Eventually the cost to develop app and games could drop so low that we will need to shift our mental model in how we discover and use apps.
For example, TikTok revolutionized short form videos by introduced a UI where users can explore a lot more videos more quickly, and the cost of showing a bad video is significantly lower (then clicking on a long YouTube video). This eventually led to algorithmically led discovery and content that was created for that format.
You could easily imagine a TikTok for games, where you can instantly scroll between and start playing games with no installation or frictions. Over time games themselves would be designed for that format, hooking you up from the first second (like a TikTok video).
This would obviously change apps and games fundumenltally, just like TikTok did for videos.
The reality is far more nuanced, and not clearly a win to Iran. We saw how degraded their military capabilities became when they couldn't capture a pilot on their own land for nearly 48 hours. We also saw that the number of rockets that they used "in total" has only just recently reached the number they used in the June war last year with Israel.
Diplomatically, we saw Lebanon, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia expelling Iranian diplomats (some even threatening war with Iran). And the entire gulf region unite against Iran. All while Iran's allies were mostly passive.
It's quite likely that Iran would need to deal with the mess both internally (as the power grab in the leadership vacuum could take place), and externally with the neighbors it bombed. Iran needs to make it appear as a win internally, and that's something that would affect any long term agreement.
Regardless, whether it's a win to ETTHER side remains to be seen when a more permanent agreement is signed. If for example Iran actually manages to impose a fee on passing ships, then that's a major achievement for Iran, and could create a dangerous pretendant for other regions (like the strait of Malacca in Indonesia, Bab El-Mandeb and even the South China sea.
The only thing really destroyed is the image of the west and particularly it’s leader the US. Whatever you view of Iranian acts, even wars have laws related to portionality that has been broken.
Also if there ever was an ounce of internal resistance then this war have probably galvanized the population and is aligning everyone to common cause of working on the build up of particularly their national security.
Perceptions are fickle, and that includes the local population. There are many cases of countries the US bombed whose population later became strong supporters of the US.
Iran’s government haven’t been toppled. People are rallying and united in opposition to foreign invasion and interference.
Iran is a strategic important ally of China and Russia.
US is no longer the world superpower as it once was and has dropped it’s use of soft power completely and relies only upon military force or it’s threat and barely any diplomatic efforts.
The world is not what was even a decade ago. So don’t expect a repeat on what happened after Vietnam and Japan.
Not capturing the weapons officer (the pilot was quickly rescued) was a missed opportunity for Iran, not a failure. The Trump Admin was incredibly lucky there is not currently a hostage situation and no one else was killed or injured[1] in the rescue. "Merely" 10s or 100s(?) of millions of dollars in equipment was lost in the process.
A bunch of US servicemembers have died or been maimed to achieve a rocky ceasefire with the end state looking worse than before the operation.
I certainly feel for the civilians affected, but from a pure "America First" perspective, this is a complete and total US failure.
[1]: Though I'm skeptical about the truth in this when officials have been bragging about helicopters with bullet holes in them.
Can you refute them? This is an insane performance to distract from withheld Epstein files. The DOJ has not done their duty, and the only reason the American public is ignoring it is the Iran War.
The US was goaded by Israel into joining a war that has not achieved it's stated objectives. America is deriding NATO for not joining this suicide mission, burning goodwill that would be valuable in a Russia/China conflict, because it's more valuable for Israel's geopolitical microcosm. Hegseth gutted the US' officers leading up to the war, precipitating war crime-adjacent strikes that have been decried even by GOP politicians.
Neither America nor Israel are better off because of this conflict, and China (once again) wins by embracing diplomatic capitalism. The economic soft-power of the dollar is now even more precarious than before.
>We saw how degraded their military capabilities became when they couldn't capture a pilot on their own land for nearly 48 hours
This is a such a armchair opinion. One country has the location information and other has vast forest and mountains. How it took 48 hrs for US is a eye opening scene for rest of the world. Multiple trillion of defense budget still a minion.
