kortilla

It’s cheap to deliver mail and even then many of those places don’t get mail to their home. It’s to a shared mailbox.

LEO Satellite internet is only cheaper because the environmental cost is not being accounted for.

Terrestrial wireless and wired had decades to do something and failed. Trenching fiber for 30km is insanely expensive and requires tons of time to get easements to do it.

Also, it’s a pretty old trope to say “X only works when cost Y I’ve invented and not even quantified is not imposed”. If you want to make the argument that Starlink should pay for something, do that. Otherwise it’s meaningless crap that can be used to argue against literally anything.

Always easy to say as the person with internet on the internet where the people stuck in those locations can’t speak.

Maybe it’s okay for you to not have internet.

Apple TV is not a TV. It’s the terrible quality of all of their TV apps that leads to this behavior.

You must not use the TV apps. Both the Samsung and the LG ones suffer from this.

I was not suggesting Jellyfin was better because the apps don’t exist in any meaningful sense for TVs.

Nope, defense is an action to prevent an attack. China isn’t building coal plants to stop global warming.

Also, the world isn’t two sides. There are tons of participants on this site who are not in the US that criticize both china and the US (i.e. most of Europe). So you realize how stupid the defense looks of “I’m behaving like a piece of shit because this guy behaves like a piece of shit” when there is a room full of people trying to do the right thing.

If your argument is whataboutism, it means you have no actual defense for your behavior. You’re just appealing to “someone else did something bad”.

and that various massacres also had black perpetrators.

the implication of your message is that this is not true

No it’s not. Saying “I won’t talk about how to make bombs” is not the same as “the holocaust didn’t happen”.

That’s still whataboutism because it’s not the only alternative.

Because that’s not a logical defense and nobody cares about moral high grounds. That’s why it’s a logical fallacy.

Actions can be judged on their own merits regardless of who presents the arguments.

Plex is a piece of shit that rams dumb streaming stuff down your throat each time you sign in on a TV. This coincidentally happens every other month or so when the app seems to forget the account it’s signed into.

It’s becoming hostile for people who want to work from their media alone.

other internet providers dumping tens of thousands of satellites in orbit instead of building municipal internet

Ah yes, that municipal internet in the Pacific Ocean. The municipal internet in the 1 person per square mile rural area. The municipal internet to mountain villages. The municipal internet running to airplanes. The municipal internet to the Antarctic research stations.

Tell me you don’t know the point of satellite internet without telling me.

If you want to make arguments against sat constellations so people can make long exposure photos, go for it. But don’t pretend there are actual viable alternatives to LEO sat internet.

Talk to employees at anthropic and OpenAI. Listen to the talks from the higher-ups. Sam Altman even said something to the effect of “we don’t need a working business model because AGI will figure out how to make money”.

Does Vatican City get a prize for being the smallest emitter?

Nope, because they are irrelevant in the scheme of sources of CO2. Tons emitted is all that matters.

The West led by the US whose adminstration currently denies the existence of climate change? Whose emissions drop was due to the fracking boom and natural gas becoming cheaper than coal? Let's not break our arms patting ourselves on the back. If fracking hadn't been invented how much coal would the US be burning?

The west, as in Europe (and the US before Trump) who began all of the initiatives to track CO2, the impacts of global warming, clean energy alternatives, etc. All of the solar tech that China is deploying today is paid for by the hundreds of failed startups pushing the technology forward in the 2000-2012 era.

China burns coal because they have coal.

That’s not an excuse. Australia gets a middle finger as well for because they have a shitload of coal and also take the attitude of “we might as well burn it since we have it”. That’s literally the opposite of being proactive.

If you only build renewable to deal with a shortage of fossil fuels, then you’re not addressing global warming. You’re just doing the very normal economic incentive thing.

Their factories produce panels and batteries and EVs that the rest of the world can use to decarbonize - so at least there's a point to "the highest emissions in the world".

Depends on how dirty the energy is for those. If more emissions come from manufacture and transport than are saved by the panel+storage, it would have been better for the recipient to burn fossil fuels.

The US is approving data centers with on-site gas turbines, and paying off windmill operators to shut down.

Yes, it’s disgusting and everyone in the Bay Area that used to pretend about global warming who is now working for companies expanding for AI can get fucked.

They are not the same.

They are not, but holy shit China is also terrible. The difference is that China has a track record of destruction over the last 25 years while climatologists screamed from the rooftops. It’s going to take 15 years even at their ambitious pace to unwind the expansion of emissions in the last 15. That’s the problem with climate change, it doesn’t matter if you increase solar production until you actually get rid of the coal burning.

