And here I am, avoiding downloading things on cell service because it might negatively impact other people around me.
So much of what comes out of that site are mob attacks from impish activities like taking over a poll or comments section on a news site way back in the day, destroying innocent lives in mob hunts, to manipulating stocks.
Honestly this person probably felt they were truly sticking it to the big guy because how dare they charge for internet.
I get the vibe, though I agree this was an unproductive way to pursue it.
I strongly suspect the fee for access is not at all related to the cost to provide service; they’re leveraging the temporary monopoly on connectivity they have to get consumers to pay absurd prices. Cruise ships are similar; I think it was double digits per day for internet.
I don’t think it’s productive to metaphorically “take the ball and go home”, but that instinct would probably be much lower if the fees for access were something reasonable.
The highest tier with a price on it is burstable 8x4Mbps with guaranteed 1x0.5Mbps for $9k a month, which feels about right for a ferry (especially with some aggressive caching). They would break even with 30 customers paying $10 for access, though really I would be surprised if a ferry went far enough out to sea to need specialized internet (I am out of my depth, though, so maybe they do).
All in all, interesting. The markups still feel high, but not nearly as outlandish as I would have thought.
I wonder if at huge economies of scale you can get cheaper marine satellite internet if you don’t need full-ocean coverage. Eg cruise ships seem to sail the same routes on repeat, they don’t really need coverage of the entire ocean. I wonder if Royal Caribbean et al get cheaper service because they have pretty static and pre-defined routes, making it easier for the satellite provider to ensure there are satellites overhead when the ships are there.
In that context it's a rip off, and higher latency/lower speed.
On the 4 or so companies I checked, most were metered as you said but also clearly designed for personal vessels. They were also expensive as you said; I think the cheapest I saw was ~$1500/month for 5GB, and $0.39/MB for overages.
I am in no way an expert, this is just based off like 4 links. Someone said Inmarsat had more commercial-vessel sized plans so I checked them out, and they do seem way cheaper if you’re planning to use the link a lot.
This is a noble activity and I salute you for it, but I'm pretty sure that towers have traffic shaping that manage QoS and fairness for you.
(Not talking about edge cases like BitTorrent or such. But if a carrier advertises watching streaming video on my phone, I don’t feel guilty downloading an app update. If their tower couldn’t handle that, it’s on them, not me.)
ISPs have done a great job shaming people who use their service for what it is supposed to be. It's 2024, and we should all have fiber to the home by now. But no, they're only working on deploying more shitty wireless connections to everybody and letting all the land-based services rot. Fuck them.
Wireless is a bit different in that there's inherently limited bandwidth. You and I share the same RF fields. If I'm monopolizing them, you can't, and vice versa. Now, if you have a home 5G hotspot, do what thou wilt. Those are advertised to support a household. If they can't, they shouldn't advertise it. However, if I were at a baseball game with 40,000 other people, and I couldn't text my wife because I saw you having 300 torrent connections open on a laptop just because you could, I'd still kinda wanna throw a beer at you. It's like listening to music out loud on the bus. You can; you shouldn't.
There's no chance the carrier can give every phone in a cell full bandwidth at the same time, they rely on only a handful of people using their connection at any given moment.
You paid for that service, they should be able to provide it to you. If it negatively impacts other users, that's the provider's fault.
But, I'm not selfish so I just water the garden at 4am now.
If your neighborhood's water pressure is affected by you running a garden watering system that most likely maxes out at 15 gallons/minute, then you have a serious problem, god help you if there's a structure fire in the neighborhood.
Seriously though, if you're not just exaggerating to make an example, contact your town/city/whatever Department of Works, something is seriously wrong.
It's low enough that some appliances like dishwashers and washing machines give 'water supply' errors unless you run them overnight. Some houses use pressure boosting pumps to get water to the top floor.
Apparently fixing the leaks is expensive and it's free to just lower the pressure and pass the problem onto householders.
I also use this analogy for smuggling and the resources spent trying to stop it: if 10% gets lost/intercepted/“leaked”, the smugglers just produce and send 11% more and demand is met. You can change the numbers but it doesn’t change the result.
Using the entire annual flow of the Colorado river doesn’t mean it’s severely limited. It just means society isn’t stupid and will use the excess to fill sunny deserts to grow crops.
As long as there are crops grown anywhere between Phoenix and LA, water isn’t severely limited.
This is false.
Most western states associate water rights with land ownership. The marginal cost of a unit of water for a user with their own well is close to zero (wells do require electricity and maintanance, but these costs are generally very small).
However, the existence of those water rights (e.g. "this 5 acre parcel comes with 3 acre-feet of water") has nothing to do with whether the water is actually available, and increasingly in many parts of the southwest, it is not.
"Severely limited" in my book means that water usage could not increase by 50%. Fairly sure this condition applies to more or less the entire US southwest.
It’s all being used because there is enough farmland and sun to absorb it. Cut out the farming and the remaining usage could easily grow several hundred percent.
People grow absolutely ridiculous shit in southwest Arizona because water is so cheap and is not “severely limited” by any notional definition of the term.
