Nah towers are incredibly cheap and can be easily maintained for decades if not centuries. Quick googling around seems like 1 modern towers costs 100k (in the west) usd compared that to entire satellite and launch overhead which seems to be at least 3.5M tho in reality much more. Thats 35 towers for 1 satellite not even considering maintenance and longevity.

Towers are also straight up superior tech that will forver be better than satellites due to simple distance physics.

Rough quick napkin math: earth’s land area is 140m km² and 3g tower can cover 300km² as best - to cover THE ENTIRE EARTH we’d only need 500k towers. That’s like nothing.
That’s 50 Billion usd without the infrastructure and cable overhead ofc but the towers and obviously we’d want play it safer on range so 10x that and it’s still only half a trillion.

Low orbit satellites are inferior tech that is only good for extreme situations like ocean coverage.

I usually buy an e-sim when I’m traveling and you can get usually get 10-20$/mo unlimited data at reasonable speeds everywhere in Asia except China which is an entire different world of its own and really not worth the hassle so you take what you can get.

One exception is Thailand where I buy 1 year prepaid sim for 40$ unlimited 100mbps which you can keep extending year after year for almost the same price.

All of these prices are irrelevant without considering local salaries but cellular data is really good in Asia. I’ve seen cell towers deep in Vietnams jungles and was actually texting from a cave there. This is why low orbit networks like starlink are severely overrated and will always lose to cell towers.

Not sure what you mean by that. Cancel culture is absolutely real and while there are cases of it overextending and being misused it’s obviously a net good for our society overall. People organizing and putting pressure on injustice is what society should be all about.

Nah, they’re not victims.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I’d abstract it to “losers in a shameless culture”.

Generally our society would have time to correct itself and face saving would be important enough to contain the losers in their own circles. However the current western culture is completely shameless and incredibly fast meaning that being a loser is kinda ok and easily justifiable. This leads to a bunch of losers getting together and cognitive dissonance themselves into some sort of dumb pointless ideology that’s wouldn’t be sustainable otherwise. Add money into the mix and you’ve got yourself real growth.

I lived in Japan for a while and still come back there every now and then and its such a good illustration of this concept. It’s an extreme face saving culture. So you have this Tate-like world of Japanese incels hiding under internet anonymity but if you are not Japanese you will never see this because the losers are contained as they’d never dare to display themselves in public.

That being said, I’m quite optimistic and I think cancel culture and western face will come back from the current slump and restore some balance eventually.

That scene in particular - spoilers - is her realizing that she might be a cylon and literally not being able to control herself to reveal there’s water cause she’s a sleeper agent.

Fallout is actually great tho!

It’s so annoying. Miscomunication and coincidence is just such poor writing. Surely there are other more meaningful ways to move the plot right?

It’s a soap opera and if you treat it for what it is It’s quite fun! People who never watched soap set expectations too high and expected real plot and depth of a real TV show which it never set out to do.

The most infamous example of this is Supernatural where the first few seasons were very episodic and exactly what you described. Then, after season 5 it keep escalating until dudes are fighting off the end of the world for the 6th time lmao

Wish you and me luck then as I’ve been dodging spoilers for years now in hopes of getting this done eventually lol

Such a shame too. The premise looked really interesting at first.

The Expanse but I’ll try to give it another shot one day.

The first season shows 2 perspectives - detective in asteroid belt and some of the most bland, basic and incredibly uninteresting dude going somewhere. Just kept falling asleep during those scenes.

I heard the layer seasons are quite interesting so I hope to at least skim through it or read the books but tbh the first season feels like it ruined the world for me already.

Wheel of time just finished the latest season in the background and its fun just bad. I’ve tried reading the book before and it’s pretty terrible nonsense too so my expectations were already quite low. I do find the main plot point of basically temu Buddhism and the Witcher cocktail very atractive but it’s just so poorly executed. All characters are meaningless. The world has so many plot holes that the wheel might as well just stop rolling right there.

Carnival row - not sure if this counts but it really sucked past season 1. It felt like something was there but it was really ruined by poor writing and Cara Delevingne and her character are so incredibly bad it really ruined any chances the show might have had.

Don’t you like a little apocalypse tease? We’re kinda into that it seems

Nah that’s a cop out. There are legit irrationalities that do not fall into this and i say that as a contemporary utilitarian.

Someone mentioned gambling in the comments and thats exactly one of such examples - the invisible gains here are almost impossible to justify rationally as in the entertainment provided by gambling can be replicated without the dangers of it very easily. As in mathematically speaking playing fair return games will yield the same or higher satisfaction than low yield games meaning low yields games are objectively irrational.

If internet shuts down you’ll have trouble keeping your life long enough to enjoy this.

I know it’s a fun hypothetical but without internet wed be falling into an immediate collapse which we might recover from but many wouldn’t make it.

Again “unsolvable” through sheer amount of positions at the beginning of the game (at its literally solved at 7 pieces) so this is just a cop out because thats boring as fuck. It’s not an interesting game where computational power is the only challenge and not even that much towards the last steps of the game.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame_tablebase#Lomonosov_tablebases

The only argument for “chess is not solved” is because of sheer math number but its a flawed argument as any game with sufficient amount of positions would be considered unsolved.

So for all practical intents and purposes - chess is a solved game but people are too attached to admit it.

Thats not what solved means in this context but chess people are so offended that’s its impossible to ever discuss this so sure whatever.

Nah in game terms chess is absolutely a solved game. Some meme edge cases do not invalidate that.