You are half right. To serve NEW customers they have to do all of that.

To improve service for existing customers they just need new Central Office equipment. And even then only switches. The equipment manufacturers are constantly squeezing more performance out of the same power draw. (A 48 port 1Gb switch uses about the same power and cooling as a 48 port 10Gb switch).

The rest of the infrastructure (wiring between the CO and the customer is already there).

For example, the home I live in was built in 1996 and I have fiber to the house.

The largest issue here is that ISPs want to spend the least amount of money possible to retain their customers. The lack of competiton in most markets ensures that they will have a virtually unlimited supply of "new" customers.

"My kid is totally not addicted to video games. Look, he plays LOTS of them!"

The people who are going to be responsible parents look at their lives, their jobs, their finances and they thoughtfully consider whether or not they can afford to have children, and whether or not they can provide that child a good life.

On the other hand, all too many people 'accidently' have kids and don't seem to care about the consequences because they know that the social services safety net is there for them. And at the extreme end of the spectrum, you have mothers living in poverty who are literally using additional children as a way to 'earn' more income in the form of welfare payments. Thankfully, those situations are the exception to the rule, but they do happen.

I get multiple recruiters a month contacting me with decent job offers that align with my skill set. If I were looking to change companies and do the same thing, it would be a great resource.

I am only passively looking at this point though. And I am only interested in moving up, not laterally.

In the middle to late stages of my career with 20 years of experience. It might be different for people who are just getting started.

Unlike the author of the article, I do not just accept anyone who wants to connect. I only accept connection requests from people I have done business with, or want to do business with. I'd say a good 85%+ of the time, I am the one initiating the connection request. I deny most connection requests because they tend to come from people overseas who I do not know and will likely never meet.

I drive for Lyft from time to time. What surprised me is how many people use ride sharing to get to and from work. They are usually short trips that end up costing them ~$20-30 per day. I did some quick back of the napkin math, and spending ~$400 a month for transportation to and from work is a lot less than my car payment + insurance + gas + repairs.

At that point, I started extrapolating. If one person is spending $400, then three people are spending $1200 or four people are spending $1600. Given that kind of capital, I could see enterprising friends all pitching in to purchase an autonomous vehicle. Where it really starts making sense is when you can send the vehicle out to do ride share while you are working.

The article even mentions that the initial market for those vehicles is businesses. I can easily imagine a business of ride sharing with AVs. That's the low hanging fruit right there.

Granted, most people do more than just go to and from work with their cars. But again, what really surprised me was how many people in college and their mid-20s have no interest in owning a car. For some, it's a luxury that they cannot afford on top of student loans and all the other costs of starting up a life after moving out of their parent's house. For others, they just have no desire to own a car. They see it as an unnecessary expense.

The OP is asking for a top notch project team who only needs someone to help with implementation. I've been doing IT for 20 years at this point and my experience has been that well scoped, managed and executed projects are the exception to the rule. More often than not there is at least some, if not major amounts of "making it up as we go" taking place.

Any team that is competent enough to lay the groundwork already has people lined up to do the implementation.

Descent was the first game I played that made me nauseous / motion sick. It was the combination of those tight quarters and truly unrestricted 3D movement.

A VR version of Descent would be interesting...

I think that's the point of this $27,000 option. They are testing the waters to see how many extremely stupid people are still out there and interested in throwing money down the SC hole.

I think it is a great strategy. It takes some real intelligence and drive to accumulate $27,000 in play money that you can spend frivolously on a "product" that does not have any real world value and does not even exist in finished form yet.

If they can scam someone like that out of that much money, I would say that is a pretty good litmus test as to how many suckers are out there in the general population.

You beat me to it. I have a really hard time feeling sorry for Yelp here.

Their business model is more or less built around high pressure sales techniques that border on extortion. Unless you pay them, good reviews will disappear and bad reviews will multiply. "You don't like the bad reviews? No problem. Just subscribe to our service, and we will help you with those."

You left out a very important variable in your equation. A single person can only be in one place at one time. A facial recognition system is everywhere.

For me, I think that there needs to be a limit on the extent of the investigation. To use the example from Washington County, the system was used to identify a thief. That is obviously a good outcome.

How many people who were not the thief, were investigated?

If during that investigation the police discovered one of those other people doing something illegal, would they then attempt to apprehend and charge that person as well?

Given the question above, it quickly becomes a slippery slope. Law enforcement effectively gets a pass to investigate EVERYONE. They get a free pass to say, "Although I was looking for Person A, I also observed Person B committing a felony, Person C committing a misdemeanor, and Person D doing something suspicious that might have been a National Security concern, so we referred them to DHS."

Mostly because my company pays for it. At this point in my life, if I did not have to have a phone for work, I would have something basic that does voice and SMS.

This is extremely wide spread. I think it is Google that is doing it.

It happened to my wife and I. We made one random mention of buying something for the house. The next time she logged into Amazon, she saw an advertisement for what we were talking about.

I drive for Lyft on the weekend and I have had multiple riders bring this up. I had one couple this weekend that mentioned it happened to them with Hulu, multiple times. They noticed that it takes at least 7 days for Hulu to "catch up" with what they were talking about. Their example was that they were having a party and the TV was on. They were talking about wanting to move, and someone randomly mentioned New Orleans. A single mention, everyone kind of laughed about it and moved onto the next subject. The next week, Hulu started displaying advertisements for New Orleans.

What I found interesting is that they said Hulu is not at all subtle about it. They will just spam the same "targeted" ad over and over again. Like a switch gets flipped. It goes from never having an ad about whatever key word was hit on, to seeing it extremely frequently.

I would be interested if anyone else with Hulu has had similar experiences. Anyone?

At the same time, I'm meeting more women than ever who are into porn, both consumption and production.

I do live in Portland, Oregon though so my sample population is likely skewed from the 'norm' for America.

I have a bin full of 1TB USB 3.0 drives.

As naïve as this might sound, I have a lot more peace of mind in Dropbox. If I experience a drive failure, I lose what is on there. They have SANs.

TBH, I am saving up for a 4 drive Synology NAS. With 4TB @ RAID5 I will get 12TB of storage. That's more than enough for what I am backing up.

I'm not so worried about shadow bans of my spread sheets and family photos.

If they start banning VeraCrypt containers, then I've got a real problem.