk. killed it).
But I get your frustration, certainly the oikeistodemari -block is just a "nicer" Kok., and doesn't actually question any of the current frameworks.
Kiitos ajatustenvaihdosta, ja hyvää alkanutta viikonloppua.
Are you an American? It would help me frame my response better to know. I assume yes for now, apologies if not.
> The Trump humangod class is not the right IMO.
Basically the problem with American education is that they started using the wrong words to describe things. American libertarians are right wing and not anarchists, American liberals are right wing, American right wingers are religious ethno-fascists, and American "communists" are neoliberals. Or democratic socialists. Or just protestors.
Trump is absolutely on the Right Wing of politics, specifically he's a populist fascist: obsession with masculinity, hearkening to the culture of a mythical "before times," referencing national strength coming from ethnic purity, huge emphasis on marketing over policy, support for centralization of power around a dictator, militarism, and suppression of opposition through force. Verbatim fascist ideals, he's just not as powerful (yet) as previous fascist leaders.
Fascist ideology is pretty much as far-right you can get, if we use useful definitions of "left wing" and "right wing." Anarchism would be as far-left as you can get, for comparison.
Regarding the current discussion, those who are making critiques of a narcissistic greed class overriding morality and buying politics, are making, even if unintentionally, a leftist, anti-capitalist critique. A right-wing critique of the current USA government wouldn't be a class-analysis (Marxist analysis) like you did in your previous comment comparing "Epstein-class" (ultra wealthy) and "actual human beings" (the working class).
A right wing critique would be more along the lines of: the government is incompetent, it's putting the needs of a few individuals above those of the state, it's not cracking down hard enough on leftist opposition, it should jail all opposition leaders, it should pass apartheid laws against members of the non-chosen ethnic group.
So basically, if your issue with the USA is that power can be purchased with money, welcome to the Left, I promise we're not all as cringe as the ones you've seen on Twitter. Just kidding, it's perfectly possible to make leftist critiques without being a leftist, of course. You see American liberals do it all the time when they make right-wing critiques of the Left, in e.g. their opposition to anti-fascist and anti-capitalist elements of the left.
> The left (without the "") pretends to know this but ends up being corrupted anyway
Yes, absolutely, this is often a critique anarchists make of revolutionary communists. I think one American politician that will be very interesting to pay attention to for the next decade is Zohran Mamdani. He's already significantly softened his stance on Israel, I'm curious how far away from his original values he'll move.
Yup, I'm still thinking that also the right has had some moral foundations and even some classical Christian values before, but just like Mamdani has centraled already the right has been Republican-Jesused from the classical Jesus (not that they ever were 100% that).
But the both show (at least to me) the corruption by power thus compromising. Either consciously or un.
I'm seeing as the natural solution, something that has been a bit field tested here in Finland, that we start the discussion on what is the safe limit for individual power or money before the risk of corruption. After the latest year almost everyone agrees that this is a conversation we must have to stand a chance.
1) If the Gini index is 1, they have taken all your money by definition.
2) They are not creating wealth, they are extracting it from the the population at large. Those who actually work, and those who are forced / manipulated by the societal systems in place (and by marketing) to pay them money. Using assets snd resources as leverage to gain more assets and resources is not "creating wealth".
3) If there is no balance point, it does not matter how much wealth they create, the inequality in itself is a much bigger issue. The billionaires get richer and more powerful, and who do they hold power over? The poor. They are taking my (and presumably yours) time and opportunity, limiting the careers I can have, limiting what free society can politically decide to do. Most obviously in terms of climate change, but also in terms of health care, welfare, social mobility, free time, etc.
> They are not creating wealth, they are extracting it from the the population at large.
For an obvious example, trillionaire "extracted" the wealth from the population? For another one, compare the aggregate wealth today with the aggregate wealth from a century ago (or two centuries ago!). How do explain the enormous increase? Who was it extracted from?
> The billionaires get richer and more powerful
Bill Gates cannot put you in jail. Nor can Bezos, Musk, Zuckerburg, etc. Nor can they send you a bill and demand payment.
> They are taking my (and presumably yours) time
Nope.
> and opportunity,
Nope. If opportunity is limited, it is the government regulations and taxes that limit it.
> limiting the careers I can have,
Nope. You're free to start your own business and embark on any (legal) career you want to.
> limiting what free society can politically decide to do.
Nope. We still have free elections.
> Most obviously in terms of climate change,
Billionaires do not do climate change.
> but also in terms of health care, welfare,
That's been handed over to the government, not billionaires.
> social mobility,
America still has plenty of rags to riches people. See Taylor Swift, for example. Did she "extract" her billions, too? To be fair, she hasn't extracted a penny from me.
> free time, etc.