But the difference is AI made it easier for dumb radicals to discover this AND it will walk you through the infrastructure.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/politics/ai-terrorism-...

I’m not shitting on China and that’s a red herring. I’m shitting on people who are praising China for being the #1 emitter who rapidly grew emissions long after the west realized how bad climate change was and was trying to correct them.

China actively built coal and continues to build coal fired generation far beyond the rest of the world.

The fact that the public charts are missing the recent decline is my mistake.

I don’t hate China, I hate people that pretend to care about the environment that glaze China when it’s very clear China optimized for its own citizens in the face of the west trying to grapple with climate change and is only now showing some signs of pivot with solar being cheap enough.

What was correct a decade ago, is very much false today, and the trend line is accelerating away from your feelings.

I’m the one that gave a trend line. Your response was that it has slightly declined at the very end and the chart isn’t up to date. I don’t think you know what a trend line is.

Put your additional year or two on the end and it will just look like every other slight reprieve. Draw an actual, you know, moving average or anything else that establishes a “trend” and you’ll see China is not reacting to climate change very quickly.

The potential upside in positives is actually there. New cures, personalized really good medicine, breakthroughs in every scientific field, etc.

The people are there because they are betting on AGI, not chatbots that make software engineering go faster.

Like putting kids that get into fights into the military.

Evidence of a process being used is not evidence of bribes in a process.

A thing happens in every administration regime where once it becomes clear that X is acceptable (e.g. renewables projects, LBOs, nuclear, oil drilling, etc), there will be a lot of submissions to do X without any bribes at all.

I was the only one who provided any in this thread. You should read up on it!

Their coal as a source is still on the way up in total tons burned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China

Carbon declining from car usage switching to electric and moving to more efficient fuel plants is the decrease you’re thinking of.

Coal is still growing there, but the upside is it’s growing slightly slower than renewables so at least as a percentage it’s declining.

Unfortunately that just means their demand increased YoY so they had to build both dirty and clean energy.

This view makes it obvious because coal is at the bottom of the stack: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:China-electricity-pr...

There is no “go first”. You either care and aggressively cut and pressure the worst emitting countries in whatever way possible or you’re just accepting severe warming with one country taking a penalty.

I don’t think you understand. It doesn’t matter if there exists a per capita that is higher. What warms the earth is total CO2. US emitting more per capita than China is not an excuse for China to emit more total and it’s definitely not an excuse to catch up on per capita.

The only framework that makes sense in is one that allows global warming as long as we all do it equally.

A lot of the trackers miss the trains because trains occur within the first few orbits after a launch. So if they don’t start recording data until some delayed event, they miss it. I had this problem a lot with live night sky trackers not showing the trains despite me seeing them quite clearly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_inclination

In order to cover those northern/southern extremes, more expensive high inclination orbits are required (in the US these are launched from California). They are more expensive because you’re no longer getting the rotational velocity of the earth for free in your orbital velocity.

So for a LEO constellation you want to minimize the launches to high inclinations and keep the bulk in those juicy easterly ones.

The problem is that the earth doesn’t care about a per capita denominator.

although they are on the cusp of peaking their use

That’s a really nice way of saying “their usage is currently at an all time high and will go up further”.

They don’t get to take credit for a potential future action.

I think the problem is that people are allowed to set up cameras of public spaces without requiring any “license to surveil”.

Starlink is leaking into radio astronomy bands, they initially said there wouldn't be a problem, but there was.

Again, these are two different things and conflating them is not productive. The initial discussion with Starlink and the astronomy community that I followed closely was explicitly about conflicts on the service frequencies (i.e. the thing unique to Starlink). They were cooperative with that.

Now it turns out electronics in space emit EM noise and that is the thing showing up in astronomy and it has nothing to do with the RF internet side. Non-Starlink satellites emit it as well but the sheer volume of starlink sats makes it easier to detect theirs.

The distinction matters because the same thing will happen with any constellation regardless of its purpose if it has onboard computers, batteries, solar arrays, etc.

I’m for passing regulations on this emissivity, but the framing that this is some kind of rug pull by spacex is dumb. They could have participated in the community the legally required amount like the Chinese do and we’d be in a much worse position.

"It is important to note that Starlink is not violating current regulations, so is doing nothing wrong. Discussions we have had with SpaceX on the topic have been constructive," said Tingay. "We hope this study adds support for international efforts to update policies that regulate the impact of this technology on radio astronomy research that are currently underway."

Sounds like not transmitting but just electronics existing in space.

This is directly the opposite of the implication of using Ku/Ka bands they shouldn’t have (which is what the agreements were with astronomy groups - aka “pinky promise”).

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/politics/ai-terrorism-...