This is amazing. I wonder how much data per unit of time this is capable of transporting.

Wikipedia says "Each segment has a speed of 10 gigabits per second (Gb/s), with a future potential capacity of 2,500 Gbit/s." [1]

Wikipedia also notes that NASA helped fund this system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Undersea_Cable_System

The max throughput of fiber optic cables isn't exactly constant. As fiber optic modem and DSP technology improves you can get much higher speeds on 15+ year-old cables than were ever possible when they were laid.

Recently I saw an article about researchers getting 300,000 Gbit/s over existing fiber optic networks (though I'm sure that's a long way from being a deployable technology): https://www.aston.ac.uk/latest-news/aston-university-researc...

That said, it's likely not worth it, given that cabling is typically viewed as a ~10 year investment, and if you're installing OM4 Multimode fiber in a house you're not likely to hit the limit of that fiber within 10 years even in extreme use cases.

I believe this could be a case of future proofing that will actually last 30-40 years, no?

But it's amazing how effective DSP can be; trellis coding managed to get modems to squeeze right up to the Shannon limit of POTS telephone connections.

The Shannon limit is changed by changing technology over the medium, not the other way around.

If you signal with light on/off pulses, you get one limit. If you add polarization tricks (using different physical properties and tech), you get another limit. As you add QAM and a zillion other tricks, you get another channel limit. If you add quantum superdense coding, you get another channel limit. Each of those, until we learned there is yet another layer of physics and tech, would be "the Shannon Limit." All of these can be done on the same medium.

The Shannon limit is a mathematical *model* of a channel. It's not a physical/technological limit.

Here [1], for example, is a paper pointing this out for transoceanic undersea optical cables. "As pointed out in Section 9.3, the Shannon limit is only limiting if we assume there is no technical way to further improve the QoT..."

Technology changes routinely change the "Shannon Limit," since that limit has almost nothing to do with physics. Physics and the signaling technology define a Shannon Limit for that particular channel combination, nothing more.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/shannon-lim...

The Shannon limit already accounts for any number of channels and any level of QAM.

There is no inherent limit from physics, only from engineering. History provides ample evidence were a given medium had it's "Shannon Limit" broken via new signaling methods over the same medium. The terms you used, "bandwidth" and "noise" are technological, not physical. "Bandwidth" increases each time we invent better methods to pack and decode it. Most of the old concepts are based on old Fourier Analysis, whereas a better modern framework is wavelets or even their successors. Fourier is a very simple way to think of signals, missing plenty of useful things, which is exactly what led to the development of wavelets, to enable more powerful signal analysis.

Note in particular there is no single "bandwidth" when dealing with photonics, since photons can be physically stacked arbitrarily without interference. Simply google for breakthroughs in photonics bandwidth to see decades of advances beyond what was previously thought to be "the bandwidth".

The Shannon limit is a *model* of the system. That model is necessarily incomplete, since there increasingly advanced technology. Those models almost always use simplifications to make the math tractable, such as gaussian noise, independent errors, and a host of other things that are not true physically. Even the concept of noise requires either a non=physical abstraction to math or some details of the engineering used to measure it. Simply saying there "is gaussian noise" is a gross model used to simplify math. It is non-physical.

A simple example that leveraging quantum has created a new field of quantum shannon theory, which has better bounds. Under shannon's theory and his understanding of information, quantum key distribution would not be possible, yet it is, and companies have offered commercial versions for 20+ years. I would not be surprised if more and more pieces of physics not currently used for communication get used in the future, changing the "limits" again and again.

Before MIMO transmission, single channel over the same medium had a shannon limit. MIMO surpassed it. Many channels, especially where light is used, allow stacking more and more information into the same medium, subject to technology ability to decode, which is an engineering feat, not a physical one.

The world of information theory has moved past shannon, just like orbital mechanics moved past Newton. Both Newton and Shannon have uses, but they're not valid for modern techniques.

Two of many such changes are compressed sensing, which was a major discovery, that routinely beats Shannon-Nyquist sampling theory, and the discovery of what is called generalized sampling developed around 2000-2010 (and still making it's way through image processing). Both are fundamental theory changes that allowed breaking previous "limits".

So please read the paper, and if you claim there is still some inherent limit, publish the paper countering the one above.

Bandwidth is defined by the signal type. A signal is defined via the technology and model of communication. Change the tech or model, and you get different Shannon limits.

Take some time and read and understand the papers I gave you. Your claims are contradicted by each of those papers (and hundreds more).

How can you honestly ignore all those well cited papers that state exactly what I said? Post some evidence countering those papers or there's no more point replying to your opinions.

The old idea of a "Shannon Limit" has been split into many types, including linear (old tech) and non-linear (using more modern tech). Both these papers address the non-linear limit (which is not a limit, as both papers show, but more of an artfact of modern tech):

[1] "Approaching the non-linear Shannon Limit" : From the abstract "We also discuss the techniques which are promising to *increase* and/or approach the information capacity limit."

