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Comment by j_san | Hacker News Reader

I'm european and dont like thousands of satelites swirrling around in the sky as well but I'd rather have government-founded satelites for the public benefit than from some way-too-rich sociopath's private company.

Of course - this project would probably not exist without Starlink, so credit where credit is due.

Personally I find it quite sad that we're destroying the night sky in the sense that before these projects people could look in the sky and know that all humans before them had more or less the same sight. Now there are just so many satellites swirling around in your sight. I find that quite sad.

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> Personally I find it quite sad that we're destroying the night sky

That's not actually a thing.

> Now there are just so many satellites swirling around in your sight. I find that quite sad.

Except 99.9% of the time you can't see any of them. So for 99.9999% of people who don't do advanced space photography the night sky looks like it has always looked.

You can’t see Starlink satellites with your eye unless they are in sunlight while the ground is not (so a vary narrow time of day and set of satellites given a particular location).

> some way-too-rich sociopath's private company.

I am certainly you've developed this view in November of 2022. Meanwhile any European stuck with DSL - which would be most of my family - would be ecstatic to get sensible bandwidth today.

Musk has been proving he's a danger to society for the better part of the last ten years.

And yet, it does not matter when anybody became aware, but when it became a real problem.

Further, one can make use of a service or product today, and still be happy that there are better alternatives in the pipeline. I am certain that is how many Tesla owners view their vehicles, for example.

There's a few comments in this thread from self proclaimed Europeans, but this one is the weirdest. The internet infrastructure here is great. I haven't seen a sub 10mbps offering in years (with 100mbps being fairly common). The only spotty places are small villages (which is a rather common theme everywhere). Europeans aren't stuck with DSL.

Where is "here"? There are plenty of places in Europe with mediocre Internet infrastructure. It is not universally "great" by any measure.

So pressure your governments so that they invest in infrastructure either directly of by incentivising private companies while keeping them in competition with each other. Even some poor European countries have amazing internet connectivity right now.

I have reliable gigabit fiber, my internet is just fine. But I have plenty of colleagues in some parts of Europe that still have chronic issues with crap internet. Most of these are not in small villages, they are just subject to the whims of companies that simply don't care for whatever reason.

The quality of internet access is pretty variable most places in my experience, and there is more to it than just the notional bandwidth of the network drop you get. Some do it better than others but universally good quality internet for a country-sized region is still pretty atypical.

That's something that has occured to me right after posting, my bad. For context I live in a small-ish town (~50000) in the Czech Republic. However, we have about 5 local competing providers each offering decent speeds. Some have started offering 1Gbps speeds recently (though I'm still on ~600mbps myself).

Well if websites were not absolutely huge for no reason, we could certainly live with slower Internet connections.

Well except for TikTok and the likes, I guess. But at some point we should realise that those "improvements" are destroying the planet.

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