> "Companies – wherever they're based – are not allowed to sell unsafe toys to children in the UK. And society has long protected youngsters from things like alcohol, smoking and gambling. The digital world should be no different," she said.
So the UK plans to fine Parisian bars that serve alcohol to British under-18s in France on holiday?
When DoorDash or whatever courier comes to a restaurant, they pick up “order number”. That order number is in essence just private IP. Courier translates it to address=public ip.
It follows that the restaurant writes the address on every delivery. Do they ID each recipient?
In the original example the Parisian bars sells and sends the alcohol.
You’ve modified that to introduce a proxy, DoorDash, that now sells and sends the alcohol. If DoorDash sells it they’re the ones in trouble in your example.
It is relevant. There's a material difference between shipping material overseas and shipping it (and handling it) within the destination country.
If someone mails $ProhibitedItem at a USPS to the UK, then it's the job of local UK police and/or customs to reject the parcel if it is prohibited. It's the UK's problem, de facto if not de jure, because the sender is out of reach.
If someone with a UK subsidiary and local processing center mails $ProhibitedItem to their center and delivers it to someone in the UK, then that's more than the UK's problem.
Absolutely yes. If a government thinks there is stuff for sale its citizens should not be allowed to buy, they don’t stop county x making it or selling it. They block the thing from entering their country.
If the government thinks there are ones and zeros on the internet it’s citizens should not be allowed to see, they should block them from entering the country.
If that were true why is everyone so irritated by this? Just ignore it in that case. But for those people that may want to become subject to British jurisdiction in future or do other business there in future, they will take requests from Ofcom seriously.
No, real example is a British citizen picking up an American AM radio station that happens to broadcast things forbidden by the UK law, and the UK fining such radio station.
Laws apply to actions in the country, they’re not based on citizenship.
If you go to Amsterdam and sleep with a hooker, you didn’t break a law by doing that: despite prostitution (specifically purchasing sex) being illegal in many western countries.
Laws apply to whatever they say they apply to. Limiting their scope to actions in the country, or at least giving precedence to similar foreign laws, is at least as much about the practicalities of enforcement as a matter of principle.
For example, Finland claims jurisdiction over crimes where the action itself or its relevant consequences happen in Finland or the victim is a Finnish citizen, permanent resident, or legal entity. Then there are plenty of rules and exceptions detailing what those principles mean in practice.
That’s not always true, and increasingly less so, particularly the Australians and the crime of child sex tourism. I am sure it’ll be expanded to hate crimes and disturbing the peace laws as well and from there used as a political cudgel to suppress opposition to government policies. At least for now you have to be a citizen of the country but the UK has stated an intention to extradite US citizens for online hate crimes.
Manuel Noriega and “el Chapo” Guzman were both convicted of crimes they committed outside the US but that caused other people to commit crimes inside the US.
Traveling to countries for child sex abuse is illegal and severely punished, although it appears that the law is about the traveling with intent, and not (officially) about the actions that take place overseas: https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-ceos/extraterritor... .
Commonwealth countries have extraterritorial jurisdiction. I don't know that it's ever been enforced for something so relatively petty as intoxication or prostitution, but it is nevertheless the law. (Obligatory IANAL though.)
Interestingly if you go to Canada and legally smoke weed then try to go to the US a month later, you can get denied because you did something that is perfectly legal in Canada, but not the US
Normally its considered legal to sell but not legal to buy.
Prostitution is primarily conducted by women, and this is a way for them to still seek protection and healthcare while still technically criminalising the practice.
GAO and CBO are under Congress directly, fortunately.
They're both awesome. Anyone who starts talking about all kinds of obvious ways to cut waste in government and isn't dropping references to GAO and CBO reports all over the place, is almost certainly bullshitting you (glares at Elon Musk).
