I don’t think they’re likely to pay enough to justify a high valuation. And remember you’re basically talking just very rural areas in the long term; towns and villages can be hooked up increasingly cheaply. Like, Starlink is maybe a viable medium-sized telco. Maybe even a large one; they might hit Vodafone scale (though probably with a worst cost structure; a lot of Vodafone’s business is just reselling other peoples’ fibre). Note that Vodafone isn’t valued at multiple trillions.
Ultimately, it’s hard to be high margin as a telco.
Thing about N1 and starship is they have _loads_ of small engines; lots of complex plumbing and vibrations. Falcon 9 has a more sensible number.
On re-entry, Buran re-entered once. You can’t read much into that. The shuttle did about a hundred times, but exploded doing it once and had a number of near misses. One reason it was killed off was that making re-entry safe was considered to be impossible. I think it’d be fair to say that re-entry for large objects remains an unsolved problem.
I mean see above. The Irish rural fibre programme was specifically for premises where it would not be economic for the other fibre networks to roll out. It was _expensive_ (probably about 4000 euro per premises in the end), but it worked.
I was pretty sceptical of NBI when it was announced, but it really does seem to have worked out. If Ireland, which is historically very bad at big state projects and which has an unusually dispersed rural population (we were much later to restrict ribbon development than other developed countries), can do it, I don’t see why any rich country can’t.
The whole thing really does feel like a bit of a repeat of the N1 in the sense that it seems to be a “lash loads of relatively small engines together and see what happens” effort, though the N1 was abandoned quickly. I did wonder about this when I saw they were planning on using like 30 engines, because, well, N1, but I was assured that it was different this time.
Well, first of all, it isn't. It's the best-selling EV, but this is largely due to the fact that Tesla has a very different product approach to the other big EV manufacturers. Tesla has exactly two real models. BYD and VW AG have basically too many models to count, with multiple brands each.
But it doesn't make any _money_. Approximately all the ballpoint pens in the world are dependent on a single company, Mikron Group. It has a market capitalisation of about CHF 275.5 million. "We're the only ones who do that" is insufficient; it has to make money. And honestly, generally, "we're the only ones who do that" is a strong sign that a thing doesn't really make much money; if it did, well, other people would do it.
> The pattern is unambiguous. In townlands still unserved by mid-2026, LEO provider Starlink has grown relentlessly and now accounts for 14.3% of fixed samples, approaching one in seven. In townlands where fiber arrived in 2021 and 2022, Starlink’s share has remained below 2% for five years, with no growth despite the same marketing, pricing, and availability.
(The context is that Ireland has spent the last six years building a fibre network for every rural premises in the country, which is now almost done; it will be complete late this year or early next.)
The problem for Starlink is, it works okay as a business model... Until fibre arrives. Then it's dead. So, long-term, Starlink's market is, essentially, countries which are too poor to do a rural fibre rollout (and bear in mind that it has become much cheaper to do so). Like, what's the bull case for Starlink? In a decade, you've got to assume that areas unserved by fibre won't really be a thing in the developed world.
> He would suddenly have a serious job with real responsibilities.
Backbench independent MP is not a serious job with real responsibilities; really most backbenchers in general barely do anything. Farage himself is fairly notorious for hardly ever even showing up.
... Wait, what would the mechanism of action be there?!
Like, if the choice of explanations is (a) obesity, and maybe some pesticide stuff, who knows, or (b) _witchcraft_, Occam's razor points a particular way.
> Nobody lifts weights or does labor like they used to.
I'm fairly sure _vastly_ more people lift weights today than in the 70s. At that point it was, well, not niche exactly, but you didn't have anything _remotely_ like the number of gyms around. Can't offhand find figures for back to then, but apparently it's up ~60% in just the last two decades.
Per the article, they did at least try to control for age (it'd be a completely uninteresting result if they hadn't). The big concern is that they did _not_ control for obesity or diabetes.
Part of the confusion is that there are two things involved here; 'Chat Control 1', an existing (but expiring) derogation to the ePrivacy Directive which allows, but does not require, providers to scan messages. 'Chat Control 2', which you'll likely have heard more about, would _require_ providers to do this. The wiki article is quite poorly written and implies that 1 is an earlier version of 2, which isn't really the case.