When I started my career 50 years ago, all I did was work. First in college (lots of studying), my first job was 50 hrs a week for years, then I started my own side businesses, etc., work work work. It was all my choice, though. Nobody made me.
BTW, Americans work a lot less than they did 200 years ago, when there were zero billionaires. There didn't use to be a concept of "retirement".
Hey again, Walter, we always seem to find eachother in these comment threads.
The Soviet Union didn't create wealth? It put a man in space before the USA - that took "wealth" by some definition of the word, perhaps just not "personal wealth."
In order to prevent famine, the Soviets decided to allow farmers a portion of land where they could sell what they grew. It kept the country from collapsing. Every historical attempt at collective farms collapsed from starvation or was propped up by government money.
I don't understand why people are still engaging with Walter on economics. He only ever posts the same things again and again: hot takes after taking econ 101.
It is. I'm just commenting on why it isn't that straightforward that the FSF presumably wouldn't care. Copyleft is an exercise of copyright. The FSF doesn't believe in permissive use of works - they believe in using copyright licensing to force others to share the way they believe others should share.
I have been using Webmin/Virtualmin for all of my 15-years as a web host. I love it, although it can be a little idiosyncratic in places, once you know how to operate with it, you won’t ever need anything else. It’s never been the most bleeding-edge or fully-featured, but it’s also never fallen behind with security and compatibility updates, and it’s had a surge in new development lately, which is exciting. On a Debian system, it’s always been rock solid for me.
Virtualmin in particular is more targeted towards production web servers, but I think they’re both something of a happy medium between a GUI and the terminal; The interfaces are all pretty explicit about the components you’re interfacing with, and nearly all of them include the ability to pop open the conf files to edit them directly.
The extensive UI isn’t the most flashy or polished, but it’s functional and if you get bored enough (as I did) you can theme the entire thing with a single CSS file (be prepared for a lot of ‘!important’ and other things that will drive UI/X folks nuts), and make it look rather stylish.
The only downside (and this isn’t really a downside for production servers) is it’s opinionated on how some things “should” be configured. It’s not restrictive, per se, but it’s not very tolerant for “coloring outside the lines”. You can run an Apache or Nginx reverse proxy, but if you want to use Caddy or Traefik or something similar, this may not be the admin panel for you.
Myself, I just run Webmin/Virtualmin on my production servers, and use a separate server for Docker and apps, where I’ve used both Cockpit and Portainer, but generally tend to stick with the CLI. The command line will always be the best, most efficient way of interfacing with Linux. Once I’d learned enough to be comfortable, I found it becomes increasingly preferable for most common tasks.
> Random equivalent-time sampling takes advantage of the nature of a repetitive signal by using samples from several trigger events to digitally reconstruct the waveform. Since sampling occurs on both sides of the trigger point, pretrigger capability is very flexible. Because repetitive signals are being sampled, the bandwidth of an equivalent-time scope can far exceed its sample rate.
Even if it's the same data, the bit stream will be a variety of 0 and 1s. The period of that waveform will then be 1 frame length / data transfer rate (or rather 1/4 frame length / data transfer rate as this is a QSGMII link). I wonder how the scope triggers on that. Trigger criterium would be a bit pattern, say the Ethernet frame preamble of 7 octects (* 10/8) spread across four streams ...
Otoh, at 5Gbps, a sample rate of "just" 10GS/s would be sufficient (barely).
I rather suspect the oscilloscope is capable of 1TS/s equivalent time sampling, but that mode wasn't used.
Here's a more specific example: PicoScope 9400 series supports just 500Msps per channel, however it's advertising "70ps transition time and 1TS/s (1ps resolution) random equivalent-time sampling", this sort of "equivalent sampling" is presumably where that seemingly crazy spec comes from.
> The milk pricing tool consumed the feed tool’s output as one of its cost inputs. The format change hadn’t broken the connection — the data still flowed — but it had caused the pricing tool to misparse one field, reading a per-head cost as a per-hundredweight cost, which made the feed expenses look much higher than they were, which made the margin calculations come out lower, which made the recommended prices drop.
“You changed your feed tool,” Tom said.
“Yeah, I updated the silage ratios. What does that have to do with milk prices?”
“Everything.”
He showed Ethan the chain: feed tool regenerated → output format shifted → pricing tool misparsed → margins calculated wrong → prices dropped → contracts auto-negotiated at below-market rates. Five links, each one individually innocuous, collectively costing Ethan roughly $14,000.
Ethan looked ill.
--
I've re-read this a few times now, and can't work out how the interpreted price of feed going up and the interpreted margins going down results in a program setting lower prices on the resulting milk? I feel like this must have gotten reversed in the author's mind, since it's not like it's a typo, there are multiple references in the story for this cause and effect. Am I missing something?
You're not missing something — the chain is internally inconsistent as written.
