/c/flashlight sends its regards

If you own anything with “white” LEDs, I have some bad news for you…

In Iowa, at least, the state had a pre-existing fiber network that got expanded to a shit-ton of rural communities and local (often municipal) ISPs. It’s more expensive than what you’d get in the cities, but much better bang for buck than Starlink.

The only people still struggling to get service are those who live way, way outside those communities – the kind of people for whom “neighbor” means somebody who lives a significant fraction of a mile away. And, outside of comfortably wealthy individuals, those people are a dying breed, at least in Iowa.

If Iowa of all places can pull something like that off, I figure it’s not out of reach of any state (or nation, for that matter) whose inhabitants give a nano-fuck about access to technology.

Speak for yourself.

I mean, we’ve already surpassed The Expanse in some ways (at least the first couple books).

Something that struck me was in Caliban’s War they were relying heavily on mirrors to focus sunlight for growing crops out at Jupiter. I guess the authors just didn’t foresee LED technology advancing as rapidly as it did.

Leviathan Wakes was published in June 2011. Caliban’s War was published in June 2012.

The L-prize “60W” category winner was announced in August 2011 (it was Philips). It didn’t become commercially-available until April 2012, but even then, it was like $50 – far from affordable for most people. Now you can get equivalent or better bulbs for less than 1/10th of that.

Yes.

This is the way.