The only context in which it looks that way is to people coming from locations that are inundated with water but are land/weather limited.
If you want to see what “severely limited” water looks like. Take a look at Israel.
As long as people can pay $100 for 10,000 gallons of water to fill a pool, there is no severe limit.
In the village where I live in rural New Mexico, at least 30% of the population here have private wells and pay nothing for water at all (other than pump energy costs and well maintanance costs). Ranchers to the south of the village pump their own water and use it to irrigate alfalfa fields without paying anyone anything at all.
The reason water is cheap here is because of the historical and legal situation. If water was managed here as it is east of the Mississippi, where it is considered exclusively a public resource, then water supply systems would be able to charge prices more like those found in the east. But because "water rights" are bound up with "land rights", there is no way currently to do politically-controlled water pricing outside of city water systems.
And yes, agriculture in this part of the world uses 75% or more of all the water that falls or flows through the land, and if that wasn't here, water would not be much of an issue. I advocate locally for changes in how agriculture is done here, and write articles for hyperlocal media here to raise awareness of this issue.
But for now agriculture is here, using water wastefully and substantially, and that means that in effect the water supply is severely limited to the point that local jurisdictions will pay farmers to not use water that they have rights to.
I've lived in Israel (Rehovot). The Negev is a broadly similar climate (though much lower in elevation) as southern New Mexico and northern Israel is very similar to northern New Mexico. The Israelis are world leaders in the use of desalination, an option that makes no real sense for most of the US southwest (southern CA would be the obvious exception). This makes a significant difference to water availability both for agriculture and residential use in Israel.
There are no timber frame buildings, not any with flammable roofs like thatch or shingles.
They aren't going to make the mistakes of the great fire again!
It seems to work - I have never seen any fire burn more than one building.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/149wg3o/why_do_lond...
Though I suppose once it's storage mechanism performs enough of the functions of a database, it's an ad-hoc database.
It's ironic that you mention "tragedy of the commons." Literally, what we don't have is a commons. What we have is enclosure. So it's truly not a "tragedy of the commons" but a tragedy of private ownership or, specifically, a tragedy of the commons' absence.
Again, there is no use in being "communally-minded" within the confines of an entity that has no community spirit, eg a ruthless, cynical, bottom-lining private corporation. In this context, "communally-minded" action cannot and will not be rewarded. It will only be exploited.
"The public" is an abstraction that resolves to lots of separate "private" people in aggregate -- it's not a specific entity capable of acting as an owner of anything. When people talk about "private ownership", what they're really describing is one specific organization acting as the de facto owner, but nominally acting on behalf of "the public" by being bound up in fiduciary responsibilities to others. That sounds nice in theory, but the incentive structures applicable to those institutons are often not aligned with the interests of "the public" (presuming that any singular interest can even be attributed to it), and the mechanisms of fiduciary accountability often do not work properly. What "public ownership" usually amounts to is private ownership by political institutions, which have their own interests and agendas.
> Again, there is no use in being "communally-minded" within the confines of an entity that has no community spirit, eg a ruthless, cynical, bottom-lining private corporation. In this context, "communally-minded" action cannot and will not be rewarded. It will only be exploited.
The corporation is an organizational model employed by people. It has no consciousness or will of its own, so attributing any of the above qualities, positive or negative, to it, is meaningless. Corporations cannot be ruthless or cynical, or be communally-minded or have any sort of "spirit". They are just processes.
The people who are using the corporation as an organizational structure, on the other hand, can be any of those things. If you have a society full of greedy avaricious people, then commercial corporations will likely behave in ways that reflect greed and avarice. But then so again will every other expression of that society -- including political institutions and interpersonal interactions -- because it's not the abstract organizational model that possesses those qualities, it's the people.
The reality here is that doing destructive things out of some antipathy toward the abstract "corporation" has concrete negative consequences for its employees, its customers, and its investors (who aren't cartoon characters wearing top hats and monocles, but include ordinary people trying to fund their retirements).
I think it's possible to have corporations whose emergent values don't reflect their constituent values. In fact, I think it's inevitable; an LLC is not a cortical homunculus.
The reality is that the behavior you are trying to justify doesn't impact the equally abstract "corporation", it impacts the actual people whose activities that concept represents -- employees, customers, investors, etc.
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But I'm just doing this from memory, it's possible I did something else a years ago.
A couple of decades ago, the idea of even having internet connectivity on a ship at sea was fanciful. The trip would have taken the same twenty hours, and there would have just been no internet access. Now, it's something that is available, but naturally has costs associated -- and the reaction here is that because you don't want to pay for it, it's justifiable to screw over everyone who is paying for it? That's almost sociopathic.
> So I started to waste their bandwidth
...why? Trying to hack it for your own use I can understand, but why would you actively try to worsen the performance for everyone else paying, or try to run up the company's bill if it's metered?
Uh ok.
