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Comment by aetherspawn | Hacker News Reader

Well an island like this is basically a big strata where dividing the cost of infrastructure between everyone makes things livable. Don’t be surprised there’s a monopoly telco, because it probably doesn’t make economic sense any other way.

And keep in mind they probably insisted on a monopoly contract because they probably spent an absolute bomb setting it up, only to get max 1500 or so subscribers.

Say: 1500 subscribers @ $100/pm and you’d be running a telco on only $1.8M per year. That’s about enough money to pay for compliance, infra upkeep, and hire maybe 2-3 staff who wear many hats.

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It’s $4-600/month for 10mbps. And that’s before line rental, equipment deposit, installation charges, and the various other surprise fees they hit you with. I know Falklanders and to say that they hate Sure would be an understatement.

https://www.sure.co.fk/broadband/broadband-packages/?utm_sou...

So let the UK eat the cost of making the ISP whole. Nobody needs or especially wants the islands except for national dick-waving; the British gov was making a point that they would and could still fight and win wars. Fine, you want to play at the big dollar table, ante up.

Sure are already subsidised to the tune of a few million pounds per year.

The islands have an exclusive economic zone, and are a supply stop in a vast ocean

They are very valuable to the UK

Don't say that too loud of Trump might want them next after Greenland & Canada.

If we could convince him to buy them that would be quite good for the UK.

Depending on the valuation

And with that guy, make sure you get paid up front. He has an extremely long and well-documented history of abusing the system to not pay contractors, workers, counter-parties, etc...

It’s a loss making endeavour, just like all the remnants of empire.

The present president of Argentina is a Trump-testicle-gargler. That would make me nervous if I were a Falklander.

Great. So they won’t mind ponying up to pay off the ISP. Subsidizing people to live there is part of it.

The people living in the Falklands want the islands.

While some countries look at land like the Falklands, or Ukraine, or Taiwan, or Greenland, and think "That's Mine", Britain doesn't do that (any more), and instead says "it's upto you"

The inhabitants of the Falklands are British settlers. It is quite easy to let people choose when you know that the choice they will make matches what you want.

That being said, if Argentina had not invaded then no-one in Britain would care one way or the other (government could have handed the Islands to Argentina in whatever deal and most people in the UK would just have shrugged it off). It has become a point of principle and pride since the invasion to tell "the Argies" that they can stuff it.

Scotland has a referendum which didn't have a certain result before it was announced.

That and the fact that we can’t have Argentina colonizing a place while the indigenous people are still on it.

This is data provided by the UK government itself: the Falklands have a little above 3500 people, with about half of it being military and government personnel, and the rest being their families.

So calling them "people living there", or "settlers" or "inhabitants" or "a democracy" is nothing short of disingenuous.

Argentinians are "settlers" too, when you think of it. I think, that according to your line of logic, they should all leave Argentine and leave it to native people.

Maybe they can move to Falklands, then. Because it was empty and had no natives...

You proved my point. Argentina is full of people, as a multicultural country, including descendants of its natives (as long as you call "natives" to the first group of people ever that settled in a territory).

A planted and subsidized military operation half the world away doesn't magically become "a society" b/c they look like that on the surface.

The people living in the Falklands are descendents of the first gorup of people to settle that territory.

After Argentina did a Russia and decided they wanted the people who had lived there for generations to leave, the UK added a military presence.

I'd love to get a credible historical source saying that the conflict for that territory started around 1982 and before that there were just UK nationals casually settling there because... the weather was nice?

I'll be waiting here.

Why would soldiers, their families, and public employees have a reduced value in a democracy? Its not like they took the island by force.

Because of the law? In most western countries (including the UK), military personnel has reduced rights because of their status of having the monopoly of violence. For instance, the aren't allowed to unionize or go on strike.

I can't tell if the second part of your comment is trolling, or really not knowing the history of the UK before 10 years ago.

You forgot that in a recent referendum almost all the islanders voted to stay part of the UK.

The islanders want to be part of the UK. Great. Move to the mainland. I don’t get to settle on some random island and demand US military support because I’m a citizen. They will, at most, evacuate me.