The GOP has hated them for quite a while because they consistently tell them that no, of fucking course cutting taxes won't "pay for itself", but they haven't yet had the votes to get rid of them. Trump can't, they're some of the few government functions that fall under Congress (possible because they don't really administer government, they just issue reports, largely on request, so they're more like research librarians than administrators)
Meanwhile, California is also trying to build housing near transit, but Menlo Park wants to preserve the character of downtown by preserving dirty, cracked, flat, surface-level parking lots like it's 1950.
NIMBYism has never been about preserving neighborhood characteristic, or noise and traffic concerns. Menlo Park is not Big Sur. Sure, some concerns are reasonable and should be investigated, but most of the time they're bureaucratic distractions that's been weaponized by people who want to delay progress and protect their investment.
For most Americans, A house is their primary savings account, retirement plan, and probably where they keep majority of their wealth. We don't build new housing in old neighborhoods because it would de-value the investment of too many people. Until we can solve this problem (where people are incentivized to pull the ladder up behind them), we will always have housing shortages. It's just too profitable.
Anecdotally, what we found in Austin was a combination of two factors:
First, awareness of the futility and selfishness of "growth elsewhere" as a solution is much higher in younger people — and by younger, I mean currently under fifty. Generational turnover in Austin had been eating away at the NIMBY majority, and conversations about housing in Austin have long been polarized more by age than by left/right political sentiment. There's a caricature, with a strong vein of truth, of the old Austin leftist who has Mao's little red book on their shelves and thinks apartment buildings are an abomination, and Austinites of that generation are experiencing mortality. At the same time, younger people are adopting more and more urbanist mindsets compared to their parents.
However, I think a much much bigger factor was the influx of younger people, especially young people with experience of larger cities, diluting the votes of the older NIMBYs. Austin has been shaped by growth for half a century, but its "discovery" in the 2000s and very brief status as a darling of coastal hipsters (remember that term?) has had a lasting effect on Austin's popularity and its demographics. It's been twenty years since it was the "it" place for Brooklynites to visit, but in that twenty years, it's had a lot of exposure for young urban dwellers, and some of them discovered they liked it and moved here, bringing their comfort with dense living and their appreciation that growth can bring a lot of positives.
Personally, every homeowner I know in Austin has seen their houses depreciate significantly this decade, and I don't think it changed a single person's mind about Austin's housing policy. People who opposed the reforms are bitter about the outcome, and people who supported the reforms say it sucks for us personally, but it's what we set out to accomplish, and we're glad that it worked.
People see lower property taxes as a silver lining for short-term swings in the market, but I don't know anybody who thinks this is a short-term swing that they can ride out.
Nobody is happy about their property values going down long term. It exposes them to the risk of a big loss if they're forced to sell because of events in their life.
> Austinites of that generation are experiencing mortality.
This is such a funny and novel way of saying "old people in Austin are dying" I just had to point it out.
Also, I like the way this comment is written in general. Felt easy to read for its length, and most importantly the tone stayed fun and personal while still being informative and on topic.
> For most Americans, A house is their primary savings account, retirement plan, and probably where they keep majority of their wealth.
If you allow for increases in density, that house (actually the land beneath it, but still.) becomes more valuable as it's redeveloped. So that American homeowner does benefit, by unlocking the upside of "evil gentrification" (or actually, density increase).
That can only happen if the higher density coincides with equal economic growth in the neighborhood. Otherwise, the higher density could result in a negative home valuation trend.
Given the above uncertainty, and higher density could result in more traffic, noise, crime, nymbys are likely taking the correction position for wealth preservation and quality of life.
"Traffic" doesn't come from higher density, it comes from zoning bans on mixed-use neighborhoods which force people to drive everywhere. The "crime" argument is especially silly: why assume that higher density only ever attracts criminals? Usually, having more people around is a positive.
You can assume higher density has "more crime" because the increase in people means if you want to keep the same absolute rate of crimes (which is the only thing people ever notice--every violent or sexual crime will be repeated in the news), you have to correspondingly increase the efficiency of crime-fighting, and American police aren't up to the task, even if they were motivated to do so.
