Except it's no longer only in rural areas, grid connected utilities are now costing more than being off grid in the cities too. Starlink residential 100 Mbps is cheaper ($69/mo AUD) (ignoring hardware and setup costs) than 50 Mbps fixed line internet ($80/mo AUD). Depending on location, home solar + batteries will usually work out cheaper than being on the grid within the battery warranty period too.
The question that comes up then is: how much traffic can Starlink handle until it gets saturated? I'm not sure it can handle even a significant percentage of the users that currently use wired connectivity. And if they see that demand for their services starts overwhelming supply, they will definitely raise the prices...
Internet traffic today is estimated to be a few tens of exabytes per day. Even if you assume 100000 Starlink satellites (we're far from that), each satellite would have to handle hundreds of terabytes per day. That's tens of gigabits per second per satellite, assuming traffic is split evenly among them (will never happen in real situations).
Starlink V3 can pump out some seriously impressive speeds and handle thousands of clients. Starlink is both a great leap forward in rocketry and radio technology.
I do still think funny how we are going back to the pre war technology tree for a re-visit
That's not even sufficient to handle the needs of a single large city. The limitation is that even with the much larger constellation they hope to deploy there won't be enough satellites visible at once from any given large metro area.
This is because Australia has high internet prices. Partly because it's huge, but partly because the NBN got stuffed-up by the Liberals because they didn't believe the country should be investing in what they called at the time "a glorified video delivery service", so put the tech back a decade, and the country ended up paying more for a worse rollout.
Your comparison point is also a bit weird to me. If I want a decent speed, my choices are fixed wireless NBN at ~250Mbit (400 in theory, 250 in practice), or Starlink at ~200Mbit, and they cost around the same.
If I were just a few km closer to the city I could get 500Mbit fibre for ~$90 a month.
So while it's definitely not out of the range of other plans, I wouldn't say it's definitively cheaper. And I wonder if the recent price drops are down to people not wanting to have much to do with Elon Musk any more. I know it's worth a few bucks a month to me not to be a customer of his.
Supply is increasing, but if that increased supply gets snatched up by investors then you haven't really increased supply for people who need a place to live.
These investors want tenants. The more supply, the more (ceteris paribus) rents drop. The more rents drop, the lower the rates of return on the home, meaning the asset is worth less and prices drop for those buying homes, too. Supply leads to lower rents and prices.
There's no magic way around these economic laws.
Of course if demand grows faster, then prices still go up. But in absence of supply increases it'd be even worse. Supply definitely helps.
Not necessarily. By the UK Government's own estimate [1], 1-in-20 homes in West and Central London (the more expensive parts) are empty. The story I've heard is owners who use them as a store of wealth safe from their own government's hands (usually Russia, China, or places in the Middle East). They prefer not to have tenants because it adds risk and complexity. I'm not saying this is the true story, but it's what I've heard, and there are definitely lots of expensive, empty apartments.
It's a fair point that there's some buying for store of wealth, but if that's the problem, address it, not something else. Amsterdam (my city) for example fines for homes left empty, either you live there, rent it out, or get fined. It should be quite easy to set penalties such that the incentive flips. There's plenty of property management + insurance products, to make the task of renting out carefree and riskfree compared to leaving it empty and paying fines.
But beyond that I find it's a minor problem that gets broad attention in the media. There've been lots of studies around vacancies, but they usually don't amount to anything close to the media narrative.
For example, most real estate investors discount their expected rental income by 10% for expected vacancy, because they know tenants come and go, it takes time to find/review/place new tenants, some tenants fall through, and sometimes there's a no alignment between a tenant leaving and a tenant being available on short-term. 8 or 10% is a very standard industry figure people often use for quick calculations. In the US I think the average is about 7% for example.
Now if you find that 1 in 20 homes, in a particular high-class area known for vacancy, of a particular city known for this problem discussed intensively in media/politics, are vacant... that's entirely within normal parameters. That's 5%, and supposedly it's the most incendiary piece of data they could find.
In other words, quite normal figures that have a straightforward solution (>3 or >6 month vacancy leads to hefty pentalties/fines/taxes). I'm not saying the problem is completely non-existent, but it's not that big a deal as people often think and repeat.
I could definitely believe this. Renting something is a hassle and risky. Tenants can easily trash the place requiring expensive repairs. Especially if you don't live close by to have an eye on things.
Also I've heard about apartments and commercial rental space staying empty because people can borrow money against the 'value'. If rents drop that value shrinks. If it sits empty, no such problem. You still borrow against that commercial property that rents for $5000 a month. You were just unlucky finding a tenant the past 5 years.
I'm one of the more frequent non-Mapbox contributors to the project. I've made a lot of PRs over the years and I try to help out with reviewing PRs and to triage incoming issues.
While I agree there has been non-trivial contributions external to the core of gl js (eg. bindings, plugins), and these help the ecosystem, they don't replace work on the core.
Personally I'd hoped that those businesses who were using GL JS commercially without a commercial subscription through Mapbox would contribute and become part of the core development and maintenance, but that didn't happen to a large degree.
Most of these platforms contribute their GBIF which aggregates it together. I contribute my sightings to iNaturaliast, but when I need the data for occurrences pull GBIF. I think this is perfect, because each site can compete on the best reporting interface, while not fragmenting data for data consumers.
Oh I see there is a completely different interface when uploading photos directly vs importing from Flickr. Since I import all photos from my Flickr to maintain the metadata link it must be using an older less flashy form.
Didn't even know the one in the video existed until now.
Yes, I usually upload my images directly into iNaturalist, so it usually suggests an ID for me when I put an ID on each observation.
I found an iNat page on uploading observations from Flickr [1] which is probably what you used. It seems to say you can add an ID for each upload but it doesn't say if the AI will help you with the ID, like with the direct uploading to iNat.
The move to GitLab was a glimmer of hope that one day I'll be able to help contribute to the project which I'm a heavy user.
I wish they went all in and used GitLab Issues for bugs and GitLab CI/CD to auto-build packages for both validation and pushing new packages into the Debian repositories.
No, but they're representative of the decision process. "Should we do A or B" results in people popping up supporting A, B, C, D, and E, and the decision tends to be "let's support them all". And as the original article we're commenting on discusses, that "support" comes in the form of "hey package maintainers, here's what you have to deal with".
I've participated in the Debian community for 18 years, since Potato (2.2). I have a fairly good practical idea of how Debian operates. The above description was based on many, many, many decisions over the years. On the rare occasions that Debian has to actually decide something rather than answering "X or Y" with "yes" (and the decision doesn't fall solely to a small number of developers responsible for the packages in question), it results in painful institutional friction.
I love using Debian, I care deeply about Debian Policy and Debian's procedures, I enjoy many aspects of the Debian community, and I'm also well aware of where Debian has difficulties.
It's completely depended on what people contribute, if you collect 360 images with a 360 camera then you can get the google street view like experience. The community contributors to Mapillary have done a lot of 360 imagery.
It's varies a bit depending if you're capturing via car, bicycle, foot or any other mode of transport, then again based on your budget and how much effort you want to put into your setup.
Except it's no longer only in rural areas, grid connected utilities are now costing more than being off grid in the cities too. Starlink residential 100 Mbps is cheaper ($69/mo AUD) (ignoring hardware and setup costs) than 50 Mbps fixed line internet ($80/mo AUD). Depending on location, home solar + batteries will usually work out cheaper than being on the grid within the battery warranty period too.