Seen? They are the primary driver of high prices.

We aren't talking about people buying hoses now, these fees weren't there before, so it becomes a typical bait and switch. "Congestion charge" means the starlink network lacks sufficient capacity to accommodate the areas that need it the most and where it was advertised the most.

https://tech.yahoo.com/transportation/articles/elon-musk-cha...

Jul 5, 2026The congestion charge was quietly added back in 2024, starting out as a one-time $100 fee, depending on location. By June 2025, that number grew to up to $1,000 in parts of the country, as PCMag reported at the time. As of last month, surcharges can hit $1,500.

No, it can't. You and me may not matter but the big money printer in Asia prints better, faster and longer, and that's all that matters. Hubris-driven magic thinking prevents seeing the real danger we are in, much to the delight of its architects and principal contractors.

You're jumping the gun here, and it's a bad habit, ask Putin about it. Framing consensual trade as armed robbery is exactly the self-righteous attitude that leads to preemptive wars and self-destruction.

As far as China, they provided exactly what they were asked to provide, in exchange for what they were offered to take. The problem is with the deal artists across the table who believe that lining their own pockets should automatically solve all problems, for everyone, and forever. Maybe they shouldn't have surrounded themselves with suck up economists who tell them what they want to hear.

> then in what way must I blame myself?

I didn't ask you to blame yourself but to "find out how we can do better", I can only repeat that request.

One thing you can learn from them is to stop blaming others and look inside, find out how we can do better. Besides, it's also quite unamerican to whine and blame others, especially on the 4th of July, we have done and we can still do better than China, but it isn't going to happen without some real change.

I doubt it.

Learning too slow is sometimes worse than not learning at all. During the heyday of globalization I was repeating a single message - this is going too far, too fast, it'll hit a brick wall. Curiously enough that's exactly what I'm repeating these days too - this time about the wild, erratic swing to the side of isolationism.

We're still operating in the same market bubble conditions as before, driven by the same people, for the same reasons - globalization and shmobalization are just means to an end, the means might be different but the end is the same.

The most effective enemy propaganda is called "sticker shock". When the sticker goes up in a week, it's double propaganda. I'm fully onboard with the idea of stopping the propaganda producers from continuing to do it.

In addition to the bot farms, many in the AI related fields have plenty of perverse incentives to participate - for reasons other than genuine interest. That's why I don't read those threads, although the marketing angle is easy to see it's also prevalent and laboring to filter out all 90% of it isn't worth the effort.

Actually, it's the other way around - you have to provide data showing that the majority of people won't change their minds under the influence of online strangers regardless of the quality of arguments and the time they spare to participate in discussions. That's how proper studies are done.

> Look, I don’t even know why are we arguing over what exactly?... Seems like truisms

As I said, that depends on the semantics of "strongly held convictions". Do all people have them or are they just for bigots?

See, you fail to convince me not because you're stranger but because the quality of your arguments is lacking - you seem to conflate these and then, instead of finding a productive reason to participate in the discussion, you jump to the defensive "I'm just writing truisms".

We're talking about capital and interest expenses for the benefit of a single customer but paid for by all other customers too. And also about Billions of $$ of commercial risk shifted to the shoulders of the public.

Don't read them. The rest of us may actually gain from another perspective, different from corporate marketing.

There's no need to change that kind of strong convictions, what needs to change is the desire to use such convictions as justification for policies imposed onto others.

> Even the same academics that would change their mind quickly about some theory would never actually change their mind on their strong ideological convictions

Again, that wouldn't be a problem if they recognized the right of others to think differently. Their propensity to invoke "science" to justify intrusive policies, one way or the other, is the real problem.

> So I repeat again if you changed your mind under influence of an internet stranger then it wasn’t a very strong conviction.

To paraphrase Keynes here, those who don't change their minds when facts change are simply fools or trolls. And the realization of change may come from a single word, of people known or unknown, or even without words - it doesn't matter, change must take place when change is due.

We could argue about the semantics of "very strong convictions" until the cows come home, but it won't do any good if we haven't beforehand agreed upon "why we argue".

Other than marketing propaganda, there isn't much real information about Mark-0. I'm assuming it's a sodium cooled, slow and hot pebble bed reactor. Hot pebble beds are well known but one with sodium cooling appears to be a first.

Why slow sodium? You get all the risks associated with sodium with none of the benefits of fast neutrons. There are operational, electricity producing, fast sodium reactors which do make some sense. I can't say the same for Mark-0.

What do the other comments contribute? Do they solve inflation, wars, monopolization? Small-picture comments have small audience, like, how many people have access to nuclear materials and gear to make use of the information provided here? In other words "political rants" have their place and in many cases they are more valuable than the rest.

AI is nukes to be funded by the taxpayer is another intersecting take which follows from you comment. If that's the case, include them in the military budget, not in a plan sold as some kind of generous giveaway.

I'm not sure what crying has to do with it but the losses across two streets are double those "across the street", across 4 streets - 4x loss, etc.

Public utilities minimize losses over a wider area with many customers, connecting a GW datacenter to the public grid isn't as simple or as safe as connecting another house, the best solution here is to keep large consumers separate to avoid grid instabilities.

> Basically what I'm saying is that if datacenters with the closest thing you'll ever see to infinite piles of cash can't expand the grid then we're in for a very rough time.

It's not true that they "can't expand the grid", they don't want to. They were eager to leach on the public grid but when asked to pay their fair share to be properly integrated by the public utilities, they got worried that some minuscule share of their "infinite piles of cash" may benefit the public - nope, you can't have that under any circumstances.