It's a huge if and honestly I don't believe in it.
Actually, if it ends up like described, it really doesn't matter whether I believe in it. Either it happens and we all die, or it doesn't happen. Pascal's Wager I suppose.
There is something awfully bad happening to the internet, including Hacker News.
It seems like rage-baiting, polarizing titles and vibe based comments are being upvoted, with no interest in the facts. For example, in this case:
1. The growth of the gold reserve in comparison to US Treasuries have very little to do with growth in gold acquisition, and has everything to do with gold more than doubling in price in a year.
2. To make it even worse, gold has since fluctuated in value, and treasuries overtook gold momentarily just a week ago. These price fluctuations has nothing to do with geopolitics.
3. Central bank buying of gold has been trending down in the last year, down 21% from 2024. So far in 2026 it's been going even lower.
4. Gold owned by central banks was higher than US treasuries in the 90s (this is mentioned in the article at least).
This is a little meta - but the thing that bothers me is that this low quality discussion like in this thread is spreading everywhere with the same mechanism - bring politics and polarization into every place, no matter how tangentially related it is.
Side stepping a little, but the Twitter and Reddit exoduses brought in a lot of people with established culture and communication dynamics at discrete periods. I considered writing an extension that collapses comments of accounts based on keywords and creation date, but ultimately decided that was regressive.
I think it's important to recognize how much the world has changed in a short period of time. HN was created when SV was unique, a large fraction of the globe was not on the internet, and web tech was new and novel. Everyone was still figuring out how to handle outreach and networking (I was positive it was a scam when the Omiyadar Network cold contacted me - "who does that?"). Today, I meet kids who made their first commits at the same age I was just trying to find friends in town who had computers. Now, our advanced is their common, and they're growing up primed for engagement-forward networking and self-promotion.
HN isn't a calcified relic of the era when it was created, it's a product of its people. We're seeing the new generations connecting from all over the world at a time when the foundational HNers are fading away, and sometimes when there's friction with my expectations of civility and etiquette in discourse and it feels like the noise is drowning out the signal and I yearn for the smaller, quieter days, I take that as my queue that I need to step back and appreciate that this is their time, too.
I think there are less experts on HN than years ago or a decade ago. And the culture of HN is getting slightly changing to a more Reddit culture every year.
It’s too bad because it’s the only place I know where you have experts in tech but also in other industries. And where I got very interesting discussions.
There's unfortunately someone who is posting some HN articles in a hackernews subreddit. I think that's contributed to the rise of Mr. Hot Take One-Liner Mic Drop, that posts something with 20 one liner replies, always at the top. If that continues happening I'm out.
One interesting factoid, since I can remember on HN, if you ever likened a conversation to Reddit they'd downvote you to grey. There are two ways to read that - Reddit is fine, don't criticize it; Reddit is embarrassing, don't diminish the conversation by comparing us to it.
Thanks appreciate the broader context in this post. As to your meta comment, besides bots, I think a lot of people are facing a great deal of pain and fear. They're emotional and even in hn a critical mass has switched to reading and writing with their gut. Good vibe project, analyse the level of emotionality in comments over time, I'd bet it's gone vertical in the past few months.
I agree with your "sensationalism is bad" take; especially as meaningful, non-incendiary comments now often get quickly downvoted for viewpoint, not tone (IMO downvoting should cost 0.1-0.3 karma). But not with "nothing to see in CB gold holdings fluctuations" view:
R1. But central bank gold holdings are rising organically, and partially at the expense of US treasuries. CB gold holdings have been dropping for 35 years, until about 2015. The price rise of gold from 2005 to 2015 did not reverse this trend. From 2015 to 2019 gold price did not rise, but reported holdings did. The recent doubling of the gold price muddies things a little, but the trend is clear.
