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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I’m happy they did it. But I’m also questioning how much difference it’ll make in a province taken over by anti-vax paranoia and a whole region of people who more than half believe things life safe-use sites and safer-supply and harm reduction are a scam of some kind, in the face of the tainted opiate crisis that has been raging for a couple decades already. Hundreds of doctors have already been screaming about that.

    TL:DR I don’t believe the wider population gives a flying fuck what doctors have to say at this point. I wish it wasn’t true, but it seems pretty obvious by now.





  • Adderall is basically chemically identical to meth. The Sacklers are fuckin billionaires for pushing Oxy onto tens of millions of people (who later had to go to the streets for fent and smack to avoid becoming dope sick if they couldn’t ween off successfully). It’s time to stop leaning into this bullshit drug-war rhetoric that was already de-humanizing long before benzo-dope and fentanyl etc hit the market.

    Anyone who opposes medically supervised safer-supply is de facto pro leaving things the way they are, which are illicit drugs being distributed by cartels and gangs at extremely elevated costs to the user, which creates an economic situation that the addicts need to come up with the money to stay unsick by any means necessary.

    In most cases the legitimate cost to produce a dose of a given drug is pennies. Street prices reflect all of the greed and logistics of smuggling them across several borders to get them into the hands of users. And those costs don’t take into account all of the violence and corruption and murder which come into play when cartels and gangs are responsible for those supply routes.

    At the very least safer-supply would bring the cost down for end-users and those drugs would be taxed which could be put back into the system, instead of those profits being taken by assholes with zero concern for who lives or dies. I’m saying this with no love for the government but I would way rather go to a doctor than a street dealer (even while I’ve met lots of dealers who have more empathy than the medical system as a whole). I think that’s pretty fucking easy to parse.





  • Well yeah… you wouldn’t have to use foreign services if a domestic alternative existed. One doesn’t for northern residents, yet. So here we are like many times in the past (like for getting northern people online, or getting them clean water to drink) talking about future, possible, great idea measures that will take place at some point instead of just doing the fucking thing.

    I don’t love Starlink or Musk. However, I do own a Starlink dish and I have used it for the past couple of years for work. I know lots of other people who live in very remote areas who have been using it since it became available to them. Starlink took off in central and northern areas of Canada very quickly because it was the only (good) option for highspeed internet, and still is. And while it would be dope if a canadian competitor came along and made good on their potential, we’re still falling back into the fact that at best a canadian LEO internet company would have to launch their sats in the north for a total of 120k customers. Starlink has the Alaskan market which is upwards of 750k people, already. The canadian customers are just a bonus for them in that region, at that scale.

    Why can’t we get northern people online now as well as develop a domestic solution? I don’t think it’s a stretch to say Telesat looks like another XPlore-net type solution (i.e. half-assed, at best, and maybe will never happen at this point). I’ve worked in tech for 4 years now. Currently for a fully private company, zero public or private/VC funding. But the first company I worked for took an obscene amount of public funding (lockdown subsidies which in fact is how I got hired) and a fuckton of tax breaks before and since. Sadly, they’ve also done a lot of screaming about the suggestion that they should pay their fair share of corporate tax. Not super relevant to this convo, but I do understand in some ways what’s at stake when a company takes public money (and still treats locals like shit). There are lots of examples of this going wrong, so I wouldn’t wanna see it be the only option on the table for any reason.

    At any rate I think we agree that folks should probably have clean drinking water first anyhow.





  • It’s an easy reaction to have when you only read the headline. But if you do the math, Starlink already provides service to most of the north at less than $200/mo per person. There are less than 120k people in the northern territories. That 2.2bn works out to something like 85 years of Starlink service per person in the north (assuming everyone there needs an individual dish, which isn’t the case). Myself and a couple of other commentors have done some looking into Telesat as a company and they launched one (1) LEO “test sat” in 2018 and haven’t done a fucking thing since to get northern people online in a timely fashion.

    If you actually talk to people who live in the north most of them who can afford to already have Starlink, because it works far better than Xplore which was the only option previously, for many years. Most northern mining, logging, and oil camps are also getting their workers online with Starlink and have been for a few years already.

    I’ve not a fan of Elon, or the canadian libs, or the conservative party. But this whole discussion is kinda bullshit. As far as I’m concerned Elon Musk is guillotine lube, top of the list. The day after he is beheaded, Starlink as a company will continue operating. Which, frankly, is best-case scenario. idk what else to say about that.




  • Not sure how it’s biased, the piece about the 1.3bn was within the first five results that came up when I searched them. To be fair, I didn’t dig as deep as you did to find that that deal didn’t go through. Thanks for the correction, I didn’t know that. The gov-can website itself still has details about the deal, not sure why they wouldn’t have removed it if it didn’t happen. For context this is the article on canada.ca I was referring to (I wasn’t trying to be shady and I don’t appreciate being accused of that).

