> rich white people have drug problems

As someone who grew up in the 80's, drugs have been big with rich, white people for a long, long time. Powder cocaine was the drug of choice for people back then, now it's meth as cocaine becomes more and more expensive, or painkillers for the percieved 'safety', changing to heroin when safety ceases to matter to the addict and cost becomes the primary factor.

In the 40's and 50's, it was GI's coming back from the wars hooked on morphine. In the 60's, it was everything. 70's was when cocaine really took off.

Rich white people have had drug problems as long as there have been rich white people.

Large cookie cutter subdivision homes developed by a single builder do have some of that stuff because it's more economical at scale - and they can create massive hollow boxes for pennies that blow over at the slightest breeze. There are subdivisions near my house that have some of this stuff - they have a lot of trouble selling because the houses just 'feel cheap'. Engineered trusses instead of joists, laminated or metal studs, etc. just give the house the feel that it's not entirely stable, even if it is all valid according to code.

The Chestnut was wiped out due to a fungal plague. Ash and Elm species are currently being devastated by the Ash Borer and Dutch Elm Disease, respectively. Walnut is being killed off by Thousand Cankers disease. I'm waiting for Oak and Maple to be wiped out due to some other exotic pest - perhaps Oak Wilt or some such.

New apartment buildings are built with concrete. New houses are built with wood and the expensive ones are clad with brick, at least, in my area.

Also, concrete production is responsible for a massive amount of greenhouse gasses - as lime is heated to produce cement, it gives off a lot of CO2, which is dumped into the atmosphere.

As someone who does carpentry and has helped build a couple houses over the past few years, this is patently false. You've been lied to by whatever environmentalist rag you subscribe to.

Most homes in the US are framed out of 2x4's cut from pine, floorboards are made of pine plywood, hardwood oak, cherry, and others are used for flooring. All of this comes from the timber industry, mostly from Canadian timber, but some more exotic stuff still comes from Brazil and Africa. My brother's floor is Brazilian cherry.

Some of that lumber is sourced from tree farms, but those tree farms are problematic as well - it takes years to grow them, and habitats establish themselves within those farms as they grow. The longer it takes to grow them, the longer it takes to offset losses in virgin forest. Hardwoods typically take over 30 years to be ready for harvest, longer if you want wider wood as you would need for 2x6 or 2x8 joists and furniture.

So what happens when solar panels become too environmentally impactful? What happens when the wind turbines are impacting migratory birds? What happens when the lithium mines and copper mines used to make those electric car batteries are deemed too toxic and environmentally hazardous? Why, we shut them all down! Who needs electricity? And while we're at it, all those trees we cut down to build houses are destroying habitats for all kinds of animals - so let's use different building materials - earthen materials strengthened with straw perhaps? Much more environmentally friendly. Next, concrete manufacturing is a top producer of greenhouse gasses. Let's stop making concrete - we don't need sewer pipes if we just have our waste water carried away by gravity in ditches, right? It worked for mankind for thousands of years!

So we ditch the electricity, ditch the timber, ditch the concrete, and what's left?

Mud huts and open sewers.

Mud huts. I think they want us all to go back to mud huts and open sewers.

Been waiting on that one forever

I'm no expert on this technology, but from tfs, it would seem to increase bandwidth by minimizing loss over distance, allowing for longer range and faster speed.

Not necessarily - there are lots of situations where it's not practical to run a cable. Secure connectivity between naval vessels is a prime example, others would be for use in the space program, or cheaper data communication between buildings in a campus. Residential broadband internet would be simpler - put an optical transceiver on the roof and point it at a tower - no more digging up the garden to provide fttp.

I pay $300 per year in my property tax bill for the public library system in my town. Why would I use anything else?

The much better Ars Technica summary article says that yes, 30m for 10Gbps, but 1Gbps over 70m. Gigabit DSL would be a game changer.

Just have to switch it around - instead of "offering a discount" for people who do this, think of it more as "charging a penalty" for people who don't.

This.

Plus, ever since Snowden, the US is actively putting pressure on anyone in power in Russia - any Russians in positions of power with so much as a parking ticket in the US is on an extradition list.