A paper came out about this recently: The City as an Anti-
Growth Machine.
> Logan and Molotch's “urban growth machine” remains foundational in urban theory, describing how coalitions of landowners, developers, and politicians promote urban growth to raise land values. This paper argues that under financialized capitalism, the dynamics have inverted: asset appreciation now outweighs productive investment, and urban land is increasingly treated as a speculative asset.
I'm not sure why new housing devalues old housing. In my mind, higher density generally makes an area more desirable (e.g. because higher density enables more jobs, better infrastructure) and raises the value. Imagine as an extreme example and existing house in the middle of nowhere around which a metropolis is developed. Surely the value of the house, or at least the land it is built on, goes up, even though it loses its "cabin in the woods" appeal.
You think if there were modern highrises in Menlo Park a tiny 2BR shack next door would still sell for $2M? It’s a supply and demand issue, nothing more.
What is your mental model for this then? If the "2BR shack" can be built from scratch for 300k, and the value for the lot + shack is $3M, then the land value is $2.7M. Most expensive real estate is land value, not actual structure value.
I see what you're saying, my point is that the principle thing driving it's value isn't the land nor the shack, it's the regulatory framework of the area.
Yes, it would go way, way, way up because if there is a high rise next door someone wants to knock down the shack and put up another high rise, a commercial building, etc.
When regulations are reduced to allow more density, the value of the land goes up because its productivity increases. The land can do more now, e.g. hold 10 apartments vs 1 house. The same land generates more rent so developers are willing to pay more for that land.
Meanwhile, the value of housing units goes down due to increased competition among sellers/landlords.
Consider two zoning changes.
1) You are a homeowner and more units are allowed on your parcel, e.g. single-family -> duplex. That increases your land value.
2) You are a homeowner and there is more density around you, but not on your parcel, e.g. apartments are allowed nearby but not on your street. Your land value does not increase. Your home value decreases due to increased competition. (Of course, there may be long term effects like the increased density actually leading to economic windfalls in the area, increasing its desirability, and then increasing your home value.)
it's not that density per se drives down existing costs, but density almost always brings more housing stock to the market (unless they are simultanously tearing down housing elsewhere) and housing stock drives down the cost of housing, which is the point of the original article.
So if we take it as an assumption that density increases housing stock, there is lots of evidence that density drives down prices of existing land/home values.
Density is not going to drive down cost for the same kind of housing. A SFH is not the same as a smaller home on a denser plot, much less an apartment block in a high rise. So the SFH owner who pursues increased density does indeed benefit.
The article only talks about rent, not price of housing, which I think is an important data point.
Homeowners don't want housing prices to fall. Ever. They don't care about rent prices (at least, not directly). But renters care about both — obviously lower rent prices are good, but many want to be able to enter the housing market but it's prohibitively expensive.
Perhaps falling rent prices has a similar effect on home prices — the value of buying a home for the purposes of renting becomes less desirable due to lower rental revenue, so prices fall. Not sure, the macroeconomics of housing never made sense to me because it's never as simple as pure supply and demand.
As an example, my wife and I finally decided to buy a house in a fast-growing CA suburb (not in Bay Area). The house was constructed in 2021 and sold for $611k. Plenty of renovations have been done on the house, we'd estimate around $20k+ worth of renovations, and the neighborhood and surrounding area has only grown since then (more parks, housing, great schools, stores etc).
The house was listed for sale at $600k; even then we were able to underbid and get our offer accepted. Inspections turned out clean, just minor cosmetic issues.
I don't keep an eye on the rental market but we've lived at two different rental properties and both of those places went up in rent once each, so I can only assume that rent is going up everywhere in this area.
Point is, rent and real estate don't always go in lock step.