The per-head vs. per-hundredweight swap is actually plausible for inflating apparent costs: a dairy cow weighs 12-15 hundredweights, so a $5/head daily feed cost misread as $5/hundredweight would balloon to $60-75/head. So "feed expenses look much higher" checks out.
But then the pricing logic goes the wrong direction. Higher perceived costs -> lower calculated margin -> the rational response is to raise prices to restore margin, or at minimum flag the squeeze. Dropping prices when you think you're losing money on every unit is only coherent if the tool is running some kind of volume/elasticity model where it reasons "margins are tight, compete on price" — which is a legitimately dangerous default for spot milk contracts.
Most likely it's just a logic inversion in the story. Either the misparse inflated costs and the tool correctly raised prices (locking in above-market rates Ethan didn't notice because he was happy), or the misparse deflated costs and the tool undercut on price thinking it had headroom. Both are realistic failure modes. The version in the story mixes the two.
Fittingly, a specification error in a story about specification errors.
A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives. In this case, fair play it’s objectively better.
>A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives
pretty obvious you never worked for an ISP and forgot about all the `middle of nowhere` customers who have no high speed internet.
even for me, in houston texas, we cant get fiber to the home and were stuck with AT&T DSL which was like $60 per month and ungodly slow. Also my GF and I both work from home and she does massive file uploads.
had xfinity not been available starlink would be an easy choice. ive tried 5g hotspots and they are not super reliable.
In all fairness, it was a qualified statement: "readily available alternatives". That immediately disqualifies customers stuck in the boonies, or a few hundred feet away from service coverage.
He has readily available alternatives, but they suck.
There are other, far worse forms of satellite Internet, so everybody has a readily available alternative. That makes it not a qualifying statement at all.
Just noting that the phrasing "readily available alternatives" by itself is slightly ambiguous: it could be read as subsetting ("the alternatives that are readily available") or just attributive ("the alternatives, which are readily available").
I apologize for the initial ambiguous snippy comment.
I'm an I.T. consultant in N. Carolina, and I've worked in very rural areas setting up connectivity for farms. Indeed, I have recommended StarLink on at least two occasions, albeit in concert with 4G/5G cellular (bad weather remains a problem). StarLink sounds great for airlines, RV's, boats, base camps, disaster relief--but those are almost all examples where affordability aren't usually high priorities, and I'm not sure if it's significantly better than upgrading geostationary satellite tech.
I do firmly believe that StarLink is, at best, a flawed solution to the largely solvable problem in the context of rural broadband access. We very recently had federal programs and funding to advance cable/fiber rural broadband services, but it was so weighed down with bureaucratic cruft that basically nothing got done. I dunno if that specific provision of Biden's infrastructure bill remains law, but I'm pretty sure it ceased being a priority after the last election (not for nothing, StarLink had plenty to gain by those federal programs dying, although I have no direct knowledge that Musk, DOGE, et al made any direct moves to stop it--I think it was mainly the shite implementation/execution by the Biden administration).
So "readily available" in the sense of "we could do it at any time, and it would be a helluva lot cheaper and more durable than continuously launching hundreds of satellites into LEO". Poor choice of words on my part, and even still I'm sure there's still plenty to disagree with there.
Regulatory capture is only a secondary reason why many parts of the USA still lack cheap, reliable broadband Internet access. It turns out that running fiber everywhere is expensive, and in some areas the potential customer base doesn't justify the cost.
It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth.. unless and until there's competition.
Funny how quickly my internet options went from expensive cable internet, to 1 gig symmetric fiber for $90, to 10 gig symmetric fiber for $50. And now, magically, Xfinity has 1Gbps+ service for $50 as well.
> It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth...
You can start a company right now and lay fiber in these places and start your own telecom.
You probably don't have the money for that but, if you put together a solid business plan, a bank would give you a loan.
You may not have the experience or expertise to do that, but there are plenty of people who do.
Why hasn't that happened yet? It turns out that laying down miles of fiber for a handful of customers isn't profitable.
Google dod it in a few places that were low hanging fruit. Places that had telephone poles where they could get relatively easy access to them.
There are certainly places where access to those poles is more difficult than it should be but most places are hampered by either being too remote to justify the cost of burying lines to a few customers (rural areas) or the digging is too expensive to many customers (suburban areas) because they'd be digging up streets.
I most certainly don’t have 1 Gps+ service for $50 though in practice my circa 50-100 Mps service for about twice that works fine does for me from Xfinity. I care a lot more about reliability.
We do a lot of things that require subsidizing, very much including the things commonly found in/around a lot of the rural farms where these services would target. If broadband internet access is a fundamental need for contemporary communication--much like the postal service, telegraph, and telephones were--then historically we do what's necessary to provide them.
