The geosynchronous satellites are about 650 times higher than Starlink satellites, so the speed of light is a significant limiting factor.

Geosynchronous orbit is 35,700 km (3.57 x 10^7 m) above sea level. At that distance, signals moving at the speed of light (3.0 x 10^8 m/s) take about .12 seconds to go that far. So a round trip is about .240 seconds or 240 milliseconds added to the ping.

Starlink orbits at an altitude of 550 km (5.5 x 10^5 m), where the signal can travel between ground and satellite in about 0.0018 seconds, for 3.6 millisecond round trip. Actual routing and processing of signals, especially relaying between satellites, adds time to the processing.

But no matter how much better the signal processing can get, the speed of light accounts for about a 200-230 millisecond difference at the difference in altitudes.

I love the way you weave in the cultural context, including the culture war parts of modern political and policy debates, the business/corporate trends in entertainment, in your telling of this history. It’s clear you know your stuff, and you’ve helped me understand something new (the influences these slasher films drew from, from Agatha Christie), grounded in stuff I might have already known (the actual movies themselves and the cultural context they were released into, including how people looked at boobs before the internet).

So thank you. This comment is awesome, and you make this place better.

This framework you describe is still grounded in a large number of producers intentionally avoiding undercutting the competition in price.

If a profit can be made selling burgers for $10, and literally every burger seller knows that I’m happy paying $15 for a burger, they still have to compete with each other to get my business. Am I going to choose the place that charges everyone $10, or the place that I know engages in opaque pricing and is offering me $15? The most sophisticated price discrimination algorithm in the world doesnt do any good if the other burger shops don’t play along.

And this plays out every day in places like airports. Yes, I know I just need to eat before I jump on my connecting flight, and I’m not super price sensitive in that situation. But I won’t go to the place that’s far and away more expensive than another, or who I just recently read about on some travel blog as a price gouger.

And for a more concrete example of something that happens today, with services that are worth a completely different price than what it costs to provide it, and where everyone knows the buyer is valuing the service at that high value. Say I have an unfinished basement, and I want to hire a contractor to finish it with drywall, paint, flooring, HVAC, etc. It’s obvious to everyone how much that project adds to the livable square footage, and plenty of public valuation models show exactly how much that job adds to the value of the home. And everyone knows I’m about to list the home afterward for sale. But if 10 contractors are competing for the job, they don’t really care what value it provides to me if I choose not to hire them, so they’re bidding prices that cover the level of profit they want to make on the job, while not ceding the price advantage to the competition. The presence of competition tempers the price gouging.

So I still think competition is the key policy to pursue. Competition solves the problem being described here, and any market with this kind of individualized price gouging is suffering from insufficient competition.

This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.

Racists would pay quite a bit of money to be able to target certain ethnic groups.

This is only a problem if the service provider is a monopoly (or if every service provider illegally coordinates price fixing).

I might be willing to pay up to $800 to fix a $1000 computer (a more expensive repair might cause me to look to buy a replacement rather than repairing). But if it’s a 1 hour job requiring $100 of parts, then all the computer repair shops would be competing with each other for my business, essentially setting their hourly rate for their labor. At that point it’s like bidding at auction up to a certain point, but expecting to still pay the lowest available price.

So the problem isn’t necessarily perfect pricing information from the other side, but lack of competition for pricing from the other side. We should be fighting to break up monopolies and punishing illegal price fixing.

The author probably isn’t personally familiar with pre-2010 internet jokes so he skipped from 5-year intervals, all the way back 30 years to Monty Python.

In the 2005-2010 era I was seeing a lot of quotes from Arrested Development, Anchorman, Talladega Nights. But the one that really made the jump from TV to internet text comments was the South Park underpants gnome meme, where step 1 was whatever people were doing (in the episode, stealing underpants), step 2 was ???, and step 3 was Profit!. Meanwhile, some pure internet nonsense around then was stuff like O RLY?, Cheezburger and other lolcat stuff.