R3. Reported gold purchases have trended down in 2025 and 2026, probably due to price doubling. But they are still positive. Emerging markets did not sell into this strength to build up more liquid holdings (UST) as more effective tools to support their economies against future malaise. Even "trending down" part is muddy, too, because some countries CB do not report it. China, an elephant in the room, started better obfuscating its holdings, including gold, since COVID.
R4. Yes. Gold owned by CB strognly trended down since 1980. That trend stopped in 2005 and reversed somewhere between 2005 and 2015. And likely accelerated in the last few years.
As a side note, I personally see USTs losing dominance as a reserve asset as a good thing. USG needs some checks on its spending, and world being willing to buy long dated treasuries at below inflation rates incentivizes the "we do not need to solve real problems, we can just print more money" mindset. My 2c.
Well, having tracked soft-science experts for 30 years, I have to say they're wrong over 50% of the time. Moreso, if it's coming from media that's owned by the same country that is causing evil.
>everything to do with gold more than doubling in price in a year.
Gold's price doesn't change, it's 42 2/9 US Dollar per fine troy ounce[1], and has been since 1973.
The problem is that this exchange rate hasn't been enforced, or adjusted since then. This allows the spot price to set the effective price of the dollar in a reciprocal arraignment.
Since, the "Gold Window" was closed by executive order, I posit that, In theory, Donald Trump could get a bunch of conspirators together, with 10.4 Billion in cash (the "Book Value" of the US Gold Reserves), and direct the Secretary of the Treasury to re-open the gold window, in private, and drain the US reserves, personally.
Edit: Nope... the law changed, thank goodness.
If the US somehow re-anchored the Dollar to Gold, the deflationary collapse would crush the economy everywhere, instantly, as all dollars outstanding would increase in real value by a factor of >100, and all debts would crush most people, companies, and economies.
So, realistically, if we wanted to re-anchor the dollar, the new value would have to be greater than the current spot price. To fully back all dollars outstanding, it would be somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 US Dollars per fine ounce.
I had previously expected this to happen a generation from now, but thanks to the complete collapse of institutional memory, and the current administration, I now expect it to happen before the end of the next administration.
Everything is politics. Which makes people who want to avoid it look delusional.
As for polarization that's been the modus operandi in my country for at least 500 years.
Everyone hates everyone but the alternative was the French, English or Spanish so what can you do?
Turns out you actually really don't need to love your neighbour.
This is mentioned often, but is also such a broad generalization that it is not constructive in any meaningful way. If everything is politics, then it can be eliminated from both sides of the equation. Focus on real and immediate problems at hand and providing concrete solutions need not have "politics" label slapped onto it by default, esp. where the ideological infighting this attracts complicates having open and frank discussions based on the facts. "Politics" has become a weaponised word often used to derail good initiatives, and with great success. The mindset that everything is politics may be contributor to that.
This is just HN. We're explicitly not productive or constructive. We're not solving the world's problems. We're just shooting the shit. This is a forum for wasting time. I guess it wouldn't be HN without the delusions of self-importance.
Everything you want to be politics is politics. Caring for other people shouldn't be politics. Being a decent human being shouldn't be politics. There are plenty of things that aren't politics unless you decide you want to turn them into politics.
The issue is when you get down to the edge cases, you get into politics again.
Is ‘caring’ (what does that mean exactly?) for someone on death row good or bad? You’ll likely find splits in answers along ‘political’ lines, especially depending on things like the nature of the crime, who the victim was, etc.
Is ‘caring’ (again, in what way?) for someone in Palestine good or bad? Or worth how much money to do? Similar split. How about Iran?
What about someone in the inner cities? Who doesn’t work?
Etc.
Hand wavy general statements are easy to have, but when it gets down to actual implementation is when real groups of people start to have very different concrete opinions on how it should be done.
You’ll also find lots of shaming among the group and against ‘outsiders’ trying to enforce idealogy. And if you think that part doesn’t happen, just read your own comment - it’s a mild form of that!
caring: (adjective) displaying kindness and concern for others.
If you look at this definition of caring and find a way to turn it into a politics issue that's your problem, not mine.