Sometimes when I'm on a satellite or limited connection and its super slow I wonder how many people are pulling shenanigans like this. You're just hurting honest working class people trying to do work, email/call their kids, manage things like doctors appointments, check on an elder they are responsible for caring for, relax and download a good book to read on a boring flight, etc. There's something really sad that the cohort of people able and willing to learn 'hacking' skills overlaps with the venn circle of anti-social personality types.
tldr; You should care about other people. I don't know how to explain that to you.
Unless your mindset is one of “it’s not enough that I succeed; others must fail by my hand”.
That said I could easily imagine doing some stuff like this as a teenager for giggles. There’s some small joy in being a minor troublemaker in a way nobody would actually care about. It’s not something I’d brag about though.
Even if we're purely selfish, wasting resources just to stick it to others is not really a productive use of our time.
Who in their right mind wants to stop others from getting what they want for it's own sake, or sees the quest for happiness as a competition?
I was pushing back on the idea that "homo economicus" or mainstream economics advocates for competitive sabotage. I have never heard academic economists advocate for this as a rational position.
If anything, the field is biased to over-emphasize positive collaboration.
The position of the parent post is some strange application of group competition for a scarce resource to happiness.
It assumes that someone's goal is not be be as happy as possible, but rather happier than others. This is the only situation where it makes sense to actively put in work to make other people more miserable.
Homo economicus would try get as much as possible for himself, or have others bear the cost (e.g. have society pay for roads but don't want to pay taxes).
They would not lower the quality of service for someone else out of spite without any gain for themselves, let alone waste time on it. They would also understand this would rise the cost of the service they might potentially want to use in the future.
Only narcissists would feel the desire to fuck up a service out of spite and ruin it for anyone else, just because they feel bad for not agreeing to the deal of having to pay
It is only in academic exercises where collaboration is made impossible that sociopathic behavior is optimal.
Right, so they can do all that important stuff on technology that was invented by nerds and hackers over the decades, while they were being demonized by society, bullied, put down, and shoved aside by the so-called sociable class.
Yeah, I’ll continue not shedding tears over Joe Sixpack’s inability to check his football scores for a few minutes.
If you piss in the punch bowl at a party attended by your in group and perceived out group, you’re going to be justifiably hated by both.
And probably not get invited to more parties.
Somehow people get in their mind that they are owed X, then spiral into bitterness and jealousy when they dont get it, and then lash out arbitrarily.
The part that I dont get is where the sense of entitlement comes from? Imagine such a deep sense of entitlement to free wifi on a boat that you feel the need to take revenge on innocents.
If you want free wifi, that's great but the private sector isn't going to do it for you. How many of these public nuisance hackers are advocating for large socialized programs to make wifi a human right on all manner of transport? Usually the hacker demographic is right-wing libertarian and would never advocate for socialism.
So you dont want socialism but you want socialized services? Curious.
If this person's story ended with "Then I started a website to advocate for regulations and pricing for better transport wifi," then that would be great! Instead he just drowned out the internet connection of paying customers who are now making angry calls at some poor tech support person making minimum wage in a poor country. He did nothing but hurt people out of his own immaturity and cheapness.
With Starlink you’re looking at a lot more than 15mbps. We’re at the point where some cruise lines offer free Wi-Fi and people still see multi megabit connections anyway.
Companies breaking with these trends face a backlash assuming a competitive marketplace.
Prices for such add-ons, especially ones that your average customer won't think of before, are also often unreasonably high because the operator knows they have a captive audience they can exploit - you either buy from them or go without.
I would disagree. Here in my corner of EU, public buses have a limited 30min - 1hour free wifi access. What most everyone does immediately getting in the bus is connect to the free wifi and start mindless scrolling on TikTok, Facebook or Instagram. Around 20-30% of the people are super obnoxious and play all the videos over loudspeaker or start calling their friends and speaking loudly as if they are in their home or something, until someone else yells at them. So far, I have only seen two person this month appearing to do something valuable(one was writing an email and another was checking local news).
Being able to enjoy entertainment (or, as you'd probably see it, "mindlessly waste the time" that you have to spend on the bus anyways) is what makes public transit bearable.
This is a culture problem, and has nothing to do with free Wi-Fi. This kind of thing never happens here in Japan, except maybe foreign tourists.
Once my company instituted a per diem limit for meals while travelling, I stopped eating cheap food and would deliberately spend exactly the limit to spite the penny pinchers
If anything, I would guess they are anti-capitalists because they are so indignant about someone offering a paid service.
But I'm puzzled by the idea his actions make any sense as a _capitalist_ impulse (Of course neither of us know anything about OP except his story).
Resentment over what somebody else has is the quintessential mental sliver communism uses to drive people to destroy the system. Perhaps the OP was just engaging in an outburst of his own destructive revolutionary zeal against his fellow passengers because they had something he didn't.
But that's quite unproductive. As it turned out, in order for stripe to work, it needs access to fastly CDN. And then I remembered that reddit also uses fastly. By connecting to stripe and changing the Host HTTP header to reddit.com, I could browse reddit! Images didn't work though (i.redd.it is not on fastly). I could edit my /etc/hosts and associate old.reddit.com with stripe's fastly IP address. After ignoring scary TLS errors, I could even log in.