The absolutists have not thought it through. Fallibilism always wins.
Don't take yourself so seriously, I certainly do not.
---
Privacy & Agency Rant:
While we missed the boat on Internet tracking, there is still time to avoid sailing through the final frontier of neural tracking.
Thanks to the BCI, we will soon be offered the trade of our privacy for the convenience of password-free login and faster typing. Next, there will be a quick TSA neural scan prior to boarding.
Then, thought crime will become a literal thing. If particular thoughts are not outlawed outright, they will at least prevent you from certain activities.
> Proposed neuro-rights include the right to identity, or the ability to control both one's physical and mental integrity; the right to agency, or the freedom of thought and free will to choose one's own actions; the right to mental privacy, or the ability to keep thoughts protected against disclosure; [0]
For a great breakdown on the SOTA (2023) tech, and the long term implications, please see this podcast with full written transcript.
> Sean Carroll & Nita Farahany on Ethics, Law, and Neurotechnology [1]
That is freaking amazing. I want to be clear that reusable first stage of Falcon 9 + Starlink is the coolest tech that I have ever seen. It was just that for me, the financials didn't work out.
> There is no broadband or fiber on remote islands along the coast.
I have family on the USA side of the islands. Kenmore Air is subsidized, but the trees are so darn tall that at many homes, Starlink is not an option. (they like the trees and use directional microwave, which sucks for Zoom)
So to me, in a tech panacea that inlcudes Starlink + Reliable EVTOL (flying cars) - this will entirely change property values for those of use living outside of traditional city limits. I ain't selling.
No, I disagree, maybe. The terrestrial Internet was literally designed to route around a nuclear war. That was its initial purpose, was it not?
Starlink needs ground stations, which are visible from orbit, and can be Shaheded... unless every Starlink terminal can also become a down-link.. which would be cool. However, then it all still relies on terrestrial fiber, right? Or, then that would be a Starlink-only WAN?
I don't want to call out a specific HN'er, but he is an HN hero. Years ago, in person, he told me he was bored. I tried to convince him to work for Starlink in Redmond, as what could be cooler than working on an entire new satellite laser-based Internet 2 backbone?! This was back when GMaps labeled that office "A Place of Worship."
I failed at that, because he probably saw that the entire concept was questionable. My point here is that this is all very complicated, and while Starlink is the coolest tech in my lifetime, it still relies on terrestrial fiber in the end.
Please, help me work through this. I am likely very confused.
I agree with that, but it's great for a greenfield project/area. Say, Mars or very high and low latitudes, or ships/airplanes.
However, once you are in an area of "civilization," there is not only an opportunity for fiber, but also maybe the locals don't want a foreign power controlling your citizens' data access. India + China = 35% of the global population, and Starlink is not legal in either place.
Meanwhile, the free speech absolutist is focused on breaking up the ~5.4% of the globe, (EU) where Starlink is legal.
I was only trying to talk about Starlink here, as that is what TFA is about. Starlink is AMAZING in-flight, out at sea, etc.. But since you brought it up:
> Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.
So, where does the rest of the valuation come from?
It feels like it comes from the alien simulation-theory overlords.
That was my thinking as well here in EU farmland. I would use it as a backup. I really wanted to have an excuse to use the cool af Starlink tech. However, after half a decade the fiber has gone down 3 times, and I just shared my iPhone's LTE as a hotspot in 2 cases, and in the third I did yard work for 20 minutes.
When Starlink first became available here in poor-ish Central-EU, I was excited. Then, only months later, but after years of planning: EU funding brought fiber to my farm area, at ~$25/900mbps 10ms.
While my story is just n=1, I don't understand the huge upside for Starlink outside of Africa or India, where they have <.1% the money to spend on such things.
However, I am dumb, and very open to be convinced.
Should I post the photo of the Ukrainian women who has murdered in July, 2026 by Imperialist Russian government attitudes, at a train stop on her way to uni graduation?
Why is any of this happening? Can the Kremlin just join us in the 21st century already? How hard is it to just stop murdering your neighbors? We want to do business, we want to exchange culture. Can the Kremlin just stop being imperialist?
Here is the best Russian art from this century, dare to click if you are not a Russophobe: (66M views, and probably <100K English speakers have seen it)
Hopefully someone can give a more informed comment. For me, it's the seats directly in-line with the first turbine, and a few seats back.
edit: Well, I hope we are beyond boohoo LLM based info now. Here is Fable 5 High's explanation, and I loosely verified it. I post this to save many watts of energy due to others asking the same thing.
Simplified:
> I'd like to avoid seats in the rotor burst zone: the rows roughly in line with the plane of the engine's fan and turbine disks, plus a few rows fore and aft of that.
More details:
> The term you're looking for is the rotor burst zone — sometimes called the uncontained engine rotor failure (UERF) debris zone. That's the phrase an aerospace engineer or pilot would immediately recognize.
> Here's the physics behind it: the fan, compressor, and turbine disks in a jet engine spin at enormous speeds (turbine disks can exceed 10,000 RPM). If a disk or blade lets go and the containment case can't hold it, the fragments fly out tangentially — meaning they travel in the plane of rotation of that disk, perpendicular to the engine's axis. They don't spray forward or backward much; they carve out a relatively narrow band.
> FAA guidance (Advisory Circular 20-128A, which designers use to minimize hazards from these events) models the debris path as the plane of each rotor stage plus roughly ±15 degrees fore and aft of it. Since an engine has multiple rotor stages spread along its length, the combined hazard band along the fuselage is a few rows wide, centered roughly abeam the engines.
> Oh god people actually go on a hinge date to axe throwing and think it’s the real world.
Hinge dates and axe throwing are not my world. I also didn't go to pop band concerts and meat market bars in the olden times. I don't judge the people who did, at least now I don't.
The absolutists have not thought it through. Fallibilism always wins.
Don't take yourself so seriously, I certainly do not.
---
Privacy & Agency Rant:
While we missed the boat on Internet tracking, there is still time to avoid sailing through the final frontier of neural tracking.
Thanks to the BCI, we will soon be offered the trade of our privacy for the convenience of password-free login and faster typing. Next, there will be a quick TSA neural scan prior to boarding.
Then, thought crime will become a literal thing. If particular thoughts are not outlawed outright, they will at least prevent you from certain activities.
> Proposed neuro-rights include the right to identity, or the ability to control both one's physical and mental integrity; the right to agency, or the freedom of thought and free will to choose one's own actions; the right to mental privacy, or the ability to keep thoughts protected against disclosure; [0]
For a great breakdown on the SOTA (2023) tech, and the long term implications, please see this podcast with full written transcript.
> Sean Carroll & Nita Farahany on Ethics, Law, and Neurotechnology [1]
[0] https://www.cirsd.org/en/horizons/horizons-winter-2021-issue-no-18/its-time-for-neuro--rights
[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/03/13/229-nita-farahany-on-ethics-law-and-neurotechnology/