If you scale a problem up, then yes, you get into politics. If you scale it all the way down, politics disappear. If you see your next-door neighbor struggling with something and you can help, you should. That's not politics. That's called being a decent human being.
> Hand wavy general statements are easy to have
I agree. In fact "everything is politics" is a stupid, hand wavy statement.
> You’ll also find lots of shaming among the group and against ‘outsiders’ trying to enforce idealogy. And if you think that part doesn’t happen, just read your own comment - it’s a mild form of that!
Disagreement != enforcing ideology, at least in my world. And if you don't see it that way, then I guess you're guilty of doing the precise thing you're commenting on.
Under that definition, ‘Caring’ can mean anything from hopes and prayers to major economic sacrifices.
With that struggling neighbor, are you talking about helping them take out their trash at night when they’re tired - or paying unemployment benefits for years?
Notably, in my experience, the ones who talk the most usually just keep talking - and aren’t the ones on the hook for actually doing the hard caregiving when things are really tough. But hey, maybe you’re different?
One big difference we have here is you’re again talking hand waving generalities, and I’m talking concrete economic behaviors and policy. It’s easy to say ‘if you can help you should’, it’s harder when it’s ’where is the line for “can” and “should” exactly when we’re talking millions of people and trillions of dollars’, and people you’ll likely never meet in your life - and taxes that definitely come out of your paycheck each month.
Move the line too much one way, and it incentivizes being a victim. Move it too much the other way, and it crushes people with legitimate problems. Both are real issues.
There is a recent one, which shows that the weight was generally stable after 1 year of discontinuation of GLP-1.
> In this cohort study of adults with overweight or obesity who initiated treatment with injectable semaglutide or tirzepatide and discontinued the index medication between 3 and 12 months after initiation, 19.6% restarted the index medication and 35.2% received an alternative treatment in the year after initial treatment discontinuation. The average weight change 1 year after index medication discontinuation was relatively small; however, there was considerable individual-level variability.
Thanks for sharing. Note that the data quality from this study is quite low because 54.8% of the cohort eventually restarted their medication or transitioned to an alternative therapy (mostly a different weight loss medication).
I don't know why a study that focuses on discontinuation didn't split the groups that restarted or transitioned against the group that actually just stopped.
The discontinued and paused groups in the actual study had lower BMI than the continuing groups - so it seems like this is at least partially independent of any weight regain.
Which makes sense since we have strong evidence for the GLP-1s providing significant protective benefit even without weight loss.
A tale older than the use of GLP-1. People do X to lose weight, they hit a target weight, declare victory and continue the habits that got them in trouble in the first place. You can go a little bit heavier on the meals and loosen the exercise if you desire, but you still have to keep yourself within maintenance threshold or the weight comes back.
GLP-1 masks the problem and people don't realize their actions aren't ideal once the mask is removed.
I agree. Thinking about it a little more, I've realized that people create things today even if unnecessary (e.g. grow their own food), a lot of it for the satisfaction of it.
So we would still build stuff, but it would not be out of necessity.
Trust me, the two are not the same, and are orders of magnitude different in terms of human satisfaction.
When I walk down a street, I get 10 people stopping me to ask "Where did you get that?". When I tell them I made it, their heads explode. I know which side of that interaction is more satisfying.
We also go all-out for Halloween, and at the big Halloween festival there is literally a line down the street of people waiting to take photos with us. We created something amazing.
In media there was a rule 1-9-90. One creates, 9 comment, 90 use or are silent/don’t care.
Richard Branson realized that a company starts to behave differently when it reaches more than stuff of 135 people that coincides with average number of people you can consider as personally known to you.
Context switching is a bitch. You cannot do it for a long time. Abundance brought by AI will somehow consolidate as people cannot digest everything created by it.