[2] "Scope and Limitations of the Nonlinear Shannon Limit" : "It is shown that this is a limit (if at all) holding only for conventional detection strategies. Indeed, it should only be considered as a limit to the information rate that can be achieved with a given modulation/detection scheme"

These are extensively cited, so use google scholar and read up to see that there is no "Shannon Limit" except for a particular channel technology. The concept has been split into a million directions depending on the underlying technology, each with a different value for "Shannon Limit".

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5210179 [2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7637002

> A relatively high-powered beam of light is mixed with the input signal using a wavelength selective coupler (WSC). The input signal and the excitation light must be at significantly different wavelengths. The mixed light is guided into a section of fiber with erbium ions included in the core. This high-powered light beam excites the erbium ions to their higher-energy state. When the photons belonging to the signal at a different wavelength from the pump light meet the excited erbium ions, the erbium ions give up some of their energy to the signal and return to their lower-energy state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier

Pulling a cable up, cutting a damaged part out of it and putting a new piece in is done all the time to fix damaged cables.

Fibre optic is great because you can usually add more bandwidth by lighting up another wavelength. The amplifiers don't need to be substituted if the wavelength is within its range.

Either the former is understated, or the latter is way overkill.

Or, I'm misunderstanding. Which is probably the most likely possibility.

The main island, Spitsbergen has a population of 2.5k people, they don't allvuse the Internet (certainly not all at the same time), and they do not pay for gigabit home internet, more like 75Mbps.

For reference, the Southern Cross fiber network connecting Australia to the U.S. does more like 10+ Tbps.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=5/77.504/13.008

This is magic to me. Anyone have a search term I could use to better understand how electricity is used to boost a fibre optic signal?

However I think there are also fully passive repeaters- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier

Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers work by utilizing a nonlinear optical effect where energy is transferred from a pump laser to the signal. This is in principle possible in any optical (glass) fiber, but by doping with exotic elements, the amplification characteristics can be optimized. Erbium is suitable for the conventional communication wavelengths.

For reference I have a PhD in information theory and signal processing for fiber channels.

The norwegians seem to think it was a russian trawler and that trawler doesn't exclude the possiblity that russians did it.

Trawler does not mean unintentional or not state related.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...

But yeah it's not unique. In this case it's really tough though because the Soviets knew it was a civilian airliner running with full lights.

Siberia Airlines Flight 1812

They claimed technical problems prevented them from fulfilling the amount of gas required by their contract for NS1 and NS2. Due to sanctions they essentially had to provide gas for free - or at least in exchange for money they were unable to spend or access.

The pipe blowing up potentially saved them from having to pay a penalty fee in the contract once the gas hadn’t been moving for X number of days.

They're in open war with Russia, are openly attacking their resource infrastructure, and are frequently posting excellent high quality footage of it.

Taking out the gas pipeline and then not using the attack for propaganda doesn't fit either their situation or their actions.

Your broader point is correct though, admitting to blowing it up would be bad press to any party.

I’d be looking for the key places in international waters and the likes needed to be cut simultaneously to say paralyze Europe banking and other infrastructure and would be checking whether there are Russian (and affiliated like that Minerva company) “trawlers” with a habit of hanging around those places.

...and then the same trawlers were in the vicinity of this cable in Svalbard when another trawler criss-crossed over it until it broke

(In Norwegian but hopefully Google Translate will do an OK job and mainly graphics)

https://www.nrk.no/nordland/xl/russiske-tralere-krysset-kabl...

It's an open war with Ukraine only so far. And many are not aware of the wider geopolitics of it, they don't know their countries are at war with Russia. Open attacks would scare many of those people and make them more hostile towards the Russian side. As it stands many are more neutral and Putin even has a significant number of fans in the West.

russia wont openly invade Baltics/NATO, they will send little green men under the cover of some self manufactured crisis. A big forest fire, chemical spill, maybe an aircraft crash or terrorist attack. Then it will be "touch our guys and we Nuke you" like they keep saying in Ukraine, with West trembling to cross magical imaginary red lines.

(I suspect it was a short-haul line, so carried no electricity for amplifiers)

https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/fct/doc/2011/2011fc494/2011fc49...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peracomo_Inc_v_TELUS_Communica...

> In 2005, however, he managed to pull up the Sunoque I. He did not know what it was but managed to free his anchor

> The next year, he again hooked an anchor on the Sunoque I. This time he was able to haul it out of the water and secure it on deck. He made no effort to free it. He deliberately cut the cable in two with an electric saw. A few days later the same thing happened. This time it was much easier to haul the cable out, and he cut it again.