In 2000-2005 or so, there were plenty of Simpsons quotes to go around. Internet memes looked like demotivational posters (a take on the motivational posters common in corporate office settings back then). This was the heyday of surreal flash animation, as the Internet didn’t really have the infrastructure to have high-bandwidth videos go viral. Stuff like Strongbad, Group X, All Your Base, etc. Text references to bash.org quotes (I put on my robe and wizard hat, hunter2) came from around this era, from what I remember.

Pre-2000, I’m less familiar with. Real Ultimate Power was the first website that made me laugh out loud. But there was less for user posting on the internet: fewer web-based forums before phpbb and vbulletin came along. You needed your own geocities or angelfire page if you wanted to post something that persisted on the web. Usenet and IRC were around, but I don’t know the culture.

$83 billion per month is almost $1 trillion per year. That sounds about right.

No, no, the bigots hate people who speak French too

Oh you can remember which one is which by remembering that they have a university named USC.

I didn’t know I was learning a life skill at the time.

The House of the Dead 2 was a really popular arcade game at the time, so adapting the preexisting game into an at-home typing trainer was actually genius innovation.

There was. If you map that onto the growth in population you’ll see that tickets per person has been dropping since about 2000.

Typing of the dead

Still my favorite example of gamification: take a useful task and make it so fun that people will gladly devote hours and hours of their time to it.

if it’s immediately rewarding

Hell of a caveat there.

If you you blow the guts out and faces off Russian soldiers by more traditional means they are just as dead

I (and all the people and organizations that have worked throughout the last century to get incendiary weapons banned as anti-personnel weapons) generally feel that the method of killing matters, and that some methods are excessively cruel or represent excessive risk of long term suffering.

The existing protocol on incendiary weapons recognizes the difference, by requiring signatory nations to go out of their way to avoid using incendiary weapons in places where civilian harm might occur. Even in contexts where a barrage of artillery near civilians might not violate the law, airborne flame throwers are forbidden. Because incendiary weapons are different, and a line is drawn there, knowing that there actually is a difference between negligently killing civilians with shrapnel versus negligently killing civilians with burning.

There are degrees of morality and ethics, even in war, and incendiary weapons intentionally targeting personnel crosses a line that I would draw.

The moral high ground is absolutely critical in war. War is politics by other means, and being able to build consensus, marshal resources, recruit personnel, persuade allies to help, persuade adversaries to surrender or lay down their arms, persuade the allies of your adversaries not to get involved, and keep the peace after a war is over, all depend on one’s public image. There are ways to wage war without it, but most militaries that blatantly disregard morals find it difficult to actually win.

In this case? The entire military strategy of Ukraine in this war is highly dependent on preserving the moral high ground.

The United States and the UK successfully blocked attempts to outlaw all use of incendiary weapons, and all use of incendiary weapons against personnel, and all use of incendiary weapons against forests and plant cover.

This is an area where it’s perfectly reasonable to disagree with how the US watered down this convention, to push for stricter rules on this, and to condemn the use of thermite as an anti-personnel weapon and the use of incendiary weapons on plants that are being used for cover and concealment of military objectives.

So pointing out that this might technically be legal isn’t enough for me to personally be OK with this. I think it’s morally reprehensible, and I’d prefer for Ukraine to keep the moral high ground in this war.

Avenue 5 has a pretty funny scene where a series of skeptical conspiracy theorist types are ignoring a very specific warning, claiming that the people they see dying before their very eyes are an illusion some kind of special effects and each follows to their own death.

Wait is there a way to invent awful things and then patent troll so that nobody can actually bring them to market?

Twitter has accounts that Brazil says violates Brazilian law.

Brazil took steps to shut down those accounts in Brazil.

Twitter refused to cooperate, going as far as to fire all of its Brazilian staff, so that it can’t be reached by the Brazilian courts.

The Brazilian courts ordered all of Twitter be blocked until they comply with local law that they designate a corporate representative who can be served by court processes.

Brazilian ISPs complied with the court order to block Twitter.

Starlink did not comply, and Brazilian courts froze SpaceX’s Brazilian assets, including bank accounts, and started making moves towards de-licensing Starlink, including its 23 ground stations located in Brazil.

The issue escalated to the full Brazilian Supreme Court, who ruled that the assets should remain frozen until Starlink starts complying with court orders.

Now Starlink says it will comply with the court order.