What Powell missed was that inflation from any cause (including transitory factors) can become entrenched when not promptly addressed, which is why the Fed has to be aggressive, which he failed to do.

This is the same guy who repeatedly claimed that the runaway inflation in 2021 was "transitory", when it was obvious to anyone with a brain that it wasn't. Everyone with a brain turned out to be right.

We're still talking at cross purposes, I feel. This whole thread is spawned by the fact that POTS is obsolete, and the thing that keeps it alive is that legislation forces carriers to continue to offer it. That legislation exists solely to answer the question "how do people call for emergency services when there is a disaster?". Carriers want to kill POTS. This makes sense. You are apparently arguing that it is necessary to string a physical connection to the house to get the same reliability as POTS. I am arguing that the only use case that started this argument is voice calls to 911, and that use case can be served at least as reliably, probably more IMHO, using wireless services. There are other arguments about whether broadband is a basic human right yada yada - those are not part of this discussion.

So how can this be allowed if there is so much graft around this technology that is flowing through thousands of hands in the government offices?

Here is an example: https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/news...

This here: https://simpler.grants.gov/opp...

Funding Opportunity Number: FM-MHP-26-002
Assistance Listing: 20.245
Funding Details: $52.7 million expected total amount to award

Executive Summary:
The objective of the HP-ITD program is to advance the
technological capability and promote the deployment of
intelligent transportation system applications for CMV
operations, including CMV, commercial driver, and carrier-
specific information systems and networks, and to
support/maintain CMV information systems and networks to
(i) link Federal motor carrier safety information systems with
State CMV systems; (ii) improve safety and productivity of
CMVs and commercial drivers; (iii) and reduce costs
associated with CMV operations and regulatory
requirements.

Eligible Applicants
1.1 General
The HP-ITD awards are available to States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto
Rico, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin
Islands. FMCSA may award HP-ITD funds to eligible applicants that have an approved program plan as
outlined in the Fixing Americaâ(TM)s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act. Individuals and businesses are
not eligible to apply for HP-ITD funding.

This entire thing is premised on the idea that there will be *more* information available to the federal government to work with, not less. They are fully committed to using these ALPR cameras that are everywhere now to track everything all the time and to put every truck driver out of service for any inconsistency in their visual data and thus hand out more fines, more court time, more oppression.

This is just one single program, one example, there are so much more, there is so much money at stake, never mind the actual flock graft itself.

I still don't get it. This approach still leaves all the wireless points of failure in place and adds CPE points of failure. I literally, and not pig-headedly, not understanding why you think it is better to replace the POTS as system-of-last-resort with FTTH rather than by defining wireless to be the system-of-last-resort.

Perhaps we are solving different problems. I am not trying to bring, nor guarantee, broadband to the masses. POTS doesn't do that, anyway. I am very specifically addressing the problem that these POTS-maintenance laws were intended to address; viz, households need a method to call emergency services in case of disaster, and that method needs to be as robust as possible across a variety of scenarios. It seems to me that wireless service minimizes both the cost and points of failure (if correctly dimensioned and maintained).

Jamming is an exotic scenario and a different argument from disaster robustness. An attacker who wants to take out a _lot_ of communications at once can take out infrastructure, which is in some ways cheaper than trying to jam spread-spectrum networks over a wide area.

As for the "places it won't reach" - sure, there are edge cases in both scenarios. Forcing a telco to keep a specific legacy system alive prevents them from using better solutions to those edge cases. If CA wants to mandate something, they should mandate a set of technical standards for connectivity and availability and let the telco solve for that problem.

A longer period of time with those you love, engaging in the activities you find fulfilling,

Drinking and eating steak are two of the most pleasurable and fulfilling activity's I can think of right off to bat....P So, I'll take the steak and alcohol....and it's fun to cook and consume these with those I love....

