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.
And here I am, avoiding downloading things on cell service because it might negatively impact other people around me.