• Not a replicant@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Disclaimer - I have a starlink terminal. I feel that the complaints should be made to the various governments that haven’t mandated modern terrestrial technologies to those of us outside metro areas.

    I live 14km/9m from a town with underground fibre optic. The best I can hope for is geo-synch satellite with data caps and latency around 600ms. I will never see fibre optic rolled out here. I can sort of understand, it’s quite expensive and needs to be balanced against income from operations to justify it. But they rolled out electricity, and they rolled out PSTN, so the justification was found in those cases.

    So, Starlink found a need and filled it. Had governments filled the need instead, the problem wouldn’t exist.

    • Maalus@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      The problem isn’t that they are filling a niche, the problem is that they are doing it carelessly and ruining other people’s work in the process.

    • lengau@midwest.social
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      3 months ago

      While I don’t begrudge you your choice, I don’t think this is a good defence of Starlink. It sounds too close to defence of leaded gasoline.

      Someone else not solving a problem isn’t a good defence for someone who creates a solution to that one problem that ends up being a net negative for humanity as a whole, and it’s definitely not a defence of a second generation that makes a known problem with the technology even worse.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I will never see fibre optic rolled out here. I can sort of understand, it’s quite expensive and needs to be balanced against income from operations to justify it. But they rolled out electricity, and they rolled out PSTN, so the justification was found in those cases.

      Yeah, but you see, the electricity and telephone rollouts were done in the New Deal era or shortly thereafter. The government has been subjected to way too much regulatory capture since then to ever consider doing something that would help the public at the expense of corporate profits nowadays.

    • lengau@midwest.social
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      3 months ago

      While I don’t begrudge you your choice, I don’t think this is a good defence of Starlink. It sounds too close to defence of leaded gasoline.

      Someone else not solving a problem isn’t a good defence for someone who creates a solution to that one problem that ends up being a net negative for humanity as a whole, and it’s definitely not a defence of a second generation that makes a known problem with the technology even worse.