yeah, it doesn’t a lot of thought to realize that societies thrived when they were… social. this has been repeated throughout history.
the people who go off into the woods as uber survivalists or whatever die alone and forgotten from an infected toenail or something equally as stupid while the society full of people down the mountain thrive and people remember each other.
its wild to me how many people are suckered in by the never ending fear mongering that prepper businesses push on them without ever thinking it through.
while i loved it, i’ve noticed a ton of people despised Don’t Look Up for the same reason some of the theater goers complained in a siblings comment.
> I attended an audience testing screener for Idiocracy … Then the lights came up and the audience started giving their reviews, in an open mike fashion. They all identified with the "idiots" and were indignant insulted, and angry. I remember making eye contact with Mike Judge like "WTF!"
this is a great example of where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap. sorry.”
i truly do believe competition can often drivr things forward but we have countless examples where executives get comfortable and decide their best course of action for profits is to do little to nothing.
if a community has been screaming for fiber internet for years and the service companies cry “oh it’s just too expensive” when we know that isn’t true, then the people who pay the taxes should say “ok, apparently you’re not up to the job, you and/or your business model is clearly a failure, we’ll do it and provide it cheaper than you would have anyway.”
maybe this would force the competition we know can often work. if they can’t figure out a way to do it without subsidies, then we’ll do it ourselves. you can call it “spooky government” all you want, but that’s just another term for “us”
something to the effect of: ok, this thing has become integral to society. ceos, you have 5 years to compete and prove that you’re up to the task by delivering A, B, and C for $N. can’t do it? not up to it? no worries, thanks for trying.
> this is a great example of where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap. sorry.”
That's what my town (Longmont, CO) did! We had laid a fiber loop around the city back in the '90s for traffic signal coordination. Over the years the town would engage different private companies to try to get them to lay fiber (or even directional wifi) to the door. None of them took off, so the city decided to do it themselves. Xfinity tried to sue us and ran a weak attempt at astroturfing, but after about five years of concerted back-hoeing most of the town has gigabit. It isn't 25 gigabit by any means but it works.
Bonus: you call a 303 number for support and somebody who lives here picks up like "What can I do for ya, hun?" (I exaggerate, but not by much). Half an hour later your problem is solved.
> where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap
Thereby accruing not only a capital expenditure but ongoing operational obligation? How is this better than scaring the cable company into fronting the cash to get the same outcome?
Cool, but isn’t this “the next time”, after “the next time”, after “the next time” already? These companies have been threatened, sued, and incentivized in numerous ways over many years, which has yet to be successful, and yet it seems like you are suggesting “just one more time” will be the impetus for change…this time…you swear…probably?
Note: I don’t disagree or agree, rather, I’m pointing out how flawed the logic is that just one more time will be what it takes.
> isn’t this “the next time”, after “the next time”, after “the next time” already?
No, it’s the time that it worked. The cable company upgraded. That’s all that matters. Whether it’s happened many times or not is irrelevant. The next time will come next time.
> which has yet to be successful
OP said they laid the fiber. It was literally successful. Preëmptively striking your service provider because they might screw you in the future is silly.
> this is a great example of where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap. sorry.”
In the US, this would likely end with ISPs suing the government, tying the case up in court for years.
That's nice in theory, but look at how much money has gone to Verizon in the name of rural broadband, and how much they (haven't) delivered. And the consequences.
Municipalities don't know anything about the job and few have the resources and personnel to become sufficiently experienced. I know every other poster on HN has a story where they personally stepped in and saw their local government through the process for incredibly cheap, hey that's great, but how is some random municipality without an elder tech god living with them supposed to get "municipal" internet without contracting with an ISP who actually knows how to get that work done?
We're talking rural broadband. These municipality don't have great human capital for this kind of stuff. Hell, they struggle to just fill potholes.
That is not how it works here. Municipality owned fiber is common here in Sweden (called stadsnät). Often several smaller municipalities join together and co-own the venture.
A common variation is that they just provide the physical infrastructure and you can then select which ISP to use on top of the fiber, from a list of about 15 or so usually. This seems to work fine in rural Sweden, so I don't see why it wouldn't work elsewhere.
As to potholes, that is not a big problem? It is usually a larger problem in the cities than out in the countryside.
i was only using fiber as just one example. but in the case of fiber, there are plenty of non rural areas that still can’t get it and are stuck with terrible options.
even so, even in rural areas, nothing at all stops them from hiring people the same way they hire a weatherman or a police man or a fireman or a city accountant. there are educated intelligent people in rural areas…
I guess we have different versions of HN cause the one I read has headlines on the front page pretty regularly about people (collectives, not individuals) doing their own broadband successfully. There's a reason right-wingers and lobbyists are against this and try to pass laws preventing it. It's because it works and undermines their position as rent-seekers who don't invest in their infrastructure.
