In all fairness, elon needs the extra money because his american politician shopping spree doesn’t seem to be working. /s
Playing the Verizon during Wildfire Card I see.
https://www.courthousenews.com/verizon-apologizes-for-throttling-firefighter-data-during-wildfire/
This is some Looney Toons type of of villainy
Fuck Elon! Boycott starlink, Tesla, and space X.
I would space Elon tbh
And TwitterX
And anything else with Musk’s fingerprints on it.
Yes 💯
I’m never going to buy an expensive internet package, a badly designed car, or go into space, that’ll show him.
WOW how much of a scumbag could you possibly get, like, we need to measure this shit because I think this motherfucker is setting some sort of global historical record.
If unnecessary dollars owned is the metric, he already did that.
Musk needs to go to prison
Or hanged.
He should definitely be charged for the deaths he caused in the Ukraine
There’s a reason the Soviets had gulags.
They were created by people just like Musk.
Yeah that’s true, but we have to hold these people accountable with resorting to fascism and violence somehow.
The gulags were not fascist torture camps. Many of them were barely even prisons, like they were towns where people could move around freely and even go to the theater. They were definitely work camps, where people repaid their debts to society, and the ones for political prisoners had heavy reeducation programs. They were successful, too. Many of the people who were imprisoned for anti-communist/fascist activity became committed socialists by the time of their release (not surprising given the logical nature of Marxism).
There’s a lot of misinformation out there about gulags, but when I say Musk belongs in one, it’s because he needs to work to repay all the damage he has done and if possible he needs to be re-educated. I don’t believe in prisons as punishment. I also don’t believe in capital punishment for people like Musk.
Stalin’s purges must have been an educational tool as well then.
Soviet archival evidence shows that the purges were democratically initiated by the party at large and were initially very popular due to the real problem of capitalist sabotage They got worse when the NKVD became overzealous and stepped beyond the bounds that were given them. The evidence shows that Stalin actually spent more time trying to reign in the excesses, but was often unsuccessful largely due to the weakness of the Soviet state that was recovering from a brutal civil war.
Of course, the purges were very excessive and rightly considered one of the big mistakes of the Stalin era, but the idea that they were his is ahistorical.
No dude, Stalin was a facist at heart and only used communism to further his agenda. He killed anyone who he felt threatened his power and with paranoia. Idk where you get the idea that he was trying to reign in the purges. He wasn’t. Doctor’s Plot, the red purge, holodomor, his hatred of Jews, there’s way too much. Everyone was happy to see him gone, at least secretly (refer to the secret speech). He had terrorised all of USSR.
While the politburo did sign off on the purges (never said they weren’t complicit) it was NOT a democratic process. You need representation of voters there.
You’re focused on the “infrastructure” part of "forced infrastructure " and not the more important forced part.
I dislike your eagerness to accept all that bullshit you just said.
People have a fond outlook of what the USSR was like. They neglect to see that they were an authoritarian society with a single party in charge which was willing to do anything to remain in power.
Gulags were horrible places on all accounts.
That wasn’t real communism. Just an ideal hijacked by meglomaniacs.
Well, I dislike the propaganda that capitalists force down most of our throats. I like looking at the actual historical record instead.
Never forget that during California wildfires less than 10 years ago, first responders were cut off from communications because Verizon cut them off.
I’m glad that incident is getting remembrance now. We’re now seeing how capital control of services is a national security risk.
Elon Musk is exhibit A in the case for why the people need to seize the means of production.
<Bolshevik chorus swells>
They keep testing the waters with this shit, cut their balls off to stop it
“Oops! It seems you have reached the maximum usage for your plan! Please call a representative to find a plan better suited to your particular usage volume, or text “$5B” to top up with extra credits.”
I just came here to remind folks:
https://www.courthousenews.com/verizon-apologizes-for-throttling-firefighter-data-during-wildfire/
“Apologizes”
Then sets a major marketing campaign (super bowl commercials?) about how supportive they are of first responders.
Yep. Rinse, repeat, profit.
Things like this should not be privately owned and relied on by militaries, it has this obvious problem, they need a reliable option from EU or Asian country should have one by now. The sooner the world stops trusting usa and fascist owned companies the better as they will betray at the drop of a hat.
That’s why they call it communism and hate it more than they do Satan. Communally owned utilities can’t be someone’s personal money printer, and that’s a problem to them, because they really want that money and power at the expense of the common good long term societal stability.
In my book, if you’re capitalist, you’re fascist. Capitalists have no ideals, no principles, they’re just fundamentally motivated by greed and voracity for more more more forever without any stated win condition. Precisely like cancer.