The islands were uninhabited until 1690 when it was discovered by an English captain. The French tried to settle there in 1764 but the UK asserted its claim to it in 1765. Since the British discovered it first, it's theirs.

Results of the 2013 Falkland Islands Referendum

Do you wish the Falkland Islands to retain their current political status as an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom?

YES: 1513

NO: 3

Why do you not wish to accept the above democratic decision made by the islanders? We can only conclude you are trolling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Falkland_Islands_sovereig...

Fair point. So do a one-time tax levy of the Falklanders to buy the telco out, since they can no longer honor the commitment they made to get service installed. Shouldn’t be more than a half million pounds each?

I have no doubt that the islanders very much wish to be British subjects rather than left on their own (they would, in that case, quickly become Malvinians). But why should someone in Glasgow want to pay taxes to support them in living there permanently?

> But why should someone in Glasgow want to pay taxes to support them in living there permanently?

you could have picked a better example, Scotland is a net drain on the UK treasury

why should someone in London pay to support people living in Glasgow permanently?

You should have picked a better example, Glasgow is a port city and almost certainly not a net drain; the rural parts of Scotland are. Just like all the rural parts of England, which leech of the English cities.

Just like all the rural parts of the US, which leech off the "coastal liberal elites."

> You should have picked a better example, Glasgow is a port city and almost certainly not a net drain

certainly true in the 1900s

unfortunately in the 2000s it's at the wrong side of the island

That was the point. If I had meant London, I would have used it.

This is how wealth redistribution works. This is how taxes work.

Yes, it is. But at a certain point you stop paying for people to live somewhere unsustainable and just pay them to leave, if it’s a financial decision.

> We can only conclude you are trolling.

You made an excellent point and then this sentence cancelled that out. You can have major disagreements with other people, even ignorant people, without assuming that your disagreement means they are trolling / a bot / arguing in bad faith / etc.

Honestly with those numbers, I'm pretty surprised it's even an independent company. Wouldn't such a community of 3-4k people in a very remote location be a prime example where providing internet could just be a gov/municipal service, subsided by an extraordinary tax if needed?

Nowadays in Britain, even if the government provides the service they would typically contract a private company to set up and operate it.

It looks like the Falkland are similar. Here's a Facebook post from the Falkland government announcing a deal with this ISP.

https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=50310531517584...

This is what a Thatcher Conservative utopia looks like, top to bottom public private partnerships.

The whole thing is an own goal.

And this might be the big issue with solar power and also EV's. If enough people switch to solar and are no longer paying into the grid at a certain point it will become unprofitable to maintain a large grid. The same is true at this point for EV's. Buying gas we pay road tax. So not buying gas is going to reduce that tax collected. At a certain point they will need to change the way that tax is collected. Probably some sort of tax on the distance an EV drives or perhaps some other method.

Already happening. I paid an EV fee on my car tabs this week.

(For some context: gas taxes are already a subset of road expense. Significant road funding comes from other revenue sources that EV drivers also pay.)

Curious if you could provide more information about the other sources EV drivers pay? Is it at point of sale or where do they pay this? I am sure it is different depending on the region but I was always under the belief that road tax payed on gas where I am is the most significant contributor to road funding. Thank you I would enjoy learning more about what other revenue sources EV's contribute to.

Not the parent commenter but https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur...

I can't tell if these figures are inclusive of interstates and all local roads, or some subset, but my impression is these numbers (for use tax pay %) look too high. The right ballpark is around 50%.

State general funds -- any sales, property, or income tax of your state -- as well as Federal highway dollars (Federal income tax). Notably, non-drivers also pay into these funds.

In NZ, EVs pay road user charges.

How is it measured? All the talk over here (UK) has frothy people talking about government tracking your every movement with a box in your car or automatic number plate recognition (the latter we already do anyway)

Even worse, many states are more than double charging EVs for the comparable average mileage that determines gas tax.