> Some weeks later, after the fishing season, while on the dock at Baie-Comeau he noticed a strange looking ship in the area where he usually fished. Later, he saw a photo of the ship in the local newspaper. The accompanying article stated that the cable had been deliberately cut and a search was on for the culprit.

Funnily enough, the cable owners (Telus) tried to thread the needle of making the owner liable, but not so badly that insurance wouldn't pay for it. The judge didn't buy this, and obviously a sole operator crab boat can't pay over a million in damages (although he did lose his boat), so in the end everybody except the insurance company got screwed.

Hard to argue that wasn’t what the fisherman was doing at the point he was sawing a cable in half using a saw he’s already dredged up several times.

Where I live this is the minimum you MUST insure yourself for and they pay out no matter what (to the other party). If you acted in bad faith they will come for your money. If it's an accident or out of your control they pay the damages you caused for you and you are fine. Since everyone is insured by law what usually happens is the companies involved all pay out and then afterwards figure out among themselves if and from whom they can collect.

I guess people may ethically agree to that but did premiums go down? Of course not.

A very profitable move for the insurance companies to provide less insurance without handing over the savings.

And it even applies to “anyone you let drive your vehicle” so everyone is supposed to be a drug recognition expert, which is even controversial amongst those that are supposed to be the “experts”.

"is in his 60s, has fished since he was 15. The courts were told that he had no formal training but picked his fishing grounds by experience"

"he saw a chart showing a line running through his fishing area with the handwritten notation “abandonne.” He concluded his underwater nemesis was fair game and when he snagged it again in June of 2006, he pulled it up and sliced through it with an electric saw."

"Vallee heard that police were looking for the culprit. He came forward and made a voluntary statement."

And if it was actually abandoned, what was cutting it going to do for him anyway? Unless he removed the cable, he was going to keep snagging it in different areas.

This isn’t like cutting a corner pulling out of a parking lot and running over some flowers. This is like digging with a backhoe in front of your business to install some irrigation, and getting irritated at all those pesky cables and stuff underground. And rather than talking to someone about it, ripping them all out because ‘it didn’t look like anyone was using them’.

But insurances' business is about finding reasons not to pay, so it's not surprising at all…

Business isn’t doing great. The place catches on fire and burns down. All the business assets and the structure are lost, so the business needs to shut down.

If arson wasn’t an exclusion;

1) why would anyone look closer to figure out if it was intentional or not? Assuming no one was injured. Who has the incentive to do all the investigation?

2) even if they got caught and convicted, in California the jail penalty is only 3 years for structure arson. $3mln is a hell of a payday for three years in jail, and without the exclusion, they’d still be entitled to the payout.

3) what if they had a buddy do it, and the evidence they conspired wasn’t strong enough to get a criminal conviction - but enough for civil court. Or civil discovery would uncover evidence, where a criminal investigation may not.

Same dynamic plays out for life insurance, vehicle, personal liability, home insurance, etc.

Moral hazard is a real issue for any insurance, as knowledge that a payout can come due to a circumstance someone can intentionally trigger definitely changes the odds of those circumstances occurring. In some cases to the point of strongly encouraging or even outright warping the market so those circumstances occur regularly.

Without insurance, the owner is the one who bears the costs directly no matter what, so we’d likely have a lot fewer buildings burning down!

People would in general be a lot more careful, just like they’d be more careful driving if every car has a giant knife embedded in the center of the steering wheel instead of having airbags. A lot more lives would be ruined though when being careful isn’t enough eh? Or people get overwhelmed.

And of course insurance companies have a strong incentive to not pay out illegitimate claims. They’d go bankrupt if they did anything else!

Sometimes (or often, depending on your POV) they try to not pay out legitimate claims, which is why documentation and legal representation is important too - and why it’s such a heavily regulated industry pretty much everywhere.

If it's the owner, then it's insurance fraud, and it has nothing to do with moral hazard.

If it's not the owner but say a random crackhead, then I also fail to see how it qualifies as moral hazard, and if the insurance doesn't not cover them nobody will (because the arsonist is insolvent and will never be able to pay $3M) and the business owner is screwed, which is a terrible outcome (and is exactly what happened here).

In any case the answer to 1) clearly is “the insurance company” exactly as if arson is excluded.

> Without insurance, the owner is the one who bears the costs directly no matter what,

Which is exactly what he's trying to avoid when paying for an insurance in the first place.

And like with health insurance, there's actually very little link between the fact that you're insured or not and the risk you're taking (Like nobody gets hurt because their injuries get reimbursed) because the harm goes far beyond the economic loss you're insuring yourself against.

If the owner won’t lose out on the payout from insurance by committing arson, or could plausibly get away with it without getting caught, he is experiencing a moral hazard to commit arson.

It’s only insurance fraud if he lies to get a payout from insurance. Which means the insurance policy would need to have an exclusion to not pay him out if he committed the arson, so he lied about it. If it did not have that exclusion, then he doesn’t need to lie about it, hence no fraud.

