I mean picked from thin air, but if you're down some weird spur road and they have to put extra poles in to run the cable it's of that order of magnitude.
I'm thinking of getting it in the wilds of central London where I have an "Openreach Stop Sell order for traditional copper services" but no fiber or a date for getting that.
I got fibre shortly after Community Fibre started covering my area (check yours at https://communityfibre.co.uk/ ) and no, it wasn't anything like that cost. I am generally happy with it.
It was like £50 for me, but a neighbour needs two extra telegraph poles installed before the cable can reach him, and he was quoted high hundreds or low thousands in pounds for the fibre installation.
I mean neither of them are physically assembling iPhones or Teslas, but I do think Apple and Tesla/Starlink/Whatever would be different companies without them.
Let's not forget stunts like the cave rescue sub that was incredibly unfit for purpose and him calling one of the actual heroes of that moment "pedo guy"
He's always been a piece of shit, it's just that the last several years he's been a far more obvious piece of shit.
I feel like this is a false narrative I hear a lot. “Everyone” didn’t love Teslas, it was a niche product and then Musk exposed himself as one of the worst people on earth, and the market shrank even more. It’s a strawman to claim Teslas were loved by “everyone” (implicitly or explicitly often stated as people with a left wing bent).
As I remember things, a lot of people turned on Musk (or were already against him) in 2018 when he called the diver who rescued children trapped in a cave in Thailand (and "stole" a moment of glory from Musk and his mini-sub) a "pedophile".
Long before he announced he intended to vote Republican in 2022.
It's not only chronically online folks who have a strong distaste for Elon. For one thing, everyone knows what an epic and highly visible failure DOGE was. That's widely acknowledged and not even controversial as far as I'm aware.
Ah yes, the $30b (FY2024) a year that funded things like the World Bank, UN World Food Programme, Catholic Relief Services, Family Health International, and Gavi the Vaccine Alliance.
Yeah, USAID was the real problem. 0.3 - 0.5% of federal spending.
1. Evolution of Musk promised cuts to federal expenses:
- October 2024 - $2 trillion per year
- March 2025 - $1 trillion per year
- April 2025 - $150 billion per year
Independent sources put the savings around $10 billion per year (the target shrunk 200-fold!).
2. Very important example of conflict of interest AND harm to the government: independent sources expect IRS workforce cuts to <<reduce>> federal revenue by <<$198 billion over a decade>>.
3. To your direct point
- most of USAID’s money was spent through American organisations, not sent abroad directly (>80% of companies holding USAID contracts were American)
- in practice USAID ran important early-warning systems: famine warnings and perhaps even more importantly disease surveillance (ever heard of... pandemics?)
Cut the nose to spite the face.
Did Musk/DOGE cut military spending (13% of budget; Musk's sponsored admin wants to double it)? Healthcare spending (27%)? Social security (23%)?
He went after politically convenient, and even worse, personally convenient targets.
It's like that joke about looking for the wallet not where you lost it in the dark, but where the light is better...
You'd think the average well educated HN commenter wouldn't fall for such easy to sport propaganda (and also spot obvious conflicts of interest). But I guess ideology beats everything and it's more important to win against "the other team".
I see you posting this same opinion again and again, week after week. People keep explaining their issues with Musk which go far beyond "he votes differently!", yet you keep insisting there's literally no good reason to dislike him.
Have you ever considered that you might just be part of the terminally online right?
Yes, low-effort spam should be censored, because it makes insightful discussions much harder.
This site isn't your personal far-right soap box. If you want to keep posting the same low-effort takes again and again without meaningfully engaging with counter-arguments, platforms like Substack are a much better address.
I’m quite sure his overt white supremacy and fascism is considered far-right extremism by everyone who is also not on the far-right. Ironic since he’s quite possibly the biggest welfare recipient of all time.
Yeah, it’s super funny that the richest person in the world believes in replacement theory and spreads white supremacy propaganda everyday. Do you realize how normal people view this?
Way back in the day, when Twitter was a thing and the API feeds were reasonably accessible, people were using tweets to build network graphs of terrorist cells and drawing maps of territories gangs controlled in major cities. It's amazing what people would put on twitter, and assuming that a micro blogging platform open to the public wouldn't be an incredibly fertile ground for the people looking for them.
This was all done in excel spreadsheets at first, then custom built tools later on. Palantir was one of the early tools, though not the most capable at the time, just the one with the most red-tape-cutting backing.
It's just political hatred and jealousy from what I can tell. They make a lot of different software, it's not like it's just a custom type of database. They don't have any sort of information that didn't exist before, it's just new ways of presenting that information. Instead of $$$$$ tax dollars being spent in secret, it's $$ and the company is in the spotlight. Anyone against transparency and cost-savings naturally hates them, but I don't know where the other hatred comes from.
They are a analysis and presentation layer that is used to plug in data sources gathered by brokers (or other parties) and present it for other uses. Yes, they themselves don’t gather this data, but they do make it seamless to use the data.
I’ll admit they are much less culpable than companies like LexisNexis or CLEAR (or even shadier outfits), and those companies should receive the lion’s share of the scrutiny, but Palantir is not blameless.
Knowingly building an apparatus that evil people can use to more easily do evil things, and which seems to have that as its primary purpose. And then naming it after a similar device used by a Tolkein villain. All accidental, I’m sure.
IBM didn't own or collect lists of Jews and undesirables, it just sold machines to the owners of that data.
Honestly I'm not sure what this analogy means. On one hand, should we let IBM off the hook because they only sold the Excel of the 1930s? On the other hand, if not many people in the world have spreadsheets and you sell yours to Hitler, maybe you bear more responsibility than you would if everyone had spreadsheets.
Palantir, if the hype is true, is building something currently rare. They also probably tailor their product to their customer more than IBM did. And there are rumors, which I don't have time to investigate at the moment, that they cross-polinate datasets between customers, which would make them a broker/owner/collector.
There was some memory command you could stick in someone's autoexec.bat that made the machine reboot so it got stuck in an infinite reboot loop until you stopped it using f5 or f8.
I argued this before. I think it makes no sense for eg an estate agents to vibe code a CRM, but if you're a tech firm (or a big firm with a tech department) I think it is worth a shot, especially if you only use 50% of the features in the software you pay for.
But it's not worth too much to deal with crappy proprietary software?
I know a lot of open source software is a pain in the ass, but so is a lot of proprietary software. You use what you know, understand, and can support.
> "I'm a mechanic and I hand forge new spanners every time I work on a car."
This is a bad analogy. It's not like he's writing new software every time he has to do something. It's more like using tools that your machinist friends built.
"My mate created me some non-standard nuts and spanners so when you bring your car in I need to spend a few hours adjusting sizes etc before I can get to work."
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