I think there are a big range of opinions people have. There are some hardcore housing resisters whose opinions get a lot of sway because of the way processes work (public consultations, activism, etc). Lots of people are a bit sceptical because of pretty legitimate reasons – noise, traffic, disruption, aesthetics.
I think there probably are balances where people could generally be happier with new construction and that opinion could be clear enough to overrule those who would never be happy with it. Things like:
- ways of having locals vote on new development with small enough constituencies that they can be paid off (ie some of the gains that would have gone to developers or other positive externalities can be captured by those who are more effected) with lower taxes or new roads or parks or whatever
- making residents vote instead of having consultations will lead to less bias in favour of the most obnoxious
- allowing apartment blocks to vote to accept offers of redevelopment (eg you get a newer apartment; more apartments are added to the block and sold to fund the redevelopment)
- having architectural standards that locals are happy with for new buildings
- allow streets to vote to upzone themselves (I don’t love this as it’s basically prisoners dilemma – if your street does it, land value increases and you gain; if every street does it land value only increases a bit but now you are upzoned)
I basically think that there are developments that can be broadly appealing and we are in a bad local minimum in lots of places of having bigger governments trying to push development on unwilling smaller governments/groups
Fundamentally as a society we need to stop treating housing as an investment. It is and should be a utility.
Suring property prices is a relatively new phenomenon (as in, post-WW2). The true origins of NIMBYism, at least in the US, is (you guessed it) racism. Long before segregation ended, and long after, there was economic segregation. Redlining [1], HOAs [2], the post-WW2 GI Bill [3], where highways were built [4][5], etc.
In fact this is a good rule of thumb: if you're ever confused why something is the way it is in the US, your first guess should pretty much always be "because racism".
Case in point: my parents. Built a house in 1988 and they still live there. Two people in 3500 square feet. Four bathrooms and five bedrooms. Meanwhile, you need a family income of 3x the median to rent a townhouse 1/3rd the size nearby.
This is beyond ridiculous and it’s totally unsustainable.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but the boomers will never die. Gen X will become the new boomers, and then the millennials after them. Individual people die, but interests stay the same.
There’s a lot of truth here, but two countervailing points: first younger generations own homes than Boomers at equivalent ages; second Boomers are particularly blind to the effects of zoning and strongly oppose development due to see firsthand the effects of 1950s urban redevelopment. They also love cars.
Us younger generations will have seen firsthand the negative effects of zoning, we do not possess a visceral opposition to development, and there is much greater appreciation of walkable neighborhoods.
> If NIMBYs were primary motivated by making money the prudent thing to do would be to support unrestricted zoning and then develop or sell the lot.
That is highly dependent on what exactly is being built next to your home. Sure, if it's more luxury housing then it'll probably drive the value of your home up. If it's low-income housing then it probably won't. And what we need is more of the latter rather than the former.
> you can take out loans against the value of the equity but this isn’t particularly common.
It's because it's an investment, you're going to get the return once you finally sell your home. Only in a pinch if someone needs a large amount of money to start a business or pay for an emergency will they mortgage their house.
> And what we need is more of the latter rather than the former.
You just need to wait. The luxury housing that gets built today becomes low-income housing as it ages. There's no short-circuiting that process the way the incentives are set up, but you can drive down prices across the board by building more, even more luxury housing.
>For most Americans, A house is their primary savings account
This is true for California, where people (foolishly) rely on their home value as their retirement plan, which further incentivizes NIMBYism.
But in places like Texas (and other areas with affordable housing), the house is just treated as something you pay off to have a low housing cost in retirement. And your investments are your retirement+savings account.
I wasn’t trying to say one was better or not, just different. Californians wrap up a large amount of their retirement savings in their houses though, so keeping those home prices high is important to them and that’s a reason for stalling development.
I think Californians do, a lot of time, retire with a higher net worth. But most of them do that because they’re more relatively house-poor during their lives - they take out larger mortgages, and save more into their net worth.
As opposed to Texans, who have higher disposable income since they have smaller house payments. It’s less incentive to save so they may spend more.