I never really got these arguments. It doesn't have to be that way, does it? I already pay a monthly base fee for electricity and then per kwh on top of that. So I consider the base fee as what is being used to maintain the grid. It's not like my actual consumption influences the wear of the grid in a meaningful way

That argument would actually make more sense for roads so I see how you'd want to tax gas instead of car ownership, but even there I think it could still be acceptable to spread it out like that.

Sure if you pay a base fee maybe but if you went 100% solar to cover all your needs and completely disconnected from the grid so you were not a paying customer then what? How many houses have to leave the grid switching to solar before the grid is no longer viable? At some point in time we will reach a tipping point. If half of all households left the grid to solar could the other half support the upkeep of the entire grid? My guess is no. So at some point we will need to subsidize the grid for those still on it or force them to switch to solar. It will be hard. Solar is not cheap upfront even though overall it is cheaper. As for the EV's I hear it is already happening in some places you are being charged for how much you drive however they do that.

I see this far in the future, and a slow process. I already know a few people with big enough solar setups to be self sustaining even in winter with big battery packs, but they still connect to the grid "just in case", which honestly I'd do too.

As more people disconnect then sure the base price might go up but why not, the other ones don't need the grid, so why pay? And as for public infra like street lights, that will just get heavier on taxes. This is something I see happening over decades rather than years, so there will be enough time to figure this out.

Big battery packs are insane to put inside a house. I'm biased because I work for a utility scale storage company, but really, 2nd law of thermodynamics, people.

The more potential energy you pack into a volume, the higher the chance the energy will be released at a time not of your choosing and in a fashion that will make you sad. We put our product in industrial zoned places where the worst case scenario for a fire is pre-planned to not be catastrophic and so that no homes will be lost. Why put your house at risk? So you can cosplay as Henry David Thoreau and take some stance against your power utility?

Keep in mind, in the US most people park ICE vehicles (sometimes 2-3 at a time) in garages attached or part of their dwellings all the time. And those not only catch fire more regularly, but contain far more energy.

Aka people do dumb stuff all the time. And mostly survive. Frankly, this isn’t likely to even be top ten from an actuarial basis.

This is the first time I’ve seen a claim that ICE vehicles are more likely to have catastrophic fires while parked than EVs. Is that true? Any source?

If I did put batteries in my house, I'd want them mounted on wheels so if they overheat I can push them out before things get exciting. Those do exist, and apart from storing juice for your house they can also take you places...

There is no way you could get close enough to a battery bank this size to push them once they started to catch on fire and not die. You might as well be trying to put out a kiddy pool of gasoline with your hands.

[https://alliedworldinsurance.com/risk-management/electric-ve...]

Far more often. Battery fires can be much harder to put out, but gasoline fires are no slouch frankly.

Thanks for the great link! Unfortunately it doesn’t speak specifically to parked/charging, which is when I would expect EV’s to be at the greatest risk and ICE’s to be at their lowest risk.

But still, seems pretty clear that EV’a are likely no more risky and possibly considerably less so in the garage. Thanks!

ICE vehicles are at risk when starting and stopping, and those happen in garages a lot.

https://www.google.com/search?q=recall+%22park+outside%22

These recalls from Ford, GM, and Kia are each millions of vehicles. And the number of these recalls is going up: https://turnto10.com/i-team/consumer-advocate/serious-park-o...

It's always been a significant risk; why do you think there are strict building code regs for the garage area of a home?

> I work for a utility scale storage company

Clearly not in any sort of engineering capacity given you wildly misused the second law of thermodynamics, which has nothing to do with potential energy, but the flow of heat from hot areas to cooler areas.

Second: energy density has nothing to do with how stable that energy is. 12lb of plutonium could level a city, but not if it isn't in an extremely precisely engineered device.

Third:potential energy and volume, you say?

Do you own a riding lawnmower in your garage? Those have about 2 or more gallons of gas, which is about 66 kWhr of energy.

Pour that out onto your garage floor, strike a match, and let me know how "sad" you are when your garage is leveled, your house structurally damaged, and you're dead in your neighbor's yard.

Do you have a gas grill, and do you keep a spare tank in the garage? 20lb of propane is equal to almost 130kWhr of energy.

Do you keep a 5 gallon jug of spare gas in your garage? 165 kWhr.

