partial_accumen

Just wait until you see how much they waste on unused life insurance!

I know you’re joking, but lots of people buy really bad life insurance products (whole life, universal variable policies) that are a horrible waste of money in 99.9% of people’s situations.

A large-ish term life insurance is fine if you have a family that needs to replace your income if you die early. Other than that, you only need enough money to get your remains put in the ground without burdening your family. Estimate $10k or so for full funeral and burial plot if that is your desire. If you just want cremation and spreading of ashes is much cheaper. If you’ve got the cash for that, you don’t even need a small term policy for that.

$250/year starting investing in 2020 into the regular S&P 500 would be worth $3,703 today. So maybe as much as a month and a half of rent depending on where you live. However the point being is, if the subscription is unused, you’re not getting any value for it. A free month (or more) of rent is something you’ll actually use.

It depends on what you mean by robotic mowers. If you mean motors that drive the wheels and you don’t have to walk behind them (or sit on them), yes, these exist without any cloud service. However, if you mean autonomous, then I don’t think those are here yet. The non-cloud robot mowers use human held remote controls.

I can think of one that is autonomous and doesn’t require the cloud for operation, but does require the cloud for the inital setup and mapping. Once it has the map loaded in, it doesn’t need an internet connection.

That pretty well describes 1st generation robo mowers: lawn roombas.

Thankfully they’ve evolved significantly since then and are on 4th generation tech now.

The primary Oneweb constellation exists right now in orbit. You can buy hardware and service today if you wanted to. Also yes, they continue to expand the constellation.

Fiber wouldn’t be a one-time charge though. There’s regular ongoing maintenance needed for a fiber network.

There’s an old joke in the telecom world:

Q: If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and you could only take one thing with you, what would you take?

A: I would take a small bundle of fiber optic cable. As soon as I was on the island, I’d make a small hole in the sand and bury it. As soon as I turn my back there would be someone with a backhoe there to dig it up.

The cost of sending crew out to fix a 10 mile fiber run servicing a single household would wipe out any possible profit from that subscriber for more than 100 years. Now multiple that by how many 10 mile+ fiber runs we’d need to service all those widespread low-density rural customers.

“How can Europe compete with that?” I ask myself more and more often (also AI bubble/data centers). Hopefully in the long term.

The competition with Starlink is the Eutelsat Group with it’s Oneweb satellite internet product. This is a French company. The founder was championing LEO satellite internet before SpaceX was in the game. Oneweb actually has the more preferred orbital slots and frequencies that SpaceX wanted. However SpaceX far outpaced Oneweb in technological growth as well as orbital constellation deployment.

From a consumer point of view Oneweb is massively more expensive to subscribe to than Starlink. 100GB of Starlink data will cost you $55/month while the hardware will cost $300. 100GB of Oneweb will cost you $325/month with the cheapest hardware costing $3800.

Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.

We have that already. Its comparatively very expensive, and also very very high latency simply because for the speed-of-light. The satellite at GEO sits at 20k kilometers. That by itself introduces 250ms of latency each way. So a 500ms latency is not uncommon for GEO satellite internet. Also, GEO satellites are very expensive because of how much energy (deltaV) it takes to get the satellite out that far and for how long they have to operate to make that money back.

First, Musk is a nazi-saluting asshole. Now that we have that established, this article is mostly rage-bait with selective truths on the Starlink service. I’m all for calling out bad behavior a company (and there is a little bit here, but not much regarding the customer billing concerns). This (mostly) rage-bait article is (mostly) distracting focus from the very important problem with Starlink regarding Musk’s influence on the government entities that are supposed to protect us from oligarchs. Not only does this include the FCC, but the SEC that let musk bend and break rules to IPO the SpaceX stock enriching himself at the cost of the American people

The narrative of the article is “Starlink has massive hidden fees! Look $1500 charge! Look $500 charge! Look $1000 charge!”

There’s three different reasonable explanations for the situations all three these.

1. $1500 charge - it was a billing software bug, not a policy change, and Starlink reversed the charges costing the subscriber nothing. Yes, I agree customer service could be better and faster.

2. $500 charge - Subscriber was trying to skirt the rules to save themselves money by subscribing to the [long term plan] for [short term] use. When a subscriber signs up for [long term plan] the extra charge is clearly shown before the service is subscribed to. Yes, the fee is there, but its not hidden. Yes the fee is high, but the prior version of how subscription works meant that the customer would simply be told “we’re at capacity for your area, no service for you at all”. Instead if service is that important for a user they can choose to pay the fee. Yes, there should be an extra warning when someone is changing their address for [long term plan] but this should be a minor edge case and the poster would not have even run into an issue if they had been subscribing to the appropriate [short term plan].

3. $1000 charge notice - See detail from the $500 charge explanation why this particular $1000 charge notice exists. The alternative is a possibly customer would just be told to go away with no recourse when they may desperately need the service even with the high priced fee. The fee was clearly labeled before purchase and the customer chose not to go forward, which is entirely their right if they don’t see the value.

Don’t be distracted by the rage-bait from the important concerns of Musk’s government influence.

A couple of case screws and an old EVGA power supply and I’m yours for the night.

A plastic snap-case from the 90s, and old EGA video card, and a power supply is the best I can do.

“That’s them, officer, right over there”

Ohio also has a town named Versailles. Imagine the worst way to pronounce the name of the historical palace in France. That’s right, they pronounce it (VUR - SAY- els).

The only way Kobo really locks you down if you buy books from their store, which I wouldn’t recommend with any eReader.

What do you do when there’s a particular book you want to read (and you want to buy it to make sure the author is compensated for their work), but its only available from one of the big 4 ebook ecosystems (Amazon Kindle, Kobo shop, Apple Books, Google Play (or whatever the hell they renamed it to this week))?

I had one such book recently and specifically chose Kobo shop as it seemed like the least evil choice between those four.

$110k/year and still paycheck to paycheck with an unreliable car?

BI and Data Governance are generally pretty good career paths right now in the IT space.

Do you live in a HCOL area? Have you explored the differential about moving to a MCOL or LCOL area and how much impact that would have on your potential salary?

But I’ve also never understood why anyone works longer than they need to if they have the means to live comfortably in the first place.

In the USA one of the best reasons to keep working is the healthcare gap before Medicare kicks in.

Also, when you’re approaching “early retirement age” you’re likely at the peak of your earning potential. Working 1 more year could be equal to 3x or 4x a single year of retirement spending.

Another thing happens when you’re still working but you don’t absolutely need to. You recognize working is optional and you can take the risk and push back on work you don’t like. It gives you the power to take the risk. If you get fired, you’re already set up to continue life without working. This makes the work itself usually much more pleasant/tolerant so there’s a lower desire to quit early.

High end IT in the last 20 years has paid exceptionally well. Lots of these workers saved enough and simply don’t need to work anymore.

The price point for electric cars in America is 25-30k. 70K is mentally ill

Chevy Bolt MSRP is $28,995.

Being an American wanting an electric car must be a nightmare! Not many options, and all of them are too expensive,

Chevy Bolt MSRP is $28,995.

Though given how it scales with voltage I can’t think of of any use cases where weight saving is that desperately needed where it would be viable…

It may not be a weight savings benefit but potentially cost savings. Copper prices are volatile and currently pretty high. If this new technology can be scaled to be produced cheaply, it could replace some expensive copper is specific applications.