While reducing his sources of income will hurt him a little bit, unfortunately Starlink is very appealing to militaries and emergency services. Being able to access the internet is great for morale in the navy, and mission critical for plenty of emergency services. This is particularly true in Australia where we have vast unpopulated areas with very patchy phone coverage, let alone bandwidth for data services. I know some services are installing starlink as emergency backups for stations and in forward command vehicles. They’ll be paying the big bucks for Starlink.

No, why?

Sounds about right. I’d seen “slot machines” (we call em poker machines or “the pokies”) more times than I can remember before I was 18.

Really we should be asking (I want to know) why FEMA invented their own USAR standards instead of adopting the INSARAG ones? Why the US have put so much more money into USAR and not flood and storm response? Surely after Harvey and Katrina, not to mention tornadoes, you’ve learned that having something like Australia’s SESs would provide you with surge capacity of people skilled in storm damage mitigation and flood rescue? I really would like to know

Well, poor black people at least

1 in 1000 year events are poorly named. One because it describes a likelihood, so this storm had a 0.1% chance of occurring in any given year, so we’d expect to see a storm like this once every thousand years on average. It’s not cyclical. Two, the likelihood of these storms is steadily increasing and so it’s probably no longer a 1 in 1000 year event.