5G Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) is already part of the 5G standard. It's not a replacement for terrestrial carriers, it's an expansion that enables devices to be always connected and select the appropriate terrestrial vs satellite connection transparently. ~75% of the land mass on Earth has no cell coverage, ~90% if you include the oceans. It's the same transition in theory that we had from landlines to cell towers.
Great, but the overwhelming majority of money is made from the place people actually live. Those places are called cities. Only about a few % of earth are built on, and even among those the top 1% is where most people live.
Don't get me wrong, that fucking great business, but its not 'replacing terrestrial ISP' level great.
They said the same thing about cell phones vs landlines back in the day. Based on Starlink's revenue doubling year on year, and a six fold increase since 2022, I don't think anyone really knows what the upper bounds for global access is yet. And traditional telcos are usually limited to a region whereas Starlink is global. Just the top 20 global telcos alone are almost $2 trillion in market cap and $1.35 trillion in revenue. Starlink has captured less than 1% of that revenue to date.
McKinsey estimated the global market for cellphones would be 900,000 units in 2000.
They were off by 100 million.
Even until the 90s some telcos believed that cell usage would never eclipse landlines which would remain the base of their business. It sounds ridiculous today because cell numbers outnumber landlines almost ten to one and have been dominant for over two decades.
They did. I worked in telecommunications from the late 90s until 2016. The death of the landline and dominance of mobile was a genuine surprise to the industry. The iPhone was the knockout blow.
my most altruistic view : they said it through actions.
Rural areas were the last areas to join the mobile networks.
This is just a practical thing though; why would you build a tower for a community of 900 people when there are still gaps in the major metropolitan areas? It can't all happen simultaneously regardless of how badly we wish it could.
There were a lot of people back in the early '90s who thought cell service would never be widely adopted because of the cost. It was clear you didn't need a mobile phone -- we'd all gotten long just fine without one.
I worked at Radio Shack in 1995 shortly after carriers started subsidizing phones aggressively and you could “buy one for penny”. They were selling like crazy.
Just some quick Googling says that cellphone penetration went from 1% in 1990 to 50% by 1999.
The Motorola Startec was introduced in 1996 and clones came quickly thereafter and were all the rage
Although it’s also the case that people like me owned cell phones for quite a while but didn’t use them to any material degree especially for personal uses for a while.
Per minute costs were expensive, roaming from your local city took a lot of work, they were bulky bag phones and you still had to pay separate long distance charges, I’m not surprised.
Sprint changed that in the late 90s where all calls were 10 cents a minute anywhere you were calling from and too and you stayed on their network.
Exactly. I eventually bought one and then an other and chose a calling area that was most likely to correspond with people I might communicate with on trips and the like but it was backup/emergency use. Not something you used personally day to day or even maybe week to week.
Allowing private right of action means this will be weaponized by attorneys in the same way the ADA has. Just scanning the bill, any small business in the US using dynamic pricing, targeted discounts or "VIP pricing" on their website would be open to suits from Colorado residents. The definitions are extremely broad and there is no safe harbor for small companies either. Damages are also uncapped and apparently Colorado allows treble damages for CCPA violations.
Sounds great! The theory behind capitalism only works if prices are transparent and goods are transferable. These sorts of "special discounts" are fundamentally harmful to the economy as a whole.
> The theory behind capitalism only works if prices are transparent and goods are transferable.
The theory behind capitalism requires people to take into account what they know when making decisions.
Suppose you have a business where many customers expect to be able to try the product before committing to buy it so the cost of paying for shipping for "free returns" has to be incorporated into the advertised price. Then you notice that a subset of customers have a better idea of what they want and never trouble you with returns, so you want to give them a discount to try to get more of their business.
That's capitalism working the way it's supposed to. The customers who consume fewer resources get to pay lower prices. But it's the thing this bill prohibits, isn't it?
If capatilism was working the way it was supposed to, the customer could choose between paying more up front, but having the option of a "free" return, or paying less upfront byt having to pay for a return (or not be able to return it).
And for that matter, the customer would have enough information to know the quality of the product before purchasing, but that is often not possible.
Everybody knows the cows are not actually spheres. It's about how you deal with it.
