Yeah, I had to go feeling around under the couch to find my eyes after rolling them so hard they popped out of my head.

You’ve got your head so firmly placed up your ass you’ve adapted to breathing methane directly.

I hated Donald Trump in the '80s already. I thought he was a dishonest blowhard and was amazed that anybody believed anything that came out of his mouth.

I hated Elon Musk from pretty much the moment he showed up as the “darling awkward little geek bro”. He always struck me as inauthentic and a little bit stupid. (I was wrong on that last point, mind. He’s a lot stupid.)

I’m sorry, Mr. Aneurysm: You’re a “feminist” who “doesn’t use Google Translate”. And who somehow thinks that your “radical feminism” is a topic suited to a thread about STARLINK in a group called ENOUGH MUSK SPAM.

I meant what I said before. The kiddie table is thataway. Go to it. Adults are talking here.

If you can’t figure out my possible nationalities by a quick application of common sense, it explains fully why you want to keep sliding manosphere bullshit talking points into an anti-Elon Musk group: You’re too stupid to live.

No amount of you pretending to speak Chinese via Google Translate is going to change this. Now piss off, little child. Adults are speaking. Go toddle off to the kiddie table and play with the rest of your breed.

Huh. Aneurysms that make you write in Google-translated other languages. Cool.

I’m very sorry to hear about your aneurysm and how it’s impacted your ability to say anything that’s even vaguely related to the group you’re posting to. I’m also very sorry to hear about your getting hit in the head by a shovel as an infant, thus causing you to say really stupid things as well.

Thoughts and prayers and healing vibes your way.

I’m very sorry to hear about your aneurysm and how it’s impacted your ability to say anything that’s even vaguely related to the group you’re posting to.

Thoughts and prayers and healing vibes your way.

Yep. Spitting facts like degenerative AI.

Hallucinated facts.

That’s the main problem, yes. Starlink is not going to be useful to anybody living in a city. There’s no need for expensive, low-grade Internet when you can for a fraction of the price just get physical connection. I mean … your apartment building is not going anywhere anytime soon, right? So that’s 60% of your prospective market gone. (The people who travel and want to use it, and the weirdos who orally service Kaptain Ketamine, are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the market size Starlink needs to pay for operations so they can be ignored for analysis.)

So about 40% of the planet lives in rural areas, and that’s the only market of any size that’s going to be a credible one for Starlink. The people who live on the edges of that already have technology available to connect. My uncle, living way off in the boondocks near Vanderhoof, for example, has a direct microwave link. He’s not going to be using Starlink; it’s literally an order of magnitude more costly than what he’s got. Similarly most of mainland China (well in excess of 80%) has 5G coverage with 100% coverage due by the end of the 2025. That’s a sizable chunk of that rural market gone too! So cut away that 40% to … let’s be generous and say 20%. (I’d actually guess closer to 15%.) That’s who’s left for needing a Starlink-like service.

But that’s not the only problem …

Oopsie! It turns out that worldwide about 10% of the world’s money rests in rural areas. (In the USA it’s actually closer to 8.5%, but let’s be generous again. It won’t matter.) The very people who would be the target market for Starlink can’t afford Starlink. So even if all of the 40% rural inhabitants around the world had to use Starlink, most of them wouldn’t because it’s too expensive. And Starlink’s prices aren’t dropping; they’re doing the opposite.

In the mean time, as shown in China, the alternatives aren’t sitting there idle. While Starlink balloons its operational costs and maintenance costs, other countries are also spreading 5G coverage, or microwave relay coverage, or fibre networks, or, or, or. They’re going to cut into Starlink’s revenue either by taking customers away or forcing prices down.

Starlink is not a viable business.

Closer to the latter than the former.

I wouldn’t discount people with brains coming up with something Starlink-like that is viable enough that it could at least eke out an OK profit, but Musk can’t do anything right.

Do you want to see a future where there actually are millions of human beings living and working off Earth?

Yes. AFTER we stop rushing headlong into making it uninhabitable on Earth.

reliable public estimates show starlink is profitable already or will be very soon

Where “reliable” is defined as “estimates that agree with what I’ve already psychologically decided has to be true for my identity to remain intact”.

Hero worship is one HELL of a drug. Rather like the ketamine your hero favours, in fact.

It is absolutely not a viable business product. All those numbers don’t hold up to even a giggle test when you count the costs of launches alone, not to mention ground operations, etc. Currently Starlink is alive only because of subsidies on these items. When (not if) the subsidies end, Starlink will return to losing hundreds of dollars on every terminal sold.

The fact that prices are jumping up now already kind of hints that it’s entering a sales death spiral. Costs go up. Customers go down. Income goes down. Costs go up. Etc. etc. etc.

Starlink is a failure as a business, and as is usual for a Kaptain Ketamine company the “numbers” they cite range misdirection to flat-out fiction.

“Funniest” and “Genocide” in the same headline.

And it’s right!

You mean Kaptain Ketamine lied?!

Starlink was never a viable business prospect. It never will be. Anybody who signed up to Starlink was just waiting for this to happen without knowing it.

I’m curious: in which world are people living where this wasn’t a predictable outcome?

Note: I’m not saying a “desirable” or “good” or “just” or such outcome. Just “predictable”.

I’d read a few issues back in the day (borrowed from an ardent participant) and I’m still gob-smacked how lively and active game designers were back in the early '80s. And how well they knew each other, all because of the pages of this little APA.

It’s the most influential publication on RPG designers that you never heard of. Most of the game design innovations that were made in the '70s, '80s, and '90s came from the pages of A&E in their embryonic form, and it still held quite a bit of impact in the '00s.