I think one of the issues with taking bribes is that even corrupt people don't want to completely ruin the economy because you don't want the people trying to bribe you lack the money to do so. Or in other words, even apart from any moral issues you don't want to kill your golden goose.

you underestimate how shortsighted republicans are

They can ruin the economy all they want. The people who are bribing them aren't going to run out of money.

Maybe not the top 5 out of those people but the rest certainly will.

What does it matter, the rest didn't bribe them anyway...

They won't. Not even the top 100. Politicians are relatively cheap to buy.

Uhhh – the politicians politicized money to companies to make tubes that we never got. Not sure if elaborating on details of tubes is going to help clear things up.

Ah yes, who needs fiber when you have an inferior product that will be worse in every calculable way?

Pay no attention to the person who stands to benefit from this deal. There’s definitely nothing illegal about it.

So what if the owner of Starlink just happened to spend a quarter of a billion dollars to get the current president elected? That surely has nothing to do with the abysmal Starlink service stealing away funding for critical infrastructure.

They were never building that, let's be honest.

Edit: rural broadband is like the new affordable housing, high speed rail, or better public transit... It's something that's completely possible to do but they'll always find some excuse to do nothing so they can campaign on it again next cycle

But just think how blazing fast the speeds will be! When they're hurtling out of orbit and crashing into your house!

If your nationwide fibre internet plan rollout was even half as bungled and bullshit as ours here in Australia, it must be a shitshow. It was used as a political pawn, with one party wanting to NOT finish it so they could use it to help get them re-elected endlessly, and the other party opposing it because it wasn't their idea, and pushing an alternative terrible plan that was far slower and far more expensive in the long term. In the end we got a terrible mix of both.

Why would they fall out of orbit?

This is proof of why Direct Democracy is better than "Representative" "Democracy"

I think it's mostly because they're told to.

Every single time the land line ISPs have gotten money for rural broadband, they use it for something else and don't build anything. Starlink actually built a network that works. Many places have gotten decent 5G home internet too.

I have been promised fiber for over a decade yet the only wired connection available is a DSL network that's been so poorly maintained that it barely even functions.

It was basically up to the states this time around, they could allocate BEAD funds more or less as they wanted and absolutely build fiber out to the vast majority of residences (look at North Dakota, it's evidently possible) through models like municipal fiber.

Ultimately it's a political issue more than anything else, Americans just can't get anything done anymore, politicians would rather enrich themselves and voters only care about the culture war.

Counterpoint: the fact that the moral "don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs" even exists is proof that people are indeed greedy and/or stupid enough to do that very thing.

I don't recall labor not wanting to finish it? My recollection was that it was the libs not wanting to go through with it and that's how we got fibre to the node after they were elected.

I get that running fibre all the way to every premises in rural areas like Alice Springs would have been ridiculous though.

Wireless data transmission should only ever be used for nomadic, temporary, and/or sacrificial links.

They’re useful for quick deployment, but are intrinsically brittle and terrible for resiliency and efficiency.

The longer the dependence on them for a given use case, the less defensible arguments in support of them become.

I’m all for the use of satellite delivery of internet services, but only when it’s used in conjunction with a broader roll out of hardwired infrastructure, at which point it can reasonably be relegated to serving as a secondary, backup diverse path.

Labor could have finished it easily if they wanted to, but they dragged their butts because they knew it was a vote winner. Just like almost every big issue, they never want to actually implement it fully because they want to continue using it to get re-elected.