There are more than 45,000 models avail at HF (if I remember it right). Choose wisely :)
One potential solution to this is AI summarization. Imagine coming home, and while preparing dinner your AI assistant recounts what happened in all your favourite tv shows that day. Then while you're doing the laundry, it tells you about all the new games it found and tested for you.
These are just thought starters, but something like this could significantly raise the ceiling on what one person is able to consume in a 24 hour period.
Adults tend to forget that they gained their powers of reasoning by exercising them.
Getting a summary, the way you described it, will be minus the effort required to think about it. This is great for information that you are already informed.
This is related to the illusion of explanatory depth. Most of us “know” how something works, until we have to actually explain it. Like drawing a bi-cycle, or explaining how a flush works.
People in general are not aware of how their brain works, and how much mental exercise they used get with the way the world is set up.
I suppose we can set up brain gyms, where people can practice using mental skills so that they don’t atrophy?
One nice thing about Starlink is that they force the airlines to offer it for free. I’m not sure why SpaceX is doing this, but it was surprising enough to me that my international WiFi was not only fast, but completely free that I researched it.
I think this approach gets the whole industry to adopt it.
Consider the opposite approach. If they let airlines charge any amount for it, the airlines that installed it would make it expensive. No one would use it. Other airlines would feel no pressure to offer it.
By making it free, it gets used, and eventually depended upon. SpaceX are making free wifi the expectation from consumers on flights.
Correct, I’ve had Starlink in several long haul flights over the past 6 months and it’s already becoming an expectation, ie makes the flights without it noticeably worse. I’m not sure whether everyone gets it for free, though, it was my understanding that it’s complementary for business class but a paid add on for economy. But once you have it, it’s fast and stable.
A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives. In this case, fair play it’s objectively better.
>A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives
pretty obvious you never worked for an ISP and forgot about all the `middle of nowhere` customers who have no high speed internet.
even for me, in houston texas, we cant get fiber to the home and were stuck with AT&T DSL which was like $60 per month and ungodly slow. Also my GF and I both work from home and she does massive file uploads.
had xfinity not been available starlink would be an easy choice. ive tried 5g hotspots and they are not super reliable.
In all fairness, it was a qualified statement: "readily available alternatives". That immediately disqualifies customers stuck in the boonies, or a few hundred feet away from service coverage.
He has readily available alternatives, but they suck.
There are other, far worse forms of satellite Internet, so everybody has a readily available alternative. That makes it not a qualifying statement at all.
Just noting that the phrasing "readily available alternatives" by itself is slightly ambiguous: it could be read as subsetting ("the alternatives that are readily available") or just attributive ("the alternatives, which are readily available").
I apologize for the initial ambiguous snippy comment.
I'm an I.T. consultant in N. Carolina, and I've worked in very rural areas setting up connectivity for farms. Indeed, I have recommended StarLink on at least two occasions, albeit in concert with 4G/5G cellular (bad weather remains a problem). StarLink sounds great for airlines, RV's, boats, base camps, disaster relief--but those are almost all examples where affordability aren't usually high priorities, and I'm not sure if it's significantly better than upgrading geostationary satellite tech.
I do firmly believe that StarLink is, at best, a flawed solution to the largely solvable problem in the context of rural broadband access. We very recently had federal programs and funding to advance cable/fiber rural broadband services, but it was so weighed down with bureaucratic cruft that basically nothing got done. I dunno if that specific provision of Biden's infrastructure bill remains law, but I'm pretty sure it ceased being a priority after the last election (not for nothing, StarLink had plenty to gain by those federal programs dying, although I have no direct knowledge that Musk, DOGE, et al made any direct moves to stop it--I think it was mainly the shite implementation/execution by the Biden administration).
So "readily available" in the sense of "we could do it at any time, and it would be a helluva lot cheaper and more durable than continuously launching hundreds of satellites into LEO". Poor choice of words on my part, and even still I'm sure there's still plenty to disagree with there.
Regulatory capture is only a secondary reason why many parts of the USA still lack cheap, reliable broadband Internet access. It turns out that running fiber everywhere is expensive, and in some areas the potential customer base doesn't justify the cost.