> There's a reason right-wingers and lobbyists are against this and try to pass laws preventing it.
There’s a reason POLITICIANS are against this and try to pass laws preventing it.
There, fixed it for you.
Let’s not pretend this is a red or blue problem. It’s a big boot hovering over your head problem. It’s a politician problem.
It doesn’t matter if their colour underwear matches yours. This is about people in power doing what they can to stay in power while guaranteeing their easy money.
Did I say that? No, you made it up. Why you chose to make that up, I can only imagine (or should I make things up too?)
Also everybody else responding to me is ignoring the point that most rural municipalities can barely afford keep their roads marginally flat, let alone tear up the roads, lay fiber, then repair those roads. Municipal fiber is a pipe dream in most scenarios, but workable in reasonably high density regions that have a tax base to work with.
That's the opposite of what was proposed above. Stop paying them altogether and replace them in the places where they aren't competing. I think that was the message.
i’m sorry, but no, starlink is not comparable to fiber.
better than dsl? i mean, sure? but absolutely not even close to better than fiber. there’s a reason data centers in rural areas run fiber for miles and miles to their centers and aren’t on … starlink.
My charitable interpretation: adding a turn-key competitor is a better way to incentive the incumbents than a long fight to add a government competitor.
Straw man. It doesn’t need to comparable. Just sufficient. If a rich rural community wants to pay to lay fiber into the boonies, they can still do that. But it shouldn’t be a shared cost across society. (I live in a rural community.)
What exactly made it possible to get copper wire into effectively every house in the country?
We didn't say "if a rich rural community wants telephones or electricity in the boonies..."
Maybe we need a new Ma Bell that's Uncle Fibre. Give them a very tightly bordered but lucrative monopoly in exchange for mandates to actually build and maintain the network. Perhaps some sort of scheme where consumers actually pay the regulator instead of the service provider, so they can hold payments hostage in the event expansion and QoS goals are not met, giving it real teeth.
It might end up being the same ~USD75-100 per month for 1Gb that many of us are paying for cable now, at least initially, but the cost would be funding making sure people in rural counties are getting modern infrastructure, and gradually ticking up speeds as more and more infra is paid down, rather than on yachts.
> What exactly made it possible to get copper wire into effectively every house in the country?
Subsidies.
> making sure people in rural counties are getting modern infrastructure
Sure. This is inefficient when an alternative is more than sufficient.
Again, I live in a rich rural community. I have gigabit fiber to my home. I have neighbors ditching wired internet for Starlink because it’s cheaper and good enough and they can also put it on their truck when they travel.
My property value does well from the subsidy. But it’s inefficient.
> If people truly want something and it can be done profitably, just start a company and do it yourselves.
There is a specific problem with last mile services: It costs approximately the same amount to install fiber down every street whether you have 5% of the customers or 95%.
So you have an incumbent with no competitors and therefore no incentive to invest in infrastructure instead of just charging the monopoly price for the existing bad service forever. If no one new enters the market, that never changes.
However, if there is a new entrant that installs fiber, the incumbent has to do the same thing or they're going to lose all their customers. So then they do it.
Recall that it costs the same to do that regardless of what percent of the customers you have, but they currently have 100% of the customers. Now no matter what price you charge, if it's enough to recover your costs then it's enough to recover their costs, so they just match your price. Then you're offering the same service or the same price, so there is no benefit to anyone to switch to your service now that they're offering the same thing, and inertia then allows them to keep the majority of the customers. Which means you're now in a price war where you'll be the one to go out of business first because customers will stay with them by default when you both charge the same price. And since this result is predictable, it's hard to get anyone to invest in a company destined to be bankrupted by the incumbent.
Which means that if the customers want someone to compete with the incumbent, they have to invest in it themselves. At which point going bankrupt by forcing the incumbent to install fiber is actually a decent ROI, because you pay the money and then you get fiber. Furthermore, you can even choose to not go bankrupt, by making the basic fiber service "free" (i.e. paid for through local taxes), which then bankrupts the incumbent and prevents the local residents from having to pay the cost of building two fiber networks instead of just one.
There is an elegant way to solve this. Mandate that whoever install the fiber lets other companies run their ISP on top of it (with a small but reasonable cut of the profit presumably). I believe this happens (mandated or not) already for mobile phone networks in the form of MVNOs.
