Mobile phones have a battery life of about one day. A bit les | Not boring, and a bit of a condescending prick

Mobile phones have a battery life of about one day.

A bit less if you're lucky, a bit more if you prioritized battery life when choosing the phone, and some 5x more if you have a power bank on you.

Life changes with a charger in your pocket. Your "battery life" is effectively infinite now. In the vast majority of places these days total strangers would let you charge your phone, for free. The cost of power, after all, is miniscule.

In fact, if your phone needs a standard charger, there's a good chance you don't need your charger with you at all; in many, if not most places you could find yourself at people would be happy to have your phone charged.

If you are a semi-frequent Starbucks, or virtually any, coffee shop visitor, quite frankly, you don't have to worry about charging your phone at all. A daily cup of coffee, virtually by definition, does pay this bill.

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Why can't we, as the civilization, do the same for the Internet?

Forget video. Forget streaming. Three very basic Internet usecases are:

⒈ 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. To read Wikipedia, or my favorite book, or today's news.
⒉ 𝗠𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴. End-to-end encrypted, and unconditionally free from censorship of course.
⒊ 𝗣𝗮𝘆𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀. A healthy mix of Venmo / Zelle and crypto. Banks are welcome.

Banks, in (3) are, of course, welcome, as are third-party messenging platforms in (3), as long as they provide the basic guarantee of unconstrained wealth transfer and unconstrained message passing.

In other words, most of today's banks and today's messengers are not welcome (the former have a tendency to block innocent payments, the latter have been caught multiple times failing to send the messages which the platform "does not endorse"). They are still welcome. On the proper API terms.

Let's get this Net Neutrality thing working. I don't care about the term; it would likely need to change. Still, there's no reason at all that poor kids all over the planet are deprived from a feature as simple as sending a "Hello" message, or sending $10 to a friend, or reading today's news.

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Maybe this would be the largest impact Elon Musk makes all in all. Make Starlink available 24/7 for ~1KB/s traffic, unconditionally. Simple as that.

If he attaches a cryptocurrency to this (a possible future for DOGE, right?), this alone could be cash-positive AF. I sincerely hope this, or something like this, is about to happen some time very soon.