Gotta love when you force one of your companies to subsidize your failure in another company.
That's gonna get some fucking investigations.
You'd think so, but Disney cross-runs ads for their various products all the time. If it wasn't Musk clearly flailing at a failing company, this probably wouldn't get people to bat an eye.
All the ones I'm thinking of are actually owned by Disney and under it as a corporation, which is different from SpaceX/Twitter which is technically separate companies.
Yeah 5 minutes in just about any direction and you can get Charter or ATT but right there at the road I grew up on? Nope!
Boy you'd almost think that letting telecom services be an unregulated capitalist hellscape leads to bad outcomes.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
The thing about the rural areas is that not many people live there by definition, which is a problem for any service trying to be profitable despite a large operating cost
Just like everything else, the answer is it depends. There are a ton of people who don't have access to anything faster than 1Mbps DSL, a lot who are on just garbage regular satellite, and for them Starlink is an unequivocally good thing. It provides good (not perfect!) internet access at a price that is not terribly out of line with other ISPs. And depending on how many people in different locations can access it, long term it could be profitable.
Part of the profitability seems to be accessories now, though. That $600 just gets you the dish and the router. If you need a longer cable you have to buy it from them because it's USB, not PoE. Have a bigger home that a single router won't cover? Gotta buy the Ethernet port separately, the unit doesn't have one. Again, it's not great, but for people who have no other option, it's the best of those options.
I grew up in a rural area that today is really not that rural. My mom still lives there and despite the encroaching urban sprawl no ISP will lay a line there so her only option is AT&T legacy DSL that's barely even supported, is only working until it quits, and I'm pretty sure is running off fucking Bell South cable laid down in the 50's.
We didn't have a Domino's that would deliver to our house until about 2018 so imagine my mom will have access to actual high speed internet in 2036.
2036: jugg is killed by an avalanche of memes sent to him
Starlink makes sense for rural areas where high speed internet is non-existant which is a larger part of the country than it should be.
Ding Ding Ding Ding!
There is a majority of the country where the only availbale internet is via Satellite. Up until like 2009 I still had dial up, and the satellite options at the time were not better.
Garlic Breadi'm a bitch i'm a bitch i'm a bitch i'm aRegistered User, Disagreeableregular
"put on your sunday best, kids, we're going to sears" is a joke that i find hilarious now but didn't understand as a kid because we would get dressed up for church in sundays and go to sears afterwards a lot so i just thought it was a thing everyone did
+32
Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
Sears is the place where I experienced my first ever First Person Shooter game. Wolfenstein 3D was running on one of the computers for sale in the electronics section. I still vividly remember being confused how to move and was excited when I figured out how to open the door.
Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
i got fired from Sears! this was when the company was actively circling the drain, basically, well after they'd sold their big brands like Craftsman, etc, and i got fired for not pushing the credit card. which, to be fair, was an absolutely accurate appraisal, i wasn't about to sell someone a shitty store card for a dying business with a clean conscience, so i didn't.
The thing about the rural areas is that not many people live there by definition, which is a problem for any service trying to be profitable despite a large operating cost
Just like everything else, the answer is it depends. There are a ton of people who don't have access to anything faster than 1Mbps DSL, a lot who are on just garbage regular satellite, and for them Starlink is an unequivocally good thing. It provides good (not perfect!) internet access at a price that is not terribly out of line with other ISPs. And depending on how many people in different locations can access it, long term it could be profitable.
Part of the profitability seems to be accessories now, though. That $600 just gets you the dish and the router. If you need a longer cable you have to buy it from them because it's USB, not PoE. Have a bigger home that a single router won't cover? Gotta buy the Ethernet port separately, the unit doesn't have one. Again, it's not great, but for people who have no other option, it's the best of those options.
