Starlink operator SpaceX is fighting Virginia’s plan to deploy fiber Internet service to residents, claiming that federal grant money should be given to Starlink instead. SpaceX is already in line to win over $3 million in grant money in the state but is seeking $60 million.
Starlink is poised to benefit from the Trump administration rewriting rules for the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant program. While the Biden administration decided that states should prioritize fiber in order to build more future-proof networks, the Trump administration ordered states to revise their plans with a “tech-neutral approach” and lower the average cost of serving each location.
“But I want a monopoly! I demand a monopoly! I’m not rich enough. I’m afraid I will run out of money and starve!” - The Goblin
It seems like the best solution would be to confiscate Starlink and nationalize it. Same with Space X. We paid for all of it, it should be ours. He can still work there, but he’ll collect a government salary, and expect to answer to a boss. Or get fired. Either way, I don’t care.
He can keep Tesla, that will be bankrupt in 2 years anyway.
It seems like the best solution would be to confiscate Starlink and nationalize it.
Not in the land of the Star-Spangled Banner, I’m afraid. That would be socialism. Orange Führer wouldn’t like that.
Looks like Elon Musk is getting way too powerful for his own good! He obviously hates competition! :-(
Well, thats fine. We should talk about where he is right now.
My guess is that he’s not running his companies in South Africa because they would have to be 30% Black owned if that were the case. :-(
Didn’t work. They are laying fiber everywhere as we speak. So happy to kiss Comcast goodbye.
So happy for you! I’m still stuck with shady cable as they cancelled the 2024 rollout.
I swear Cable internet was propped up by hidden fees and promo pricing.
Musk is a domestic terrorist.
Musk isn’t American; he’s an international terrorist
But he is, he has both US and Canadian citizenship in addition to S. African.
He cheated after coming here illegally. Then did a bunch of sex crimes and destroyed american jobs. No. Sorry but illegal immigrants to the torture prison.
I don’t make the rules; i just write fanfic about them being enforced evenly.
That doesn’t change the fact that he’s an American citizen. That’s what I was correcting.
Oh, so the government doesn’t kidnap or murder citizens now?
I’m not sure how that’s relevant. The OP claimed he wasn’t a citizen, I corrected that.
No, said it was foreign or internatuonal or something.
Which it is.
As an American, I do not claim him.
That’s fine, but he’s still a US citizen according to the law.
they hate you. always remember. they hate your entire existence. they’d literally crush you in a hydraulic press if they could. giving you pain is the only way they feel a semblance of happiness.
I don’t think they hate us, it just that they love money more. They can, and do, inflict untold misery and suffering so long as there is money at the end of it.
no. there’s no end to the amount of disdain they have for you. they’d do it for free too; they just don’t have to.
People who disagree with you are people who never spent time with the ultra rich. I’ve had the pleasure to hang in those circles and it was absolutely eye opening the complete disdain that social class has toward the working class. It’s so fucking crazy that one has to see it for themselves to truly appreciate the hate they have for everyone not in their economic circles.
Preach on brother, but I also understand why the plebs don’t believe you
Isn’t it that they just don’t care?
Nope. It’s active and malevolent.
This is absolute insanity. To think that fiber and satellites are even on the same playing field is absolute brain damage.
We just got fiber 3 weeks ago. I pay for 600Mb/s and it is honestly the best internet I’ve had. I was afraid that we wouldn’t get it, but I was astonished when a salesman stopped by. I signed up that day. Lol
The problem I see is that we’ve already paid for fiber
Yep, $400bn wasted on fiber “deployments” that never went anywhere while telcos pocketed the cash, and that was as of like a decade ago.
And across the pond the french government spent 20bn to have the government build out fiber and now basically everyone in france has super cheap fiber internet.
Paying companies to do stuff that’s against their financial incentives doesn’t work.
I’m so fucking tired of living in this god damned dystopia.
Reminds me of the German Telekom and their unceasing effort to slow down state subsidised fibre deployment.
The subsidies are primarily for towns left behind with bad ADSL (it was below 30mbit average and is now afaik 100mbit), that want to build their own local fibre nets cause nobody else does.
They seem to watch for construction permits and then swoop in and build a few fibre adsl distribution boxes or elevate a street or two with fibre to raise the average speed in town just above threshold. The local net looses the subsidies and usually stops construction or if already built only commercial customers are still allowed to be connected…
i hope elon dies and starlink goes bankrupt
I hope some hero gives him the UnitedHealth CEO treatment.
