Then get your local government to change their policies. In my state user costs (how long your commute takes) are as high a priority as project cost. I've seen projects do things that added 30% to the cost (huge time restrictions on lane impacts) to limit the impact to the public's lives. More than half the projects my state issues these days don't even allow lane closures during any hours were it will impact traffic. I'm about to issue a job where the only work hours are between 8pm and 6am M-Sat (they can work all day Sunday), in other words it's ALL night work.

Your state simply doesn't care about user costs, and that's YOUR fault. If you want them to care you need to make that known, frequently and to as many people as possible. You need to make clear that you don't care if it costs more.

Portray as a nut? He IS a nut.

He had the gall to question Obama's citizenship (born in Hawaii to an American woman and Kenyan father), when Cruz was born in Canada (to an American woman) and has a Cuban father.

But now it's crazy to question his ability to run for the presidency because his mother was American, ya know just like Obama which he claimed meant Obama didn't meet the requirements because the birth certificate is a forgery and he was actually born in Indonesia, a foreign country, just like Canada. But most of the birthers will leave him alone because he's not Black. Though I can't wait to see how he defends all the crazy shit his Dad has said over the years. His Dad would fit in with the west-borough baptist church with some of the shit he's spewed.

All politicians are emissaries of Satan but Hillary Clinton is only a 1st level Imp while all of the Republican candidates are first level commanders right below the Great Satan himself with a direct link to the orders of the dark lord.

I'd rather have GW Bush back in office again for 8 years rather than ANY of the republicans running for office these days.

But if a Clinton get's elected again, I know at least one thing for sure, that is that she won't start approving tax cuts while boosting spending (gotta boost that Military industrial complex or they might not get their checks at election time) like the Republicans want. You know Tax-cut and spend, the new Republican Motto since the NeoCons took over the party. I'll take a tax and spend Democrat over a tax-cut and spend Republican any day of the week.

This is a party that has made "no new spending without offsetting reductions elsewhere" their party platform under Obama but they get control of both houses and the first thing they do is write a bill to boost Defense spending 200 billion and don't pay for it. You also have the duplicity of groups like the Koch brothers that scream and yell about competition and free market but the first chance they get they get a law passed in Florida barring people from using any power that they didn't buy from the power company (because ideals don't count if it hurts the bottom line).

Fox News is the largest Psyops campaign ever run on the american people. You have an entire channel (actually several) whose news and stories are being scripted by one of the political parties.

It's amazing to me how many people aren't horrified by this. The old FCC regulation about fairness wouldn't have allowed that, but it was sunk years ago, and rather deliberately.

How will ULA survive if the government doesn't force SpaceX to operate like a traditional defense contractor sucking at the cost plus fixed fee teet. The Airforce has to help them get there because this commercial competition non-sense will mean the loss of plenty of high paying executive jobs and ULA.

Blah Blah Blah Blah

More dribble, little understanding and a continued insistence that you know it all.

The facts seem pretty clear here, and the fact is that it cost $3k for a random individual to hire a contractor, who in turn got all the necessary permits and permissions and ran the line. Therefore in the absolute worst case, it would have cost Comcast... $3k to run the line.

Said random individual hired a fly-by night contractor to install said line for $3K has very little bearing on what it would cost Comcast. You have no idea if the contractor followed any of the requirements or received any of the required permits or performed the required studies or even installed it properly (such as the pull weight limits for the type of cable installed). I would in fact wager against it having been done properly because the guy probably hired the contractor that gave him the cheapest price without any regard to following the rules.

Of course the beauty of doing what he did is that he now owns the entire thing. That contractor nicked a water line that's now leaking and will end up causing frost heave that ends up destroying the roadway, it's all on the homeowner. Or the water line nick floods his neighbor's basement, guess who pays to replace the neighbors antique furniture that's now ruined. He improperly trenched the roadway and replaced the pavement with inadequate drainage and improper material which causes the roadway to fail, it's all on the homeowner. There are a million things the contractor could have done wrong, all of which that could have catastrophic consequences. The first and foremost is that if that was installed without a right-of-way permit the local jurisdiction is probably going to make him remove that line in the future, or they will remove it and charge him for the removal.

Or even the simple problem of his internet connection stops working, Comcast will deny it's on their end and will suggest he replace that line he just installed and Comcast will likely refuse to do any troubleshooting because it's not their line and not their problem. Or some other company installs a Utility in the area and cuts his line because it's not properly marked, identified or in the one call system, all the liability is on the homeowner.

That homeowner took on some big liability by installing something into the public right-of-way. I hope it doesn't come back to bite him in the ass and end up bankrupting him and ruining his life.

The folks digging up our street were Comcast employees (or at least contractors working for Comcast, not some installer company). They drove Comcast trucks. They ran underground pipes that were manufactured specifically for Comcast, with their name printed every few inches all the way down the length of the tubing. Maybe you don't realize just how big a company we're talking about here.

They were independent contractors hired by Comcast with a Contract requirement that they badge their trucks and wear Comcast shirts. Comcast supplies the materials, there is an advantage to labeled conduit in that people digging utility test holes can easily identify the owner.