It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth.. unless and until there's competition.
Funny how quickly my internet options went from expensive cable internet, to 1 gig symmetric fiber for $90, to 10 gig symmetric fiber for $50. And now, magically, Xfinity has 1Gbps+ service for $50 as well.
> It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth...
You can start a company right now and lay fiber in these places and start your own telecom.
You probably don't have the money for that but, if you put together a solid business plan, a bank would give you a loan.
You may not have the experience or expertise to do that, but there are plenty of people who do.
Why hasn't that happened yet? It turns out that laying down miles of fiber for a handful of customers isn't profitable.
Google dod it in a few places that were low hanging fruit. Places that had telephone poles where they could get relatively easy access to them.
There are certainly places where access to those poles is more difficult than it should be but most places are hampered by either being too remote to justify the cost of burying lines to a few customers (rural areas) or the digging is too expensive to many customers (suburban areas) because they'd be digging up streets.
I most certainly don’t have 1 Gps+ service for $50 though in practice my circa 50-100 Mps service for about twice that works fine does for me from Xfinity. I care a lot more about reliability.
We do a lot of things that require subsidizing, very much including the things commonly found in/around a lot of the rural farms where these services would target. If broadband internet access is a fundamental need for contemporary communication--much like the postal service, telegraph, and telephones were--then historically we do what's necessary to provide them.
Yeah, a primary reason would include "spineless legislators who allowed carriers to say "We'd need tens of billions of subsidies to even consider doing this", and then when given that money to do so, just... largely didn't. And kept cruising without consequence (and with the money).
It's not that expensive. The Starlink Mini is around $200, and service is $50/mo for 100gb.
I've been somewhat skeptical of the addressable market (doesn't fiber + cell tower network offer good enough coverage?) but I know so many people who have put it on their RV, their boat, or are using it rurally that I've started changing my mind. And the service really is better than cell phone networks, which are far too patchy to provide reliable service at decent speed.
And you can put it on standby mode for $5/mo, so you're not even really locked into $50/mo if you're occasionally doing travel where you want to stay connected.
And in places like Africa, they've had to tightly rate limit new customers because demand is so high.
Yeah, as an RVer, I can tell you that you would probably be surprised by how much of the country does not have readily available cell service. And even if it does, they might not have it on your network.
I was paying more to have SIM cards for all of the big three, and getting much less out of it
The markets are additive. The great thing about Starlink is that it is GLOBAL. Meaning if you want to offer it for ships and planes (where there are no alternatives) you might as well also offer it to RV. And to rural people. And to the military. And you can do so in every country on the whole planet at the same time.
Having a few 1000s of sats to cover the whole planet is crazy efficient.
If you look at just the satellites, the build + launch costs are about $2.5M ea, which is impressive to be sure. But they only last 5 years, so that's $500k per year replacement costs. Then if you look at their capacity, they still can't meet their FCC / RDOF broadband designation speeds, but let's be generous and say they can serve 1000 simultaneous users per satellite (their current ratio, let's say it's good enough, incl. oversubscription ratio). So that already means 50%-100% of the entire monthly Internet bill from a consumer is going to just be replacing satellites. Let alone everything else to be an ISP.
This is very basic math. They need to launch more satellites if they want to hit their RDOF throughput goals and serve customers in the remaining areas. The most valuable extra-rural areas were low hanging fruit and already drying up.. the future addressable market is more dense and competitive suburban areas, which further limits the number of users per satellite because everyone shares the same spot beam spectrum.
But as you know well--having your personal connections to SpaceX it seems as you always defend them on HN--Starlink is about Golden Dome not consumer internet, so the private markets will fund it.
Yes and unless you're paying Starlink say $300/mo, they are taking a loss to serve you internet. Cities are especially difficult for them because more users are in the same spot beam so everyone shares the spectrum and they need even lower oversubscription ratios.
