So the Travels Begin

I’ve been posting pretty regularly for almost exactly five months, and I’m very happy with it. I’m glad that Kay agreed to write here, and I appreciate that the comments here are well-informed, courteous and smart. Thanks to Kay and thanks to everyone who reads and comments.

My rig build is pretty close to done. So we’re hitting the road. Posting will be less frequent. I guess one of the good things about this being an email newsletter is that you’ll know when I post because it will hit your inbox.

Before leaving, I further enriched Elon Musk by buying my second Starlink. This is the Starlink Mini. My wife and I had very mixed emotions about it, but it’s unfortunately critical for work on the road, which we both do. This is especially true for video conferencing.

Anyway, me buying another Starlink and paying the hefty price for monthly service is sort of a symbol of where we are in 2025. Starlink is an amazing technology. This is the new dish (photo from an ad):

It’s about the size of a large piece of paper and about 2 inches thick. This dish uses about 1/3 of the power of the Gen 2 dish that I bought two years ago, which is huge for camping off-grid. Yet, I get about 100 down and 10 up with it, which is fine for anything we want to do (and better than a lot of rural Internet).

But the technological innovation comes with a price that Musk would like all of us to pay: complete fealty to his whims, even though government contracts essentially enabled Starlink. Like other services I use on the road, Uber/Lyft and AirBnB (sparingly) for example, the masters of the universe running them want us to think they’re so revolutionary that government regulation will render them useless. This isn’t true for ride sharing or ghost hotels, and it isn’t true for Starlink. I like Starlink, but I don’t like being a hostage to Musk’s bullshit.