Either way, that the insurance policy would pay him if he burnt his place down is literally the moral hazard. It’s called a moral hazard because it creates an incentive for him to commit an immoral act that he otherwise would not. It’s existence is a hazard to his morals.

That they would exclude if he did it himself, and would investigate it, is what the company is doing to attempt to mitigate that moral hazard. But it always exists.

This random example is interestingly at odds with all the other definitions and example on that very web page!

> If the owner won’t lose out on the payout from insurance by committing arson, or could plausibly get away with it without getting caught, he is experiencing a moral hazard to commit arson.

This makes zero sense, because in that line of reasoning, the moral hazard is always there no matter what the policy is about arson: “all the owner needs to do” is to commit arson without being caught, which is exactly the same thing whether or not arson is excluded from the policy, since committing arson on your own good to receive payment from insurance is insurance fraud anyway.

The only thing that changes if arson is excluded is if the arson is committed by somebody else!

> Either way, that the insurance policy would pay him if he burnt his place down is literally the moral hazard.

But you are making things up! This particular moral hazard would only exist if insurance fraud was not a crime in itself, which it is already! And as such, there can be no such moral hazard, because no insurance company is to pay a dude that burns down his own place no matter if there's an exclusion about arson in their contract.

> That they would exclude if he did it himself, and would investigate it, is what the company is doing to attempt to mitigate that moral hazard. But it always exists.

The company would have to do no investigation and it would do no mitigation, as it would be the police investigating to protect public order.

AS I said before, the moral hazard would only exist in a place where insurance fraud is not recognized as a fraud.

Saying that this a moral hazard is like saying that bank robbery is a moral hazard on the perspective of banks, and that's clearly not what this phrase means.

Btw, you are the one missing the subtlety of “burning down your own good” vs “having it burned by a third party”. But sure, I'm the one who don't understand.

It could be from leaving the door open ‘accidentally’ so someone ‘breaks in’ and does it (actually, or intentionally) or it could be hiring someone to do it - as long as they don’t get caught in a way that stops the payout. Or ignoring that pile of cardboard boxes near the oven, or the weird smoke smell near the electrical panel. Or not hiring security when they know they have angry protestors threatening to burn the place down. Or pissing off the local unstable homeless dude, and then not doing anything when he threatens to burn your place down. It doesn’t have to be a rational or conscious decision for it to be a problem for the insurer.

Moral hazard is a fundamental problem with insurance, because insurance by design and necessarily by definition removes loss/creates payouts for events that would otherwise leave the owner solely on the hook. Which if not done carefully, can alter behavior significantly.

It’s usually mitigable, or no one sane (or able to remain solvent long term!) will write such a policy. The early days of insurance, there were plenty of examples of people abusing it or weird edge cases causing insurance companies to go bankrupt. These types of Risks are so obvious though, and the industry so much more mature, that in modern history it’s usually due to corporate incompetence or the like.

For example, good luck getting a huge life insurance policy on a random homeless person and having it pay out if they die (regardless of if you had anything to do with their death).

Or not having a serious investigation if a friend gets in a car accident with you and gets lifelong disability injuries.

Insurance fraud is a crime created for the insurance industry to help protect them, and in theory reduces insurance costs and helps society.

Because this issue is always on their mind for a good reason.

They’re also a business in it to make a profit, and will happily exclude reasonable things and refuse to payout for reasonable claims if they think they can get away with it. Hell, I can’t think of any insurance company that likes paying out for anything.

But that doesn’t change the nature of moral hazard.

Your argument is weird because you’re essentially saying moral hazard isn’t an issue because there are laws making some of the more obvious damaging behaviors illegal.

But that’s like arguing it’s never dangerous to drive a car because there are laws making reckless driving, driving without a license, drunk driving, vehicular homicide, etc. illegal.

When actually, those laws are because at a fundamental level, it’s always dangerous to drive a car, these problems are common, and we’re attempting to mitigate them somewhat because we think (at a societal level) it’s worth it.

“Kill the chicken to scare the monkey

It's reasonable for the responsible party to pay the damages. And yet, it's a risk, which is why it's common to carry insurance for your own liability (in which case, your insurance usually wouldn't subrogate and sue you)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalassophobia

Trawler fishing is devastating for the local ecology, we just don't see the damage - to quote [1], page 16:

> Seabed habitats are under significant pressure across European seas from the cumulative impacts of demersal fishing, coastal developments and other activities. Preliminary results from a study presented in SWD(2020) indicate that about 43% of Europe’s shelf/slope area and 79% of the coastal seabed is considered to be physically disturbed, which is mainly caused by bottom trawling. A quarter of the EU’s coastal area has probably lost its seabed habitats.

Honestly I'm pretty much in favor of banning trawler fishing and the import of trawler-fished fish into the European Union, even if it's just to protect our fiber links.

