Don't you have to roll trucks more frequently for copper though?

It looks like the OPEX for FTTH vs Copper broadband is actually quite a bit lower.

This has to do with better basic reliability of FTTH vs Copper, and possibly some energy and field equipment savings.

Anyone in the industry actually know?

So It sounds like if Comcast had invested more in FTTH upgrades (high CAPEX), they'd now be enjoying the lower OPEX that their competitors are theoretically enjoying.

Upgrading infrastructure to FTTH is high CAPEX, but there's usually federal money to help with that in the US, and, there are always very favorable tax and accounting rules for CAPEX spending.

It looks like Comcast's problem is that they are irrationally married to an outdated business model and outdated technology. If they get priced out of the market, "the system worked"

it could also be price anchoring. they could know the price is BS but they are anchoring something unrealistic now to help later.

if we spend the next 2 years thinking the next xbox is going to be $1800, when it launches for $999, some people will be overjoyed at the great deal they are getting.

but their concerns were ultimately proven correct, over and over.

there were significant LPEs in other OSes that were exploitable because of kernel lock bugs and race conditions.

and since the smp days, entire new classes of bug (eg info disclosure because of observable side effect bugs in cpus w parallel speculative execution) have also been invented as new processor architecture features have become common.

concurrency is still hard, 30 years later.

Take absolutely any business.

Add "instant, real support by competent Americans"

Loudly proclaim that your customer service is based on this. Make it a credible promise.

Charge x% more than your competitors.

Congratulations: you have a small, lucrative share of the market cornered. You also have a Moat that is AI resistant.

I only ever contact "customer support" when the company has fucked up and I can accurately explain how and I cannot fix their problem my self.

But Increasingly companies have simply removed any mechanism by which you can contact a human with agency. You are subjected to chatbot humiliation loops until you give up. If they give you phone number, you are on hold, or hung up on, or transferred until you give up.

Latest example: For the last 24 hours, an Azure portal blade that my team uses has been completely non-functional, with a knockout-js error in the Azure portal code.

Their own AI-troubleshooting thing says there is no problem with Azure. [they shipped the org chart, again].

Because we don't have a paid support contract to go with our paid cloud shit, there is no way for me to tell Microsoft there is a problem with the service we buy from them. The AI says there's no problem. Without a paid support contract, there's no "plan B".

(Technically, I can also write a forum post, if I agree to getting data mined and spammed forever. During the signup process, I tried changing my country to Germany, and the automatic opt-in changed to manual opt-in, but the continue button was blocked until I "opted in")

The enshittification is preposterous, and there are a class of people out there who will pay more - sometimes MUCH more - to not be humiliated by incompetence.

Those customers are out there, but where are the companies who want them?

The gutter is filled with thousands of crowns.... waiting for the next king to simply pick one up.

>hurting brown people

This _probalby_ wont get through your confirmation bias filter, but if you look at who trump is giving _pardons_ to, i think the leading groups are:

> jews
> blacks

I don't think white Boomers (never mind white 2A supporters) even register.... with the possible exception of releasing some J6 prisoners.

A lot of the people you dislike, because of who they dislike, and who supported Trump, are pretty upset about all of the "pandering" Trump does to criminal blacks.

So if he's supposed to be a white supremacist president, the majority of white supremacists don't seem to agree.

Most people cannot actually see things from outside of their bias filters.

(ironically enough, Stephen Miller, the main mouthpeice of Trump's "racist" immigration policies, is Jewish... again, much to the consternation of many pro-white Trump supporters)

Obviously, the majority of ammosexual 2a supporters view what ANTIFA, BLM, and anti-ICE protesters are doing as much worse than what the Trump admin is doing.

It turns out that almost nobody is against authoritarian violence per-se. Everyone just wants it done to their enemies instead of themselves.

The number of people within FedGov who have heard of DeepSeek is small. The number who could tell you why it might be better than some other model at some specific task is much smaller.

The number who could want to use deepseek for a valid reason is vanishingly small.

One thing that should be abundantly clear is that the Trump admin doesn't control everything in the executive branch. There is still significant employee resistance to Trump and anything construed as a trump edict or trump agenda.

There's no evidence the administration is afraid of smart people.

There is substantial evidence that people within the executive branch have attempted to undermine or simply ignore Trump's directives.

Banning use of Chinese AI in fedgov makes sense to me; similar to banning use of certain chinese cellphones for fedgov use. Doesn't matter if they are better. What matters is the high liklihood of foreign systems being used in espionage.

It may be that the "ban" isn't prima-facie about limiting the use of deepseek, but, announcing a policy and then firing-for-cause people who choose to violate it.

They didn't support SMP for a long time either.