So. You were saying?

> Do you keep a 5 gallon jug of spare gas in your garage? 165 kWhr

If you keep a 5 gallon jug in the garage, your risk is higher than if you don't. If you keep a lawnmower in your garage, your risk is higher than if you don't.

Like I said: the higher the amount of potential energy, the greater the risk of it being released in a way that will make you sad. It's a straightforward derivation from thermo.

If I went 100% solar, I'm happy to pay the utility to be the middleman while I sell my excess solar to the neighbors.

> Sure if you pay a base fee maybe but if you went 100% solar to cover all your needs and completely disconnected from the grid so you were not a paying customer then what?

Off grid solar is exceptionally rare. The grid still serves a purpose unless you’re willing to buy a lot of batteries and always moderate your usage.

Realistically, solar users won’t be disconnecting from the grid in large numbers. It doesn’t make financial sense to buy massive battery banks to avoid a small monthly grid service fee, even if battery prices drop significantly more.

The fear of everyone dropping off grid isn’t realistic.

> Sure if you pay a base fee maybe but if you went 100% solar to cover all your needs and completely disconnected from the grid so you were not a paying customer then what?

Then they are generating substantially less pollution and CO2 than the idiots driving around in their dick-compensating machinery that gets 12mpg, and society should incentivize that.

Hint: look at all the costs to society from internal combustion vehicles. Chiefly, global warming, and the health costs (and lost productivity) from the pollution.

It's already happening in Pakistan: https://www.ft.com/content/69e4cb33-3615-4424-996d-5aee9d1af...

Consumer electricity is also taxed, although it's not explicitly linked to roads. But then that's not really how governments work anyway, all the money goes into a ~black hole~ big pot and is spent around.

Roads are notionally supported from general taxes in the UK anyway, not fuel duty.

> no longer paying into the grid at a certain point it will become unprofitable to maintain a large grid.

1. IDK where you live, but most people pay quite a bit for grid itself, often more than for actual power.

2. With batteries the grid can be about 10x smaller.

In my state, I pay a special tax on my EV when I renew my license plates. It is based on fuel source. The point is to offset the lack of gas taxes I would be paying. Or it might just be a disincentive to buy an EV, it’s hard to tell sometimes.

At some point we’ll switch to mileage taxes, which make more sense for infrastructure upkeep. Gas taxes were only ever a rough proxy for “how much do hou use roads and bridges.”

How do you track how far everyone drives to tax them correctly?

The same way we track how much electricity households use from the grid. By using a (smart) meter.

There are a bunch of technical solutions, from certified shops you stop by once a year to networked cars. Implementation is the easiest part of this change.

Many cars are already "smogged". Would be trivial to record their mileage year to year at the same time. Require a "smog" for EVs and record their mileage and maybe scan their BMS for any faults.

Require a mileage readout when renewing registration, and when sold.

Gas taxes are used to fund road work.

The nice think about gas taxes is that they’re mostly proportional to the mileage driven and the weight of the vehicle, two factors that determine contribution to road wear.

EVs tend to be heavy but not contribute at all to gas tax. A separate EV tax for road maintenance is reasonable.

Sort of but road erosion is to the fourth power of weight while fuel consumption is approximately linear with weight, so the tax is not exactly proportional to use.

Do you have a source for this? I wouldn’t be surprised if it were supralinear but that feels high to me.

Like we have a short segment of road in my town that’s almost exclusively and regularly used by garbage trucks, which are ~10x the weight of a car. I don’t think the road gets repaved 10,000x more often than other roads though?

It's even got its own Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

Aha, 4th power of axle load - that makes more sense. Thanks!

Not all road structures are equal (it's easy to design a road to last 20 years before resurfacing almost regardless of the loads put on it, and the cost variances aren't that major). Temperature variations are a bigger limiter of life of a road, especially freeze-thaw cycles

> Gas taxes are used to fund road work.

"Road work" is almost entirely paid for by overall tax revenue and only a tiny fraction comes from fuel and other use taxes like registration fees. It doesn't include things like police/fire/ems response to crashes.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-13/debunking...