And here in Sweden we have the same for fiber. I don't think it is mandated here, since not every place has multiple options like that, but many do. If you have municipality owned fiber (stadsnät) it always work like that I believe, often you have a choice between 15 or so different ISPs.
why would we do that? not everything has to skim profits to a certain group of people just because they exist. they can use magical competition and build it if they want a piece.
if an area has been waiting for… (what would it be now? around 30 years since the internet took off?) so these companies had 3 decades to build out and have refused, if we the tax payers step in and we pay for it, why should we let them in? they have refused to do anything for literal decades… even worse, many of these companies took billions in subsidies and still did nothing. they’ve refused to be good boot strappin capitalists, for decades.
(i want to reiterate what i said above, i believe competition can often work really really well. but if we dont understand by now that it fails sometimes too, we're not seeing clearly.)
think about how long that is, like some people become grandparents at around 35. someone born in the windows 95 days might have a grandkid and the poor sap still wont be able to get fiber. even in tons of urban and suburban areas.
some of these same ceos have gone on about how perfect the marketplace is, how awful taxes are, how magical the marketplace is… decades later if we have to build it, why should they get a piece?
The physical cable that goes to every house is a natural monopoly. Really it's even more like the conduit the cable is installed in. Doing that part more than once is both fairly inefficient and tends to market failure.
The rest of the service isn't. Transit is a fairly competitive market. You may also have providers willing to use more expensive terminating equipment and then offer higher-than-gigabit speeds on the same piece of fiber. You want the competitive market for every aspect of the system where it can work and to keep the monopoly as narrow as possible.
Notice that the point isn't to let just Comcast use the municipal fiber and then get ~100% of the customers again, it's to let this happen with fiber to the home:
Having the municipality run the whole thing would be even better sure. I'm not sure why we do that mix here in Sweden, but it worked out OK for us I think.
Also, wouldn't those subsidies come with a legaly enforceable requirement to actually build out infrastructure? If not, I think that is where you went wrong.
im saying we shouldnt give them subsidies at all. if they cant make it work in the marketplace, if they arent up to the task, then the competitive marketplace is a failure in that instance. and thats ok.
no subsidies. if they cant do it, fine, we'll do it and we'll provide cheaper than they ever would have. and in the case of fiber, we know this is the case. there are plenty of municipally owned fiber areas that are solid and cheap af.
its ok to admit that the market doesnt always work. often, absofuckinlutely. always? not at all.
a lack of subsidies would make it obvious where those failures exist so we can just do it ourselves (the spooky government) for cheaper. tell them "you had your chance" and move on with our day.
Do I recall incumbent providers lobbying to ensure that competition be forbidden, so that they can continue to charge a lot for bad service? I think at least a couple of years ago, 16 US states had banned community internet at the behest of Comcast and chums.
I suppose that municipal broadband being banned at the behest of incumbent monopolies and duopolies isn't quite outright banning competition; just making it a lot harder to do.
This line of thinking comes up so often, but ignores second order effects. I don't need schools because I have no children, but I will certainly depend on well educated children entering the workforce.
Or, more facetiously, I don't need a subsidised fire service because no building I visit is currently on fire.
Yes but you cannot make up more than about 10-15 examples everyone will agree with, seeing as those are subsidized in practically every country on earth, and then apply the thinking the guy above you gives for everything else.
In my opinion internet access is as fundamental a right now as water access so I think it should be subsidized to a fair degree.
But not for example if it is to supply only a small island of rich people just because they happen to want to live there and force the rest of the state to supply them. There's nuance to these things and we can't just outright subsidized everything and we can't market economy everything either
I agree with you. The internet is now important enough that it's required for almost everything past basic sustenance. Governments worldwide are moving services to the internet, so it's not even optional any more.
As precedent, the framers of the US Constitution specifically authorized the government to run a national service provider of last resort...
In that technological era of horses and handwriting, it became the US Postal Service, but I think if it occurred today it would be the US Networking Service.
If it was easy to do with a lot of margin it would have been done by someone else in the private sector. In fact, they tricked these companies into making investments that weren't worthwhile for them. Sounds like the kind of people the deserve the shitty internet they have.
I hear vending machine ppl often have 1-3 very profitable locations and 10-40 locations that only barely make sense often only because they already are in the business.
I imagine hiring someone to fix or restock them makes a lot more sense if you have 100 machine rather than just one.
It really depends what the goal is. Profit with fiber or fiber with profit?
Here public transport is required to cover all routes. Postal service is the same. Fiber doesn't seem that different?
The problem is all the regulatory stuff that means the bigger you are and the longer you've operated for the better you understand and have relationships with the often pretty inept regulatory bodies that can stop you.
Then as the local government, maybe start by removing that regulation. Or if the regulation is required, you're going to have to pay a premium for people willing and able to put up with it.
This is a fundamental problem of value creation and value extraction. Just because the ISP's can't extract the value of adding the additional fiber capacity doesn't mean it doesn't confer that value to the customers. We live in an age of value extraction, what's colloquially known as "enshittification", that can't go on forever. Somebody has to create the value that is being extracted.
