Z & Elon
Spare me their Twitter bullshit
Z invites Elon to Kyiv. Ugh.
Maybe The Operator can arrange the visit. Sean Penn can accompany. With Imagine Dragons. They can all sing Carol of the Bells after Klitschko erects the 12-meter tall diesel-generator powered Xmas tree next week.
Some time ago, before Putin tried to decapitate Kyiv, Ukraine announced that every community with a hundred potential broadband subscribers would have ADSL brought to them. Months later my local mairie in Semihory snapped into action by putting a petition on its reception desk. But in a village where the median age is about seventy, and where there are probably more hatchets than computers, and where no one ever goes to the селсовет, there was no mad rush to sign up. So I had to do it myself.
For years I tried to get satellite to work, but the rates were always ridiculous (consumption-wise, analogous to a hundred bucks for a bowl of tapwater), and while my Fijitsu could theoretically be configured to negotiate the VPN moat and drawbridge of satellite broadband, people were happy to point out that no one ever had.
After Kyivstar erected a tower up the road, though, rates became more affordable. Thanks to Elon, I pay nothing for my Starlink connection. Packages are on offer that compete in price with terrestrial DSL, without miserly bandwidth limitations. So I just signed the hell up, using a false name and fake address. My connection is a lot faster than the retired Russian general with the pig and goat cheese farm two хутори away.
My two Twitter accounts are abdymok and dronedept. I use them to keep track of bodega cats and Ukraine experts, such as Timothy Snyder, who is finding it enormously difficult to put together a lecture about Ukraine’s contemporary political history post Independence.