511–520 of 726 posts
Most states in America ban municipal fiber. They saw EPB (Chattanooga) and said, no, we must make sure that doesn't ever happen again. That is how 'free' market is done in US, all the rules are to make sure the richest people become richer.
Stop calling it a free market! These stupid rules keep it from being free.
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Switzerland uses a system similar to the original plan for Obamacare, where individuals are mandated to buy insurance, so if Switzerland is what you mean by "universal healthcare" then it's not only not impossible, but the USA already has a more voluntary take on the exact same concept.
The ACA has been steadily kneecapped since its inception. And the “more voluntary” bit is pretty important. As is it costing about double.
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Can confirm this guy is Swiss Has arguably the best infrastructure and system in the world and will still find issue with it. A real Swiss hardly knows the horror show that is the rest of the non-Switzerland world. yeah, fiber rollout is slow outside of the cities. It’s still better than 95% of the developed world. All perspective.
People endlessly complain that the SBB is 'always' late.
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> A lot of places in America had their “network” infra built 50-100 years ago on copper That's no different to Switzerland so far… > and no one wants to pay to basically rebuild all of it. …but the Swiss seem to have decided it's worth the investment. > I happen to live in an area where there are still above ground utilities. If anything, that can make things cheaper. You don't need to bury everything, and in some pl…
> …but the Swiss seem to have decided it's worth the investment. West Virginia is 1.5x the size of the entire country of Switzerland. Let that sink in. Texas is 16x times bigger. The idea that it should be doable in a country that is 100x bigger, with 50 separate states, god knows how many individual counties because it could be done in vastly smaller one is where your problem is.
The thing with fiber is that it can go so much longer than copper without any active components. It is also very future proof, you won't be pulling it out of the ground/off the pole for at least 50 years if not longer.
If size is such an issue, how did you get power?
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I'm not sure this is true. What you're describing is the local optimum problem. Yes, the local optimum is better if you can't push through to a better one, of course. And heading merely 'towards' the better optimum often makes things immediately worse. But that doesn't make the better optima worthless, or ever-unreachable. It seems a bit like saying humans will never fly. It's a question of technology level, in the s…
Until you get a technology that makes people acting perfectly rationally, with perfect information and getting marginal cost equal to average cost[1], free market is never gonna work. And until you get a technology that prevents leadership to be egoistic and corrupt, Communism is never going to work. I'm not holding my breath for any of those tech to happen. [1]: interestingly enough, such a condition is pretty much…
Most successful economies are largely market-based, as things stand today. Even the successful command economies (i.e. China) use markets extensively.
Unless you mean perfectly free markets will never be perfect resource allocators. Well yes, perhaps, but what does that matter if there's no perfect solution? The nudges required to 'fix' markets are a form of technology, as discussed. As such, it either exists and is effective or not.
My favorite example is here in the Phoenix metro area. We had DSL and cable internet pretty early compared to the rest of the country (mid/late 90s), but then things stagnated. Then in 2014, Google Fiber announced they were expanding here and, all of a sudden, the local telco and cable companies (Centurylink and Cox) started rolling out fiber all over the place -- like pretty much overnight. Then Google backed off, a…
Weirdly, I live in a somewhat rural part of Brazil, and all providers are small players. They’re all offering 1Gi FTTH and are now competing on price. Meanwhile, the closest metro area still suffers with cable internet topping at 600M and low availability. Some big cities have seen a surge of small providers too, which has been great for consumers. That said, I dont buy the “natural monopoly” argument at all, especia…
The ISPs are not always good at maintaining that raw capacity, though.
For context:
41 US States are geographically larger than Switzerland. It's most comparable state in area is West Virginia. West Virginia is .064% of the national area.
Some fun distance contexts. Driving end to end in Switzerland is comparable in distance to: Driving from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, Detroit to Chicago, or New York City to Washington DC.
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People were saying the same thing about 10Mbps 15 years ago. Things change, and 25Gbps is massive future proofing for the next 50 years probably.
My point is I don’t even come close to the bandwidth limits. My latency is excellent. I had coax based internet and it was going down a lot. I switched to fiber about 5-6 years ago. Never went down once
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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 f…
If people truly want something and it can be done profitably, just start a company and do it yourselves. If you need subsidies, that means the people who don't want that think are paying for it, just so people who do want it can have it cheaper. With subsidies, the cost is still there, it's just hidden in some tax or other.
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.
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> In which way this is a viable strategy that you can repeat more than once? I’m not saying commit to bluffing. But after the other guy has folded, continuing with your threat just to be petty is kind of dumb.
Or not if you want the threat to work a next time.
You don’t care if it works next time. It worked this time. If it doesn’t work next time, build it next time.