As someone who moved here 2 years ago… yeah that was one of the first things I learned. Kislings seems to mostly bank on their fame and location I think; they’re always busy but don’t have a good selection of beer (well, there’s always solid demand for basic macro beer I guess) and after 2 mediocre-yet-pricey batches of wings I went back to Lighthouse, where the bartenders know my name.

Nice to see Lighthouse get some love around here! I’ve been a fan of their wings for a while now, some of the best on the east side IMHO.

The Dude abides. My Neanderthal guy was just looking for some milk for his Caucasians.

Everything’s impossible to enforce in Baltimore. Just, uh, not in any other city. It’s an excuse I’m tired of seeing. We are better than this!

Add the unique stresses caused by the pandemic, followed by recent inflation and higher interest rates, and I’d be surprised if many more restaurants that usual aren’t close to folding right now.

Oh yeah you can definitely track the phone, have it make noises, reset/wipe etc., so long as the battery has power.

Yes, iPhone has basically the same thing, and it’s pretty easy to do. It won’t get your phone back but it’ll save your data and make it slightly harder for those punks to make money off the phone.

OP, sorry about your situation! That’s terrible 😔

Echos control 70% of the home smart speaker market in the US. Ending Alexa would devastate that market and Amazon’s ability to maintain a presence there at all.

They need to go the Costco route and view it as a loss leader. $5 rotisserie chickens apparently cost the company $30-40mn/year. But their annual revenue is over $200bn. How many people buy smart stuff on Prime to work with their cheap ass Dots that cost $20 on Black Friday?

Maybe we are in the minority, but a lot of people I know have smart home stuff and an Echo Dot is one of the most affordable ways to control them. And Amazon sells a LOT of smart home stuff. If Amazon is going to profit off Alexa, that’s where, not in sales or ads from the device.

Tbh, I see zero advantage to ever buying anything with Alexa. That function is a useless novelty to me and can actually be problematic if you have kids. But these things are so incredibly useful otherwise.

Edit: I mean, I could always use the clunkier Google thing or the pricey HomePod or just my phone I guess, but then Amazon gets even less money from me and loses out on a major market opportunity.

Specifically along Baltimore St.

Good to know. It’s a little annoying, though most of you seem to agree their product is tasty!

I’m not from bmore and spent much of the past 20 years living on bases where military police will quickly have uh, very nice words if you’re noisy after 10 on weeknights, so it’s just a different environment. Thanks for helping me understand what’s going on in my quirky adopted home :)

It’s good to hear the at least quasi-positive vibes about the night shift ice cream trucks. It’s annoying if you’re trying to sleep and several of my neighbors have little kids, but at least the consensus seems to be it’s delish stuff :)

Who said anything about hiding it? (Probably won’t matter much in a couple weeks)

Just not in the city 😢

(Seems like some are getting better though, must be that infrastructure bill money from last year. Thanks Biden!)

I’d ride it 5x a week; it would’ve been perfect, but here I am driving a car like a peasant.

Interesting, and makes sense. Thanks for your comment!

Thanks for your input! This is right along the lines of what I’ve heard before: term limits strengthen lobbyists by creating a revolving door of inexperienced politicians.

I’ve been doing my job for 15 years and am just getting comfortable as a senior level expert. I can’t imagine how much more experience it takes to run a city.

NASA had reported they were paying closer to $9k/lb with SpaceX but that could’ve been older data. Like I said, I saw a different price on every website I looked 😅

Oh thanks for that latency correction! That makes a huge difference.

Yeah so that’s a bit of a complex thing. I know satellites can technically reach anyone in their footprint, with a few exceptions (like those near the edge). But the towers can provide incredibly fast connection if you’re close by, but that drops off rapidly. I live about 170-200 meters from one of those little 5G internet antennas (the lamp post sized ones, not the giant cell towers), and can barely receive it’s signal, partly because of blocked line of sight (a row of brick townhomes; they’re probably limited in how high they can raise them due to skyline interruption or whatever). Just rough guesstimating based on some really crappy math, there’s probably something in the vicinity of 400-500 townhomes in range of that thing, just not me! The internet tells me they have a range of 300-450 meters but that probably is under ideal conditions: say, a taller tower in a less densely populated area.

That’s still probably more than enough customers to justify the relatively low cost of putting hundreds or even thousands of these things up in dense urban neighborhoods, compared to say, running cables and junction boxes and such.

The taller cellular service towers would have a greater range but maybe not massively so because as I understand it, the ultra wideband 5G doesn’t have quite the range of lower frequencies used on 4G (or lower band 5G) so your top 5G speeds are really gonna depend a lot more on how close you are to that tower, how densely they’re packed in, and a lot more on the kind of obstructions that are in the LOS than lower frequency wireless products.

What’s that number for Starlink? At least, how many people could a single satellite cover with solid ultrasuperludicrous-HD Rings of Power streaming worthy speeds at once? I’m sure it varies a bit because the satellites are constantly moving but what’s the rough stats?

Thanks, this was very informative!

A hell of a lot more. By my estimates you get at least 50 of those 5G towers per satellite. But the satellites also have greater latency (about 500ms to LEO, IIRC, due to limits on the speed of light) and lower total bandwidth (around 1gbps compared to 8gbps with the towers). Those numbers are subjective of course so it depends but I just can’t see Starlink outperforming terrestrial internet where such internet is available.

In addition to the issues others have expressed, I think we still underestimate just how damn expensive it is to send anything to space. I’m having a little trouble finding anything definitive because each site I look at seems to vary wildly in how much things cost, but a general price for low earth orbit insertion is ~$5-10k per lb and each Starlink satellite is 573lb. It’s estimated they cost between $250-500k/ea though that almost certainly does not include launch costs (my napkin math is $1.5-3 million total). SpaceX might send them at cost, since it’s their own company, significantly reducing that per pound cost but that’s still a lot of money.

These satellites have a limited lifespan and will need to be replaced every few years (once they run out of thrust fuel they’ll gradually de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere). SpaceX’s Starlink has about 3,000 in orbit now.

OTOH, a 5G internet tower costs more like $40k, is always in range (though it’s coverage area is much, much much smaller), will have much less latency due to shorter distance, greater bandwidth, and doesn’t need to be fully replaced every few years. So putting a few thousand of these things around a large city should provide decent coverage and faster speeds for a fraction of the cost of satellites.

It’s not a bad system. There are many strong use cases for satellite internet, especially in more rural areas and places where infrastructure is lacking or hard to build. And economics of scale + slowly improving technology do continue to bring satellite costs down. It’s just definitely not the most effective internet for most urban and many suburban folks, especially in western countries where fiber and 5G towers are already very common.

This makes me happy :)