Are you paid hourly? Does the company pay you extra for coming in to do this, even if you are not scheduled? I am guessing the answers here are "no" and you are a salaried IT/knowledge worker professional.

Because they are paid by the hour. They clock in and out and are not generally doing "knowledge work." They don't hang out after hours to talk about better ways to sort pallets, if they are there after hours they are there to socialize or do other non-work-related things. (This isn't a dig - this is the work I did for several years before going to college and it's the honest truth.) They have very very little in common with salaried or management employees in terms of pay, job expectations or career path. So yeah, it's natural that the rules are totally different.

You're using an odd definition of "suddenly" that means "announced four years ago and delayed at least twice."

Unlike wireline infrastructure where you can always run another cable, wireless spectrum is limited. With that same 20 MHz of spectrum you can for example serve a few tens of thousands of 10-year-old 3G devices with narrowband service or you can repurpose it to serve millions of 4G or 5G devices with broadband service. Which is a better use for people and the economy overall?

I say this having been in the industry on the cell carrier side - so of course I'm biased - but even a decade ago we told IoT device makers "We're your best alternative to making your device work without having your customers run a dedicated landline. But we always have to move on from generation to generation every decade or so... so be prepared to upgrade your stuff." Some of them listened (and did things like upgrade their gear to use a home's WiFi) and others didn't. I can say having been in plenty of those discussions that long ago that IoT vendors who are crying about obsolescence now knew the risks that long ago and just wanted to sell cheap hardware and not worry about the costs of upgrading later.

There are literally thousands of communities in the United States alone that would love to do this, and they have tried. And failed. They are all eagerly awaiting your solution to how easy it is.

History shows that despite all your best intentions, you can't just say your town of Cornhole, Nebraska is a tech hub and have it happen. The fact of the matter is that you need one really big employer (and/or a top flight university Computer Science program nearby) to "seed" an area with a skilled technology workforce for themselves and other companies to draw from.

HP did it for Silicon Valley (with Stanford help) and you see what followed. Microsoft did it for Seattle, then Amazon and Nintendo followed. Dell did it for Austin. MIT largely did it for Boston. The DC area became a hub for ISPs after UUNet and (God help us) AOL. Note, for example, that despite all the advantages of NYC, the lack of an "anchor tenant" in tech there has meant that this sector never developed the same way that, say, finance did.

So you really need to land a whale or a great college. And that's much harder to do than it sounds. (Oh, and especially good luck drawing talented young computer engineers to your rural Mississippi county with blue laws and a social climate out of the 1930s.) Remember half the country bending over backwards to get "Amazon HQ2" and then they ended up just staying in Seattle? That happened for a reason...

My thinking exactly. 17 years ago, the US Army invaded Iraq in violation of international law. That's why to this day I will never go to a national park. Or watch "Hamilton" because it promotes the use of $10 bills. Or pay taxes.

Not just that, this guy sounds like someone who has never been on the employee side of a bankruptcy. In the early 2000s, I worked at a startup telecom company which had (remember these?) severance clauses in the employee agreements. If I was let go for any reason other than being "fired for cause," the company owed me six months' salary.

Eventually the company's top investor (Goldman Sachs) decided its projections were too optimistic as the dot-com boom took hold, and my company laid off nearly all the employees and the next day then filed for bankruptcy. Because of the bankruptcy filing, all of the company's obligations prior to the filing were suspended of course. (After you file for Chapter 11, all of that money you owe for anything up to that point goes on hold until a judge determines the outcome of your case!)

I and lots of other ex-employees really needed that severance payment money to get us through a really rough time in the telecom business with few jobs to be found. But what did we all get? A settlement 18 months later that paid us out a little under 10% of our promised severance payments. I would have been better off with no severance payment if the company had survived two more paychecks.

Maybe my experience is atypical but I find it hard to believe that most employees are better off if their employer goes bankrupt than if the company is around to either a.) keep them employed or b.) at least be on the hook to pay for things like severance, COBRA and whatnot.

The whole thing is based on a misleading-at-best premise. Huawei doesn't "dominate" 5G in the US at all in terms of deployments. That's because the "big four" carriers in the US are all using Ericsson/Nokia gear. Ericsson and Nokia charge premium prices, but they are absolutely the gold standard and any carrier that needs to scale nationwide is going to go with them.

Where Huawei has a large market share is in small local/rural carriers, private networks and the like where they don't have the money to buy the Cadillac gear and Huawei is 20% or so of the price. What the government is trying to accomplish is making sure every mom and pop rural cellco in the country isn't running spyware-riddled Huawei gear. But even in the worst case scenario that's maybe 5% of the total 5G nodes that would ever be deployed in the US.

