TerkErJerbs

I use LocalSend between all my devices (work, personal, etc). Mac, Linux, Android, Winblows. All. It's fast, effective, lightweight. FOSS.

Not sure how it's biased, the piece about the 1.3bn was within the first five results that came up when I searched them. To be fair, I didn't dig as deep as you did to find that that deal didn't go through. Thanks for the correction, I didn't know that. The gov-can website itself still has details about the deal, not sure why they wouldn't have removed it if it didn't happen. For context this is the article on canada.ca I was referring to (I wasn't trying to be shady and I don't appreciate being accused of that).

I don't have a horse in this race. I personally don't give a fuck about how the north gets connected per se as long as billions of public money isn't wasted. Again, imo clean water infra is probably a lot more important in the long run for the people in the north considering there is already at least one viable service to connect to the internet with. I can't quite wrap my head around why Telesat hasn't left the "testing phase" in 6+ years. Your added context here makes me even more wary given the details about the company that would actually be manufacturing the LEO sats (and obviously... haven't done so yet. Why is that?).

We all know why canadian cell and internet prices are among the highest in the world. It's because our entire population is less than that which occupies the lower third of california. It costs a lot to build infrastructure to provide comms tech for each person per capita on this scale considering 95+ percent of our population lives along the US border. My point is that Starlink already has the infra in the northern sky, mostly because they have a pretty sizeable market in Alaska and the knock-off effect is there are already LEO sats within range of providing lots of northern canadian residents that same service. The rhetoric about national security is laughable given anyone with a debit card anywhere in the country can already order Starlink and have it delivered within the week. If you're gonna go down that rabbit hole, let's ban it across the country in favor of a domestic solution that might be available in another decade at the current rate of development. While we're at it, let's make it so that those fly-in communities in the north are only allowed to get food and supply deliveries on canadian-made airplanes and boats.

It all starts to break down when you think about it. This isn't a political thing for me, it's practical. I'm not a huge fan of government in any form (read my comment history). But since we're all participating in this fucking shitshow let's look at the facts and spend our collective tax money wisely. If that 2.2bn is actually going to mean most people in the north get cheap or free internet within the next decade I'd love to see it. Meanwhile, unfortunately, Starlink is already in place and working for that purpose. That's just a fact, whether anyone likes Elon Musk or not. I fuckin don't.

I just looked into Telesat for the first time, and I'm happy if they actually do anything they say they're gonna. I found that the canadian gov't already injected 1.3bn into them in 2021. Further reading on their own website shows they only have one (1) "demo" sat in LEO launched in 2018, for "testing purposes". So we're now giving them another 2.2bn for what exactly? If this project turns out like some of the other semi-publicly funded or subsidized attempts at connecting northern canada it's never going to happen, or like in the case of XPlore-Net turn out to be the shittiest overpriced attempt at internet providers ever to have existed. Tens of thousands of their customers bought a Starlink as soon as it became available to them, several years ago already.

I've traveled the north and I know a handful of people who grew up there literally on trap lines and in one case a fishing village in the northern section of Nunavut. I really am for everyone in Canada getting online. I'd like to have seen it happen a long time ago. I just don't have a lot of faith in these publicly funded projects given their track record. And to be clear, I loathe the liberals as much as the conservatives, I'm not choosing a political side here. To put this another way, 3.3bn would go a long way towards building out the clean water infra that the gov't has also been promising for decades. idfk call me crazy but there isn't already a successful company going around offering that service for very cheap. Maybe we should be investing in areas where there's not already a solution.

Again, I'm no Elon stan. You don't have to convince me he's a dbag, and I wish some other competitor would come along with something better. However I've personally used Starlink in sub -30C temps for work, for weeks at a time. The dishes work perfectly fine in cold climates, and they have a self-heating element to de-ice themselves if you enable that feature. I don't know what you're talking about. I do know lots of other people who also rely on it in similar climates.

You can go onto Starlink's coverage map right now and order service to Dawson City Yukon, and anywhere equilateral to that point. There's a pretty big market for it in Alaska, already. The tech does what it says it does, which kinda sucks because I'd rather not put money into his fucking bank account. But yeah. It is what it is.

Unfortunately this is where Musk figured out how to corner the market ahead of time. It was the same thing when cellular tech came into the mainstream. Lots of less developed countries with poor or no hardwired telcom infra found that skipping ahead to next-gen tech (cell towers) was super cheap and quick to build, so lots of corners of the earth found themselves connected in the 90's that had never been prior to that decade.

Starlink and low-orbit sats for internet coverage are a similar leap ahead in cost and speed to deploy. Elon and his goons saw it coming long before anyone else did, and the fact they also have Space X was a pretty key part of their speed to deploy.

I'm no Elon stan, I hate the fucking guy. But it is what it is. He got there first and people in northern canada can already access Starlink for under 200/mo. I am no math guy but I suspect that even if the fed gov paid every cent of everyone's subscription to Starlink it wouldn't amount to 2 billion dollars. 🤷

EDIT just did some napkin math. With the help of wiki found that the population of northern canada is less than 120k people. So cost of taxpayers footing the bill for everyone up there to be on Starlink would be 24 million/yr. Or... for that same 2 billion, 83 years of Starlink subscriptions for each and every person up there. That would be if each single person had their own dish.

Put butter on the outside, throw it in a hot pan and grill it. Even go further and get a sandwich press. NOW YOU'RE COOKIN!

Kinda. In FP1 you can make kids work in mines and you can force your townsfolk to work extremely long hours and eat sawdust in their rations to make the food stretch longer. You can turn their heat down to save resources. Etc.

You won't last long though haha.

When extreme climate collapse really kicks in, the average person will wish it were some protesters disrupting their commute for a few hours on a weekday vs literal breakdown of infrastructure and society indefinitely.

👆

I'm about as anti drug-war as you can get (actually)... And still when they pushed through public decrim the other year without community dialogue or support and made it quasi-legal for addicts to use in parks and whatever the hell (plot twist as street addicts we've always used in parks anyhow) I felt something dark was afoot. I predicted that province-wide smaller communities would make a political thing of it and push back tenfold, and they have. Now safer supply, harm reduction, safe use sites, and decrim are all off the table if conservativism is platformed (and it's looking like it will be).

I almost thought at the time they were throwing the whole thing and sabotaging it. I almost think even now that's the case. Feels like the NDP just kinda gave up. I don't even like them that much (fuck you John Horgan and Katrine Conroy and the CIRG) but they're objectively better than a party openly advocating for "involuntary treatment" whatever the hell that means.

It's fuckin sad.

Boats, planes, drones, phones, bikes... Anywhere that you can maximize storage cell capacity in odd shaped volumes and spaces/designs. It's great.

*years? Yes. It used to be the bleeding edge of search and now it's just profit driven enshittification like the rest of ai-ridden garbage tech wallstreet bullshit.