As for liability, there's a little thing called liability insurance. Companies doing that sort of work have to have it, and if they hire a company to do the work, the company they hire has to have it. It is usually required by law.

Yes Liability insurance can be purchased, and probably even cover 90% of accidents. Large companies choose to hire independents because if the independent contractor makes a mistake the small company can declare bankruptcy and clear all the liability while Comcast isn't material affected. No for profit company of Comcast's size would EVER dig in a utility with their own forces. It's economic suicide and the insurance they would need to purchase to cover them for all possible incidents would be so prohibitively expensive to basically make it impossible to build anything at all.

I ran into a utility once where the costs for any contractor that dug up and cut the utility were about $46K per minute the line was out of service. This was a cross country fiber with multiple strands. At the time, splicing a single fiber required a clean room standards and about 6 hours of time to cut, polish and splice the strand. The line was literally in the middle of no where, as is frequently the case it's more likely to run into these types of utilities in rural areas. Consider the cost of a break that took out all the strands where the fastest response time would be about 2 hours and that's just to locate the break, determine how bad it is and dispatch the repair crew. Then the repair crew has to dig up the line, make clean cuts, setup a clean room tent around the break and then splice all the fibers. Though communication cables can have some of the highest repair costs there are plenty of other utilities that a break can trigger other catastrophic damage including the loss of life. What does it cost if you cut a gas line and you end up killing an entire family, how about a whole neighborhood of families? What about the costs if you cut a high pressure oil line, kill several people in the process and poison the land and water for several thousand people?

Comcast chooses to use contractors in some places because they don't have enough work to keep full-time staff occupied, and/or because it confers tax advantages to use contractors instead of employees. The liability claim is just something they tell contractors so they don't realize how badly they're getting screwed.

No, Comcast uses contractors for anything that requires digging, and I have no doubt it's company policy. They more than likely use their own forces to pull the cables once the conduit is installed but they do NOT dig anything with their own forces that's not an emergency (and I have big doubts they would even do it in emergency, they retain contracts for emergency work for that just like everyone else).

Maybe you didn't read the original post. This was about a rural installation. In my experience, that usually means bare coax cables in the ground (no conduit, and probably not fiber), minimal utility mapping (relatively few houses with taps from the power and phone lines), minimal planning and engineering. I mean yes, you do have to do utility mapping, but it's a whole lot easier to map a rural street with a straight wire that parallels the road than it is to map a suburban street that has wires going in random directions from transformers to houses every fifty or one hundred feet.

The only communication utility that has direct buried cables (no conduit) that I'm even aware of is very old installations of telephone wires. I have run into some of the older fiber optic cables that were not in conduits but they were in armored cables with flowable fill. Such cables aren't used for anything that's not very very important. Anything installed within about the last 30 years when cheap PVC conduit became cheap is now in conduits.

As far as the statements about rural versus urban costs you don't know what you are talking about. You don't understand the process, you don't know how the planning works, or anything about the process. Why do you continue to pretend that you understand anything about this business because you read something on the internet?

The cable company would have to comply with the local building codes no matter what. I doubt there's a huge difference there between a rural install and an urban install. If anything, the rural install is probably more laid back, less rigorous, and has lower overall compliance cost. A building code inspector isn't likely to inspect the entire length of wire, but rather the termini, so that cost should be about the same for a 1,000-foot run as for a 50-foot run, assuming it doesn't require them to install any boosters along the way (and if it did, he/she wouldn't have gotten satisfactory results by running the line himself/herself, so we can safely assume that it did not). Similarly, they had to hook it up to their network whether he was thirty feet from the street or a thousand feet, so that cost is also irrelevant. The only relevant factor that makes this house different from any other is the cost of running a thousand feet of cable in a slit in the ground.

So rural is easier, but then it's about the same cost? Yea that's the kind of duplicitous statements you get when you are talking out your ass. There are no building code inspections on buried cable outside a dwelling that I'm aware of, there may be some in other states but the entire point of a building code is it covers BUILDINGS. I knew you would focus on that, it's why I put it in. The local jurisdictions codes and right-of-way access permits and their requirements are going to drive the planning and engineering costs to an extent. Comcast is the only one at all that cares if their lines work or not, all the local jurisdiction cares about is what they damaged and where they put the line when it was installed.

You might find this hard to believe because you don't know what you are talking about but the cost to install the cable to this one house could be a million dollars. He could be on the outer limit of the amplification limits such that it would require them to install an entire fiber hut and amplification system. He could be on the other side of a protected refuge or there could be major utilities between him and the closest connection. In fact there could hundreds of reasons that only Comcast knows about why they can't afford to service that house. There is little point is speculating about what those reasons are unless you want to pay the $5K it would cost for an engineering and locate study to check the feasibility of the installation.