Starlink is only economical at scale but it only works in areas where that scale doesn't exist, also the folks who could really use it can't afford the costs. For long-term profitability burying or hanging fiber makes sense, but for-profits don't care about long-term profits only next quarter profits. Fortunately even the FCC decided Starlink wasn't viable for solving the problem and refused them a big pot of funding.
i got fired from Sears! this was when the company was actively circling the drain, basically, well after they'd sold their big brands like Craftsman, etc, and i got fired for not pushing the credit card. which, to be fair, was an absolutely accurate appraisal, i wasn't about to sell someone a shitty store card for a dying business with a clean conscience, so i didn't.
anyway, fuck em!
I worked at Sears for six or seven months back around 2006. I used to get harangued for not signing people up for the shitty Sears card too. I said I can either continue selling appliances and having happy customers, or I can start pushing these shitty cards with awful interests rates and pissing people off. I'm paid on commission, so guess which one I'm going to do.
The ceo of Sears had a similar idea back when I got my first job there. He wanted to transform Sears into the business of the future by taking it entirely digital, and creating a social media market place. It would be Facebook/Amazon, where all the hip youngsters would hang out in digital space and #humblebrag about the new 22" Craftsman T110 17.5 HP riding mower they bought. It was bold! It was innovative! It was controversial! It was gonna revolutionize the way people hung out and did business on The World Wide Web!
Anyway Sears dead as fuck now.
Isn't most of that that the CEO literally looted the company?
Oh yeah the man was basically an evil wizard from what I heard. He never attended meetings in person, everybody was forced to look at a TV screen that he video called in to and he was like, sat at the end of a long table all shadowy and shit.
They should have gone out of business in like, 2012-2014 but because Sears was such an old company they were sitting on tons of primo real-estate that was owned outright I think. So in order to fluff quarterly earning he would just sell locations for a profit. It was why it was such a slow decline
He really kinda did the company dirty. Sears had a lot of brand recognition the problem was they were the store of the elderly, I mean the fucking ancient. My first day on the floor a 7,000 year old man shuffled up to me, shit himself, and then shoved a lawnmower manual from 1914 in my hand and asked me to find him the drive belt. I had to go to one of those corporate training things (I was like, 18 and a regular salesman) and the guy doing it was like "we gotta reach out and get people excited cause Sears is where everybody's grandma shops and our customers are going to sleep." So, dying basically.
I dunno, I'm not really a business man but I have learned that the key to a successful business seems to be focus on what you're actually good. Whenever a nut job like Musk jumps in and then wants to fundamentally alter the basic functions of a company by adding in new, off the wall features or "functionality" that's it. It's done. Game over. Typically this would be the point the CEO starts looting the company for all its worth but that's assuming the CEO is just evil and not a complete dipshit who spent $44 billion American Freedom Shekels on the company at an hilariously overvalued cost.
The person he was selling the real estate to was himself, as far as I understand.
God I never thought I'd be wistful for a competent piece of shit CEO.
If Musk was looting Twitter for actually valuable assets so he could put more money into SpaceX to get our species into space faster, I'd be all for it.
Instead he's just punching his own nutsack and tearfully shouting at passersby that his nuts aren't sore, their nuts are sore.
The thing about the rural areas is that not many people live there by definition, which is a problem for any service trying to be profitable despite a large operating cost
You know, I keep hearing that cable companies have a high operating cost to provide service to rural areas, but I've never seen this proven or quantified. Is there a source for this information that isn't an ISP?
0
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
edited November 2022
Edit: my experience is wildly out of date and somewhat limited
The thing about the rural areas is that not many people live there by definition, which is a problem for any service trying to be profitable despite a large operating cost
You know, I keep hearing that cable companies have a high operating cost to provide service to rural areas, but I've never seen this proven or quantified. Is there a source for this information that isn't an ISP?
I live dead center in Albany, NY (a reasonably sized town) and there are people I work with within a 30 minute commute that are completely unable to get cable. One dude even got up the ladder of Spectrum's support staff and flat-out asked what the cost would be, because he would pay it. He was told that no matter what cost they gave him they still wouldn't do it. Internet access in this country is fucked up.