Besides, open source per se isn't the issue. Most large carriers around the world are already big users of open source to virtualize most of their network functions and move away from proprietary gear. The exception being the eNodeB/gNodeBs and radio heads where the hardware and software are tightly tied together - not the best place for open source to be a strong replacement. If the government wanted to solve this problem directly, they could just start giving out grants to subsidize small telcos that want to go 5G as long as they buy non-Huawei/ZTE equipment. A lot simpler and probably less expensive.

Lawsuits over something like this seem unlikely, given how all this started several years ago and the lack of suits then.

You may recall that in 2012-ish "4G" was all the rage. Sprint looked at its dumpster fire of a network roadmap and decided that, because it was nowhere near a LTE rollout, it had to stay in the marketing game. So it squinted at the 3GPP "4G standard" and said "since it specifies 10 Mbps speed, and our WiMax network could get 10 Mbps on a clear day if you squint at it right, we will now say we have the first '4G' network!" T-Mobile felt the need to respond, so they looked at their HSPA+ network and said, "well if Sprint's WiMax network counts as '4G' by that standard, then our network is 4G too." AT&T sadly succumbed to the peer pressure and branded HSPA+ as 4G as well, which was especially unfortunate given that they actually had a "real 4G" LTE rollout on the horizon (they were second after Verizon in the US).

Nobody ever successfully sued Sprint, T-Mobile or AT&T over any of those shenanigans, so I doubt there will be much more luck this time around.

It depends on who you are, though. If you don't have a stable economic base or tax base (e.g. Greece) and/or don't have control over your own monetary policy (er... Greece again) then you don't really have a choice. You have to spend less when the economy is down because... you have less money to spend. Some economies are simply screwed up enough systemically that throwing more money into them will be a waste because they need to be fundamentally restructured. If your economy is totally based on something external you can't control (like oil prices or tourism) then printing more money is no better than a band-aid. There's no amount of money in the world that would make Venezuela's economy sustainable right now. So "austerity" is your only remedy if you don't have an economy that is fundamentally sound.

However, Keynesian economics will tell you that you should inject money into the economy when it slows down - much like FDR did in the United States during the Great Depression, or the "Obama stimulus" infrastructure spending in 2008. Keynesian thinking follows what you suggest, but it's only practical in cases where you have control over your own money supply and there is a reasonable chance that all the economy is missing is enough people spending money.

The talk about "managers" is misleading due to what that term means at big legacy telecom companies. At any of the Ma Bell-descended companies (including Verizon), a "manager" is a salaried employee, contrasting with an "professional" (hourly i.e. union) employee. A very tiny percentage of "management" employees actually are "managers" in the traditional sense. So it basically just means that they are laying off a large number of salaried non-union workers rather than hourly union employees.

Sure, but how many of those people are willing to move for a new job? Just looking at the data offhand, the unemployment rate in Imperial County, California is 19.3% while the rate is only 2.7% in Santa Clara County, California. If people won't even go that far for jobs, why would we expect the millions of Rust Belt unemployed to go to the theoretical new Apple factories in Nevada or South Carolina?

Sure, for group half duplex voice communications only. It doesn't do any good for your laptop, tablet, handheld fingerprint scanner, wireless firefighting temperature sensors, etc. Oh, and good luck talking to anyone on the radio who doesn't have a compatible radio - like the doctors at the hospital, the mayor... so on and so forth.

The problem isn't farmers, it's poor people. Satellite Internet is available pretty much everywhere that dialup is in rural areas. If you are using dialup instead of satellite Internet, it's most likely because you either don't have the $60/month that satellite Internet will cost you or you don't use the Internet enough to think it's worth $60 (but you can/are willing to pay $19.95/month for dialup). And if you own a farm but can't afford $60/month for Internet, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, you're farming it wrong.

Whatever else Richard M. Nixon may have screwed up, his name and signature are on a plaque that will rest of the moon for (presumably) millions of years. Not Kennedy's. I'd say that's pretty sweet revenge.

I'll wait for you to logically trace your statement back through where profits come from, which is revenue; and where revenue comes from, which is consumers.

You do get that - at least in the US - only profits are taxed today already? Is there something you are proposing differently that somehow does not get passed back to consumer revenue? If so, the Nobel economics committee is eagerly awaiting your paper.

Utterly unrelated point: Dear PopeRatzo: I have seen your posts for years on Slashdot and disagreed with almost all of them. And I get that, in responding, I am falling prey to XKCD "SOMEONE ON THE INTERNET IS WRONG" disease. But you seem to have some genuine feeling and thought behind all your posts, regardless of how often I disagree with them. And I very much respect that. The world is short on honest conversations between earnest and principled people.

So as an experiment I am extending an olive branch here in that if we can get along then almost anyone can. Send me a message via my Slashdot obfuscated e-mail address.