That, or maybe $140M is a gross over estimate, or is referring to more than what’s discussed in the article? I’m tending toward that; it can’t possibly cost anywhere near $10k per subscriber to build out fiber normally, even in small cities, can it? Seems like if it was normally that expensive, there wouldn’t be fiber anywhere. What’s so different in Boulder? I’d speculate that CenturyLink paid less than $1k to run fiber to my house, even if I include my share of their neighborhood & citywide costs.
Fort Collins is in the midst of this right now, they proposed borrowing "up to 150 million" to roll their municipal fiber out. The cost break down is here, page 5.
I got a survey from Larimer County about having municipal internet. Of course, it doesn’t seem like it will make it to my place outside of Estes Park. I’m stuck with a 5mbps WISP :/.
> it can’t possibly cost anywhere near $10k per subscriber to build out fiber normally, even in small cities, can it?
I don't know, because I don't possess any expertise in the matter. What I do have is a history of watching public works projects budgets balloon completely out of control. It seems far more likely, given history, that this estimate is low.
Costs in Boulder are quite a bit higher than other cities because we have very little to no topsoil in areas, you hit bedrock (which is often granite) immediately, and you need to drill or blast that out for most underground construction.
At least that was the line Google fed us when we got rejected for their fiber, who knows.
I have not studied the whole Boulder area in detail, but as a PhD Geologist and having visited friends in Boulder that have added a basement to their house, I'd say you might have been fed some misinformation. Maybe little topsoil but lots of glacial till. They might be right about digging being expense though. Glacial till can be full of huge boulders that are hard to trench.
There are a couple areas where there is tons of topsoil sure, like in South Boulder I think many houses have basements, but as soon as you get out west or north you'll see all granite. Being a geologist I'm guessing you know the wide range of formations and different geologic timeframes we have across the span of like two miles.
I live on glacial till, can confirm it's a huge pain to dig through, just in my own backyard. Drilling holes for anchors, I spend more time prying fist sized rocks than drilling. Which is incredibly difficult in a four foot deep, ten inch wide hole.
I heard on the grapevine that the real reason was that city council tried to hold the new campus hostage as a bargaining chip (nice campus you have there, it'd be a shame if the property was re-assessed and greatly increased your tax burden) but Google was having none of it and pulled the plug then and there.
It seems dumb that poles are uncommon in an area with little topsoil over a granite substrate? Why so fancy? Incidentally this could mean that the trailer parks are cheaper to serve than swankier neighborhoods; there are lots of poles in trailer parks.
winter storms and strong winds. i've never lost power in the boulder area, except when a substation failed, regardless of the weather. when i lived in areas with overhead lines, power loss was a regular event, occurring during winds that would be considered mild in boulder.
Regularly trimming trees around the power line seems less expensive than boring through granite? The frequency of storm-related outages is a good proxy for how much the power company is spending on vegetation removal.
The front range gets 100mph+ chinook winds, and late spring storms dump feet of heavy snow leading to what we affectionately call "treemageddon", during which town will be filled with the thunder of trees crashing down for hours and hours. It's not an ideal environment for lines on poles.
at least in newer developments, my understanding is most underground channels (think sewers) generally provide some facility for running new lines/equipment in them, to reduce the number of times that city streets need to be dug up to lay x,y or z.
I work for an ISP, typical cost for just labor + materials for fiber is $10k per mi., labor being the majority of the cost. I live in the midwest and fiber techs start getting paid around $25 per hour and it can take a crew of 2-3 guys for a few hours per household which if you have in-house guys isn't as much but if you're contracting it out can inflate cost 2-3x. That's if you don't have to make the run down the street and live close to a node.
We're in the opposite position from people that doubted whether the human body could cope with transport faster than a horse.
We have pretty good data for what very high G-forces do to the human body and what the failure rates of rocket launches are, and neither are compatible with routine commercial flight.
If you consider that the early jets (ie comet) had a tendency to disintegrate, and take a speculative view that rockets have largely been in the comet era for perhaps a prolonged period (40-50 years!) and take another speculative leap that current technology/space companies are going to improve this by orders of magnitude (lots of ifs) then it isn’t too far removed.
