The geosynchronous satellites are about 650 times higher than Starlink satellites, so the speed of light is a significant limiting factor.

Geosynchronous orbit is 35,700 km (3.57 x 10^7 m) above sea level. At that distance, signals moving at the speed of light (3.0 x 10^8 m/s) take about .12 seconds to go that far. So a round trip is about .240 seconds or 240 milliseconds added to the ping.

Starlink orbits at an altitude of 550 km (5.5 x 10^5 m), where the signal can travel between ground and satellite in about 0.0018 seconds, for 3.6 millisecond round trip. Actual routing and processing of signals, especially relaying between satellites, adds time to the processing.

But no matter how much better the signal processing can get, the speed of light accounts for about a 200-230 millisecond difference at the difference in altitudes.

I love the way you weave in the cultural context, including the culture war parts of modern political and policy debates, the business/corporate trends in entertainment, in your telling of this history. It’s clear you know your stuff, and you’ve helped me understand something new (the influences these slasher films drew from, from Agatha Christie), grounded in stuff I might have already known (the actual movies themselves and the cultural context they were released into, including how people looked at boobs before the internet).

So thank you. This comment is awesome, and you make this place better.

This framework you describe is still grounded in a large number of producers intentionally avoiding undercutting the competition in price.

If a profit can be made selling burgers for $10, and literally every burger seller knows that I’m happy paying $15 for a burger, they still have to compete with each other to get my business. Am I going to choose the place that charges everyone $10, or the place that I know engages in opaque pricing and is offering me $15? The most sophisticated price discrimination algorithm in the world doesnt do any good if the other burger shops don’t play along.

And this plays out every day in places like airports. Yes, I know I just need to eat before I jump on my connecting flight, and I’m not super price sensitive in that situation. But I won’t go to the place that’s far and away more expensive than another, or who I just recently read about on some travel blog as a price gouger.

And for a more concrete example of something that happens today, with services that are worth a completely different price than what it costs to provide it, and where everyone knows the buyer is valuing the service at that high value. Say I have an unfinished basement, and I want to hire a contractor to finish it with drywall, paint, flooring, HVAC, etc. It’s obvious to everyone how much that project adds to the livable square footage, and plenty of public valuation models show exactly how much that job adds to the value of the home. And everyone knows I’m about to list the home afterward for sale. But if 10 contractors are competing for the job, they don’t really care what value it provides to me if I choose not to hire them, so they’re bidding prices that cover the level of profit they want to make on the job, while not ceding the price advantage to the competition. The presence of competition tempers the price gouging.

So I still think competition is the key policy to pursue. Competition solves the problem being described here, and any market with this kind of individualized price gouging is suffering from insufficient competition.

This is only a problem if the service provider is a monopoly (or if every service provider illegally coordinates price fixing).

I might be willing to pay up to $800 to fix a $1000 computer (a more expensive repair might cause me to look to buy a replacement rather than repairing). But if it’s a 1 hour job requiring $100 of parts, then all the computer repair shops would be competing with each other for my business, essentially setting their hourly rate for their labor. At that point it’s like bidding at auction up to a certain point, but expecting to still pay the lowest available price.

So the problem isn’t necessarily perfect pricing information from the other side, but lack of competition for pricing from the other side. We should be fighting to break up monopolies and punishing illegal price fixing.

Why do you care if the person you voted for wins?

Because it’s an election with consequences, not an online fandom.

The author probably isn’t personally familiar with pre-2010 internet jokes so he skipped from 5-year intervals, all the way back 30 years to Monty Python.

In the 2005-2010 era I was seeing a lot of quotes from Arrested Development, Anchorman, Talladega Nights. But the one that really made the jump from TV to internet text comments was the South Park underpants gnome meme, where step 1 was whatever people were doing (in the episode, stealing underpants), step 2 was ???, and step 3 was Profit!. Meanwhile, some pure internet nonsense around then was stuff like O RLY?, Cheezburger and other lolcat stuff.