The pass cost was very nearly paid by having service in the street just 1,000 feet away. Remember that, the cost of running a cable in the suburbs is typically much higher than the cost of doing so in a rural area, because you have to deal with a lot more sidewalks, roads, and driveways. Mind you, the extra distance makes up for a lot of that, but 1,000 feet really shouldn't be a big deal, assuming they don't have to dig up any roads (extra permission) or put up any poles (extra cost and probably extra permission).

The following just proves you don't know what you are talking about.

I don't know why Comcast didn't want to service this house. I don't have the information required to know that because it would require not only detailed knowledge of the site and restrictions it would also require detailed knowledge of Comcast's capital improvement spending plan neither of which I have.

What I do know though is that you don't know what the fuck you are talking about. I can say that as someone with experience dealing with utilities (above and below ground) within the public right-of-way every day of my career for the last 20 years. So give it up, you don't know what you are talking about and playing the know-it-all is lame.

You have no concept of what it takes to put a cable in the ground.

First, all Comcast construction is done by contractors for liability reasons. This isn't negotiable for a large company, a single improper process for a contractor digging a utility in could bankrupt even a company of Comcast's size if their employee's were directly involved in the right incident.

Second, though it may only cost $200 a day to rent it's rather irrelevant because Comcast pays the going Contract rate for installations.

Third, if you think digging the cable in is the only cost you have no concept. There is the planning and engineering costs, the utility mapping, the right-of-way access, the coordination with the local city and the compliance with the local building codes, the insurance costs, the contract management costs, the inspection costs, the quality control and quality assurance. Pulling and splicing cables through the conduits, power and other interconnection costs, splicing the cables, testing and validation, and plant hookup.

Verizon's pass cost (the cost to put a cable in front of the house) was about $1500 per house in a typical suburban environment. It probably costs about another $500-$1000 to dig the cable to the house install the ONT and pull the cable to the jack.

May I suggest you not comment about such subjects in the future. Leave construction and estimating how hard something is to the people that actually know.

Easier to Detect. The easiest to detect is great big gas giants nearly the size of their star orbiting very closely (hot gas giants). Those were the first discovered and comprise the majority of systems discovered so far because the bigger the planet and the closer to the star the easier it is to infer with the current detection techniques. We've never actually imaged one of these worlds, we've only inferred their presence for example by rhythmic flickering from a planet passing in front of the star.

As someone (I can't recall who) said, trying to find planets is like trying to see a mosquito in front of a 10,000 watt light bulb from a football field away. In other words is pretty difficult, in fact so difficult we can only find planets through inferred methods, not direct imaging. Unless we can find a way to completely block all the light from the star without blocking anything illuminated by the star and thousands of times more magnification (say a focal length of half the solar system) we aren't going to image a planet like earth. Space is really really big and the distance between stars so great that even when two galaxies collide there is very little chance of two stars impacting.

You pay nothing to install, the power price agreed to from the panels is often lower than the local rate (depends on local rate), the price is fixed for the contract lifetime (no inflation) and they maintain the system (except keeping trees off your roof, that's your responsibility).

Other than all those errors your post was almost totally inaccurate.

Companies like Exxon and Chevron spend billions drilling the ground to find oil. They then build collection systems on numerous wells, tanks to hold the oil and shipping facilities to load the oil into tankers. Then the transport oil around the world (with the immense logistics that requires), unload the oil into more tanks, process the oil through a distillation process to separate the different hydrocarbons (and keep in mind how hard it is to distill something that has more energy than thousands of tons of dynamite). They then collect and distribute those refined hydrocarbons into separate tanks, pump from the storage tanks to tanker trucks, distribute the tanker trucks to your local gas station which is probably also owned by them and includes additional tanks and pumping infrastructure.

I want the world to move away from Carbon as well but don't discount the challenge of doing what the oil companies do in finding, extracting, refining and transporting it to your local gas station. It is an immense job to do that they accomplish and they do it pretty much continuously to keep that spigot flowing.

Hate to break it to you but California is not the only geothermal site within the US, there are MANY. Hell if you just include the ring of fire we've got, Cali, Oregon, Washinton and Alaska. Throw in the other sources and you add hawaii, utah, wyoming, idaho, montana and many many others. There are lots of spots where there is enough thermal energy close to the surface to make geothermal energy not only economical but cheap and clean. The magma ball under yellowstone is so large that it alone could probably generate all the power the US needed if you could get enough water for the generation.

It's always sunny somewhere, it's always blowing wind somewhere. And often when it's not sunny it's windy and vice-versa.

The solution to renewable power fluctuation is an interconnected grid at to make it feasible and profitable to time shift power. That's it. Germany is proving very effectively that solar and wind don't need huge backup generation capacity. Renewables can provide all the energy we need and the energy companies hate that idea (it will mean dramatically less profits) so they spend a lot of time and money on propaganda, some of which you've fallen for.

If people stopped caring about body modification and tattoos they wouldn't be "cool" anymore.

There is a pretty simple rule in life that you figure out about the time you hit middle age. Anything you think is cool, actually isn't. More often than not cool means doing stupid and irresponsible stuff to prove you are daring and fun. It proves neither, takes a lot of years to realize that.