[1] https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/720778d4-bb17...

Where I live it’s cut back dramatically, but the bizarre thing is that it’s strictly permitted in territories where we know rare deep sea glass sponge reefs exist, and once thrived. These reefs are islands of immense diversity and biomass which fed huge numbers of transient species moving through the deep. They were also nurseries for a large number of fish species we commonly fish for.

We work so hard to regulate our fisheries yet do so little to properly protect the resources they extract from a holistic perspective.

Our fish industry is really well connected politically and the large players exactly know how to play the fiddle, and any attempt to hold the foreign ones accountable with actually working and appropriate measures (it's highly likely that it will take live ammunition or an intentional collision, at least in legally "open" seas) would likely result in WW3.

  the less you’ll understand why it’s still permitted in so many places.

It's absolutely an existential threat to the ecology of the entire Earth yet those are the reasons why. "Close to 90% of the world’s marine fish stocks are fully exploited, overexploited or depleted."

Source: https://www.unep.org/facts-about-nature-crisis

https://news.mongabay.com/2023/07/mud-muck-and-death-cambodi...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8823369/Gree...

https://www.huckmag.com/article/paolo-fanciulli-the-italian-...

I love eating seafood but have basically given it all up due to environmental concerns, there's very few fisheries left that are harvested sustainably and farmed fish as an alternative cause a host of other problems for marine wildlife in the area.

Even the sustainable types of fish usually end up with huge amounts of bycatch that it's hard to justify eating them too.

At this point the only seafood I can eat is something I've caught myself and isn't of concern for sustainability, Australia is lucky in that respect with quite a few species thriving but we still face a lot of illegal fishing in our waters that's incredibly hard to police.

Are you asking if I would be willing to pay more money for goods that don't irreversibly destroy ocean ecosystems and that aren't made with slave labor?

I struggle to imagine the kind of person who would say no to such a question. Someone with no money in a country with no safety net on the verge of starvation? Someone with no moral comapass?

> I kinda don't like the taste of bugs.

I don't understand what bugs have to do with ocean trawling. Is this an unusual way of referring to lobster?

[Capt James F. Bradley Jr.] was at his office in Naval Intelligence one day at 3 a.m. when the St. Louis native began reflecting on his boyhood life on the Mississippi River. As he later told the authors, he recalled that the river beach was dotted with signs warning, “Cable Crossing — Do Not Anchor,” so a boater would not foul the cable.

At that point, he wondered if the Soviets did not have similar signs along their Arctic coasts to prevent their critical cables, including those used by the KGB and the Soviet Northern Fleet, from being damaged.

As a result of these ponderings, in 1971 the American submarine Halibut, with its periscope up, slowly and secretly traced the Siberian coast looking for telltale warning signs. The cable signs were found, and American divers put a tap at the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk on Soviet communications.

https://stationhypo.com/2021/09/05/remembering-captain-james...

Here's a description of an early operation (which I think was actually on copper cables): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells

When I worked at Google, Snowden and others showed that it was likely the US NSA was spying on Google fiber outside of US, I believe the speculation was that they tapped lines around UK, possibly underwater. There's nothing quite like seeing a packet trace containing an RPC between a frontend and backend and being able to recognize the communicating services, collected by a third party. Google greatly sped up its RPC encryption project after that revelation.

Then I remember how far ahead the likes of the NSA and NRO are compared to what we're familiar with, and become rather less sure. The Orion satellites have 100m radio dishes, and were first launched in the 90s. Two Hubble-like telescopes were so old hat that they were donated to NASA in 2012. Considering that the NRO is so secrecy-oriented that its very existence was classified until 1992 (it went 11 years completely undetected, and leaked via a New York Times article in 1971 and an accidental entry in a budget report in 1973) and no mission since 1972 is declassified, this says a lot about how much further on they are.

Then again, if unattended taps were installed on cables, you'd also expect them to occasionally be found when lifting cables for repair. And they'd be so advanced that it might be worth lifting an entire cable to check for and acquire such a tap. Which means the tappers would think twice about putting one in, if they could then lose it.

<conspiracy theory> An advanced enough attacker would build their cable taps in such a way that they automatically dropped off when they detected the cable being lifted - and would probably result in suspected but not provable "damage caused by human activity" that has broken through the cable armouring and exposed the fibre bundle inside. Now I'm wondering if the Svalbard cable damage was a software bug in the cable tap device.

[0] https://fac.ksu.edu.sa/sites/default/files/06149809-Optical_...

The "Get pumped" section of this page has an almost ELI5 overview: https://hackaday.com/2023/08/08/under-the-sea-optical-repeat...

