That’s a house hippo!

I’d be okay with the govt owning shares, honestly. That way the public would get a voice in how these megacorps operate, and that voice would get bigger the larger the company becomes.

I know, me too… And to add the icing on the cake, it broke like 2 weeks ago just 6 months outside warranty (red light & beeping). I’m installing a Tesla Universal Wall Connector instead.

They always force me to get the 80$ lenses… Still pretty cheap, but it ends up more around 100$ so I only change every couple years.

Funnily enough, I don’t think I’ve seen one of those yet

Oh yeah I’m sure prices are a big part of it, my question is about how they manage it I guess.

In Québec, Canada. EVs are relatively popular here, as we have a very good public charging network (Electric Circuit), we get $12k off most EVs at purchase (not a tax credit, $5k from the federal govt, $7k from the provincial govt) and $600 for home charging equipment. Our electricity is also pretty cheap and 99.9% green (Hydro).

Looks like Chevy is doing something right with their EVs, because the Blazer and Equinox have been for sale for what, 6 months? And already I see at least one of them almost every day. I feel like there are more on the road around me than there are Mach-Es or F-150 Lightnings, which have been for sale for much longer.

The store nearest me will deliver whatever you want for a $30 flat rate. I have a minivan so I can still carry a lot of stuff myself but for that price it lets me avoid messing with removing my seats so it’s worth it

Funnily enough, in my town there used to be a Future Shop, and then a Best Buy sprung up in the new commercial district, but apparently couldn’t compete because it closed 2 years later. Then about a year later Best Buy bought Future Shop and they re-branded the existing Future Shop to Best Buy.

Yeah, ToysRUs is alive and well in Canada. I have no idea that the bottom-right one is.

My firefighter neighbour told me that the procedure now is just to let them burn, like they do with gasoline fires. They make sure it doesn’t spread, but they won’t try to extinguish it because it’d take 10-12 hours and thousands of gallons. By just letting it burn they’re done in an hour with a few hundred gallons.

Connecting more people to the Internet, giving more options in rural areas.

Hay is basically cut grass, straw is the part leftover from harvesting wheat and taking the seeds. Both are baled, but they’re used for different things. Hay is food for any animals that eat grass like horses and cows, buy straw is not edible so it’s used as bedding.

I’ve personally been a Starlink subscriber for about a year while I was traveling, and it really was a game-changer. Rock-solid internet in remote places, fast enough to have Zoom calls on, all for a price that’s only about twice what I currently pay now that I’m back home (people complaining about Starlink’s price don’t know what they’re talking about, this is 100+ Mbps statellite internet we’re talking about. Other options are ten times the cost for less than a tenth of the speed).

It just drives me nuts when I see progress being blocked for stupid reasons. Examples in other areas would be wind power (“but what about the birds”), electric cars (“but cobalt = slave labour”, “akschually, when you charge the car with the dirtiest fuel possible and take into account all externalities it’s less green than just the tailpipes of a gas car”), space exploration (“the potable water sprayed on the launch pad leaked into the environment, here’s a fine”). There’s some stuff that’s been disproved years ago by anyone with half a brain that keeps being repeated, it’s infuriating.

“Just asking questions”… It’s just a bit suspicious that as soon as the safety aspect was proven to not be an issue, you immediately switched to another angle.

But to answer your question, yes, vapourizing someting made of metal and plastics in the upper atmosphere could certainly count as pollution, and we don’t really know the effects it might have on it because no studies have yet been done.

What has been done, though, is a study of how many meteors fall on the earth every hear: early estimates in the 60s were of about 100,000 tons per year, but further studies (1) showed this was grossly underestimated and more accurate values would be about triple that.

Starlink has launched 6,054 satellites in orbit (2) that total about 3,838,042 kg or a bit below 4000 tons. Even if they all fell in the atmosphere tomorrow, it’d only amount to less than 2% of this years’ “stuff” that burns up in the atmosphere (the rest coming from natural sources). Honestly I don’t think that’s significant, but I’ll concede that we don’t really know for sure. I just think that there are other more immediate, much worse sources of pollution that people should direct their anger towards.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20110512174406/http://static.icr.org/i/pdf/technical/Moon-Dust-and-the-Age-of-the-Solar-System.pdf 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshield_launches

Says right in the article that the rate is 9%, and they give up a 10% stake in the company.

I got better terms than that on a CAR loan last month…

Man, you really are looking for any excuse to hate on SpaceX, right?

If you’re that worried about pollution, just look up the mass of a starlink satellite vs the mass a coal plant burns every hour… Even if the satellite ends up vapourizing as 100% pollution, I’m pretty sure it’s orders of magnitude below other industries like coal power or aviation.

They’d burn up / vapourize. This is partly why it took them so long to get their space lasers to work (for satellite to satellite communications); these things usually are usually based on a crystal that wouldn’t burn and could hurt someone when the satellite falls.

Shortest answer is that even if all Starlink satellites suddently exploded at the same time for no reason, they’d fall back to Earth in a matter of weeks. They’re waaaay lower than the other satellites you’re thinking of (see discussion on geo-stationary satellites for why), so they need to be actively pushed every few days just to stay up. They’re so low they’re still subject to atmospheric drag.