GreyEyedGhost

I'm not saying you're wrong, but the people who have enough money to travel to the States, but not so much money that they wouldn't travel elsewhere are doing a lot less traveling to the States. That segment of the population has been very vocal with their travel dollars that they don't approve of the political stance or America right now. No, they probably aren't a majority, but they aren't insignificant, either, and they are making their opinions heard in a very clear manner. Likewise store purchases. I don't buy Tostitos/Lays anymore. I barely buy Pringles. My go-to for chips is Old Dutch (which has an American parent company but is produced in Canada with at least partly Canadian ingredients) or other Canadian brands. Enough people are doing it that it's impacting display decisions at grocers (some of which is to basically lie to us and make us think things are more Canadian than they really are). Both of those are signs that it's more than just some angry minority being vocal, there is a quiet segment of the population that simply puts in varying amounts of effort to not send money to America.

And one isn't even relevant in this case.

That's not really how orbits work. Unless there is a stabilizing burn or very unusual conditions the debris will have an eccentric orbit, going both lower and higher than the impact point. And passing below the orbits of the starlink satellites will expose them to even more atmosphere than they will be at the starlink orbit, so their orbits will decay faster than their apogee would suggest. Sure, some will experience the right conditions to put them in an orbit such that the perigee is at the altitude of the starlink orbits or even higher, but the vast majority will not.

This does not preclude carelessness or malice causing impacts, the launch in question being the former and China's satellite destruction previously being the latter. Do you think Starlink isn't releasing their orbital paths to other launch organizations? And that net is generally very predictable. Any deviation from the existing orbit is done at the expense of the lifespan of the satellite and while there are a lot of those satellites, there's far more empty space between them. The kind of planning that rocket launches normally get is more than enough to hit those windows, along with the other windows rocket launches normally have to hit.

That's a great point, and has almost nothing to do with Kessler Syndrome. But what can I say? I live near a city where the leaders of a few nations decided it would be fun to test the effects of fallout by releasing radioactive dust over it. Aluminum oxide is pretty benign, comparatively.

Certainly, the consequences of our actions need to be considered, but let's stick to the legitimate ones, such as what you listed, and not the highly improbable ones such as Kessler Syndrome.

Debris from a collision can be flung in all directions, including higher orbits.

Possible, but not at all likely. The joy of orbits are they're pretty predictable because after the energy is applied the object just keeps following a path. To get a higher circular orbit would require deceleration at the right point to stabilize it. If this doesn't happen, and it doesn't in a collision, you will have a new orbit that will more or less pass through the altitude of the impact. So while it may have a higher apogee, it will have a lower perigee, which means it will suffer more drag due to more atmosphere. So the vast majority of debris from the collision of a LEO satellite collision will naturally deorbit, possibly faster than if the satellite hadn't just become inert in its orbit.

The low orbits that need to be constantly maintained or they naturally deorbit are the exact opposite of Kessler Syndrome. If every Starlink satellite was to disintegrate right now, the majority of the debris would be gone in 5 years.

So, "nuclear test und an uninhibited island" next?

Un inhabited?

Edit: apparently you can't have partial words italicized.

I almost always called family from the previous generations by title and first name, or just title. So, Grandpa, Aunt Sue, etc. Cousins and siblings got first name only. My kids call their immediate parents mom and dad, and their step-parents mom or my wife's first name. I rarely associate with my ex or her husband, and they refer to him when talking to me by his first name. If they were close enough to him to refer to him as dad, I'd be happy for them to have that good a relationship.

A single point of data rarely answers the question unless you're looking for absolutes. "Will zipping 10 files individually be smaller than zipping them into a single file?" Sure, easy enough to do it once. Now, what kind of data are we talking about? How big, and how random, is the data in those files? Does it get better with more files, or is the a sweet spot where it's better, but it's worse if you use too few files, or too many? I don't think you could test for those scenarios very quickly, and they all fall under the original question. OTOH, someone who has studied the subject could probably give you an answer easily enough in just a few minutes. Or he could have tried a web search and find the answer, which pretty much comes down to, "It depends which compression system you use."