Yup. First the SS closes your subreddit. Then the death camps. True facts. Definitely not somebody's unhinged sense of victimhood collapsing into a singularity. Not at all.

What is particularly pathetic about the whining about oppression and SJW political correctness conspiracies is that this move is presumably just business.

People so ghastly that they are considered to be of less than zero value to the business running their hangout; all convinced that being shown the door because they are annoying the useful customers is some grand conspiracy.

I doubt you could get them on the record about it(and they'd presumably blame some twist in the advertising spot sales chain if pressed); but I'd be fascinated to know if, and if so, which, advertisers are actually interested specifically in the users that Reddit is attempting to shed. They likely aren't the highest value ones, by any means; but even demented abhumans buy things, so somebody must be interested in them.

I wonder how much, if any, of this is actually a personal reaction to the site's evolution; and how much is simply the decision that the bad press (Reddit: Nastier than StormFront!) needed to stop and it was time to monetize the better neighborhoods harder than in the past. Clearly the popular AMA coordinating employee didn't get sacked for bad performance in doing things as they had previously been done, which certainly suggests that change was in the air even before the real fuss started and Pao left.

The ideal route, for cost and time savings, would be a disused rail line(or, at greater; but quite possibly still less than new rights of way and earthmoving, on pillars above an active rail line). The rail network has shifted some over the years; but the earthmoving done to accommodate the lines tends to persist for decades after they go idle, and they tend to run between places that are, or were, worth travelling between.

I imagine that the magnetics and reasonably gas-tight tube would still be more expensive than conventional rail lines or even maglev; but being able to factory produce the tube segments and just plop them into place without substantial terrain rework would certainly lower the bill and build time. Like putting one of those hamster habitats together.

Sure, sure; but pissing money into a sand trap is American Greatness, while building infrastructure is degenerate socialism. You have to keep your priorities straight here.

I'm not optimistic about it getting built; but aside from environmental considerations; a hyperloop system could be of considerable interest for freight that is currently too expensive for air travel; but would be willing to pay a premium over conventional rail or truck for greater speed.

If the tube were big enough to allow intermodal containers, the customers would swarm you, demanding that you take their money. Aircraft style ULDs would probably be the more realistic option, and better suited to the tube shape; but a suitable robotic autoloader could probably spit those things into suitably designed freight chassis cars at a good clip. Couldn't beat trains on price; but markedly faster, probably cheaper per unit mass than air freight.

Going by the commercial offerings(you can probably do it faster if your yacht is built like a clipper ship and runs like hell all the way); that's somewhere between 20 days and 3 months. Those scantily clad companions had better be of a 'highly stimulating nature'; because that's a long time, even compared to flying coach.

Really, except in densely settled areas(where the fire can spread to nearby buildings, 'firefighters' are a socialist luxury program. If the building's owners aren't incentivized to save it; it'll just burn down and put itself out within a few hours. Why bother with drones when you could just cut the fire department entirely? Most people who call are liars, and the rest are too lazy and cheap to install fire suppression systems on their property, so the hell with them.

That's the unfortunate side effect of having bullshit 'homeland security' slush money available to the tribal militias of failed, 3rd world, states. Hickistan's sheriffs have enough of a problem with grandiosity without the feds buying them fancy toys.

It's certainly possible that someone attempting a rapid expansion could butt up against the limits of the location; but the handy thing about fiber is that the cost per strand drops pretty dramatically as you run more of it to the same place. The actual fiber certainly isn't free; but the necessary rights of way, support/protection for the cable, labor for installation, etc. cost much the same until you get to some impractically gigantic bundle. It may be necessary to make upgrades; but if a location is already well served enough to start building a datacenter, it's a good bet that adding the necessary capacity there will be cheaper than dealing with more, smaller, links to more locations.

It's really a very old idea, just with cellphones and GPS for ever finer granularity. Historically the granularity was more or less limited to 'day laborer', or paid by the piece, since more accurate timekeeping and information processing weren't available; but the basic concept of having a pool of disposable peons waiting to be temporarily employed as you need them is not new. Or particularly pleasant.

I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that the really wealthy generally spend less time whining about taxes and more time creatively structuring their assets so as to not pay them; and can also afford, if they want, to live under just about any tax structure worldwide, so their choice of residence and citizenship is based more on preference and perceived advantages than on economic necessity. They may still dislike paying whatever taxes they can't avoid; but not enough to put themselves to any great personal inconvenience or hardship about it.

The less wealthy, but wealthy enough to feel exploited by the tax system, whine more loudly because they have fewer options for lowering their effective tax rate(high-salary skilled workers, say, tend to resent getting taxed at income tax rates rather than capital gains rates); and because they are relatively poor enough that the marginal value of the assets they lose to taxation is higher(if you are really rich, taxes may offend you in some abstract sense; but they don't really change your ability to enjoy basically anything money can buy; if you are merely wealthy, taxes aren't putting you in the bread line; but they quite possibly are reducing the range of things you can afford.)

The somewhat less wealthy are also presumably less able to insulate themselves from their environment. A suitably large fortune will keep just about anything except the central government at bay(this is why so many Russian oligarchs hang out in London); but the smaller the fortune the lower the degree of cost-effective insulation you can manage. This makes Jamaica's relative poverty, very high crime, poor corruption ranking, and mediocre HDI somewhat less attractive.

That claim is particularly weird because the pitch is targeted at wealthy Americans.

Yeah, sure, there are plenty of places where you have uncomfortably good odds of 'racial crimes', or garden variety getting mugged and/or shot; but wealthy people generally don't live in them. That's one of the perks of having enough money to live in the nice part of town. The people you want just don't really have to worry(they might anyway, like the nuts ranting about how talk of 'inequality' is just a step away from sending anyone not on welfare to the death camps). Unless there is a supply of people who just really want to live a long way from anywhere(flights to Australia aren't exotic or anything; but they are very, very, tedious); they'd better have a more relevant set of issues.

There are occasional clusters of cuts that seem a little curious; but single undersea cables getting knocked out now and again is just a fact of life. My understanding is that the people who specialize in laying and repairing undersea cable are more or less constantly moving from job to job. The only real story is that the fiber went down before the microwave link had been repaired. Given that you can get 100km out of a wifi link(with distinctly non-stock antennas, and potentially some small-but-FCC-unapproved increase in transmission power), it sounds like they should consider some backups that they can bring back into service more quickly.