So that’s a partial advantage to California - the expensive homes force a higher savings rate, naturally.
But, at retirement age, a lot of their net worth is tied up in their home. So to unlock a lot of those savings they need to move to a lower cost of living state like Arizona, Nevada, Florida, etc.
While the Texans can just stay in their paid-off house.
So yeah it’s just different.
Texans are just paying off their home throughout their life and staying in it. They have larger disposable income to go towards other stuff (kids, lifestyle) while Californians gotta pay that mortgage
It's not that they're "intuitively better" it's that prior generations of them have passes less insane state and local law and they're not at the tail end of a ~20yr industry boom so "pay down my house and cash out to somewhere cheaper" doesn't make sense as a retirement strategy for as many of them.
To be fair it is not the city/elected officials who wants to retain the parking lots. The downtown redevelopment would probably make the city a lot of money.
It is the businesses around downtown who are pushing the save downtown campaign. I imagine the businesses contribute a fair chunk of revenue to the city now and have some influence .
Relative to say parts of Redwood City, or Palo Alto. Menlo park has a fair amount of student-ish 4 Unit lots, so it not all zoned SFU.
TBF a lot of the complaints are coming from businesses that are _probably_ renting. There is absolutely the chance that their business will go under due to construction disruptions before they can benefit from the increased foot traffic once the development is complete.
And, of course, once the development is complete, and the value of their land goes up, so too does their rent....
Menlo Park today has free and ample parking downtown. RWC is paid parking anywhere within few blocks of downtown, all the garages are paid, the garage on Jefferson Av charges more on Sundays. Same thing in San Mateo downtown.
To be fair, parking structures always look and feel pretty distopian.
I like the approach of making downtowns walkable and having a bit of parking at the periphery of downtown, along with good public transit. Encourages people to use public transit to get to town in the first place. Downtown residents can use transit or a zipcar or equivalent when the need to get out of town, instead of devoting a ton of space downtown for storing their cars.
Not sure if that approach is really practical, but if it can be made to work it is much nicer.
Well, in Menlo Park they're just flat surface parking lots, not even multi-story structures. The planned development is multi-story housing with parking underneath.
To be fair, I am boycotting the (similar) underground garage over at Springline because they're clearly made only for people in Range Rovers or whatever. They have those AWFUL ticket machines, set too far back (to avoid getting hit) and too high to access from a normal car.
The global capital of technology has absolute horrid infrastructure and is not on the forefront of any municipal technologies.
There's a big disconnect from people building new projects and local governance, and it's growing. When tech companies started even providing buses for their employees, because local government is too fractured and incapable of running needed bus routes, and can not coordinate across county and city borders, local activists were extremely upset that tech workers were not driving their personal cars and instead using environments-saving and traffic-reducing transit.
Super easy unless you have moved recently, then you don't get the bill and end up years later in collections for the original amount plus a million late fees added on.
Nah it arrives electronically to kivra, which is like email except you log in with your social security number and it's only for "official business" like invoices and whatnot.
Unfortunately here in the US we are pathologically incompetent.
One day we will attempt to roll out such a system. We'll pay McKinsey billions to develop and operate it, set no targets, and they will take the money and disappear for 10 years, and then deliver some unusable website developed by one offshore developer.
That sounds great! In the US the phrase you used "mailed to my sthlm address" would never mean anything other than physically sending a paper bill to your house.
Yeah I phrased that wrong. I wanted to emphasize that I don't live in Norway. I found it extra impressive that it worked so seamlessly even with a foreign car. Oh well.
The reasons why the Bay Area is the global capital of technology are absolutely totally unrelated to the quality of infrastructure or the policies of local government there.
It’s mainly due to the state of US technological advancement decades ago when the whole thing got started, the general US-level business-friendly environment, and the presence of an extremely prestigious (especially in science and tech fields) university nearby.