In 2000-2005 or so, there were plenty of Simpsons quotes to go around. Internet memes looked like demotivational posters (a take on the motivational posters common in corporate office settings back then). This was the heyday of surreal flash animation, as the Internet didn’t really have the infrastructure to have high-bandwidth videos go viral. Stuff like Strongbad, Group X, All Your Base, etc. Text references to bash.org quotes (I put on my robe and wizard hat, hunter2) came from around this era, from what I remember.

Pre-2000, I’m less familiar with. Real Ultimate Power was the first website that made me laugh out loud. But there was less for user posting on the internet: fewer web-based forums before phpbb and vbulletin came along. You needed your own geocities or angelfire page if you wanted to post something that persisted on the web. Usenet and IRC were around, but I don’t know the culture.

“Feminism” is like philosophy in that over time it makes certain wins, and the discussion around that topic gradually sheds the label.

In the same way that ancient philosophers were establishing the disciplines we now call mathematics, geometry, and physics, or early modern philosophers were establishing what we now call economics and political science, and mid-century/postwar philosophers were establishing what is now called computer science and information theory, the history of feminism is notching wins and making them normal:

• In Anglo American law, women were able to own their own property beginning in the early 19th century, starting in the American South (somewhat ironically driven by southern concerns about preserving the institution of slavery).
• Women were allowed to be considered for credit and banking services, equal to men, beginning in the 1970’s.
• Women earned the legal right to equal pay for equal work in the 70’s, even as cultural attitudes in many circles still considered that to be government overreach (even today).
• Marital rape and other forms of domestic violence were outlawed pretty recently. The last state to criminalize marital rape did so in 1993, the same year that Jurassic Park came out in theaters.
• Liberalized divorce rules throughout the 80’s allowed women to leave abusive husbands more easily.
• Most gender segregation in official government institutions were dismantled in the 1980’s and the 1990’s, including the abolition of male-only universities, and laws imposing different legal drinking ages between men and women.

Today, many of us who were alive when these rules were in effect think of them as totally backwards. Nobody is seriously advocating for a return to denying women the right to have their own bank accounts, or giving husbands the right to rape their wives without consequences.

But the cultural understanding of the meaning of feminism rarely considers preserving past wins, even recent wins. People only think of it as fighting for something in the future.

Most men have experienced the stifling gender norms that force them into a box: they’re not allowed to cry or show any feeling other than anger, there’s no such thing as non-sexual touch or romance, women don’t like sex so trying to get close to them is inherently rapey and goes against their desires.

Feminism fights against that trap, that men are only men if they check certain boxes. That’s what’s toxic: telling men they’re not allowed to be certain ways.

So yeah, feminism does have a lot to offer men. Toxic societal expectations are bad for everyone.

I read it in Larry David’s voice.

$83 billion per month is almost $1 trillion per year. That sounds about right.

John Oliver sometimes runs random out of context clips of MILF Manor and I’m not sure actually watching them in context would make them any less ridiculous.

No, no, the bigots hate people who speak French too

SNL had a fun sketch about this 12 years ago.

Oh you can remember which one is which by remembering that they have a university named USC.

Haiti’s gonna hate hate hate

why wouldn’t I use my platform to share those beliefs?

I think it’s perfectly valid to say “the system that gave me this platform is unfair and I shouldn’t have benefited from it to the degree that I have, but I have the platform now so I’m going to use it for good.”

especially the historical ones

Tycho and Kepler always cracks me up.

I didn’t know I was learning a life skill at the time.

The House of the Dead 2 was a really popular arcade game at the time, so adapting the preexisting game into an at-home typing trainer was actually genius innovation.

Typing of the dead

Still my favorite example of gamification: take a useful task and make it so fun that people will gladly devote hours and hours of their time to it.

Prosecutors are generally somewhat accommodating of victim/witness preferences, because being subpoenaed to testify in open court can be intimidating in even low profile cases. And forcing a person to testify against their will generally isn’t a good trial strategy for winning cases.