And the cost of a flight would be 300-400k in fuel, which means that tickets would be roughly premium economy cost or business cost. Business would eat up day trip returns from ny to shanghai in a heartbeat. Maybe people would have to wear a g force suit like pilots?
> ...how many CO deaths from accidentally leaving the car running in the garage were happening before the introduction of key fobs vs. now.
The great thing about the free market is that information spurs innovation. News stories like these make consumers aware of risks they couldn't recognize before. Now we, as informed buyers, can seek out these safety features in the products we buy.
Yeah, no. Humans are awful at estimating any low-probability event. That's why seatbelts and air bags took so long to catch on, despite being positive changes.
Well, in fairness, another big factor in the case of air bags for sure, and seat belts to an extent, is that the auto companies fought them (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970118).
It seems that the humans in this thread are equally bad at it, considering the clamor for government force over an infinitesimally small number of admittedly tragic events.
> Which ISPs are so bad that you want to use external services, which are further in distance than your ISP, for speed?
When I upgraded my WiFi equipment at home a month ago I thought it was defective. Multiple times every day I'd seem to lose connectivity to the internet. After two weeks it occurred to me that my previous router was configured to do a couple things for me, one of which was overriding what DNS servers were assigned with DHCP. I reconfigured my new equipment to use those DNS servers and suddenly everything works normally.
Not really :( I'm looking to replace my router entirely soon anyhow, and hoping this does the trick. My hardwired devices don't seem to have this problem.
Alternatives exist, what you're complaining about is that they're not popular. You aren't entitled to viable alternatives. If a private business acts in a way contrary to your beliefs, your only option is to stop using them. Having an alternative private business to choose is nice, but never guaranteed.
Can you tell me what's the alternative for Youtube? Or github? The alternative should be a real alternative, not a useless replica. For example, I should be able to watch latest movie trailers, music videos, tech reviews, etc. on the youtube alternative. And I should be able to report issues to Microsoft's VS code project.
This is not just about popularity. On the internet, winner takes all. The monopoly is extreme in every type of website/service. If you can't use Youtube, you effectively cannot watch videos on the web. If you are banned by github, you cannot participate in the global open source community.
There are 2 solutions:
1. Break the monopolies.
2. Force them to respect my rights, similar to the government.
Git is a decentralized version system there is absolutely no reason to have to use Github to work on any open source project.
Youtube is no monopoly. You have hundreds of sites offering video streaming services and you can broadcast your own as well using other services not affiliated to youtube. The fact that almost everyone uses Youtube does not make it a monopoly.
There's an extraordinary difference between you being entitled to a company being forced to exist to serve whatever arbitrary need or approach you wish, and there being an open market such that a competitor can set up shop.
If you were entitled to alternatives, that means the tax payer has to reasonably fund every possible alternative that could exist, or at a minimum a vast array of them, and most likely at perpetual losses. It'd be extraordinarily dumb and would become an epic cost for the government and would breed corruption (failed businesses, bleeding vast red ink, perpetually subsidized no matter what they do).
True in the general case - however, it gets strange when that argument is used to defend monopolies, i.e. markets that, for whatever reason, are not open.
E.g., I personally don't see why it's bad when an elected government passes legislation but totally fine when Apple uniterally updates the App Store ToS or Google excludes certain things from Search. In both cases, participants of the respective markets won't have any choice than to comply.
I believe YouTube is comparable. Yes, there are alternatives. However, YouTube's popularity is important for content producers. If you make your own video content and are banned from YouTube, you'll likely have a significantly harder time to be discovered.
I agree with you that this woudn't really be an issue for GitHub, since there is neither a market nor any lock-in effects or monopoly.
You want to participate in web standards groups? You have to use github to do so in any sort of effective fashion.
Same thing for various open-source projects.
The _owner_ of a project has a bit more say in things, though I've heard some people claim that in order to attract contributors a project must be on GitHub nowadays, because many people will fail (or refuse) to participate in any way other than GitHub pull requests.
So I agree with you about Apple and YouTube; I just think GitHub is closer to them than you think it is...
When you cherry pick quotes from the source it sounds contradictory. What I meant, and what I feel was clear when taken in context, is that alternatives exist in this particular case. However if you do not think those alternatives are viable then that's just too bad. You aren't entitled to viable alternatives, or alternatives that fit your definition of viable.