So, my guess is that a government's budget can enable sampling anything from "so much bandwidth". Regarding encryption, if you run the numbers, to brute force common encryption algorithms it would take Google's compute 1 second. Image all Google service have an outage for 1 second. Google is just an example to imagine the sizing required. In other words, technically possible. And shouldn't be dismissed with "oh, there is encryption, so that door is closed for any threat actor".

> Source: I worked on said analytical software.

That's not true at all.

https://forensicssource.com/collections/evidence-markers/pro...

It's more likely that they take photos with both measurements.

Perhaps they intended for the information to be shared with US intelligence.

Apply this logic elsewhere, and you cannot trust social institutions; for example, your local human services department when they come to warn you about your domicile being unfit for human habitation. Next, you can't trust the medical profession after you've been involuntarily committed to a mental institution after threatening the local schoolchildren (although we all know you were only warning them about the coming danger). You can't trust the state medical authority to regulate the medication that is used to treat paranoid schizophrenia. Now you're stuck in a padded room, unable to move your arms to scratch that incessant itch on your nose, pleading with your caretakers to just listen to reason, open their eyes to the truth.

All you wanted to do was alert the world to the alarming fact that the United States obviously staged evidence that someone intentionally cut an undersea communications cable to Svalbard, Norway on the 7th of January, 2022.

Instead of a magic formula, you take things on a case-by-case basis, examining sources and possible motives of those sources, looking at past experience with them for hints. This sounds like work because it is. It's very easy to just accept what you're told, but it's not heroic or even reasonable.

> All you wanted to do was alert the world to the alarming fact that the United States obviously staged evidence that someone intentionally cut an undersea communications cable to Svalbard, Norway on the 7th of January, 2022.

Meanwhile, the United States government is like "that line of thinking ultimately leads to the conclusion that trust is impossible."

For about half the population of the US right now if the Daily Wire or like Joe Rogan came out and said that refrigerators are a deep state conspiracy that has been transing the kids, that would be it. No more refrigerators. There would be piles of refrigerators miles high at landfills across the country and having cold drinks would be a sure sign youre a corrupted liberal.

Also rather than not having cold drinks going back to using ice boxes is probably the better option.

More seriously, we do live in a complex world, we can't function without trust but we also have to be open to changing our opinions based on new evidence. I'm just reading "How to talk to a science denier" and it's got some interesting takes on these topics.

We literally had a wide spread conspiracy about secret DNA editing viruses that were controlled by 5G cellular antennas, because They™ wanted to mind control people and make them sterile for population replacement by Them™.

I’d say that it’s not about being plausible in any sort objective sense, but rather a successful conspiracy theory must reinforce existing beliefs and biases.

See also: Ultraterrestrials, and UFOs as satanic entities battling Jesus.

There's another category of fables I'd call "religious fables". Those are ones that can't be falsified. Feels like your other examples fit in those. Religious people believe all sort of things in these categories. They're not really related to the factual reality. This is different IMO from your run of the mill conspiracy theory because those generally have enough counter-evidence where you can make a reason/logic based assessment of the probability of true vs. false. An analogy is flat earthers pointing to some "evidence" that in their mind supports the idea that the earth is flat while ignoring the bulk of evidence demonstrating it's not. Even if you do not have the ability to directly observe whether the earth is flat or not you can weigh the evidence. It's true religion and conspiracy often intersect. Religion by its nature is belief without facts.

Create some story about the “hum” of an air compressor being linked to declining birth rates or whatever and someone will believe it. Keep harping on it long enough and it goes from a fringe idea to vaguely plausible surprisingly quickly. Just look at the Anti Vax movement and those are well over 200 years old.

I feel like for something to stick there does need to be more than that. But who knows, give it a try and see! If you look at the common conspiracies they seem to target more complex things.

Anti-vax is a lot more complex. There was Andrew Wakefield's fraud. There are real side effects for many vaccines. There are public health considerations. The science is definitely not at a fridge level. Pharma companies can have conflicts of interest. Maybe the original cowpox gives immunity to smallpox is more intuitive but mRNA vaccines that cause cells to make the Covid spike protein are not as simple. Covid vaccines were rushed to market (one can argue for good reasons) and they did have side effects (e.g. myocarditis, tinnitus?). Authorities have walked the line of being open about the considerations vs. trying to force public health policies, sometimes eroding trust while they do that. Even experts differed on some finer policy points. I know I was really upset with people who didn't vaccinate for Covid because I believed we could get herd immunity but then new variants showed up that were so more infectious and got around the vaccine where that didn't matter.

All of them.

That’s two different standards, and only relevant if either of them was a significant percentage of total population. Most people don’t even understand why a refrigerator door gets briefly stuck after you close it. It’s practically a magic box that gets cold which is perhaps why they fall for conspiracy theories so readily, any explanation is equally plausible.

And sure at a high level I understand both, but to really understand a refrigerator the same way you would need to really understand 5G etc, you would need to know the actual pressures involved etc. People don’t know the chemical properties and makeup of the refrigerant. What’s the acceptable impurity levels. What lubricants are in use, etc. The physical geometry of all the mechanical parts and so forth.