If you try to sell "return insurance" then some customers don't buy it but end up wanting to return it anyway and then leave you a bad review for not having free returns. That costs you more than charging somewhat higher prices and having free returns, so that's what you do instead. But now efficiency requires some other mechanism of allowing the people who don't do excessive returns to pay a lower price.
Also, suppose you actually did sell return insurance. Then you notice that a subset of the customers who buy return insurance rarely use it, so you want to give them a discount to try to get more of their business.
Your idea of charging less to customers who know what they want is also a spherical cow.
They’ll buy your entire life from a data broker and charge you more because yesterday you accidentally viewed some Lamborghini seat covers. They’ll calculate that you have less willpower on Thursday nights and change their advertised price from $10 to ON SALE $2 off $12. They’ll just do coincidentally use the same algorithm to determine their price as all the other stores do so they don’t have to worry about competing on price.
> They’ll buy your entire life from a data broker and charge you more because yesterday you accidentally viewed some Lamborghini seat covers.
You're describing incompetence. You're not actually rich just because you viewed something by accident which means you're not actually price-insensitive and they just lost the sale to someone else. That has nothing to do with algorithms, incompetent companies put themselves at a disadvantage and make fewer sales than other companies all else equal, and the ones that are sufficiently bad at it go bust.
> They’ll calculate that you have less willpower on Thursday nights and change their advertised price from $10 to ON SALE $2 off $12.
They do that regardless of whether it's Thursday.
> They’ll just do coincidentally use the same algorithm to determine their price as all the other stores do so they don’t have to worry about competing on price.
This again has nothing to do with algorithms. They can do the same thing by just looking at the prices other merchants are charging and setting the same ones, and if you really want to prevent this then the law you want is the one that prohibits manufacturers from enforcing "no sales below MSRP" against retailers.
Because in a market with a large number of retailers, the individual retailers all have the incentive to defect from a price fixing scheme, because increasing your market share from 0.5% to 20% by having the lowest price when those other idiots are refusing to compete on price is worth way more than having slightly better margins. This is why it's important that the number of competitors be large instead of small. Laws should be directed to ensuring that rather than trying to micromanage a consolidated market full of incumbents so large they can buy the government anyway.
What if they’re not incompetent and you intentionally looked at Lamborghini seat covers, then, and correctly flagged you as willing to pay more as a result?
What if that fake sale tactic only works on you when your willpower is low and they know it?
Price fixing by software is a real thing. I agree that ensuring lots of competitors is a better way to avoid it. How would Colorado do that?
> What if they’re not incompetent and you intentionally looked at Lamborghini seat covers, then, and correctly flagged you as willing to pay more as a result?
What they're more likely to do is show you higher end products, because a rich person (or the person they hire to buy things for them) still has the capacity to compare prices for the same product and then charging more for the same thing still loses them the sale in a competitive market. Whereas if they show you the premium product instead of the base product because they've correctly surmised that you'll prefer the better product even if it costs more, is that even bad?
> What if that fake sale tactic only works on you when your willpower is low and they know it?
Then they still use it all the time because that's more effective than trying to guess when your willpower is lower and sometimes being wrong.
> Price fixing by software is a real thing.
It's a hypothetical thing where it works as long as everybody is using the same software. Like the other methods of price fixing, it stops working as soon as anybody does something different because then customers just start buying from them, and then we're back to needing to make sure there are enough competitors that that's what happens.
> I agree that ensuring lots of competitors is a better way to avoid it. How would Colorado do that?
In a lot of markets it's already the case but they're applying laws like this to them anyway. In consolidated markets, we largely already have antitrust laws and the main problem is a lack of enforcement, so maybe go chop up some large corporations.
There are also some cases when the courts issue a bad antitrust interpretation and then you need the legislature to pass a short bill that basically points to that case and says "no, the opposite of that".
Dynamic personalized pricing is a real thing. Has been for ages. The old-fashioned techniques are coupons and loyalty cards, or just having higher prices in higher-end stores. Competition isn't nearly as perfect as you say. It's very common for high-end stores to sell identical items at higher prices and still sell plenty of them.
These days you can do a much better job if you have data about your prospective customer. This is not a hypothetical. For example, Target was found to charge higher prices in their app if your location was close to one of their stores. Orbits and Delta have both been found to offer personalized prices as well.