In my state, you get a 90 percent discount on your excise tax if your vehicle is of a model year newer than the current year. I don't see anyone getting up in arms about that, but someone buys an EV - which pays taxes on the electricity it uses - and people scream blue bloody murder they're "cheating", because among other things, we don't look at the total cost to society that a car has.

No, friend. These regressive taxes are because conservative idiots in dick-compensating machinery that gets 12mpg are pissed that people who made the intelligent and environmentally conscious choice are being led around by the nose by the oil cartels.

...who are subsidized, and those subsidies are rising: https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...

https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...

oil and gas subsidies repay it back. the true cost of gas is 2-3x current price.

> The same is true at this point for EV's. Buying gas we pay road tax. So not buying gas is going to reduce that tax collected. At a certain point they will need to change the way that tax is collected.

WA state had a “genius” workaround for it. I remember being shocked the first time I got my annual car registration slip for my (then) new EV. It was a flat $150 fee + $75 “transportation electrification” fee, on top of all the normal annual registration fees. For more expensive cars like Teslas, proportionally it is not that ridiculous (it “only” raises the fees by about 30-40%). But for something more affordable like Nissan Leaf, it essentially doubles the registration fees (aka increases by almost 100%).

Luckily, they seem to be experimenting with it still. Just saw that starting this upcoming July, they are rolling out a voluntary program where those fees above get waived, if you opt-in and pay 2.5 cents per mile. No idea how they would track it (on a technical level; e.g., using what device? how the data is processed? does it count only in-state miles or just in general?), and that’s the part that I am honestly worried about the most.

But that seems at least like an interesting try.

Yeah, the only real solution here feels like paying off the monopoly, a cost which in the end is likely going to need a handout from the UK. It’s tough to identify anyone who’s done anything explicitly wrong in this story, or a solution that doesn’t end up shafting someone. Perhaps a negotiated tax on non-monopoly users there that goes to the monopoly to help defray their investment is the only sensible solution.

Or just allow competitors in?

Why does the monopoly need paying off? It’s risk/reward for them, if they end up loosing money on their venture why should the taxpayer foot the bill?

They agreed to set up service in the falklands on the condition that they be allowed to have a monopoly. If you take that away you’re breaking a deal you made.

You don’t have to break the deal, just serve notice.

A bit of googling on this agreement shows that there is a 5 year notice clause, so they can just serve notice now if they want. No need to pay anyone off.

(https://www.openfalklands.org.fk/leos-and-vsat-legislation-i...)

> Why does the monopoly need paying off?

Presumably because they have a piece of legally binding paper saying they do? Changing the law to cut out the monopoly is the government reneging on the agreement they made with the monopoly to pony up the cash and presumably a tort.

They could also simply fail to enforce the law. Or use that as a threat to come to a negotiated settlement with the monopoly.

> They could also simply fail to enforce the law

The article says that that’s the status quo but Starlink aren’t ok with it. Not enforcing the law would also seem to be actionable under any agreement signed though. Finally, any precedent set here will make it much harder for the government to strike any other kind of deal next time it wants to encourage a company to invest.

The reputation and credit rating of governments falls if they fail to respect contracts they've signed under their own laws.

They could just exit using the clauses in the agreement though, like the one they have seems to have a 5 year notice clause.

I’m not saying break contracts, just saying there are usually sensible alternatives to exiting these sort of things that don’t involve just paying someone off.

I would imagine there is a contract stipulating that they’re a monopoly because otherwise the economics don’t work out.

There is but it has a 5 year notice period that can be enacted.

Waiting for the exclusive contract to end would also work. Unless they really weren't thinking ahead when they contracted this out, there must be a way to choose a different provider, but it may be a lengthy wait.

Their revenue is north of £100M p.a., and they are owned by batelco. They are not hurting for cash.

> Their revenue is north of £100M p.a., and they are owned by batelco.

Looking at the wiki page for Sure, they serve many island jurisdictions with a total pop of ~265k, and the falkland islands is only ~3500. That's a ratio of 1:75, 100/75=1.3 million lines up pretty well with OPs comment of the budget for the falkland islands.

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