TerkErJerbs

Yeah I got the memo. Disclaimer above that I am not a math guy and shouldn't have ever attempted it. 🤷

Well yeah... you wouldn't have to use foreign services if a domestic alternative existed. One doesn't for northern residents, yet. So here we are like many times in the past (like for getting northern people online, or getting them clean water to drink) talking about future, possible, great idea measures that will take place at some point instead of just doing the fucking thing.

I don't love Starlink or Musk. However, I do own a Starlink dish and I have used it for the past couple of years for work. I know lots of other people who live in very remote areas who have been using it since it became available to them. Starlink took off in central and northern areas of Canada very quickly because it was the only (good) option for highspeed internet, and still is. And while it would be dope if a canadian competitor came along and made good on their potential, we're still falling back into the fact that at best a canadian LEO internet company would have to launch their sats in the north for a total of 120k customers. Starlink has the Alaskan market which is upwards of 750k people, already. The canadian customers are just a bonus for them in that region, at that scale.

Why can't we get northern people online now as well as develop a domestic solution? I don't think it's a stretch to say Telesat looks like another XPlore-net type solution (i.e. half-assed, at best, and maybe will never happen at this point). I've worked in tech for 4 years now. Currently for a fully private company, zero public or private/VC funding. But the first company I worked for took an obscene amount of public funding (lockdown subsidies which in fact is how I got hired) and a fuckton of tax breaks before and since. Sadly, they've also done a lot of screaming about the suggestion that they should pay their fair share of corporate tax. Not super relevant to this convo, but I do understand in some ways what's at stake when a company takes public money (and still treats locals like shit). There are lots of examples of this going wrong, so I wouldn't wanna see it be the only option on the table for any reason.

At any rate I think we agree that folks should probably have clean drinking water first anyhow.

I'm with you on that. I really am. However I'm also for people in the north getting online effectively before another decades passes. The government (and that's not just the libs) have been promising this shit since the early oughts, and throwing money at it that seldom seems to do any good.

NP! It's a great app, the dev updates it really frequently and I've never had any functional issue with it. I keep meaning to drop onto their git issues board and make a couple of small quality of life suggestions for the UI/UX as I use it dozens of times per day for work (there are some processes that currently take 5 clicks/per that could be reduced to 1 or 2 max) but that is a very small and nice problem to have.

This is an interesting scenario with the entire military might of the US sitting in Alaska at this moment literally there to prevent this exact thing from happening. I mean, fun to think about, but not happening any time soon. Especially by the year 2030.

You can buy used dishes online for as little as 100 bucks and get the account transferred over to your name. Source; bought a dish for less than 100 bucks and got it transferred to my account. You don't have to pay full price for the equipment. And I don't know where you live but even in a major city you're paying roughly 120/mo for decent broadband internet. If you're doing a budget plan you can get it for half that, if you want fuckin 1.5mbps upload speeds lmfao.

It's an easy reaction to have when you only read the headline. But if you do the math, Starlink already provides service to most of the north at less than $200/mo per person. There are less than 120k people in the northern territories. That 2.2bn works out to something like 85 years of Starlink service per person in the north (assuming everyone there needs an individual dish, which isn't the case). Myself and a couple of other commentors have done some looking into Telesat as a company and they launched one (1) LEO "test sat" in 2018 and haven't done a fucking thing since to get northern people online in a timely fashion.

If you actually talk to people who live in the north most of them who can afford to already have Starlink, because it works far better than Xplore which was the only option previously, for many years. Most northern mining, logging, and oil camps are also getting their workers online with Starlink and have been for a few years already.

I've not a fan of Elon, or the canadian libs, or the conservative party. But this whole discussion is kinda bullshit. As far as I'm concerned Elon Musk is guillotine lube, top of the list. The day after he is beheaded, Starlink as a company will continue operating. Which, frankly, is best-case scenario. idk what else to say about that.

There are quite a few high profile (in the media anyhow) cases where nutjobs get off on starting fires, yeah. But the really dark shit starts to happen when (ahem) alternative media sources start to imply that all arsonists are paid state actors and/or sexually aroused political players doing all the arson.

It's usually insurance-related. Or accidental. Nothing that sexy in the vast majority of them.

My favorite was last year during the very real wildfire issues affecting western canada where the flat-earthers kept posting video of actual forestry worker helicopters torching brush piles (something they actually do, during the off-season, to clean up tinder piles) and conflating it with "treaudeauh-paid ANTIFA super-soldiers out to bring in 15 minute cities and permanent state control by burning society to the ground" or whatever the hell. The absurdity of it all kinda turned me on in the other direction, ngl.

Classic King Missile - Take Stuff From Work.

ACAB

Research Xplore-net and circle back to this. The feds poured all kinds of subsidies into this shitty company and it's never been more than a joke among anyone who's ever had to use it. ETA look up hundreds (and thousands that didn't post to the internet) cases like this one where Xplore-net users bailed en masse for Starlink as soon as possible and got fucked around for months with their cancellation and billing workflows.

I can't find it but I'm reasonably sure I remember Xplore-net asking for a bailout or subsidy funding due to their customers fleeing around lockdowns. I'll post it if I can find it.

ETA #2 lol Canadian Broadband Firm Xplore In Talks to Receive Fresh Financing

That was the same issue I had with SyncThing, it just seemed to conk out at weird times and I gave up on it (for that purpose). It's great for centralizing a directory of files from one machine to another but I didn't love it for keeping a single file up-to-date with changes coming from more than one point on the network.

Oh yeah sorry, I misunderstood. I think what you're looking for is local (network) versioning which I've had trouble finding in the past as well. I had hoped SyncThing would do it but it doesn't. Versioning is something a service like git does perfectly (i.e. notifies of and/or resolves conflicts in text files on the fly, seamlessly). When I was doing a lot of writing from different devices I set up a private repo on Github (and later Gitlab) and got my text editor to auto-sync-on-save to the repo (from any device) and it worked great. There are very likely self-hosted solutions that wouldn't rely on the cloud for that, but for me it worked fine as private repos because nobody but me would ever see those drafts (in a perfect world... we all know microsoft has almost certainly trained their shitty A.I. on my terrible writing versions over those years on Github because they own that platform).

I know there are ways to get Git working locally, probably for this purpose, but I don't know of any simple ones to suggest.