Price fixing where everybody uses the same software is a real thing. RealPage recently settled a lawsuit over this.
You seem to be taking a very Libertarian approach where you assume economics 101 wins out over anything more complex, but if you look at what's actually going on in the world this is not the case.
> Dynamic personalized pricing is a real thing. Has been for ages.
The thing where you get a discount for making a below-average number of returns is also dynamic personalized pricing.
> Competition isn't nearly as perfect as you say. It's very common for high-end stores to sell identical items at higher prices and still sell plenty of them.
High-end stores are often selling more than just the product. Some people put a premium on buying from a place they trust not to carry low-quality products so they can save time needing to exclude those themselves, or to not provide them with a counterfeit or not make returns a hassle if there's something wrong with it when they get home. I mean how would you explain anyone buying from them otherwise?
> For example, Target was found to charge higher prices in their app if your location was close to one of their stores.
It's pretty obvious why they do this. It's more expensive to keep stock at a retail store with premium downtown real estate than a rural warehouse, but if you do then you'll get sales from customers who want to see the product before they buy it or who want to get it today instead of waiting for it to be shipped. So stores have to charge higher prices than websites to cover their higher costs.
Which creates a problem for a company that has both a store and a website. If they charge higher prices on their website than other websites, customers shopping at home will use another website. If they charge lower prices on their website, customers will come use the store as a showroom or take advantage of same-day store pickup but buy the product on their phone while in the store to get the website price, using the store without paying the higher costs of having a store. This is already putting many retail stores out of business because people will use the store as a showroom and then buy the same product on their phone from whatever website has the lowest price, but at least then the store has the advantage that you can walk out of there with the product instead of waiting for shipping.
Now, is raising the website price while you're in the store a good way to fix this? Maybe not, because it kind of pisses off the customers once someone figures it out and you get bad press. But that's the argument that they don't benefit from doing it, which is no reason to ban it. You don't have to punish companies for things the market will punish them for itself. Whereas if it's actually effective to help them keep the store open so that people continue to have a showroom and same-day pickup, why are we trying to stop this again?
> Price fixing where everybody uses the same software is a real thing. RealPage recently settled a lawsuit over this.
The fun thing about attempting to fix prices is that it's illegal regardless of whether it's effective. It's completely possible to net lose money by withholding units from the market to the net benefit of the landlords not using the same software, while simultaneously causing legal problems for yourself.
It turns out that "a fool and his money are soon parted" also applies to companies.
> You seem to be taking a very Libertarian approach where you assume economics 101 wins out over anything more complex, but if you look at what's actually going on in the world this is not the case.
The reason those things are taught in Econ 101 is that in the common case that's what happens. Competitive markets actually benefit customers.
The primary things you need from the government are a) to prohibit anti-competitive acts so that competition actually exists, b) to punish fraud and c) to price externalities imposed on people who aren't party to the transaction (e.g. environmental pollution).
You generally don't need (or want) the government to prohibit companies in a competitive market from doing things customers could avoid by just patronizing someone else. If many customers with 100+ options are knowingly choosing one you think they shouldn't, it's more often because they're getting something out of it than because the government is smarter and less corrupt than everyone else.
I can see how say, a roofing business might have a “VIP” sale during a slow season, such that a discounted contract is signed and money is exchanged in the future when the weather doesn’t prohibit the work.
I can see how a roofing business might buy your online shopping history, deduce that you drive a Lexus, and bump up their prices. Then profile you as not very handy, and cut corners knowing you won’t spot the issues.
If someone owns a home with a garage, you don't need to know what kind of car they own to case how wealthy they are. It'll be pretty obvious just by looking at the house, the lawn, the neighbors homes, their lawns, their cars, is there a pool in the backyard, is there a community pool with expensive memberships, etc. Google maps and social media will tell you a whole lot... for free.
Why pay? Clearly not because some people may own garages and they may or not store their cars in them. Most people load their garages up with so much shit a car doesn't have a prayer of fitting anyways.
Just because lots of info is available doesn't mean more info wouldn't be useful. You never know if your customer might be well above the neighborhood's average wealth. Or be average but have poor impulse control when spending money, which is even more valuable.