The specific reason is that William Shockley's mother lived in Palo Alto. Stanford gets the credit but in reality it had nothing to do with the decision.
I would bill by ticket machine too if it was my job to collect money on the parking. I’m guessing that the amount of people who never pay is much higher than zero so it really only makes sense when you have such high throughput that the slowdown is detrimental (such as the Bay bridge).
I park on the street for free. (The lot is also free in monetary cost, for the short windows I'd park there, but the hassle is larger than the hassle of finding street parking).
> They have those AWFUL ticket machines, set too far back (to avoid getting hit) and too high to access from a normal car.
Are you sure it's the ticket machines? Around here, the ticket machines have stayed the same, but it's now impossible to use them without stopping the car and getting out, because car manufacturers have decided I need eight inches of empty space between myself and the side of the car.
That eight inches is called "side impact protection" and, while it sucks to not be able to comfortably rest your arm on the window sill, it is pretty important to have in the event of an impact to the side.
I drive a 90s Miata. Trust me, I hate the SUV trend as much as anyone else, and I also recognize that car design from the 90s is not exactly the pinnacle of crash safety.
> To be fair, parking structures always look and feel pretty distopian.
What a lot of the new buildings in Austin are doing is putting an attached garage directly behind a 4 + 1 mixed use development - the street-facing facade is the apartments and shops, and the garage is directly behind (and usually attached) to the apartments. You basically never see them.
Babies throw tantrums, your job as a parent is to not give in to their demands. But California has a weakened state government due to the governor's will-he-wont-he bid for higher office some time between now and 2092, he's afraid to make waves. If it were me I'd say: you need more housing. And if the fine people of Menlo Park say no, then let them maintain El Camino Real themselves. A home depot employee will be by to unlock the shovel cage for you shortly.
Menlo Park isn't comparable to Austin though - Austin's equivalent of Menlo Park would be a country club CDP in the Austin Hills like Rob Roy.
A better comparison would be ATX against San Jose.
Just like how the "rich" residents of Santa Clara county know that you want to live in Campbell, Los Gatos, Menlo Park, Los Altos, Loyola, etc, similarly rich Texans and Austinites live in the Hills.
The reality is the residents of Menlo Park and Rob Roy don't want your type, and in a lot of cases tend to be the same people as there aren't many places left where you can trail run, bike, eat Michelin star ramen, and not pay income tax.
Just because we make good money in tech, it doesn't make us "them". I highly recommend reading the works of Pierre Bourdieu with regards to cultural capital.
Menlo Park was never a "middle class" town. The 101 was always the (literal) redline.
The median household income is $210K [0] and it's the same demographic, unlike historically lower middle class but now upper middle class San Mateo [1].
A Menlo Park home address that is on the correct side of the 101 opens the same doors in the Bay that a Bel Air address does in Los Angeles or an Austin Hills address does in Austin.
Rich doesn't equal conspicuous, especially in the Bay Area - "Wealth is quiet, rich is loud, poor is flashy"
Yep! That's what I meant - Rob Roy, Westlake Hills, Barton Creek around the country clubs, and Lost Creek. Those are the equivalents of much of Menlo Park and Atherton, and I know of a number of people who lived in Menlo+Atherton and moved to those areas of Austin in order to front-run taxes in the run-up of some significant exits.
280 to El Camino is "oldish rich" (made their millions in the 1980s-2000s), the El Camino to 101 is "new rich" (made their millions in the 2000s-2010s), and 101 to Meta used to be a Samoan ghetto (literally, redlining was legal until the 60s and unofficially the norm until the 90s) until they were gentrified out.
The old money (rich before tech) to the West of 280 in Woodside and Portola Valley.
I think this is a bunch of retrospective justification when the truth is that home-owners vote against supply expansion measures that may decreases their home value (their main investment).
Just like how people pretend "I'm actually super concerned about emergency vehicles" when it comes to replacing a car lane with a bus/bike lane. It sounds better than admitting they don't want to be inconvenienced, they'd rather have an extra car lane than someone else get a bus/bike lane, etc. So the hand waving begins.