Though ultimately yea a smartphone extremely complex. I’m just saying being able to have a high level understanding is very different than knowing how to maintain or design something.

There's no conspiracy here. They're just taking photos with both sets of measurements.

Conspiracy was the furthest thing from my mind; I’ve seen photos from police in the US with centimeters and I thought it was hilarious: Americans using cm and Europeans using inches. What’s the world coming to?

If there was a conspiracy I think they would not have made such a foolish and obvious error.

It's indeed more likely the police just bought an off-the-shelf measuring device. They often come with both imperial and proper units.

> If there was a conspiracy I think they would not have made such a foolish and obvious error.

Alas, that's not necessarily a good rule-of-thumb. Incompetence is a thing.

Compare to eg how the Russian spooks placed three copies of the game SIMS 3 in the pictures they published of an alleged assassins' lair.

(Most likely, some superior officer told the grunts to put three SIM cards for burner phones in the picture.)

See https://www.vice.com/en/article/88gpmg/russia-sims-3

Ah but how the media has such different standards for conspiracy theories when it furthers a desired narrative, rather than contradicts it.

> [...], which was then mistaken by an officer on the scene for being meaningful.

Well, my narrative here is that one way or another the officers were incompetent. Either in staging (more likely), or in assigning meaning (less likely).

No. It's simply the _commercial product_ the police used for markers. It shows both cm and inches. You don't think that the police themselves are actually manufacturing these things, do you?

https://asiatimes.com/2023/04/new-us-spy-sub-built-for-seabe...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_(character)

> Several experts with extensive experience with submarine cables and installations have assessed the images for NRK. Their judgement is that the damage to the Svalbard fiber was due to the cables being crushed.

Finally evidence that Godzilla is real!

The day before our arrival I receive a call that a boat somehow broke the water pipe which lies on the bottom between Rebak and Langkawi, cutting the island off from fresh water, and whether I wanted to rebook to another hotel.

Not sure what the moral of the story is, but it kinda fitted the context :)

https://x.com/PerErikSchulze/status/1794828268480438514

I did rewind and listen again then look up what he was saying and indeed, my assumed knowledge of smoking was altered.

Apologies for my vagueness with 'issues', I don't want to under or over state what he said and right now I can't locate the exact sentence within the days of testimony.

This man... https://archive.is/x5MRY

https://www.c-span.org/video/?510467-1/derek-chauvin-trial-d...

That is a difference.

Removed capitalisation because I’m against capital punishment. /s

https://www.scotsman.com/webimg/legacy_elm_28724349.jpg?crop...

And through the grandfather, who fades to translucency.

It wasn't just me; that PSA made enough of a splash that it was called out on Friends.

I've tried to find that PSA in the past, but with no success. Once I asked a friend if they could find it, and the response was "Oh, I know exactly the one you're talking about. I won't help you look for it. I hate that commercial and I don't want to see it again."

Looks like it's made it onto youtube by now in glorious 240p: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6pb6XxrbmE

I note that the second comment is "This commercial was what made my father stop smoking." It's interesting to think about the balance between disturbing the smoking audience so strongly that they stop, and disturbing the non-smoking audience so strongly that they complain about being exposed to your traumatic imagery and imperil your funding.

In my imagination, this one would end with the roulette wheel stopping on 0, but the result of 0 not being depicted.

You can google for places to buy them.

https://www.fishersci.com/shop/products/smokers-lungs-kit-2/...

"These inflatable swine lungs have been stained realistically and then specially preserved in odorless, nontoxic solution that retains the texture and elasticity of fresh lungs."

Submarine cables are clearly marked on nautical charts, and even recreational boaters know not to anchor in those areas.

A professional trawler captain is not going to accidentally trawl over such an area.

given the use cases re: satellites on the island, and the continuing cold-yet-increasing tensions with Russia, it's absolutely reasonable to make that assumption

maybe they'll try to blame this on Ukraine like they tried with the undersea pipelines that got blown up, too

I agree the odds are reasonably high Russia arranged this on purpose. And that's fine for the purposes of a discussion that doesn't have consequences, but not for much more.

>After an inital investigation, the police dropped the case due to lack of evidence, and inadequate legislation.

What many might not know is that Svalbard is home to the northernmost satellite station in the world. It is just one of two stations that can communicate with polar orbiting satellites each day. ESA and NASA as well as other civilian organisations are present there, and the station communicates with well over a hundred satellites, and are pretty vital for much of the satellites that look back at us.

Starlink Ground Station Network is global, spread in many different countries and look more resilient than a single one.

And these polar orbit satellite typically live a lot longer than the relatively short lived starlink satellites, potentially opening you to a (perhaps unlikely?) scenario where starlink moves to new and incompatible hardware for inter-satellite communications, and your satellite is then made obsolete.

