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If you wanna look into another example search for the Abercrombie Plan in Edinburgh: it was a very ambitious urbanistic plan to "modernize" this city. For instance they proposed to demolish all of the historical Georgian and Victorian buildings in Princes Street and replace them with brutalist buildings and a motorway.

by sobellian4 hours ago|

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People have different definitions of progress. I have found that people who are "progressive" on one axis can often be quite conservative on another. Look at the SF Bay Area. While it is quite progressive in the political-ideology sense, we oppose construction that would cause literal progress in the material conditions of the citizenry. "Manhattanization" has been a word used for decades to oppose the thought of densifying SF. My neighbors here in North Bay come out in arms to oppose light bollards on a public footpath. We cannot even progress our footpaths. Rather than build a larger, more inclusive, and cheaper city, you will find countless proponents for rent control - a solution to the question of, "how can I use the law to keep my apartment cheap while refusing to accommodate any more people in the city?"

You are seeing this in this thread. I doubt anyone likes to be described as contra-progress. But nevertheless people would rather conserve the current night sky than see it transmute into a shimmering sea of a million artificial satellites. It's not really obvious to me why one state should be preferable to the other.

by CWIZO9 hours ago|

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Yes? We don't have to blindly and constantly be making progress on everything at all cost. Look around you, look at what all this progress did to the world we live in.

by freedomben6 hours ago|

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Then our descendants will talk about how they were held back by our greedy ancestors who just wanted to be able to look at the night sky and see only natural stars, and they'll be right.

Also let me guess, you have high speed internet avaiable at your house so starlink isn't your only high-speed option right now?

by jagenabler23 hours ago|

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I resent my recent ancestors for tearing up all our cities in favour of motorways, and grateful only that it wasn’t worse. They thought that was progress though, and that cars were the only way to move into the future.

I’m not against advancing in this area, but there is nuance. Progress can be short sighted.

by ivell6 hours ago|

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Progress is a very human centric view. But if you consider earth as a whole system, we have over optimized the system for our benefit while the other parts of the system hugely suffered (other species, environment etc.).

We need to ensure our progress is balanced taking into account the whole system instead of just one part.

by 9 hours ago|

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deleted

by ben_w9 hours ago|

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The alternative to Starlink already existed before Starlink. I'm using it right now.

by freedomben6 hours ago|

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my alternative was dial up or a 10 Mbps flaky wireless ISP. Is that what you're using right now?

by SoftTalker4 hours ago|

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I remember when I first had 10Mbps at my desktop at work. It was amazing. I wonder how slow that would feel today?

by freedomben3 hours ago|

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It's pretty painful, and makes a lot of work from home impossible between meetings, image pulls, etc. Until starlink I had to do development on a cloud vm

by mmsimanga8 hours ago|

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African here living under and shit hole government who has no interest in improving the lives of the people. Starlink has been a game changer! An absolute game changer. I do not support Elon Musk but just putting out there that Starlink is helping kids in remote areas with no electricity (they use small solar panel) to access the Internet.

by JKCalhoun6 hours ago|

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Hopefully they don't part with books—the way kids in the U.S. have. Hopefully they don't spend all their free time on Tik Tok…

by mmsimanga5 hours ago|

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Most people cannot afford to have it in their home. They will get access at school or shopping centre. Most kids don't have phones either but I really do get your point. The other danger is they tend to be susceptible to fake news and stories made up using AI. I have had cousins from the village send me a picture of a mermaid claiming she was caught in one of the rivers.

by ben_w4 hours ago|

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> I have had cousins from the village send me a picture of a mermaid claiming she was caught in one of the rivers.

For what it's worth, this also happens with printed books.

I wasted the latter half of my teens taking New Age occultism and magical powers as a profound topic rather than a literature and culture topic, thanks to a combination of a bookstore chain near where I grew up and a mother who also took this all very seriously.

by JKCalhoun3 hours ago|

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I wasn't suggesting that books are some kind of paragon of "truth". But as I think most HN readers would agree, there's just something… tangible about them that seems to stimulate the brain in a way that ephemeral images on a screen don't.

by moomoo1139 minutes ago|

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what about being a better parent?

i feel like all these problems people come up with stem from the fact they suck at parenting and have to project.

i and most people i know don’t have these problems. we actually care, and our parents cared about us.

when i was growing up it was kids who drank or smoked (we didn’t have smartphones).

just avoid them.

these days if kids are glued to the phone that’s the parents fault. bad parenting.

take kids to the museum or get them to a classical show or something.

if parents make excuses why they can’t, again L parents.

by JKCalhoun6 hours ago|

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Hopefully they don't part with books—the way kids in the U.S. have.

by inglor_cz7 hours ago|

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In some places.

Starlink is a global phenomenon, good ISPs were at best a local phenomenon.

by applfanboysbgon11 hours ago|

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Polluting the sky with junk is not "progress".

by Marha0110 hours ago|

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Colonizing space is progress.

by taotau7 hours ago|

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Yeah, how is that mars colony plan going realistically. have they figured out the bits about how humans are going to survive in a toxic irradiated environment for months on end? I want it to happen, but I honestly havent heard much from spacex about it other than we have to be allowed to develop cheap rockets. There's a lot more involved in a journey to mars than just cheap launch costs.

by bluescrn9 hours ago|

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The word 'colonization' has become rather toxic, though. Maybe we need a new word for occupying barren planets where there's no native life being displaced?

by cramer4next3 hours ago|

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Not toxic unless you subscribe to the lefts redefinition of the term. Most people wouldn't be here if we didn't colonize the new world.

by jagenabler23 hours ago|

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The indigenous populations probably would.

by moomoo1135 minutes ago|

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they were also going around killing each other and ripping out hearts from living people as sacrifices, so given enough time they would have done the same thing.

and they would have been 100x more brutal.

by cramer4next2 hours ago|

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Its highly unlikely that an indigenous population would adopt the colonizer's term. If you look at demographics of those who use that definition of term its mostly people of Anglo-Saxon decent. And its the same people who are living on stolen land.

by antonvs8 hours ago|

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No-one is “colonizing space”, you’re just being conned by a man who figured out he can make a lot of money by convincing people that such fantasies could be real.

The US spends up to $4 billion a year just to keep a few people alive on the ISS. And they can’t stay there too long because it’s too dangerous to their health. The idea that we’re going to “colonize space” in the foreseeable future is laughable.

by inglor_cz7 hours ago|

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Sending robots to space is still a form of building presence there. Not every colonist has to be a human. In fact, they are probably coming last, into pre-prepared positions and bases.

by mhb6 hours ago|

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Airplanes?