Austin is unique even in Texas for its aggressive construction boom + decreased rent, so it's not even a Texas thing.
> In California people are very scared of poor people because they tend to commit more crime and the justice system refuses to prosecute and imprision them, especially if they are criminally insane.
Funny to read this when it’s common knowledge the rich commit so much tax evasion the IRS doesn’t bother investigating, and tech billionaires like Thiel are regularly abusing hard drugs and spewing unhinged theories about the end times and an AI god. You can just say you don’t like poor people. You don’t have to use some statistical fallacy that supports your confirmation bias.
The reality is that the visibility of criminal acts is inversely correlated with income. Why would a rich criminal spray paint graffiti on a building when they’re making so much money off white collar crime that they can just buy it and do whatever they want?
That’s not even getting into all of the things that should be crimes but aren’t, because the ultra wealthy and their megacorps can legally bribe politicians to their hearts content. Or the child sex trafficking. Epstein’s buddies weren’t living rough.
What you pointed out doesn’t change the argument. That IS a main driver for NIMBYism in wealthy areas, even if they’re wrong or misguided, even if it’s just false perception. Don’t really know how doing some whataboutism will change that. I think most people would likely choose to live next to a tax avoider over a violent criminal?
Performative ignorance is when you dispute something supported by tons of empirical evidence with a few anecdotes and whatever you just made up and expect me to spend time refuting it. It's the same technique flat earthers and young earth creationists use.
It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth.. unless and until there's competition.
Funny how quickly my internet options went from expensive cable internet, to 1 gig symmetric fiber for $90, to 10 gig symmetric fiber for $50. And now, magically, Xfinity has 1Gbps+ service for $50 as well.
> It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth...
You can start a company right now and lay fiber in these places and start your own telecom.
You probably don't have the money for that but, if you put together a solid business plan, a bank would give you a loan.
You may not have the experience or expertise to do that, but there are plenty of people who do.
Why hasn't that happened yet? It turns out that laying down miles of fiber for a handful of customers isn't profitable.
Google dod it in a few places that were low hanging fruit. Places that had telephone poles where they could get relatively easy access to them.
There are certainly places where access to those poles is more difficult than it should be but most places are hampered by either being too remote to justify the cost of burying lines to a few customers (rural areas) or the digging is too expensive to many customers (suburban areas) because they'd be digging up streets.
I most certainly don’t have 1 Gps+ service for $50 though in practice my circa 50-100 Mps service for about twice that works fine does for me from Xfinity. I care a lot more about reliability.
Good advice! I’ve literally never consciously looked at that recommendation page thus avoid shorts mostly too.
(I couldn’t be trusted with TikTok so I have to be careful with shorts etc).
With TikTok I avoided it for years then one week when sick I installed it and within a couple hours it had an algorithm for me that was crazy addictive.
I started messing with it and looked up and 4 hours had gone by and it felt like minutes.
Yeah, I think the paradigm has shifted. There's a perception that, while these companies have always profited off of our inputs, that we both benefitted. We contributed to a public good, they provided the platform, and profited off that platform.
Now it feels like the public good is being diminished (enshittification) as they keep turning the "profit" knob, trying to squeeze more and more marginal dollars from the good.
The system still requires the same inputs from us, but gives less back.
Apple wants to give me $250 trade-in for my M1 Air with 16GB, but it seems to be worth $500+ on the open market, so yeah, still above hand-me-down territory. It feels as good as the day I bought it, and literally the only reason I'm considering replacing it is now we have 2/3 laptops with magsafe and I'd like to start distributing those chargers around the house. So tempting to just swap for a used M2 for a couple hundred dollars, but the chore of moving to a new computer is holding me back.
So the UK plans to fine Parisian bars that serve alcohol to British under-18s in France on holiday?
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