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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • If you want to be effective, you need to drift south as much as you drift north to get adequate coverage - still a circular orbit, just tilted off the equator. This causes a real problem, because northern Europe is far enough north that you have to pretty much cover the whole world, anyway. Also, the more you move from the equator, the more bands of satellites you will need to have coverage at all times. The other part in the Starlink system is the requirement for some number of base stations to connect to the internet backbones. Further iterations are reducing this need, but it will never be 0.

    What this means is, it would be cheaper for Brazil or the Middle East to have local satellite internet than it is for Europe, China, or Australia. In fact, if Europe had a low-orbit satellite internet offering, it would be more cost effective to sell it worldwide because they would be close to that just covering their own needs. Which is also the position Starlink has chosen to be in.



  • Yeah, I don’t see us all moving into cities, although many people already have. I also don’t think we need to have one giant city - those numbers were given to show how little actual living space people need, keeping in mind that Paris doesn’t seem to be viewed as somewhere undesirable to live, and still has room for beauty and not just urban utilitarianism.

    On the flip side, many people who move to the city do so for work. I hope we see less of that, where things can be more decentralized so people who like a less urban environment can still effectively contribute to society and the economy without having to stifle their personal living preferences. I’d also like to see less cost-efficient but more space-efficient growing conditions for agriculture so more land can be returned to a natural state while still supporting the populations we have. Both vertical farming and vertical living can contribute to that. And I absolutely realize that livestock tend to be both less cost- and space-efficient, especially if it’s humane.




  • There are good indications that a significant part of the overvaluation was due to Musk hype, so clearly people hating on Musk will have an outsized impact compared to the public faces of other corporations. I’d still say that’s a good reason for the stock to drop. Now, add on massive recalls to the truck designed in Minecraft, and lackluster sales for a variety of reasons (including Musk hate). It’s not a good time to own Tesla.


  • If people were to stand shoulder to shoulder, the entire population of the world could fit into half of Prince Edward Island. If the world’s population was in a single city with the density of Paris, it would be the size of Iraq. To put that in perspective, Paris is the 35th most dense city in the world. If you matched the density of the densest city in the world, it would be about the size of Uruguay.

    Of course, each person needs much more land to survive, and more still if they’re to live the lifestyle we in the developed world enjoy.




  • This is fairly inaccurate, as well. Paid work was certainly lower, but prior to the Industrial Revolution merely putting clothes on your back was a fairly labor-intensive task. One estimate puts it at 10 spinners to supply one person on a loom, and this work was often done by women at home, and was generally paid work in the Middle Ages. A British census in the mid 1800s, which over-represents unpaid work in domestic services as laborers (I’ll let you decide if that counts as women being part of the economy or not), still had about 50% of women in the census as employed.