Yeah I don't know about the math. I've seen numbers that differ significantly from yours, but none which make it profitable at a reasonable price. I am sure he will continue to drop launch costs and I assume satellite improvements will make them able to serve more people, maybe orbit longer as they get smaller.
Complete nonsense. They didn't start in 2015 and didn't get investment into Starlink from Google because hopefully some presidnet would want Goldon Dome in the future. Starlink is a good business and has plenty of military value without Goldon Dome.
100 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €29/month in Europe, $39/month in the US.
200 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €49/month in Europe, $69/month in the US.
400+ Mbps down / 20-40 Mbps up (QoS higher priority), unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €69/month in Europe, $109/month in the US.
A good high-speed fiber connection is obviously better quality and value; but if you don't have one, then Starlink is absolutely the most competitive option you're going to get.
I don't have a lot of data points, but in metropolitan France at least I think you would always be better off with either a fiber or a 5G subscription, because it will be cheaper for more throughput, and because fiber is very widespread.
In Germany I think you are still better off with a cable subscription which also seems to be widespread in my experience and is cheaper than Starlink even if it's not as good as French deals (I only take in account offers without a contract for fairness, but if you don't mind you may be able to get even cheaper offers).
They have several niches where the alternatives are more expensive and worse. Half the RVers in any park have it now. RVing teaches you how much of the country is not covered by cell signal. Boats.
Another one I know first hand: food trucks. I do several events a year where cell signals get overwhelmed and cease to function, but I still have to process my credit cards. I’d say a solid 25% of food trucks are running these now.
In the (relatively) rural area that I live in, the only ISP options available were something like $75/mo for 10mbsp speeds. Starlink was an incredible blessing when it became available. Legitimately feels like magic in comparison to the existing options we had.
Why would you be "terrified" of space-based ballistic missile defense? Seems a lot better than ground-based interceptors that have a not-great rate of interception.
For trillions of dollars, Golden Dome is unlikely to be effective at interception, but it destabilizes MAD and can be used as a global prompt strike offense weapon.
Nobody wants their brand associated with price gouging and half-broken in-flight credit card payment portals, and Starlink is better enough than any alternative that they can play hardball with airlines.
Delta is still stubbornly refusing to adopt Starlink.
I've got status with them and have started booking with other airlines b/c it doesn't matter how nice the seats are if you can't get any work done. Most airline revenue comes from business flights, I don't think they realize how important this is to their customer base.
It's probably what the UA CEO was talking about, trying to get competitors to sign contracts with other providers. Viasat was hot stuff for a long time, wouldn't be surprised if there's a noncompete preventing the change.
Nobody had a problem with flip phones that play snake or Blackberry physical keyboards until the iPhone was demonstrated, and then nobody could conceive of ever going back (except in niche cases, e.g. journalists loved those keyboards)
Only if the airplane uses much slower ground based Gogo (?). I use it every now and then when taking the 45 minute flight from ATL to my parents home in South GA
Regardless one of the conditions surely is giving them permissions to sell this to starlink as and everyone else. So whether the information is the same is probably irrelevant, how they are using it is.
Probably, because you are now associating your internet browsing with your personal information. (I don't know if they have the sophistication to actually do this, but it is very possible.)
On the flip side, the "private" aviation customer is 100% forced into the pricey plans privately with (physical) speed enforcement on the terminals.
There's even two tiers of aviation speed limting: 300MPH ($250/mo) and 450MPH ($1000/mo). They know who they're targeting at both speed points (the guy flying for fun in a prop VS the guy in a Gulfstream that wants to Get There Now).
What sucks is that normal "for fun" prop pilots used to be able to use the basic $50 roaming plan, and then Starlink pulled the rug out from under them by taking it away, instead offering the new plan 5X the cost with 1/5 the bandwidth limit. Total scumbags. Even your hated local cable company doesn't have the balls to 5X your monthly bill suddenly out of the blue.