    I don’t have a horse in this race. I personally don’t give a fuck about how the north gets connected per se as long as billions of public money isn’t wasted. Again, imo clean water infra is probably a lot more important in the long run for the people in the north considering there is already at least one viable service to connect to the internet with. I can’t quite wrap my head around why Telesat hasn’t left the “testing phase” in 6+ years. Your added context here makes me even more wary given the details about the company that would actually be manufacturing the LEO sats (and obviously… haven’t done so yet. Why is that?).

    We all know why canadian cell and internet prices are among the highest in the world. It’s because our entire population is less than that which occupies the lower third of california. It costs a lot to build infrastructure to provide comms tech for each person per capita on this scale considering 95+ percent of our population lives along the US border. My point is that Starlink already has the infra in the northern sky, mostly because they have a pretty sizeable market in Alaska and the knock-off effect is there are already LEO sats within range of providing lots of northern canadian residents that same service. The rhetoric about national security is laughable given anyone with a debit card anywhere in the country can already order Starlink and have it delivered within the week. If you’re gonna go down that rabbit hole, let’s ban it across the country in favor of a domestic solution that might be available in another decade at the current rate of development. While we’re at it, let’s make it so that those fly-in communities in the north are only allowed to get food and supply deliveries on canadian-made airplanes and boats.

    It all starts to break down when you think about it. This isn’t a political thing for me, it’s practical. I’m not a huge fan of government in any form (read my comment history). But since we’re all participating in this fucking shitshow let’s look at the facts and spend our collective tax money wisely. If that 2.2bn is actually going to mean most people in the north get cheap or free internet within the next decade I’d love to see it. Meanwhile, unfortunately, Starlink is already in place and working for that purpose. That’s just a fact, whether anyone likes Elon Musk or not. I fuckin don’t.


  • I just looked into Telesat for the first time, and I’m happy if they actually do anything they say they’re gonna. I found that the canadian gov’t already injected 1.3bn into them in 2021. Further reading on their own website shows they only have one (1) “demo” sat in LEO launched in 2018, for “testing purposes”. So we’re now giving them another 2.2bn for what exactly? If this project turns out like some of the other semi-publicly funded or subsidized attempts at connecting northern canada it’s never going to happen, or like in the case of XPlore-Net turn out to be the shittiest overpriced attempt at internet providers ever to have existed. Tens of thousands of their customers bought a Starlink as soon as it became available to them, several years ago already.

    I’ve traveled the north and I know a handful of people who grew up there literally on trap lines and in one case a fishing village in the northern section of Nunavut. I really am for everyone in Canada getting online. I’d like to have seen it happen a long time ago. I just don’t have a lot of faith in these publicly funded projects given their track record. And to be clear, I loathe the liberals as much as the conservatives, I’m not choosing a political side here. To put this another way, 3.3bn would go a long way towards building out the clean water infra that the gov’t has also been promising for decades. idfk call me crazy but there isn’t already a successful company going around offering that service for very cheap. Maybe we should be investing in areas where there’s not already a solution.


  • Again, I’m no Elon stan. You don’t have to convince me he’s a dbag, and I wish some other competitor would come along with something better. However I’ve personally used Starlink in sub -30C temps for work, for weeks at a time. The dishes work perfectly fine in cold climates, and they have a self-heating element to de-ice themselves if you enable that feature. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I do know lots of other people who also rely on it in similar climates.

    You can go onto Starlink’s coverage map right now and order service to Dawson City Yukon, and anywhere equilateral to that point. There’s a pretty big market for it in Alaska, already. The tech does what it says it does, which kinda sucks because I’d rather not put money into his fucking bank account. But yeah. It is what it is.


  • Unfortunately this is where Musk figured out how to corner the market ahead of time. It was the same thing when cellular tech came into the mainstream. Lots of less developed countries with poor or no hardwired telcom infra found that skipping ahead to next-gen tech (cell towers) was super cheap and quick to build, so lots of corners of the earth found themselves connected in the 90’s that had never been prior to that decade.

    Starlink and low-orbit sats for internet coverage are a similar leap ahead in cost and speed to deploy. Elon and his goons saw it coming long before anyone else did, and the fact they also have Space X was a pretty key part of their speed to deploy.

    I’m no Elon stan, I hate the fucking guy. But it is what it is. He got there first and people in northern canada can already access Starlink for under 200/mo. I am no math guy but I suspect that even if the fed gov paid every cent of everyone’s subscription to Starlink it wouldn’t amount to 2 billion dollars. 🤷

    EDIT just did some napkin math. With the help of wiki found that the population of northern canada is less than 120k people. So cost of taxpayers footing the bill for everyone up there to be on Starlink would be 24 million/yr. Or… for that same 2 billion, 83 years of Starlink subscriptions for each and every person up there. That would be if each single person had their own dish.