You think anybody should be allowed to use whatever city infrastructure they like?

The entire purpose of public property is for public use, it if wasn't we would be communists. To try to deny access to anyone to public property is a violation of equal protection. Anyone and everyone that wants to start a public utility of whatever sort they want should have equal access to public property as anyone else does. Exclusive agreements for public property access have been struck down every single time someone tries to enforce them because they aren't legal. Any "franchise" agreement that has terms limiting it to a single utility are illegal on their face and those terms will never be allowed to be enforced.

WOW, or Way Out West.

Whoever sets up the lunar base, do you mind also putting a Pirate Bay server up there, too? I never finished downloading the second season of Hannibal.

Wasn't "passive-aggressive" at all. I'm genuinely concerned when I see someone get uncharacteristically upset over what may be a simple missed point.

I don't do passive-aggressive very much. I'm more the aggressive-aggressive type if I have reason to lash out. I also don't much care for sarcasm unless it can't be avoided.

Gold comes from mines? I always believed it came from pawn shops and elderly relatives.

Maybe it's time for me to stop buying organic fruits & veggies at the grocery store.

The technical term would be 'seigniorage'.

"Inherently worthless" is the salient feature of money. When you trade things of intrinsic value you are bartering. It's only the fact that you were taught to value "dollars" without question that makes you think "$370 million" has any intrinsic value.

Well, we know the Nazi regime asembled ME 262s in an elaborate network of underground tunnels to avoid Allied bombers who late in the war were operating over Germany with near impunity. The tunnels were excavated and ME 262s assembled with Jewish slave labor under horrific conditions.

If you were involved with such a thing you'd have plenty of reason to keep it secret.

Every? I don't give a shit, but then I'm not in the US, and never plan to live there...

For fuck's sake, this is the last comment like this I am going to respond to!

Take it easy. You're getting all worked up for nothing.

It's a new year. Make the best of it and learn to deal with your stress level. You'll live a longer, healthier life.

Why not just run one fiber, ditch all the copper, terminate it at the local POP and then allow various vendors access to that fiber and compete for my business?

Where's the monopoly rent in that setup?

When Gates and others push to have ALL of their money given to philanthropy, I just shake my head and say what fools. It will be spread around and do little good.
OTOH, ppl like Paul Allen is the one that pushed the cable companies to carry the internet. Likewise, he funded Scaled Composites jump into the X-Prize and winning it. This was the real start of private space going forward.
Now, we have Ellon Musk building up companies such as PayPal, Solar City, Tesla, and SpaceX.
Between these 4 companies, he employs more than 100K ppl. BUT, more importantly, all 4 have changed society for the better.
Paypal helped bring retailing to the net. Prior to paypal, few wanted to put their CCs on the net (in fact, only idiots did).
Solar City was key to bringing down the costs of solar installs. The reason is because they focused on getting the INSTALLATION to be cheap and fairly quick, while buying from various makers and forcing their prices way down. Now, they are building MULTIPLE factories that will do 1GW/year of solar modules.
Tesla has forced ALL of the other car companies to produce hybrids and electric cars. In fact, Tesla has made such an impact on the car makers that all of the majors are banding together to push fuel cells. In the mean time, Tesla has installed over 300 super chargers around the world, and will almost certainly have 600-1000 units by end of next year. In the mean time, they are busy producing a line of factories in which the first one will more than double the production of li-ion batteries.
Now, he has SpaceX which has created the world's cheapest launch system. But, he is not content to stop there. He is working on recovering the first stage of F9 and 3 stages of FH. If this is successful, then sometime next year, he will cut the prices up to 50% off. And again, he is not interested in stopping there. He is instead focused on creating a rocket that will launch 200+tonnes to LEO, so as to send ppl to the moon and mars. All of this is forcing other companies and govs. to change.

The author has a point that many of the billioniares are doing NOTHING productive with their money. The right solution is to drop taxes on new companies that are solving issues. This would encourage others to jump into these kinds of ventures. And it far far better to have 8 failures combined with 2 successes in new arenas, then to simple have the money sitting around doing nothing.