Independent analysis based on Starlink IPv6 traffic estimates there are 4.7 million US Starlink residential subscribers, and that about 2 million came on line in the last year.

I suspect my understanding of the situation is dead on correct; Starlink is filling the vast hole, whatever your "semi-rural" anecdote has you thinking. At an average of 2.53 person's per household in the US, this means Starlink is now the provider of 3.5% of all per capita broadband in the US, and likely to 5% or more inside another year.

Where Comcast is available. Sure. I suspect you're missing some critical information about Comcast availability in rural areas.

No, it isn't. What's outrageously expensive is quasi-government monopolies that are really massive healthcare/retirement benefits companies.

Fiber itself is cheap, as are the electronics on either end of the cable. Trenching can be expensive, but it doesn't have to be. Trenching gets expensive when it involves legal battles and navigating permitting thickets controlled by local utilities and governments. The actual act of laying fiber in trenches isn't very costly, and doesn't take much time.

Go look at the FCC National Broadband Map, which is really great, btw. Filter the whole country by Fiber and look at the coverage. Note how N.D. and S.D have extremely high coverage. Also note how these are highly rural areas, with properties separated by great distances. Yet you can get FTTH there. Given the excuse that's been offered for decades; that the US is big and low population density makes broadband too expensive, this shouldn't be possible.

Yet there it is. Why? Because those states are conservative, and they don't turn every feature of life into another balkanized quasi-government mess, complete with public-sector unions, bought and paid for union politicians with crazy union contracts that turn every public institution and utility into another retirement benefits operation that also happens to provide electricty/water/internet/whatever.

That's why.

Imagine having last mile right-of-way into the largest market of wealthy homes on Earth, and squandering that affordance so badly that you find yourself saying these things. Between Musk solving the rural internet problem, and aggressive fiber and wireless operators dealing with urban areas, Comcast's old and busted coax system is going the way of copper pair telephone service.

Ok. Therefore what?

What is the UK government supposed to do on behalf of nice weather/climate?

The celebrity greenpeace so-and-so has demanded action. The media has broadcast that demand into the echo chamber. So what shall be done to "stop the doom-loop?"

I note that this optimally brown and heavily tattooed spokes-something appears to be be big jewelry fan, and spends a lot of time collecting glamour shots around the planet, espousing its sexual preferences and flashing its cleavage. I imagine all that metal is recycled and was walked/sailed to all those sites, where the images where hand painted, and not shot with the products of high energy electronics fabrication processes in various Asian hellholes that are exempt of the UK's regulatory regime.

Or maybe not, a Maja is just another hysteria grifter that has found its niche at titillating you with regular doses of fear and loathing.

I am not the least bit confused. The same technique that might be used to remove "harmful" behavior can be used to alter any behavior. That's self-evident to anyone with even passing concept of how models work.

False. The depth depends on the effort made to analyze the model and test behavior. There is no limit here: abliteration can be as shallow or as deep as one has time and money to spend.

Yepp, as I said: The system is built first and foremost to defend itself.

Personally, I don't think that police should have any right whatsoever to enter your digital devices. Yes, including for terrorism and kiddie porn. And I am 100% for us nerds developing defenses against this overreach. This case is a lesson that teaches us distress PINs are a good thing, but we need to improve on them, make it less obvious they were used, etc.

It's not a question of "Germany for the Germans". It's a matter of allowing people who are openly opposed to your culture to become a sizeable minority, while at the same time putting pressure on society in every way in order to extract wealth for the "elites", while at the same time replacing everyone among the "elites" who is actually capable of something with incompetent, corrupt egomaniacs.

If one of these factors were absent, we might yet manage. Competent leaders might be able to keep things together. Not maximizing profit for the few while returning the populations' lives back to peasantry would give ordinary people breathing space to cope with everything and solve issues at the base. Not importing culture war would keep society more cohesive and able to fight back against the exploitation.

As a (small) shareholder of both companies, I'm against this move. Not that my opinion counts for much, but these are two companies that are strong each for their own reasons and a merger would muddle that. But maybe that's the point.

We thought the Megacorporations would emerge as vertically integrated all-consumer-products giants. Turns out that a tech bubble beats that.

That does not follow. Germany especially is an export-oriented economy that relies on cheap energy to be profitable. It competes directly with asian countries that have far lower costs. You might not grasp the magnitude: Gas was 2.5 cents per kWh a decade ago. It jumped to 30 and more after Ukraine, USA or a combination of both blew up North Stream 2. Granted, it came down again, but it's still over 6 cents today. (exact numbers depend on your market, location, yada yada )

Russia is suffering a slow-burning blow to its compound growth. I honestly don't think that the damage to Russia is worse than the damage to Europe.

Russia's army also took a beating AND would be needed to keep control of Ukraine, half of which (the western parts) are intensely anti-russian. Controlling an occupied territory can be as demanding if not more than conquering it.

It's not just you.

I've lived most of my life in Germany and definitely got its best years. It's been going downhill for the past 20 years or so. And a lot of the why are very similar to the ones you list, and while I saw them early and left the country for that, it's only been coming to a head in the past decade.

True, but there's a saying that capitalism won the competition because communism failed first. Meaning capitalism will fail 2nd and we might be seing that.

Yes, but by what measurement? Being able to destroy the competition might mean you are better, or it might mean you aren't playing fair. Microsoft dominates the OS market, but not by offering the best OS.

And your example of Kuwait is more spot on than you think. The USA also was handed a cheat code - it was the big winner of WW2, with no damage to its infrastructure while Europe was in ruin, Russia had lost 10% of its population and insane amounts of infrastructure, etc. - and while everyone else involved was busy rebuilding basics for a few year, the US could pivot its wartime industry to productive industry and jump ahead.

Worse than that, it's an entire circle-jerk. Many of these people were at consulting companies, then were placed into their positions, while still being loyal to their consulting company. The biggest one whose entire modus operandi is placing their people into positions where they can give the company future business is McKinsey. This isn't even news.

Yeah, but that's not how that works.

The CEO these days is one of the bad apples, and his real-world experience consists of a cozy upper-class childhood, a business school that exchanges money for degrees, a few years at McKinsey or such and a placement as CEO somewhere. He has barely even MET a working class man in his life. His primary concern are quarterly numbers and getting his bonus. The fact that quarters are very short periods in the business world alone doesn't allow him to focus on anything else, unless he wants to explain to the wife why they can't buy that nice mountain chalet she wanted this year.

Buffet is exceptional in many ways, he's not a good example here.