Not privately owned? But state owned is equally problematic, simply be at war with that state — bam. It probably should be a sector of the UN that can be elected to by its separate constituents. Except the UN barely has teeth compared to America’s grill. If there were aliens, the rich would try to kill them because of the competition.
I miss when I was young and naive and thought the world was basically good. I feel like in today’s world I have to protect my nieces and nephews, and future children from what the world really is, which is just sad.
The only solace I get occasionally is focusing on looking at the stars, and what’s out in space, and the vastness of it all, reminding me every once in a while that what happens on our little slice of the universe isn’t all there is.
The world was basically good because serious people created institutions to make the world good after the world almost destroyed itself with pointless war for two generations in a row. Unfortunately it seems we are more regressing to the mean of the world being shitty again.
And starling is polluting the night sky with millions of satellites.
Enjoy stargazing while you still can. We likely only have a few years left.
Since when? We had the Vietnam war, Korean war, Dessert storm, countless interventions in the middle east. And don’t even get me started on what’s going on in Syria. World wars are flashy. But, we never stopped waging war after that. You sound like a bobble headed naive optimist telling me how great the world used to be after WW2.
The whole World is never great. Parts of it have had great times even when other parts suffer. From a North American viewpoint, their world has been more often good or great in the last century.
The vast majority of everyone wants what’s best for everyone else. We just all have really shitty information about each other.
We’re also dictated by a global system that indoctrinates us in a zero sum competitive and antagonistic mindset, which rewards you every step of the way for succumbing to it like feeding you little pellets like a pigeon.
World is basically good, there is a couple of bad apples that abusing good will of the rest of humanity.
Most people are basically good… to the people that matter personally to them. Unless they’re like Vash the Stampede, a typical person’s umbrella of empathy includes only friends and family they regularly see, not humanity in general.
Covid proved otherwise for me. There’s also countless wars, and dictators throughout history who have proven counter to your point. Just bcz some people are nice doesn’t mean the world is basically good.
What a reeking piece of shit.
Just another cappie looking for more profits.
A person I actually wouldn’t mind seeing ICE deport…
I fully support sending him to Mars, as long as it’s a one-way trip.
Personally I’d like to see him travel vertically about three feet or so with a rope around his neck. No spaceships needed, we can build those later.
I hope there get to be alternatives to Starlink soon. Ideally it would be a publicly held company that (somehow) limits that no single individual can own more than 1% of the company. Honestly, that’s how all publicly traded companies should be set up!!
One could argue that low earth orbit is a natural monopoly like water pipes, electricity poles or railroads, and should be owned by governments, that could rent bandwidth to companies.
There are a few problems with that, would it be owned by the UN with US, Russian, British, French and Chinese veto powers over its use? Would it just be one country, and then the US would be able to help let’s say Russia by turning down physical speed limits of internet connections for drones cutting out musk from the equation? Would it be based on whose airspace they are in at the time to rent out the data as required, thus stopping Ukraine from doing deep strikes into Russia? Also and most importantly figuring this out would be hard work and politicians are historically lazy on things that don’t affect them personally and why would they fight Elon musk to nationalize SpaceX or the satellites they own for Starlink when they can just sit back and be bribed much more easily?
They could build international hubs that any nation can add to and share the space. They built the ISS and ran it for long enough its technically possible. Not that I think the leaders of this world are capable of being long sighted on anything right now
The only international organization the could manage something like that that would have a possibility of keeping a free and open internet would be something like the UN for world wide usage where a sub organization, with open books would need to be audited by anyone, see my other response in this comment chain for more details.
Allot each country a certain number based off their population with a minimum of 1, and have that country pay for their satellites. Then each country decides what to do with them.
The way Starlink or any other satellite constellation works would be either destroyed in functionality by being removed from said constellation, they can only connect to a larger network or satellites for their functions to be useful, or the country’s control over a few of the total would be functionally useless. The best option in that veign would be for SpaceX or whatever company runs the constellation to be owned by all governments proportional to their population but that would have issues where countries like Russia, China, the US, NK, and Israel would then have more access to the constellations to spy on all people and censor everyone world wide more directly. I don’t think that would work it would make things worse most likely and would be completely unfeasible. I think a non profit something along the lines of the ACLU but world wide running it for the benefit of humanity with privacy, freedom of speech, and that sort of thing in their charter while being functionally immune from state/government interference while operating under those parameters would be the most feasible solution which would be ugly but maybe better, maybe with the UN as the overall backer of the constellation management, making it a more powerful entity but stopping the US, China, Russia, France, or the UK from individually controlling the way the constellation is used, and forcing all countries in the UN to allow access to the free and open internet.
