>. Seriously. The only thing Google really does is sell advertising; everything else they do can be seen as a means to that end,

Yep. Just like TV, which has been delivered via satellite since the 1980s. And radio. They make their money from ads.

Also like newspapers and magazines - subscriptions only pay for the paper they are printed on. The reporters, editors, etc are all paid for via ads.

Over 90% of all web sites too.

Enjoy your smoke signals.

Satellites aren't actually a new thing. NBC, CBS, and ABC have been using them for decades "to provide a commodity they already make money on ... allowing them to use that commodity to make even more money."

You might also remember the big satellite TV dishes from the 1980s, and Dish Network, etc.

Suddenlink provides good service and has happy customers. Explain why it should be illegal for them to offer their better service to people who currently suffer Comcast. Take your time, I'll wait.

I didn't say it should be illegal for politicians to run ISPs. I said it's silly to think that ONLY politicians can run ISPs.
   

Suddenlink provides good service and has happy customers. Explain why it should be illegal to offer their better service to people who currently suffer Comcast.

I didn't say it should be illegal for politicians to run ISPs. I said it's silly to think that ONLY politicians can run ISPs.
   

If you are doing micromanagement via 'agile,' then you are favoring processes over individuals, which goes directly against the agile manifesto. The daily standup is for teammembers to communicate amongst themselves, not for a daily status report to managers, which is why the manager is not supposed to be present, to prevent it from degenerating (also, you're supposed to stand up to prevent it from degenerating).

Micromanaging is almost always counterproductive, in any management method. I understand where you are coming from though, I have a manager currently who is using estimates to push people harder, standups as status meetings, and generally uses agile to micromanage. I've been working on mentoring him to do better, but managers can be stubborn.

btw the reason to do agile even with experienced people is to gain focus, increase communication, and partition responsibilities (someone has to figure out the requirements, for example). There are plenty of ways to do this, The Mythical Man Month points out that with a small, experienced team, almost any development methodology will work, but agile is one methodology.

As mentioned in the story you linked to, they had AAA in 2013. Two months after that story, they were downgraded due to the excessive debt load for the municipal fiber, which isn't fiscally sound.

>. . I see no reason that can't work for internet connections as well.

That is an interesting point. I'm not sure about all of the reasons one has often worked well and the hasn't. Perhaps having a board of volunteer citizens deploying a brand new $200 million technology project is different from having them oversee the maintaince of 100-year-old power lines in many ways. If a private company, such as the Edison Company, had already built a high-speed fiber network like they did the power network, and that network only needed to be maintained rather than constantly upgraded we might see more similar results .

I don't think they can just wait out the shutdown of the low-margin producers, then bump the prices back up. Or at least, they can't bump them back up very far, because the technology used by the low-margin producers will not be lost. It will likely get a little bit better. So they'll have to keep the price low enough that the low-margin producers can't re-enter the market.

It's even possible that tires get a little more longevity due to regenerative braking, which tends to be smoother and gentler than friction braking. The limited battery capacities of current EVs probably help as well, since they encourage efficient driving, which means no hard braking or acceleration.

I'm not sure if these factors make a measurable difference in tire wear, but it's plausible.

Lack of adapters has never been my problem.

I had a typo. When we CAN'T do a better job than the private companies we compete with, we partner with them.

If the entire model seems completely foreign, consider state colleges and universities, who compete with private colleges to attract students. We're the same. We're a government agency just like the University of California is, and we compete just like UC competes with private universities.

>. State governments ban local governments from creating broadband networks at the request of telecom monopolies and you stand on a pulpit and preach about government non-interference. They are interfering by granting these monopolies in the first place!

We're in agreement there, 100%. Governments shouldn't grant monopolies to their donors. Where we see things differently is that perhaps you've never heard of Suddenlink or any of the two hundred other cable companies that aren't Comcast and Time Warner. Suddenlink just upgraded everyone to 50-100Mbps at no additional charge. Suddenlink gave me their technical manager's cell phone number when the customer service agent realized I knew more than he did. There is no evidence that only the corrupt politicians can run an ISP. In fact, we see that Suddenlink does it quite well, and their customers are happy. Google fiber has many happy customers, some getting the service for free*. So to make it illegal for Suddenlink to come in and offer better service than Comcast, at a lower price, is stupid. Not stupid for the politicians - Comcast is paying for their campaigns. Stupid for voters who support such nonsense.

If a city wants to getting into the ISP business, fine. Chances are, it fails and they sell the fiber to Google, after the taxpayers lose their ass on it. That's fine if they want to try, though. What they shouldn't do is make it illegal for Suddenlink to offer better service than the cirlty, at half the price the city charges.

I work for a government agency that competes directly with private companies. We offer some of the best programs in the world, and have world-renowned staff because if we didn't do a damn good job the private companies who do would get our customers. When we can beat the private competition, we partner with them to offer services customized for the needs of of local citizens and our other customers. The "other customers" pay our bills, local citizens get our services for free - without even funding us through tax dollars.

That's true, my cable company, Suddenlink, is delivering high speeds with coax for the last mile. They are spending a billion dollars* or something to upgrade their network to make that happen. At the same time, a competitor can spend the same billion dollars to build fiber, or to build their own high-speed coax. The old, soggy coax that Comcast already has can't provide those speeds, so they have to do new build just like the new competitor does, partially erasing Comcast's advantage from being there first.

* I don't remember if it's a billion dollars, two billion, or $250 million. The point is, they have to put in NEW coax plant and that's expensive, they can't just use the old.

Yes this post is slightly simplistic, not going into fine details, but the point stands - over builders are doing much better lately by providing next-generation networks rather than matching the incumbents' investment in old networks.

I should mention that politicians are probably better at passing laws than ISPs are. Each type of organization has it's own structure and it's own specialty. The city council promotes fairness and deliberativeness by taking holding two public hearings and taking six months to weigh a decision. That's good since they are passing laws.

The company that builds new fiber networks makes decisions much quicker, and that's good because we want the whole city built out in a year or two, not ten or twenty years. So it's not that private companies are BETTER than political bodies, they're just designed to do different things. Here are some references. You can recognize easily find 80 more like them.

Memphis Networx was sold at a loss of over $27 million
Burlington, Vermont lost $17 million in taxpayer dollars
Mooresville and Davidson losing $8 million each year
Utopia $200 million debt is four times their other municipal debt, for all other infrastructure
Chattanooga lost their credit rating did to overwhelming debt from their government broadband attempt

Again, this isn't because government is BAD. It's because US government is designed to be fair, transparent, inclusive, and deliberative, not fast or efficient. To get a huge fiber network rolled out across an entire city in just a couple of years, and do it without spending $10,000 per customer, you need a fast and efficient organization. US governments aren't fast and efficient because they shouldn't be - they should be deliberative, transparent, and equitable.

I suspect that once you divide them into two categories, "high testerone" and "low testosterone", the individuals in those groups would exactly match "male" and "female". Depending on luck, you might have one Barbara Hudson who is closer to the middle, but still ends up in the same group anyway.

I mention it only because unlike studies, in real life we can recognize that Mike Tyson is probably going to have more exaggerated "male" characteristics than Chrisley. Still, I bet Hilary Clinton has more estrogen than most men, even though she has half as much as Katy Perry.