Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

Sure, and I have a similar view. Show me what we bought for $640M instead of just saying we spent $640M. How many people did we house for that? How many people weren't living on the streets because of it? What kind of conditions were they in? How many nights did we cover? What was average spent per person per night? Is that a reasonable cost? Just complaining about $640M answers none of these things.

You've got an overly simplistic view of government spending if just looking at a dollar amount (which is peanuts in terms of the overall spending of even this one agency) is enough for you to get upset about it.

We're going to need many, many billions from FEMA for this, which comes from a separate budget entirely. If this disaster costs FEMA $50B in relief (probably a way too low estimate), that migrant cost is only 1.3% of the total outlays of just this one storm. But FEMA has already spent over $20B on disaster relief this year so if this storm does end up costing $50B that's really $70B in disaster relief alone along with the several billion in other spending FEMA usually has. So really more like 640M / 75B == Arguing that $640M spent on migrant housing efforts is somehow massively impacting FEMA's responses to disasters is just ignoring reality. Its less than 1% of the money FEMA has to spend. Argue you don't think the migrants deserved the housing, but don't act like FEMA's response would have been materially different to any disaster if that money hadn't been spent. Because that's not based in reality at all.

And if you're upset about FEMA's allegedly poor responses to other disasters (not personally claiming either way here to any specific response), what makes you think just throwing more money at those responses would have solved whatever problems were there? I thought we were wanting to argue for the government to give us more bang for our buck not just throw more money at problems without going into deeper analysis of supposed failures. Maybe those issues were underbudgeting, maybe they were management issues, maybe they were issues outside of FEMA entirely.

Having a really big focus on Any amount of government waste is worth talking about to me. But just throwing out an amount and saying it was spent on migrants isn't telling me its waste. Pointing out that half that was spent at a Ritz-Carlton for a dozen migrants would be, but that's probably not the reality of the spend.

I was curious about this and triple checked. Some claims had citations. Therefore at least some were supported.

I wrote:

> Somewhat helping a couple hundred people out of a million plus, is not quite the "nice" gesture.

I understand a bit more the disconnect now. I did not write carefully that I meant that as a hypothetical, in the context of an "at worst." As a claim, I would agree it is unsupported. And I agree it can reasonably read that way. I can see how that would bias the reading of the rest of the content.

> that dude that bought 50 StarLinks on his own credit card and hauled them out to those in need

Is that a real example? I'm willing to take your word for it. I don't read twitter nor reddit. Those types of anecdotes are not reported on from the sources I read.

Which is to say, you genuinely have some info I don't have. No logical traps. I am learning more about the scale and utility of starlink. Anecdotes do not make data, at the same time I appreciate the info. I do wish you could unbias the conversation, make it about ideas and data, and not make this personal.

Fair call for lithium chemistries, which will probably drop closer to one order of magnitude within 2-3 years (if the trend from the last year-to-date holds). But if we're talking about sodium ion, I wouldn't be surprised if that did drop by a couple of orders of magnitude, which is already sitting about ~140USD/kwh for consumer packs (but before shipping from China). It has a weird discharge voltage curve and needs a more capable inverter to handle it though, but at the prices I'm seeing, overcapacity is plenty affordable.

Or if you're looking now at sodium ion. It's only just hitting the consumer market, but it's already cheap enough for energy storage at the scale GP is talking about. Might take a few years for cell quality, inverter, and charging technology to improve, but by 2030 it will be so dirt cheap to the point that it would be economically sensible for any household.