+21
KalTorakOne way or another, they all end up inthe Undercity.Registered Userregular
Sears is the place where I experienced my first ever First Person Shooter game. Wolfenstein 3D was running on one of the computers for sale in the electronics section. I still vividly remember being confused how to move and was excited when I figured out how to open the door.
As a kid, Sears was my favorite store in the mall because they had those demo consoles you could play by the video game section. My mom would just drop me off at Sears while she shopped, and I'd play Vectorman, Comix Zone, Sonic Spinball, Yoshi's Island, fucking Virtual Boy - whatever they had.
The thing about the rural areas is that not many people live there by definition, which is a problem for any service trying to be profitable despite a large operating cost
You know, I keep hearing that cable companies have a high operating cost to provide service to rural areas, but I've never seen this proven or quantified. Is there a source for this information that isn't an ISP?
I live dead center in Albany, NY (a reasonably sized town) and there are people I work with within a 30 minute commute that are completely unable to get cable. One dude even got up the ladder of Spectrum's support staff and flat-out asked what the cost would be, because he would pay it. He was told that no matter what cost they gave him they still wouldn't do it. Internet access in this country is fucked up.
Let's be fair here, most aspects of life in this country are fucked up (unless you have money)
Sears is the place where I experienced my first ever First Person Shooter game. Wolfenstein 3D was running on one of the computers for sale in the electronics section. I still vividly remember being confused how to move and was excited when I figured out how to open the door.
As a kid, Sears was my favorite store in the mall because they had those demo consoles you could play by the video game section. My mom would just drop me off at Sears while she shopped, and I'd play Vectorman, Comix Zone, Sonic Spinball, Yoshi's Island, fucking Virtual Boy - whatever they had.
As far as I can tell, Sears is the only place anyone ever played a Virtual Boy.
It was also the first place I payed Ocarina of Time, which blew my damn mind at the time
Sears is the place where I experienced my first ever First Person Shooter game. Wolfenstein 3D was running on one of the computers for sale in the electronics section. I still vividly remember being confused how to move and was excited when I figured out how to open the door.
As a kid, Sears was my favorite store in the mall because they had those demo consoles you could play by the video game section. My mom would just drop me off at Sears while she shopped, and I'd play Vectorman, Comix Zone, Sonic Spinball, Yoshi's Island, fucking Virtual Boy - whatever they had.
When I was a kid, their demo consoles were their branded versions of PONG and the Atari 2600.
(That's actually where we bought the latter.)
Steam, Warframe: Megajoule
+2
MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
Sears is the place where I experienced my first ever First Person Shooter game. Wolfenstein 3D was running on one of the computers for sale in the electronics section. I still vividly remember being confused how to move and was excited when I figured out how to open the door.
As a kid, Sears was my favorite store in the mall because they had those demo consoles you could play by the video game section. My mom would just drop me off at Sears while she shopped, and I'd play Vectorman, Comix Zone, Sonic Spinball, Yoshi's Island, fucking Virtual Boy - whatever they had.
As far as I can tell, Sears is the only place anyone ever played a Virtual Boy.
It was also the first place I payed Ocarina of Time, which blew my damn mind at the time
They definitely had Virtual Boy kiosks at Toys 'R Us.
+6
Kevin CristI make the devil hit his kneesand say the 'our father'Registered Userregular
The thing about the rural areas is that not many people live there by definition, which is a problem for any service trying to be profitable despite a large operating cost
You know, I keep hearing that cable companies have a high operating cost to provide service to rural areas, but I've never seen this proven or quantified. Is there a source for this information that isn't an ISP?
I live dead center in Albany, NY (a reasonably sized town) and there are people I work with within a 30 minute commute that are completely unable to get cable. One dude even got up the ladder of Spectrum's support staff and flat-out asked what the cost would be, because he would pay it. He was told that no matter what cost they gave him they still wouldn't do it. Internet access in this country is fucked up.