> Now, it's definitely sad when people lose their jobs, but that's kind of the devil's bargain we've made with capitalism.
It's not so much a "bargain" as it is how we discover which jobs are useful. Capitalism is very efficient at exposing useless labor, and this is a good thing. Having a bunch of humans laboring at jobs no one needs or wants is wasteful.
What is it wasteful of? What if someone working such a job feels better about being alive, because they have a role to fill in a community? Why is having people doing forms of “make work” worse than letting people waste away into despair? Would you feel good about having your aunt thrown to the curb, because she has no marketable skills?
The ideas of “efficiency” as they are used in economic theory are very narrow, and reflect a technical understanding of a vastly over simplified model of reality. Such models do provide insight into real life, but they are analytical tools, nothing more.
Economics, as field of study, has a big problem with the concept of “value.” The price of things tends to stand in for the value of things, as it is easily measured.
You don’t have to look hard to see the absurdity of taking this compromise too far. Look at military spending. Since dollars are spent buying a weapon, and workers get paid, profits are made, the “value” of the sale gets added into GDP. Then we take that missile, and blow it up. If we kill our enemies, then maybe one could say we got our money’s worth. If we kill only innocents, then I see it as more of an “anti-value.” What if it just blows up in the desert, and makes a multi-million dollar hole in the sand? Sort of a modern, high tech version of paying one group of workers to dig holes, and another to fill them in, is it not?
> Why is having people doing forms of “make work” worse than letting people waste away into despair?
How would you suggest choosing who gets to do the "make work" versus who must toil away at the necessary? How would you suggest compensating those whose work is more vanity than value if no one pays them for their output?
If someone is lacking marketable skills, and is forced to take a “make work” job, I would hardly call that a “vanity” project.
This was done in the Great Depression, to try and keep the economy going.
There are ways to create work that is valuable, but the market value is below what anyone can afford to live on. So the government could subsidize salaries, in addition to hiring people.
Getting back to my comment about military spending: I see it as a destructive waste. How does that get decided? It’s decided by people operating in a complex political-financial-industrial-military complex.
If we, as a society, can decide to waste lives and wealth on idiotic military action, we can decide to spend wealth on helping our own citizens.
This has an assumption built in: The more money you control, the more your your opinions ought to shape what work someone else does. Some people think the assumption is very true, some think it is very false.
That's what government services and the electoral process is supposed to be for. If you're one of those who believes that the electoral process is broken though (and I count myself a member), then I guess there aren't many options. Philanthropists maybe.
You are making the completely unwarranted (and demonstrated false by modern history) assumption that decisions coming from capitalism are made objectively and rationally.
"Capitalism" doesn't make any decisions. It's emergent behavior. People make all kinds of decisions and bets and tradeoffs, some of which work better than others and "win".
That doesn't mean we always like those outcomes, hence the need for regulations, social safety net, etc.
Overall, it's a pretty shitty system, since it means that some people are always losing, but it also seems to be the best we've got.
> "Capitalism" doesn't make any decisions. It's _emergent behavior_. People make all kinds of decisions and bets and tradeoffs, some of which work better than others and "win".
> Overall, it's a pretty shitty _system_, since it means that some people are always losing, but it also seems to be the best we've got.
_Emphasis mine_.
Is it a system or emergent behavior? I'd argue that these are mutually exclusive and that capitalism falls squarely in the latter category. It is the result of individuals being free to exchange whatever they find valuable.
Patents were created because we believe that there’s a win-win to providing limited term protection for new inventions. There are fields, like IC design, where lack of IP protection would halt innovation pretty quickly - nobody is going to invest tens or hundreds of millions to build a new chip if a competitor can copy it in a matter of months.
That said, it’s a bargain made for the public good, and we should always keep that in mind. It’s pretty clear that there are abuses of the patent system, we need to think about how we can modify it to minimize those abuses while protecting valuable research.
Just speculation, but might there be regulations regarding the labeling of alcoholic beverages for sale that prevent accepting crooked labels or even price reductions?
This seems to be a greater indictment of taxation in general rather than the notion of an asset created to represent something of value in the market. An unscrupulous state actor could manipulate this system to their advantage.