It's the old Marx quote: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". Except you know, the opposite.
I have a lot of ability. I'm not gonna flex it for others without pay that gives me significantly higher living standards than the average person. Are you going to force me to work?
No, however there's a bunch of people with your abilities that will do it because they're capable of seeing that something as crucial as internet access is a public good. You can choose to not work, plenty of us will make things move forwards without you, nor care about your living standards.
Thanks for writing a reply. I was wondering why this comment was floating around 0. I realize it's pretty contentious politics on HN, but I figured the philosophical point is at least interesting anyway, and that HN would be able to separate the two. Your reply helps me adjust that assumption.
> There are a lot of things you can do in a rich, tiny, homogenous country that you can't do in an enormous, diverse country.
US states are little islands entirely capable of doing things like building infrastructure. There is no excuse for our states and their lack of movement, certainly not “the entire country is just tooooo big. whoa is us.” nonsense.
this is one of the reasons im hearing more and more people are using open/locally hosted models. particularly so we dont have to waste time to entirely redo everything when inevitably a company decides to pull the rug out from under us and change or remove something integral to our flow, which over the years we've seen countless times, and seems to be getting more and more common.
products entirely disappearing or significantly changing will be more and more common in the llm arena as things move forward towards companies shutting down, bubbles deflating, brand priorities drastically reshifting, etc...
i think, we're at or at least close to a time to really put some thought into which pieces of your flow could be done entirely with an open/local model and be honest with ourselves on which pieces of our flow truly needs sota or closed models that may entirely disappear or change. in the long run, putting a little bit of thought into this now will save a lot of headache later.
Yeah. Back when Gemma2 came out we benchmarked it and were looking at open models. For our use case though, while the tasks are pretty simple, we do need a pretty large context window and Gemini had a big lead there over the open models for quite a while. I'll probably be evaluating the current batch of open models in the near future though.
i thought it would bother me, but honestly, tehre are just too many good games that dont require eac.
i would imagine eac on linux will have to be addressed once steam machines drop, but for now i look at it like, if a game requires eac, at this point the game studio is just too lazy or cheap [0] to be linux compatible so we just play something else. far too many great games.
[0] its even more silly considering eac doesnt seem to stop cheaters at all. every single popular game that requires eac is still absolutely overflowing with more than obvious cheaters.
It's not the same as EasyAntiCheat and doesn't support the same features. It's like saying Excel works on iPad, but you can't even use VBA on that.
Or a game example: I have Minecraft (Bedrock) on my phone so therefore I should be able to do the same things as Minecraft (Java) on Windows. The problem is they're the same names for different software with similar, but not the same, functionality.
So you're saying that easy anti cheat on linux is different from on windows? I am aware it is not as effective as detecting cheating on linux, but does this affect gameplay itself? Or do game developers not want reduced efficacy of detecting cheaters, and so they don't support linux at all?
I don't play those games myself but the word is that the EAC on linux lacks the same kernel hooks that are available on Windows. I personally consider that a plus but if you're a developer obsessed with strong anti-cheat you probably do not.
Linux kernel provides ways to observe from user space. The problem is that there’s nothing to stop someone running a kernel which neuters anticheat tools ability to observe using that functionality. As far as I’m aware the only way to mitigate that is via measured boot attestation and having signed kernel etc.
i can say with a pretty high confidence level that few people in the free software movement want the closed off black boxes these companies are locking away.
they’re not free in any sense of the word. from price to openness of the models. would openai cry if every bit of their models were wide open for us to use however we see fit? if so, then it’s not free, again, in any definition of the word.
Yeah same. Both things are true and if we’re being honest, one more than the other.
The grid is ailing, but it is data centers pushing it over the edge. A newer and more robust grid wouldn’t be hurt by them. But without them the grid wouldn’t be failing. Be honest and draw the correct causal relationship.
Yep - this is the same BS marketing campaign the Chevron tried to (succeeded actually) pull of in the early 2000's WRT global warming. There's was energy. The campaigns were like "I will take the bus to work" or "I will use my hair drier less".
It's a deflection campaign - focusing consumer attention on a thing that is true (that won't cost them money) to divert attention from another thing that is true (that will cost them money and is their fault).
Both are true - and if they want to exploit a commons (the environment, the electrical grid), then they should pay for that exploit.
the people who go off into the woods as uber survivalists or whatever die alone and forgotten from an infected toenail or something equally as stupid while the society full of people down the mountain thrive and people remember each other.
its wild to me how many people are suckered in by the never ending fear mongering that prepper businesses push on them without ever thinking it through.
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