Yeah, a primary reason would include "spineless legislators who allowed carriers to say "We'd need tens of billions of subsidies to even consider doing this", and then when given that money to do so, just... largely didn't. And kept cruising without consequence (and with the money).
It's not that expensive. The Starlink Mini is around $200, and service is $50/mo for 100gb.
I've been somewhat skeptical of the addressable market (doesn't fiber + cell tower network offer good enough coverage?) but I know so many people who have put it on their RV, their boat, or are using it rurally that I've started changing my mind. And the service really is better than cell phone networks, which are far too patchy to provide reliable service at decent speed.
And you can put it on standby mode for $5/mo, so you're not even really locked into $50/mo if you're occasionally doing travel where you want to stay connected.
And in places like Africa, they've had to tightly rate limit new customers because demand is so high.
Yeah, as an RVer, I can tell you that you would probably be surprised by how much of the country does not have readily available cell service. And even if it does, they might not have it on your network.
I was paying more to have SIM cards for all of the big three, and getting much less out of it
The markets are additive. The great thing about Starlink is that it is GLOBAL. Meaning if you want to offer it for ships and planes (where there are no alternatives) you might as well also offer it to RV. And to rural people. And to the military. And you can do so in every country on the whole planet at the same time.
Having a few 1000s of sats to cover the whole planet is crazy efficient.
If you look at just the satellites, the build + launch costs are about $2.5M ea, which is impressive to be sure. But they only last 5 years, so that's $500k per year replacement costs. Then if you look at their capacity, they still can't meet their FCC / RDOF broadband designation speeds, but let's be generous and say they can serve 1000 simultaneous users per satellite (their current ratio, let's say it's good enough, incl. oversubscription ratio). So that already means 50%-100% of the entire monthly Internet bill from a consumer is going to just be replacing satellites. Let alone everything else to be an ISP.
This is very basic math. They need to launch more satellites if they want to hit their RDOF throughput goals and serve customers in the remaining areas. The most valuable extra-rural areas were low hanging fruit and already drying up.. the future addressable market is more dense and competitive suburban areas, which further limits the number of users per satellite because everyone shares the same spot beam spectrum.
But as you know well--having your personal connections to SpaceX it seems as you always defend them on HN--Starlink is about Golden Dome not consumer internet, so the private markets will fund it.
Yes and unless you're paying Starlink say $300/mo, they are taking a loss to serve you internet. Cities are especially difficult for them because more users are in the same spot beam so everyone shares the spectrum and they need even lower oversubscription ratios.
Yeah I don't know about the math. I've seen numbers that differ significantly from yours, but none which make it profitable at a reasonable price. I am sure he will continue to drop launch costs and I assume satellite improvements will make them able to serve more people, maybe orbit longer as they get smaller.
Complete nonsense. They didn't start in 2015 and didn't get investment into Starlink from Google because hopefully some presidnet would want Goldon Dome in the future. Starlink is a good business and has plenty of military value without Goldon Dome.
100 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €29/month in Europe, $39/month in the US.
200 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €49/month in Europe, $69/month in the US.
400+ Mbps down / 20-40 Mbps up (QoS higher priority), unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €69/month in Europe, $109/month in the US.
A good high-speed fiber connection is obviously better quality and value; but if you don't have one, then Starlink is absolutely the most competitive option you're going to get.
I don't have a lot of data points, but in metropolitan France at least I think you would always be better off with either a fiber or a 5G subscription, because it will be cheaper for more throughput, and because fiber is very widespread.
In Germany I think you are still better off with a cable subscription which also seems to be widespread in my experience and is cheaper than Starlink even if it's not as good as French deals (I only take in account offers without a contract for fairness, but if you don't mind you may be able to get even cheaper offers).
They have several niches where the alternatives are more expensive and worse. Half the RVers in any park have it now. RVing teaches you how much of the country is not covered by cell signal. Boats.
Another one I know first hand: food trucks. I do several events a year where cell signals get overwhelmed and cease to function, but I still have to process my credit cards. I’d say a solid 25% of food trucks are running these now.
In the (relatively) rural area that I live in, the only ISP options available were something like $75/mo for 10mbsp speeds. Starlink was an incredible blessing when it became available. Legitimately feels like magic in comparison to the existing options we had.
Why would you be "terrified" of space-based ballistic missile defense? Seems a lot better than ground-based interceptors that have a not-great rate of interception.
For trillions of dollars, Golden Dome is unlikely to be effective at interception, but it destabilizes MAD and can be used as a global prompt strike offense weapon.
I consider it context-dependent. If a site is intended for users to jump around to different pages often, then sticky headers make sense. If it’s designed for long-form articles or scrolling through feeds, then non-sticky headers make sense. When I have implemented them on my own sites, I try to keep them minimal and unobtrusive. But I also have never heard this complaint specifically, until now.
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