181–190 of 528 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Clearly a conspiracy, which is why all the assassins were objectively incompetent, only succeeded by sheer stupid luck, and both Germany and Austro-Hungary were itching and planning to start a war regardless. Ferdinand's death didn't cause WW1, it just started it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
UK was already creaking at the seems in the 2000's. I left in 2011 and have spent the last 5 years crawling up a sewer pipe of regulations trying to get my post brexit immigration sorted. Brexit was just a fantasy of better days to come that was actually pretext for a right wing power grab. And what do right wingers ultimately want? A world of red in tooth and claw capitalism with themselves as the permanent winners,…
Harsh but fair. It's not significantly different in the US. You know, it's not different in ANY of the empires, past or present. Look at Russia and it's just a couple decades of further decline, but the same thing. If hackers and nerd idealists are worth anything, it's for trying to solve all this against a background of constant push-back. I sometimes wonder if the most important thing I could possibly do is try to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm a lecturer (5 yrs) and I'm struggling to pay my bills. We've been out on strike and nothing happened Why would not working result in higher pay? Especially in a field where the product is increasingly seen as a luxury that costs as much as a downpayment for a house and ultimately not a essential requirement for employment.
Striking provides a forcing function to reveal the actual value to the employer of your labor. In certain fields (e.g. medicine, academics) there are huge centers that represent the majority of jobs for a region. Specialized workers here find it harder to job hop, as there are fewer opportunities. Striking provides another means to better pay. Say you value my work at $40/hr, but are currently paying my at $20/hr. In…
Hard to swallow for union types but it’s how I ended up being paid significantly more and having no issues buying a house.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I emphatically disagree. If you live in a city, it's quite sufficient for IPTV, a bit of youtube, spotify, etc.
YouTube, Netflix, music streaming, most video conferencing, and general web browsing all work fine on a 1.5Mb/s link in my experience. It's certainly not fast, but it's fast enough to do the basics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Things are getting tough for lots of people and that's with extremely high levels of employment. Capitalism has succeeded then.
[flagged]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I emphatically disagree. If you live in a city, it's quite sufficient for IPTV, a bit of youtube, spotify, etc.
Sure, you might get away with consuming a single video stream. But you shouldn't be surprised that there is very little demand for this. A single HD video stream (1080p) can require 8 mbps. Trying to consume multiple of these, especially with a realtime protocol like WebRTC, is impossible on an ADSL connection.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's amazing that one-sided contracts like this (where you're committed to a term, but they're not committed to a price) don't violate consumer protection laws. What if they chose to double your monthly bill?
They can't. The contract generally says the price rise will be inflation plus a specified percent. Otherwise, eg if they raise call costs, they have to tell you that you can cancel penalty free - which I have done multiple times.
You sure? In NL it's just inflation, anything else means you have the option to cancel. Seems odd that they could specify an extra percentage in their terms of service just for the heck of it, not because of increased costs or so.
Though, in practice, you're with a carrier for a reason (either best quality or lowest price) and the competition also raised prices per inflation, or at least close enough that it doesn't tip the scale, so there's never a point cancelling a contract prematurely. Maximum contract duration is 2 years anyway iirc.
Just yesterday I was trying to sign up with Verizon for my new address. Fiber is not available in my building, so they offer "5G Home Internet" for $60-$80/mo, which is crazy expensive for what it is. I asked whether there were ADSL lines available, since these were recently available for as cheap as $15/mo. It seems this is no longer the case. Maybe there's a market here? EDIT: I am in the US, and I've just realized…
An interesting thing to note in contrast to this is the massive amount of PE cash being pumped into privet regional FTTP broadband companies. Affluent areas, such as where I live, are even seeing multiple competing companies pulling fibre through the OpenReach ducts. We have two along with BT to chose from in a town of only 30k people in the midlands. As others commenters have noted, the rich/poor divide is getting w…
The fact that you have multiple companies each running their own physical network (through the same ducts, no less!) is absolutely wasteful - imagine if we did the same for the electric grid, water or gas. The physical network should be government-managed and any providers can pay for layer-2 access between any 2 points. This will prevent wasteful, redundant infrastructure.
On the other hand, being an L1 fibre provider requires a point of presence in the every location where your customers' fibres are terminated because packets are not fungible. Of course, you could expose L2 access by mandating that an independent party such as OpenReach own that fibre terminating equipment and then have them interface with ISPs in an IXP, which is what I assume you're suggesting. That works. Technically. It worked for LLU to privatise BT's existing network, and resulted in a huge reduction in prices to access the existing network.
On the other hand, it was pretty useless for innovation. Nobody had any incentive to build any new infrastructure, so it just languished. My OR connection is still 30Mb/s, rather than the multiple private 1Gb/s+ providers in my area. Plus OpenReach takes weeks to set up a new service and are useless at fixing faults. Even now, OR fibre, in the few places you can get it, is limited to 115Mb/s upload, and it's expensive, whereas the best private fibre company near me is 3Gb/s symmetrical for £50/month. If as an independent ISP renting L2 access from OR, if I want to provide better bandwidth than OR is willing to sell, there's nothing I can do.
Fibre is tiny and easy to install, relatively speaking. There's not much additional cost to having multiple redundant fibre providers covering a street. I do wonder if there's something we can do to find a middle ground, like open access under-road trunking, or having a right to buy the fibre installation from an ISP and port it to another provider.
Visiting family in the UK for the first time in about five years. Costs here are _way_ higher than I remember. I bought three hamburgers, three drinks, and two large pops at a burger shop here, the total was 48 GBP (about $60 USD). This was at Five Guys. I couldn't believe it. I visited my co-worker in the UK, and over some beers, he mentioned he's getting taxed at 48-50% on top of this. Also 20% VAT on regular shopp…
On my $172k salary I pay $59k in taxes which is roughly $1k more than I'd pay in the UK but in the UK that includes national insurance while in the US I pay health insurance on top. So while taxes sound crazy in the UK it's not actually different to the US - it's all marginal. VAT is only 7.25% in California but then you have to add 15-20% in tips when you're out.