Nothing AI can do replaces the important part of my work.

or the common sense to not store absolutely everything they own with one giant megacorp

This is, I believe, the definition of a free market choice

Yes, a free market isn't the answer to everything. It will never optimise for sustainability unless this is a conscious consumer choice factor. It's way too important to leave it to that though. Hence regulation.

Just change the underlying economic incentives - but nobody is even barely there yet, except maybe the EU. Doughnut Economics, when are you going to save us (& the planet)?

Fair enough, and I agree that regulation is often needed, but we cannot, in general, expect it to have only the consequences explicitly sought.

Reads like AI slop and the name makes me want to take a shower

ok

How is Starlink flying too high? Their orbital decay is something like 5 years right?

Starlink is just under 600km in order to target a specific voluntary threshold of 25 year decay. Most of their finished birds are going to make around 5 years without propulsion or impacts.

Three things about that -

Profitability generates competition, which may or may not respect precedent. Right now Starlink is only really worried about collisions with other parts of Starlink. We cannot afford a Starlink-inspired future to happen at 600km.

Debris generating events can spin out an object with much higher cross sectional mass than an intact satellite. Think of it in terms of what we use drag for on Earth, like a kid building kites. A heavy metal bolt works worse as a kite than a long thin panel.

These calendar decay timelines are blind to density. If there are a billion satellites with a natural lifespan of 5 years flying at 551km then they are going to go into an exponential cascade in a matter of weeks. If you plan to launch very large constellations, you need very fast decay timelines to keep that safe. It is much safer at very low altitude. There is decay 'room' for >10x as many satellites at 300km as at 400km, and >10x as many at 400km as at 500km, and >10x as many at 500km as 600km.

...

It would also be nice to set aside something for manned spaceflight. Unlike with a satellite collision, if a pressure vessel gets penetrated everybody dies and nobody wants to go back. The ISS and Tianhe are going to have to deal with debris risk slowly raining down from a collision at 971km.

Fortunately we have ample local alternatives in Seattle to pick from

Paradox of tolerance

source?

Rayiner says it in a comment upthread. Whereas most lawyers in the US work on cases filed in state court, Rayiner works on cases filed in Federal court, and if you were to sue the US government to try to assert the free-speech rights of the immigrants we are talking about, you'd do it in Federal court.

Sadly, his comment has been flagged.

my solution is to buy a basic kindle with wifi and use that to download the books, then transfer them to calibre directly from the kindle