Vertical integration is not cheap, but it does have it's upsides.

https://uk.pcmag.com/networking/150673/starlinks-laser-syste...

“We're passing over terabits per second [of data] every day across 9,000 lasers,” SpaceX engineer Travis Brashears said today at SPIE Photonics West, an event in San Francisco focused on the latest advancements in optics and light. "We actually serve over lasers all of our users on Starlink at a given time in like a two-hour window.”

As I understand it, the Starlink network has a number of ground stations, and an active inter-satellite "mesh," thanks to laser links, which would allow it to route around the loss of one or more ground stations? (although obviously it requires at least one ground station to be live in order to access the non-Starlink-connected Internet)

The lasers began being integrated between 2020 and 2021, so it's likely SpaceX has made decent progress equipping their network with this capability, although I can't find the latest figures for the proportion of satellites that have lasers.

It sounds like there's something I'm missing if we can't do "Starlink from the satellites, so we don't rely on a specific ground station"

Could you help me understand the limitation?

There are satellites in orbit today that have nothing to do with Starlink. Some of these have been up for a long time. We're talking weather satellites and research satellites. The ones in a polar orbit can only use one of two ground stations to communicate back with the earth, simply due to their location. One of those ground stations has lost it's fiber optic connection so it can't be used at full bandwidth right now.

None of that so far has anything to do with Starlink. We're talking about a system os satellites that already exists and predates Starlink sometimes by decades.

The person that started this thread proposed: "Maybe just use Starlink from the satellites, so we don't rely on a specific ground station." In other words, have these already existing satellites integrate with the (relatively new) Starlink system.

So they're saying that we somehow make those old satellites, which are already in orbit and have their own communication systems designed to interface with ground stations, somehow stop using the ground station and start using Starlink instead.

That said apparently they do have a satellite backup, just not through Starlink.

Then it isn't really a backup. A lower-bandwidth failover capacity is properly described as an alternative or degraded pathway. To be a proper "backup" a thing has to actually do the primary job at least temporarily.

good for getting into the other side of a connection or doing some management tasks like back-up telemetry -- but we're talking SNMP, SSH connections to routers, etc, not GigE levels of data.

There are tons of commercial observation satellite operators that use Svalbard for downlink (downlinks at Svalbard can be procured commercially through a company called KSAT which operates the station). Ukraine has been purchasing a lot of imagery from these companies, including both optical and radar imagery. If I had to hazard a guess at a possible motive, that'd be it.

All that because whoever controls the North Pole controls most of the Northern Hemisphere, it’s actually one of the very few “ways in” inside North America and control of the continental United States (there were a few US geopoliticians/geographers who first became aware of that in the early 1940s).

As air-power started to be taken seriously with the advent of WW2 (some) geographers started realising that one of the shortest ways of getting from Europe to North America is via the North Pole, or close to it, anyway. Hence those maps I've linked to, which had the North Pole at their center, and that is because Renner thought that the control of the North Pole was similar to the control of the Northern Hemisphere. Related, a little bit later on ICMBs were meant to take the same route, give or take, hence why NORAD became a thing.

But, again, we can choose to take the "lol! lol! lol! The Russians and their shovels!" angle, which won't benefit anyone involved in this conversation, intellectually speaking.

Later edit: Additional resource, this study [3] titled: "The Hot Struggle Over the Cold Waters: The Strategic Position of the Arctic Region During and After the Cold War"

This paragraph there is a good start on how important were the views of people like Renner when it came to the Arctic, that is in the context of the US vs. the USSR/Russia (potential) confrontation:

> The first to focus his interests on the significance of the strategic position of the Arctic was George T. Renner, when in the 1940s, based on a map with the North Pole at the center, he estimated the opportunities and threats associated with this new perspective. However, the increase of the Arctic’simportance is inextricably linked with the development of technology which allowed greater exploration of the region. Shortly after the outbreak of the Cold War, in the rhetoric of the United States, the High North began to be identified as a “mighty” and “important” region.44 Hence, the geostrategic role of the Far North was fully revealed during of the Cold War, when it was possible to observe real military and political tensions on the polar waters and islands.

[1] https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-renner-world-...

[2] archive.org link that should work, but doesn't: https://archive.org/details/dr_rand-mcnally-world-map-for-th...

[3] https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

https://ussnautilus.org/1014-2/

God I have developed such a distaste for political opinions. Everyone thinks they're right and everyone sees the various maleficent actors in others.

[0] https://www.jpost.com/international/article-802290

You need to construct an entity that both the US and China make themselves fully subservient to.

Good luck.

At this point this seems to be the most common cause of see cable damage.

I guess the captains decide that it's worth dumping the anchor in a storm to protect the cargo even if the area "forbids" it.