On the other hand, without private right to action, consumers may have no recourse if the AG doesn't wish to pursue action (possibly due to corruption, or lack of resources).
> any small business in the US using dynamic pricing, targeted discounts or "VIP pricing" on their website would be open to suits from Colorado residents
The solution is to use reasonable efforts to block Colorado residents if you can’t comply with the law. That’s a tradeoff a group of people are allowed to make for themselves.
The problem is that a small business in Florida or Massachusetts that does 95% of their business in their own state may have no idea that this Colorado law exists until someone sues them over it.
We don't really want small companies to have to start blocking people in other states by default. That's not great for interstate competition.
If they got into the account they got everything. The publicly released pictures are more of a taunt meant to publicly signal that he’s fucked. I would bet (figuratively) that anyrhing of actual value is either being sold or leveraged. After all this is a man that has shown an almost infinite capacity for humiliation.
I love Proton but it's really low on usability since their calendar doesn't integrate with anything (by design). If you are used to managing a busy calendar it's quite a shock. And their docs and sheets apps are extremely minimal and basic.
Nobody has explained to me how iOS ad SDKs across different apps can track individual users given that there hasn't been an accessible GUID on iOS for many years now.
Enough location data becomes effectively unique: There is likely only one phone in the world that averages over X nighttime hours in my apartment-complex and averages over Y workday-hours in the the same office block where I work.
That kind of pattern can be used to determine that two or more different app-identities are the same person, and anybody buying that data has a strong incentive to try it.
Fingerprinting devices once you’re installed on them isn’t much harder than doing so in a web browser.
Have Instagram installed on your phone? Great, now every Meta-owned app _or advertiser running on their platform_ has a pretty good shot at identifying you based on IP, location, app usage, etc.
There is a ton of signal about identity available just by virtue of running alongside other apps. Screen size, OS version, and IP are pretty good proxies for unique identity, especially if all you care about is _probable_ matches.
My understanding was that it's very difficult to reliably fingerprint iOS devices. Apple limits access to identifiers and specifically disallows fingerprinting. For this application of tracking people, you'd need decent reliability or you'd just get noise.
And no, I don't have any Meta published apps on my phone for exactly the reason you outline. I'm very aware of how IDFV and IDFA work.
IDK how many people on HN have read When Prophecy Fails, but it's a seminal paper as I understand it. If you want a more contemporary and readable book on the same topic, When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying-Saucer Cult by Diana Tumminia is very readable and covers the same ground.
Super interesting to see the original research challenged.
Electrek is a highly biased source, the editor has a grudge against Elon and Tesla. It's really unfortunate since it used to be one of the best EV sites.
One of them is a bus hitting a stationary Tesla - hard to paint that as the teslas fault.
A few are low speed reversing into things, the extreme majority of which done by humans are never reported and are not in the dataset comparing how many crashes Tesla have had vs humans.
I would say they’re facts, but they’re being used dishonesty
> One of them is a bus hitting a stationary Tesla - hard to paint that as the teslas fault.
Since the narratives are redacted, who's to say the Tesla didn't change lanes to be in front of the bus, slam on the brakes, then get rear ended?
Or pull partially out of a driveway, stopping and blocking a lane with a bus traveling 35mph in said lane and got hit by it?
> A few are low speed reversing into things, the extreme majority of which done by humans are never reported and are not in the dataset comparing how many crashes Tesla have had vs humans.
I'm sure this happens to humans all the time, but not a single one of those humans would be considered a good (or even decent) driver.
That is a completely made up bar that is impossible to test for, and can never be met.
Even Waymo have tons of reported crashes in the same document.
Self driving cars need to be better than the average human - which means less injuries and deaths. Given 100 people will be killed on the road in the US today, it’s actually not a crazy high bar to clear.
Is there evidence of that? No matter who is criticizing Musk's companies, they will get slandered in one way or nother, which doesn't mean Electrek isn't biased.
Tesla is not the market leader in BEVs. It's BYD (2.25m 2025), then Tesla (1.6m), then VW AG (1 million). Given the current growth/shrinkage rates (33% growth for VW AG, 9% drop for Tesla), they'll be third in a year or so.
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