I live in a small Texas town, and I had Charter cable internet. My buddy that literally lived across the street and down a single house used to also have internet through them. After a few years he got tired of whatever ISP he'd been using so he called up Charter to switch back. They told him they don't offer cable internet in that area. He said yes they do, he used to use them years before. They said no he didn't, he was lying. He had to bring old receipts he'd kept, plus some receipts from me showing they currently serviced his street, down to their local office before they finally were like, "Okay, fine, we'll hook you back up"
The thing about the rural areas is that not many people live there by definition, which is a problem for any service trying to be profitable despite a large operating cost
You know, I keep hearing that cable companies have a high operating cost to provide service to rural areas, but I've never seen this proven or quantified. Is there a source for this information that isn't an ISP?
I'm an ISP; but we're not for profit. I can't publicly post numbers but I can talk about how we evaluate cost of service and feasibility.
Profitability is the huge factor there.
Let's take two areas with equal lengths of infrastructure say 100 miles; area A has 30 customers per mile and area B has 3 customers per mile.
Now overbuilding fiber will most likely be cheaper in area A because it is more likely to have had more maintenance done due to the high density. Area B will most likely require more expensive construction to account for using current infrastructure or burying everything.
Deploying fiber requires range based electronics, due to increased distances in B it will still cost about as much A to outfit equipment to serve those subscribers.
CO support depends on number of customers so costs for A should be higher in total, but less per customer.
OSP support depends mostly on miles of plant, so costs for A and B will be the same.
In the end you have higher capital costs to deploy in rural areas and your expenses per subscriber are higher, and your maximum revenue is lower. So, if your buildout requirements are a 30% return on investment, then in certain cases A may get built, but B will never get built.
My accounting/grant writing secret is to combine areas A and B and tell the accounting department this is our average costs for serving customers at a density of 16 customers per mile
My accounting/grant writing secret is to combine areas A and B and tell the accounting department this is our average costs for serving customers at a density of 16 customers per mile
Another thing to note about the Sears CEO that looted the company is that he turned it into a Randian nightmare
as in, he wanted to try getting rid of centralized planning and instead implemented some kind of 'internal capitalism' and had Sears's internal divisions compete with each other for things like budget, marketing, IT services, etc. (or go to contractors for those services)
Maybe he believed in all this and thought it would make for a more efficient company? or it was an excuse to find 'efficiency' while he looted the company because one of the problems under his leadership was that he basically never invested any money in the company, which is what lead to the stores selling the real estate for cash, which has been mentioned was another company he had ownership in, which would then lease the land back to the Sears store
David_TA fashion yes-man is no good to me.Copenhagen, DenmarkRegistered Userregular
So... will they spend the time to work out which 20% of the microservices that are needed for Twitter to work, or will they turn off the entire microservices including the 20% needed for Twitter to work?
I guess that's actually a rhetorical question, unfortunately.
Posts
All the ones I'm thinking of are actually owned by Disney and under it as a corporation, which is different from SpaceX/Twitter which is technically separate companies.
Boy you'd almost think that letting telecom services be an unregulated capitalist hellscape leads to bad outcomes.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
2036: jugg is killed by an avalanche of memes sent to him
Ding Ding Ding Ding!
There is a majority of the country where the only availbale internet is via Satellite. Up until like 2009 I still had dial up, and the satellite options at the time were not better.
Not much what's up dog with you?
UDP packets may arrive duplicated or late
anyway, fuck em!
Starlink is only economical at scale but it only works in areas where that scale doesn't exist, also the folks who could really use it can't afford the costs. For long-term profitability burying or hanging fiber makes sense, but for-profits don't care about long-term profits only next quarter profits. Fortunately even the FCC decided Starlink wasn't viable for solving the problem and refused them a big pot of funding.
I worked at Sears for six or seven months back around 2006. I used to get harangued for not signing people up for the shitty Sears card too. I said I can either continue selling appliances and having happy customers, or I can start pushing these shitty cards with awful interests rates and pissing people off. I'm paid on commission, so guess which one I'm going to do.