OpenBSD tends to lag behind most OSes in "workstation quality of life" features, whereas they tend to be world-leading on unambiguous specs, and code correctness. (And man pages, IMO)

Their excellent security reputation is well deserved, and is downstream of their priorities... which I would describe as "skeptical of shiny new things with ambiguous semantics"

Ah, I had missed Trump accounts because they originally couldn't hold individual stocks according to how congress defined them in the legislation. I was not aware Trump and co were trying to do an end-run around the legislation by arguing that the law doesn't prohibit corporations from donating individual shares.

However, that's a pretty new development, is controversial, and its unclear how it would really work, especially in tandem with the other rules.

Its a little tricky too, as children generally don't have suitable investment accounts that can hold publicly traded shares. I'm doubtful they even legally can open those accounts.

So what are they going to do, issue a gazillion single paper share certificates? What a shitshow that would be, the fees and shipping alone around dealing with that for a single share would be nuts, not to mention the hassle of redeeming them, and the untold numbers that would be misplaced or destroyed. And I'm still not sure children can own them, or sign the agreements required to get them.

What else could the do? Create beneficial trusts for every child? Whose going to administer that? and again the fees and management expenses around it would be nuts all for a $150 space-x share?

It might be reasonable for him to set a bunch aside, and as children reach adulthood, let them claim them at that point.
If the idea is that the kid can't sell it or whatever until they're an adult anyway, its probably fine. It'll be income maybe when they receive it, so that could work out badly for some kids though, if they have to sell it to cover the taxes on it, because they don't have a job yet. Especially if its appreciated to a couple thousand or something. (How are splits etc handled, do they get one or more? Or worse... reverse splits on a single share?)

It was probably the other O'Neil, with one L. He has no sense of humour at all.

I could understand bots and mailing lists. The thing I never understood with LinkedIn was how many real people (usually recruitment agents) had apparently spent the time to read my profile and send me a personalised message, yet still thought I'd be interested in a job paying half the market rate for someone with my skills and experience.

Have you ever worked for a US defense contractor?

For some of the roles at those companies, you need a SECRET (or higher) national security clearance.

So the "private company" thing is a bit of a false distinction because of how much classified/top-secret national security material is developed and held by "private" corporations in the US.

For example, the coatings and techniques for applying them to US stealth aircraft are secrets developed and/or held by US private companies.

Employees at those companies who attempt to exfiltrate secrets to foreign governments are absolutely committing espionage against the United States, and should be considered for execution.

Frontier AI work is becoming a matter of national security. It is _possible_ that secrets exfiltrated from OpenAI could be implicated in foreign espionage, and the death penalty might be appropriate. I don't know the specifics of what was leaked or to whom or for what reasons. My strong suspicion is that secrets were leaked to a party acting on behalf of a foreign government.

I don't have a moral objection to moving the work in house, but I have practical doubts about the execution.

Governments deliver excellent results quickly only under narrow circumstances, and all of the examples I can think of are essentially some form of authoritarian rule.

For instance, In WW2 we had USA, Germany, and USSR, and they were nominally three entirely disjoint political systems, but all of them adopted nationalized command economies, and restricted personal freedoms and non-wartime activities of the citizenry. Each party claimed it was locked in an existential war of ideas and values against the other parties; but all three adopted functionally the same authoritarian wartime command economy (in principle)

Each had astonishing and rapid achievements despite very nominally different structures.

The American advantage in all this is that compared to its national peers, it is functionally the least odiously-authoritarian towards its citizenry. In both NSG and USSR, too much disobedience towards the state micro-managing your work was cause for execution.

The US model of significantly privatized R&D gives an interesting blended model: you have authoritarian corporate leaders (like Musk), who work people _hard_ and crank out results quickly - but if someone doesn't like working for Musk and quits, they are not committing a crime against the state. So America gets good results fast, but the people are oppressed somewhat less.

China is "nominally" communist but is really more National Socialist (with Han ethnic supremacy being the analogue to what Germany was doing); the key is they have a society run by authoritarian technocrats that has "communist" window dressing the pragmatic advantages of diverging from Communism when doing so would be beneficial. They are doing the "big results with blended authoritarianism" thing pretty well these days.

The speed of US sector private innovation is nothing to sneeze at, as much as we have stupid companies doing stupid things slowly and badly.

SpaceX has dramatically outperformed NASA at manned space flight for the last decade. I think most engineers want the Apollo-era NASA to come back.

It seems that without the ruthless focus of being in a war you might lose, govt seems to not be in any particular hurry and to have a lethal inability to focus on the right things and to shut off distractions.

Our form of government is slow by nature and by design, which is why we simply throw it away when there's something scary going on (WW2, Covid, etc). The Romans at least codified this into their system and national mythology for a while. We still fight for "freedom" while having price controls, conscription, and butter rationing...

BTW, i was corrected in a different thread.

I should have said espionage, Not treason.

No declared war (Yet).

Ooh. thank you, you are correct. I apologize.

The Rosenbergs were executed under the 1917 Espionage Act.

Legally, the Espionage Act is the correct play here.