It’s too difficult to distinguish between a terminal in small GA aircraft and something with destructive payload. Commercial aircraft are few and controllable.
Delta has had free high speed satellite internet for years. I’m going to start flying Southwest more this year but they also advertise free internet. I don’t know how fast it is.
The built in entertainment systems are so full of ads, that I much prefer the planes with no seat back screens. I've always already got my own devices which I use to entertain myself, whether the airline is providing advertainment or not.
The reason it is hard is not due to a power balance. Both of those countries could have sent nukes with minimal efforts.
But their goal is targeted and precise attacks, that effectively destroy targets based on specific, and high quality intelligence.
The other part is that defense against missiles is significantly harder and more expensive than sending missiles. Iran, while relatively poor, has dedicated a significant part of its economy for missile development and production.
Day one and they've already bombed a school and killed dozens of children. The goals, strategy and tactics have not been clearly communicated. You can pray they are using high quality intelligence, but history tells us they are not at all concerned with collateral damage. They likely want to degrade Iran's military capabilities, but they also want them cowed and bleeding.
Israel is interested in the fall of the Iranian regime, a thing that can only happen if the Iranian people will rebel against it. The last thing Israel wants is to have the Iranians rally behind the state’s flag.
Based on this cold calculation, bombing a school full of children would be counter productive, even if you believe the Israelis are just collecting children's blood to make matzahs (passover is just around the corner!).
On a more serious note, do you know the actual source for this claim? I don’t mean the news outlet, I mean what entity gave this to the news outlet.
> Israel is interested in the fall of the Iranian regime, a thing that can only happen if the Iranian people will rebel against it.
I personally don't believe in such appeals to rationality of parties waging wars. The issue is: if you wage a war, you can't control precisely what is going on. No one can. Like MH17 was shot down by pro-Russian separatists: who was interested in it? No one was, but still MH17 was shot down.
Israel bombed schools, it probably did it without clear intent to bomb them, but at the same time it means it is not very concerned about a couple of hundred of underage causalities. Like it was (and it is) not at all concerned about Palestinian causalities in Gaza. Moreover to my mind, it is the strategic stance of Israel: to be as brutal as possible to make neighbors to fear Israel. Israel does it for decades, it does it every time it wages a war. It means that now it just cannot wage a war without demonstrations of brutality. Even if it wanted to it just cannot, because on all levels of command people were taught to demonstrate brutality, and they were not taught how to wage war surgically. You can't overcome such a training on so many levels with a carefully crafted prompt.
> do you know the actual source for this claim? I don’t mean the news outlet, I mean what entity gave this to the news outlet.
> Ok, so the Iranian regime itself published this news? And you don’t even question it?
I question everything, and in this case I'm choosing to believe it. Such fakes are hard to forge, and as recent history shows such news are not fakes. Look at Russia which claimed that it did nothing wrong for how many times? Russia all the time tried to declare that everything is a fake forged by Ukraine. And if we look at what Ukraine did to Russia, we can't find a single example of a fake news forged by Russia.
A priori probability of this being a fake is low, and if you look into it, it is a pretty good "fake". No one still questioned it, while you can see some news from Iran that are clearly anti-regime news.
So, no, without clear evidence for this being a fake, I believe it is not a fake.
It's all over. NY Times writeup points to multiple sources and videos of destruction that they have authenticated. I don't think any body count has been independently verified.
You are relying on unreliable news sources, the strikes are incredibly precise. See the aerial photo of Khamenei's residence that was bombed [1]. You can see how the surrounding area remains surprisingly clean in face of the utter destruction in the middle.
One nice thing about Reddit, is that if someone posts fake news, people refute it (which is not the case in this post). So there is active fact checking in place.
That photo is taken directly from AP news reporting, taken by Airbus.
Reddit is a shithole, even more so after it went public a year ago..
Anyway, I don't think the AP pictures are too convincing. Sure it might look like smoke in there, but it looks more like the entire right side of the image was carpetbombed - not just the building complex in the middle
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