I’d rather Starlink just be independent from Musk. There are people who just can not get a good Internet connection and rely on it, and other Satellite Internet companies are awful.
I hate Musk as much as the next person, but Starlink is brilliant and works well. If they got rid of Musk and stopped being dicks like they are with this, it’d be okay.
I don’t know how much Musk can be separated from Starlink. Not only because Starlink, as part of SpaceX, is privately held but also because the main reason they now have a superior service to offer is that they got fucktons of money from government customers, which is also tied to Musk’s action
A big part of Musk’s involvement with politics is because everything he does, from EVs to rockets to, now, big energy-guzzling datacenters for AI, needs a lot of government backing, if not in terms of direct contracts at least in terms of regulation and incentives.
Even his direct involvement with Trump wasn’t because he suddenly became a Nazi (he’s probably always been one, according to his own family) but in order to become even more entangled with government investments, even trying to control NASA directly.
And not only US governments. I remember Musk suddenly being everywhere in Europe pitching Starlink. Meloni’s government in Italy was grilled for allegedly agreeing on a big contract with Starlink.
Id rather all this space trash burn up and we just spend the money on providing internet via land.
It’s still a good thing for cell coverage in remote areas for hiking emergencies though. The few satellites that currently do that are stupidly annoying and expensive to use. You have to carry specialized equipment, and if you use Garmin, you pay a yearly fee for the privilege of signing up for the low tier plan, then a monthly fee for the service, and then pay by the text message after the first few. Starlink just added T-Mobile so if you have a newer phone and use T-Mobile you can skip all of that and message out in emergencies without all that nonsense. Hopefully more brands will be added soon, but I don’t know.
Life is not safe. Adventure even less so. The loss of the night sky and the risk of Kessler syndrome is not outweighed by a slight convenience allowing influencers to stream video and hit social media while pretending to get away from it all.
It’s not for streaming. As far as I know it’s just text messages. Absolutely agree we should not be using screen time when out and away. We just need that little bit of safety.
There are also hand held radios, strobelights, flares, and PLBs that do not require more satellite infrastructure.
People being lost in the wilderness is not a new problem. It often happens because people don’t bother to consider that they might get lost and plan appropriately.
Sorry, but not everyone gets to come home, especially if they don’t do a little planning.
Starlink is literally his plan to rule the world. If you singularly control access to the internet for everyone, you’ve won the information war… against everyone. The good news is his Nazi addict ass will likely die young from a chest-cavity attack.
Good luck having that shitty tech win over Europe, where fiber is proliferating particularly quickly. We all know satellite internet cannot come close to the speed and reliability of fiber.
Plus we hate Musk.
It’s good for remote areas and at sea, it’s shit everywhere else
I will string together old coathangers and twisted, unheated solder before I use starlink.
If you figure out the right protocol you could probably catapult a series of twisted pears from house to house.
The way the internet is going, bashed and bruised fruit salad sounds preferable to the actual data anyway.
Hey, we just need someone to innovate the shielded twisted pears, that will give us a much better fruit salad than the unshielded twisted pears.
The visuals are priceless. Screaming, agonized pears flying from building to building with California raisins singing in flight amongst them. I think i just found a reason to play with AI video generation!
Previously i’ve only accepted AI into my life as a thing to use when I get asked ‘stupid business jargon management /HR question’ at work.
but I’m tentatively prepeared to allow this, it might be raisin the bar.
Capitalism breeds innovation and advancement, folks!
Also didn’t Rupert Murdoch also stifle fiber adoption in Australia because better internet would cut into his TV and print empire there?
Why is it always this same recurring cast of 100 same rotating cunts over and over ? If we get rid of them, can we at least have fresh new cunts, this batch is extremely stale, LUIGI !!!
🧱🧱👽 🔫 🧱🧱🧘 🔫 🧱🧱🦵🏼 🔫I was reading a (non-fiction) book about Gallipoli, a battle that was fought in Turkey in 1915-16 during WWI. At one point, an Australian journalist by the name of “Keith Murdoch” shows up and starts contributing to the Allies’ failures and eventual withdrawal. And I was like “wait, is that?” and the answer was “yep”. Keith Murdoch was born in 1885 and was Rupert Murdoch’s (full name Keith Rupert Murdoch) father. Aside from helping to fuck up Gallipoli, Papa Murdoch led a smear campaign against Australia’s greatest WWI general (who just happened to be Jewish) and got him removed from command. The Murdoch name has been a stain on humanity for a long time.
Kinda. Murdoch killed the NBN because Foxtel was not in a position to compete with fibre.
