Forcing all costs on to new entrants in a market is generally a bad thing for the market and causes it to not expand fast enough. Also they may just choose to not participate in the market at all. I.e they'll bring in a whole lot of natural gas generators, put them in the parking lot and call it good, which is not a good thing long term.
Why would any reasonable governing entity (I understand we live in a world where there are not many of these) allow you to run a bunch of natural gas generators in a parking lot?
Forcing all costs into externalities is also not ideal. Right now, some state's systems, force residential consumers to pay for new infrastructure for new demand while only minimal costs are paid by the new customer.
When people ask for a commercial service hookup there is usually a charge to bring transformers and service lines to the building. This is a constant cost based on the load. The infrastructure to run the service lines out to a new commercial district are usually borne by the residential rate payers. It's how utility monopolies work in any of the states I've worked in.
So, you could think of it like this:
New customer: 100k-500k. Existing customers: 5% rate hike or 1M-100M/year in increased payments.
Per customer this may be minor but there are many customers.
The problem has been we have no system for proactive construction of new generation. Note: up until recently in the US demand has been mostly flat. We have been building significantly more power efficient systems so utilities did not know we would see a massive demand spike.
China somehow was able to harden against this and continued to improve infrastructure.
I agree. Lightning is such a better connector and one of the main reasons I still haven't replaced my phone. If lightning could've just been updated for higher bitrates it would have been so much better.
I went through lightning cables fast. Unsure why, maybe I sweat a lot, or keep my phone in humid places.
But every so many months I had to replace the cable because the 4th pin would be burned.
I don't have that issue with USB-C. But I do feel that the lightning receiver is less fragile over the USB-C one. Removing lint from a USB-C receiver is harder.
There was also a separate issue. Apple until recently had always used this type of plastic that easily degrades and certain peoples skin oil (mine included) causes the plastic to just dissolve. Turns yellow then brittle and then just comes apart. But that's not really related to lightning.
I personally hate USB-C as it's a poorly designed connector. It's flimsy and can easily broken yet at the same time difficult to insert.
I've had a couple be broken by getting "squashed" because there's no mechanical support because of the rounded edges so the metal easily pancakes.
They also seem to be easily damaged such they stop connecting through a failure mechanism I haven't quite figured out (my macbook air no longer reliably connects to them).
Finally, the ports don't have reliable insertion and they're sharp, so they scratch up whatever device they're on as people repeatedly miss the insertion position resulting in surface scuffing. Phones especially should not be using them because of this issue and should be using something like lightning that did not have any sharp edges which avoided most scratching.
1. Orbiting objects never try to avoid each other.
2. They're in high enough orbits that atmospheric drag is not a significant factor such that debris can last decades or centuries.
Starlink fails both as they constantly maneuver and they're in low orbits that are constantly cleaned by the atmosphere.
And I'd add that "kessler syndrome" is actually a statistical process, not a rapid sudden cascade of satellites crashing into each other. It takes years to decades for it to actually "happen". It's not something that can be caused by military action either.
Do you think Starlink is somehow extraterritorial or something? They're no more or no less a "private internet" than any other ISP. People need to get a reality check. Hacker news is becoming one of the most luddite places on the internet.
Many weapons designers thought they were making war “more humane” by creating weapons that killed faster and more decisively.
Haber, on chemical warfare: “The gas weapons are not at all more cruel than the flying iron pieces; on the contrary, the fraction of fatal gas diseases is comparatively smaller, the mutilations are missing.”
> Many weapons designers thought they were making war “more humane” by creating weapons that killed faster and more decisively.
Do you think the world would be better off if we still killed ourselves with swords instead of drones? The result is the same. A death is a death. The real cause of wars is not "better weapons".