I want them all to get scrapped and never used. They are causing significant harm to scientific endeavors that matter an incredible amount more.
Let alone contributing to harmful space debris travelling at insane speeds
I think it’s just an excuse, he has interfered before for no valid reason
Yeah, there’s no way one rich man should have so much geopolitical power.
He lives with no valid reason.
And there it is. Fuckers.
Musk is charging Ukraine $2500 per month per Starlink terminal, for over 250,000 terminals. Musk is making bank for shitty service (it’s not fast enough for gaming) and then he cuts services for partisan purposes, costing Ukrainian lives.
The upsell maneuver reminds me of when Verizon tried to do the same thing to California wildfire response services when communications cut out during disaster control efforts. That didn’t play well, either.
it’s not fast enough for gaming
Dawg, you need like a 5 megabit connection for online gaming, if even that. Starlink offers multiple times that at the minimum.
I can understand it being too slow for many things, but gaming is one of the worst examples you could’ve possibly given.
Couldn’t find a reliable source for the 250,000 figure. The closest thing I could find was 50,000 in 2025.
I hate this as much as you do, but come on, don’t make shit up.
Download speed isn’t the problem with satellite are you dense?
The co-founder of the Ukraine Defense Fund, which has helped secure Starlink access for the Ukrainian military, told The Atlantic that he estimates there are now over 250,000 Starlink terminals in use across the war zone.
I found the article in The Atlantic (Paywall bypass here):
[Musk’s] company has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from the Starlink terminals operating in the war zone. Liscovich estimates there are well over 250,000 of them. In the past, SpaceX, which runs Starlink, has reportedly charged the Ukrainian government $2,500 per terminal each month, and it has cut off service when bills go unpaid. Earlier this month, when U.S. military officials asked SpaceX about the outages in Ukraine, the company advised switching to an upgraded contract to restore Ukraine’s access, U.S. officials told us. (Musk and SpaceX did not respond to questions for this article.)
As for incapacity for gaming of Starlink, that’s anecdotal, having heard it is a problem from fellow gamers here in the States that depend on Starlink. There’s enough of a lag to disallow for common action games, although this is a known issue consistent with all satellite internet services. Hence the need for rural ISP buildout blocked by the big communications oligopolies (and presently the well-bribed Trump administration)
You’re remarkably antagonistic for a Lemming. Are you sure you’re not a Musk-shill or a bot?
We pulled expensive, heavy copper wire to every rural area in the 1930s-40s, we could pull cheap and lightweight fiber on the same poles easily today.
We paid for it in the 90s. Then telecom companies just didn’t provide the service they were paid to
I found the article in The Atlantic
Fair enough, I couldn’t find that article.
here’s enough of a lag to disallow for common action games
Lag is different from a lack of speed, which that person claimed. Lag = latency, nothing to do with speed.
You’re remarkably antagonistic for a Lemming. Are you sure you’re not a Musk-shill or a bot?
I really really really hate this redditor style tendency to call everyone who corrects facts they want to believe in a shill or a bot. I couldn’t have made it more clear that I’m not a Musk fan:
I hate this as much as you do, but come on, don’t make shit up.
It’s just that I’m overly concerned with facts, likely due to my neurodivergence. These kinds of comments feels kind of ableist, although that again is probably something I might get shit on for, as you’re not supposed to call out ableism on this platform.
I don’t understand this bot thing either. I haven’t seen a single one of these bots you’re talking about. Repost bots, sure, but agenda pushing bots? The entities that push that stuff clearly aren’t interested in this platform yet. On Reddit it’s very obvious.
“Fast” doesn’t just refer to the download speed, it also refers to the latency.
By any competent gamer’s standards, WiFi is slow. Starlink is untenable.
One “special” mind to another, a head for facts doesn’t preclude you from being wrong and/or needlessly pedantic.
Are you really comparing latencies od GEO sattelites 35.000km away from earth to LEO sattelites that stay at 500km?
C’mon, starlink latencies are very close to normal cable internet
Bandwidth doesn’t matter for gaming - latency does. You could have a 100Gbps connection, but if it has a latency of 1000ms then it’s useless for gaming.
Yeah, but I bet those ping times are just awful. And that can definitely interfere with gaming.
I thought so too, then I googled it. It’s actually not a bad latency at all. Better than some cabled connections I’ve used in the past.
Might not be very stable though.
Hmm, that’s somewhat surprising. And agreed on stability being sus.
In the end, though, even if it was a perfect connection, I would never know cause fuck that guy. With a 2x4 with rusty nails in it. Obviously.
Agreed!
