I see it as an odd commentary on the mass inequality in this country. Some inequality is a good thing, but too much is morally disgusting and a recipe for mayhem and national collapse.

May The Force be with George.

That works out to 10,000 square feet per home.

Obviously there are roads and common areas to take into consideration, but that seems really huge. My entire lot size is 6500 square feet with about a 1100 sq ft. foundation house (2000 sq ft finished) sitting on it. That 6500 sq ft. includes driveway, garage, yard, basically everything I have title to.

These properties don't sound like "affordable" houses at all, it sounds like solidly middle class for most areas and probably luxurious for that area. I would generally expect an "affordable" development to have much higher density.

Apple is also purported to be building their own electric car, but I don't think either Apple or Google want to be in the car *manufacturing* business. That is messy, labor/union intensive and involves a whole lot of engineering and regulatory crap they know nothing about.

They want to be suppliers to whoever IS building the cars. Building your own skunkworks vehicle gives you a shiny to show off but more importantly gives you a lot of engineering exposure to the internals that you wouldn't know about otherwise.

Sarcasm aside, Microsoft was heavily under the anti-trust scope at the time, and needed a viable OS competitor to not look like a monopoly. MS thus wanted Apple to survive. (It's possibly the same reason AMD is still alive.)

Better yet, and less violent, lock the execs in a cell with spotty Internet and a bunch of channels they don't want. Let them watch the World Series, but have the picture and sound go all pixelly and choppy in the 9th inning in a close game.

Love the idea, it will never happen.

The ISP service is mostly a race to the bottom without the ability to manipulate the market via monopoly power, including blocking competition at the local level, extorting content providers you don't own to pay you for service delivery (a second time, really, since you already billed your customer for delivery of bits).

TV service via cable is a dead business. Streaming is killing it and if Comcast, et al, wasn't choking high speed Internet and restricting content providers from streaming their own content it would be dying even faster. HBO is already escaping this market.

Content is where the money is, but even there you have to wonder. It doesn't take a whole lot of realignment at the content creation level to leave NBC-Universal in a bidding war with Netflix for new shows. If Netflix or Amazon can come to the production house with the same sized check as a network, why should the show go on a network?

just invent transparent aluminium, kit out an old alien spacecraft with a big water tank, and transport it...

We tried that. Random whales kept clogging the lines.

Better yet, build a telecom that isn't a dick. If it works right, I won't care about my brown lawn, I'd probably never even see it. I'll put up damned cacti to get away from AT & Comcast Warner, who are already prickly.

I don't know why the north couldn't grow its own fruit and vegetables in those high tech vertical hydroponic gardens that use LED lighting. It might actually be a wash with the cost of shipping perishables and greatly cut what amounts to exporting water in the form of high-water-content agricultural products.

I think you're off base when it comes to avacados, aren't they supposed to be really good fats? Besides, fat isn't what makes you fat, it's bulk consumption of shit carbohydrates.

I'm sick and tired of forced bundling from telecoms in general. I can't just buy what I want and only what I want; I have to buy crap I don't want and don't use to get it, and there is not enough competition to find one that doesn't ALSO force bundling.

They should be split up, not merged, dammit! Merging just makes them more bundly.

And don't even get me started about reliability and stealth billing "fees". ARRRRGGG.

I imagine Facebook will eventually eliminate "Most Recent" as an option -- they really want to structure the feed like a TV channel, with content you want from your friends interspersed with a bunch of paid promotion junk content you can't avoid.

They don't even seem to respect "I don't want to see this..." now -- I have blocked "Timehop" (really, your post was dumb the first time around, it's no better 3 years later) a dozen times and it keeps showing up.

I wish it was somehow smarter about hiding categories of content.

My neighbor frequently shares pages/people's posts about New Agey kinds of food topics -- "10 reasons why boiled kale improves your aura". I use the "Hide all from Melanie Stargazer" option to block it, but there doesn't seem to be a way to train Facebook to block other similar pages/content types.

My guess is many of these shares are from people trying to make a career out of being digital holistic gurus of some kind and pay Facebook to promote their posts. But I wish I could train it to identify this category of post and just never see it again.

I also feel like I've blocked countless radio station shares, which must also be paying to promote their content. But I don't want to see clickbait from "101.3 The Wave" or any other station I've never heard of.

Still another is the mass tag shared post, often from an organization/entity -- "Foo Bar with Manny Smith and 47 others". I'm pretty sure the mass tagging is done to develop maximum exposure, but it seems to abuse the putative social intent of tagging a post as identifying people actually with the poster.

Yet another annoyance is the phenomenon of people posting replies that contain ONLY people's names as tags. Occasionally I want to see the comments to a post, but often the majority are just name tagging. There should be a way to hide those so that only the people tagged and/or their friends (depending on security settings) see them.

Imagine a planet without trolls. Would all civilizations evolve trolls?