Having worked in the alarm industry (Ademco -> Honeywell) for quite a few years, I can tell you that it is a cliche in the industry that alarm systems are installed and left in situ without modification for literally decades. Monitoring fees are dimensioned as pure passive income and a truck roll is the cause of wailing, rending of garments, and gnashing of teeth. I was involved in the Great Migration in the mid-2000s when regular POTS started to get VoIP legs in the middle in some of our biggest markets. There was not exactly joy in the monitoring/installer industry about having to persuade customers to buy new equipment and pay for additional monitoring services due to force majeure. There never is.

Aggregator to CO is almost certainly on fiber in most instances, probably still using up dark fiber laid in the WorldCom era. Regardless, it's a lot less effort to maintain one (or let's say two or three - for redundancy) copper links between nodes and central, than it is to maintain thousands of individual links to consumers. No matter how much you mux and demux in the middle, ultimately 10,000 individual homes require a minimum of 10,000 copper pairs from the home to ... someplace.

Note that this isn't quite the transparent plug and play you might think - things that aren't human voiceboxes and ears will notice the difference. Alarm systems, certain legacy home medical monitoring equipment, demand regulation equipment, etc.

Right, because it is easier to get a smaller ask approved than a larger ask. Asking to sunset the entire POTS network would be a bigger ask, less likely to succeed. But the goal is the same. Once they're allowed to block any new accounts, you have natural attrition - as people move house, die or otherwise conveniently discontinue their POTS services, those POTS services are not reconnected at a new location, and the POTS footprint starts shrinking even faster than it is today. So the next time they go to the gubmint, AT&T says "only 0.1% of our customers are using POTS, can we pweeeeeeeeeze kill it now?"

But you're missing the fact that in the wired copper POTS scenario, the telco's backend still needs to have power 100% of the time; whatever way you slice it, the telco needs to install and maintain backup power systems. And with wires you can't fall back to a different local node if the one nearest you - the one you're wired to - goes down. With cell service, subject to ToF-based protocol limitations, you can possibly handoff to a more distant node if an earthquake, fire, battery failure or Godzilla attack eliminates your local cell tower.

Why do you stipulate wired? No matter how I look at the failure scenarios, wireless seems to be more robust. In the wired scenario, you have local nodes with backhaul to the telco, and from those local nodes you have the last mile to the house. Assuming the last mile is IP and not analog voiceband, you still need battery backup at the customer end for the ONT or modem or whatever "hub" equipment is at the customer premises, even if the customer is using an analog POTS phone plugged into that "hub" as their emergency voice product. In real life, customers are mostly using WiFi-connected devices - phones, laptops - which require their own battery charging infrastructure anyway. Moving to a wireless network connection that eliminates the physical last mile seems to me to actually improve system robustness. The telco only needs to characterize battery backup for the equipment it owns - local node, and backhaul, and so forth. The customer uses their own devices and can have spare batteries, power banks, UPS, etc if they want. In the wired scenario the telco has to plan for an unknown number and load of customer devices, and once the telco's UPS goes dry all customers fall off the grid immediately.

Of all the things that never happened, this never happened the most. Flip over any POTS phone sold for the US market. You'll see a REN marking on the bottom - Ringer Equivalence Number. That number specifically characterizes the current drawn by the device when ringing. 1.0 is your standard legacy electromagnetic clapper. Electronic phones are typically in the ballpark of 0.25. If you put too many devices on your line, the world comes to an end - sorry, no, I mistyped - if you put too many devices on your line, one or more of them won't ring properly. In the days of pure electromagnets, consumer lines were typically rated for a total REN of 5, meaning you could have your main phone and 4 extensions on the same line. If you put too much load on the line, in the electromagnet days, you'd get quiet or no ringing. These days I can't imagine plugging in enough devices to overload the line, but if you did they would behave erratically. There is no "blowing the breakers by putting too many phones on the line". Circuit protection devices at the telco end prevent your shenanigans from causing trouble for other people.

Shut up you ignorant fuckwad.

Q.E.D.