If Musk was looting Twitter for actually valuable assets so he could put more money into SpaceX to get our species into space faster, I'd be all for it.
Instead he's just punching his own nutsack and tearfully shouting at passersby that his nuts aren't sore, their nuts are sore.
How dare an employee disagree with me in public!
And now Musk has to show his ass more by getting into arguments to try to defend his claim about why Twitter was slow in some countries:
You know, I keep hearing that cable companies have a high operating cost to provide service to rural areas, but I've never seen this proven or quantified. Is there a source for this information that isn't an ISP?
Good lord it's cringy.
PSN: Robo_Wizard1
I live dead center in Albany, NY (a reasonably sized town) and there are people I work with within a 30 minute commute that are completely unable to get cable. One dude even got up the ladder of Spectrum's support staff and flat-out asked what the cost would be, because he would pay it. He was told that no matter what cost they gave him they still wouldn't do it. Internet access in this country is fucked up.
As a kid, Sears was my favorite store in the mall because they had those demo consoles you could play by the video game section. My mom would just drop me off at Sears while she shopped, and I'd play Vectorman, Comix Zone, Sonic Spinball, Yoshi's Island, fucking Virtual Boy - whatever they had.
Let's be fair here, most aspects of life in this country are fucked up (unless you have money)
As far as I can tell, Sears is the only place anyone ever played a Virtual Boy.
It was also the first place I payed Ocarina of Time, which blew my damn mind at the time
When I was a kid, their demo consoles were their branded versions of PONG and the Atari 2600.
(That's actually where we bought the latter.)
Steam, Warframe: Megajoule
They definitely had Virtual Boy kiosks at Toys 'R Us.
Steam: YOU FACE JARAXXUS| Twitch.tv: CainLoveless
I actually had the Sears variant of the 2600. It looked very different but had exactly the same hardware.
I can still hear the starting noise of the terrible Pac-Man game.
I live in a small Texas town, and I had Charter cable internet. My buddy that literally lived across the street and down a single house used to also have internet through them. After a few years he got tired of whatever ISP he'd been using so he called up Charter to switch back. They told him they don't offer cable internet in that area. He said yes they do, he used to use them years before. They said no he didn't, he was lying. He had to bring old receipts he'd kept, plus some receipts from me showing they currently serviced his street, down to their local office before they finally were like, "Okay, fine, we'll hook you back up"
I'm an ISP; but we're not for profit. I can't publicly post numbers but I can talk about how we evaluate cost of service and feasibility.
Profitability is the huge factor there.
Let's take two areas with equal lengths of infrastructure say 100 miles; area A has 30 customers per mile and area B has 3 customers per mile.
Now overbuilding fiber will most likely be cheaper in area A because it is more likely to have had more maintenance done due to the high density. Area B will most likely require more expensive construction to account for using current infrastructure or burying everything.
Deploying fiber requires range based electronics, due to increased distances in B it will still cost about as much A to outfit equipment to serve those subscribers.
CO support depends on number of customers so costs for A should be higher in total, but less per customer.
OSP support depends mostly on miles of plant, so costs for A and B will be the same.
In the end you have higher capital costs to deploy in rural areas and your expenses per subscriber are higher, and your maximum revenue is lower. So, if your buildout requirements are a 30% return on investment, then in certain cases A may get built, but B will never get built.
I like the cut of your jib.
as in, he wanted to try getting rid of centralized planning and instead implemented some kind of 'internal capitalism' and had Sears's internal divisions compete with each other for things like budget, marketing, IT services, etc. (or go to contractors for those services)
Maybe he believed in all this and thought it would make for a more efficient company? or it was an excuse to find 'efficiency' while he looted the company because one of the problems under his leadership was that he basically never invested any money in the company, which is what lead to the stores selling the real estate for cash, which has been mentioned was another company he had ownership in, which would then lease the land back to the Sears store
thinking about the jpeg of a coconut that keeps team fortress 2 from crashing
I guess that's actually a rhetorical question, unfortunately.