Because people with phones may not be around at convenient times when you need to make a call. And the lack of public pay phones is precisely the issue being addressed here - most people moved over to cell phones, so either they dont carry change for the few public pay phones which do still exist, or the phone companies either removed them or stopped fixing them after they were last vandalised.

This guy said he set the phones up because he lost cell phone reception during his drive to work - he may work antisocial hours, so he cant just knock on someones door when he gets a flat at 3am.

And lots of people would be concerned about their own safety knocking on random strangers doors - especially in society today.

So this guy is giving people the option to make calls in cell phone dead zones, because thats what *he* saw as missing. Good on him.

I understand your knee jerk intuition about crypto currency. But very earnestly I suggest learning a bit about monetary policy. It's indispensable. And after that you may want to read about bretton woods and how banks in different countries actually can trade money to each other. The US treasury and its impact on monetary policy enables this. It's not just a methodology in the sense that bitcoin is a method for moving money. Monetary policy is how countries can perform the miracle of Keynesian economics to regenerate Growth in a downturn. That cannot ever be done ever without fiat currency and a central bank. Period. This was. Why for example Germany plunged in to pre-hitler ruin after world war 1. There was no way to climb out of turned down economy when you had no gold reserves (France took them). Germany only managed to recover when they pegged their mark to a kilo of wheat-- not a long term solution but a desperate move that mostly worked. But the economic malaise didn't end till Hitler started spending money into the economy. That was made possible by moving off the gold standard prior to Hitler.

Without monetary policy you are left with the austerity of Austrian economics which pretty much inverts the rational of monetary policy and loses all it's advantages.

If crypto ever rises to rival the dollar you can kiss the USA goodbye because it will mean the end of monetary policy and central banking. If you say good riddance, I think you may not understand how the world works

Yes its an anecdote, and you get 1Gb/s now, sure.

This was 8 years ago - and gigabit fibre to the premises was not new in NZ when I moved here.

And in the UK I lived in a large city, while in NZ I live in a rural town.

But its good to hear that you are finally catching up with NZ.

Yup, moved to NZ from the UK and I went from 80Mbit fibre-to-the-cabinet in the UK (and only getting around 50MBit to the house in reality) to getting gigabit fibre to the premises in NZ - and the NZ offering had no caps, got on average 950MBit plus sustained, and was half the price of the UK offering.

Other countries have solved these problems.

In the UK, most people dont have to file taxes - there are no deductions for the vast majority of people, you dont get to deduct your mortgage costs, healthcare costs or anything else. You pay your tax in monthly instalments taken from your wage by your employer, based on well known tax codes and your level of earning, and at the end of the year you get a piece of paper saying how much you paid. If you switched jobs and earned more but underpaid tax, your tax code is adjusted for the next financial year and you pay more tax per month to cover both the previous years shortfall and your new tax requirement.

If you run a business, then the business does file returns, and does have deductions - so that covers your business, Uber driver, travel expenses and everything else. People travelling for business claim expenses through the company, and the company deals with the tax implications.

A businesses accounts and the accounts of the business owner are very very strictly separate - the business owner does not get to dip into the business for their own usage, they get paid a wage or dividend, which is taxed like everyone else as income.

Don’t unsubscribe, mark it as junk. And if it gives you the option to block the sender, do it.

Gmail has such an inconsistent behaviour here it’s unbelievable - how the web ui works is very different to the apps.

Gmail also is terrible at spotting obvious spam, and im regularly marking actual spam as such.

You joke but a lot of suppliers to the US government, including the military, works on a two-contract basis - the initial acquisition of the item, and then the support contract for the item.

A lot of suppliers bid low on the initial acquisition contract, because they know they can make up losses on the support side later on. The supplier is also more willing to take on more risk as part of the supply, again because they can make money back on the support.

If the support contract becomes uncertain because the military can go elsewhere to support the item, then expect the supply contracts to get a lot more expensive, and a lot fewer contractors willing to undertake fixed price deliveries for anything.

The US government did try something similar to this in the late 1980s and early 1990s - they split the procurement of new items into two contracts, the first being the development of the item, and the second being the delivery of the item. Whomever won the development contract had to hand over everything needed to produce the item to whomever won the delivery contract. The problem is, all the risk exists in the development contract, and all the profit exists in the delivery contract.

It did not go well and after a couple of very bad outcomes for development contract winners, they stopped bidding. So the approach was dropped.

The sheer difference in quantity of fuel there is going to raise eyebrows if you try and put AvGas into an aircraft that requires JetA.

Which is why the Jeju 737 didnt record any data once its engines shut down - the 737 didnt have a RAT.

Which means that the most important points of the accident were unrecorded.

Another greater possibility is that one engine failed for some reason and the pilots reacted incorrectly causing the good engine to be shut down. This is the most likely and there have been other crashes caused by this kind of mistake. Pilots spend their whole careers maintaining equal thrust between a plane's engines, but then when an engine failure happens they have to go for maximum unequal thrust.

This is unlikely because its been shown that the time it takes to go through the 787 engine-out checklist, to get to the point where you do anything that could conceivably turn the good engine off, is longer than the time between when the aircraft took off and crashed.

If this was the case, it would have been done by a crew member not going through the checklist.

Its like claiming medical ethics laws are stifling the advancement of medical treatment and drugs, because you cant test on patients without their knowledge and explicit consent...

They might very well be, but its a limitation society is willing to accept over the protestations of drug companies.

The only person bringing SpaceX into this is you.

Why does there have to be any comparison at all? Why does there have to be a perceived competition between what Blue Origin are doing here and what SpaceX are doing over there?

There is something broken in western news media and social media, in that everything simply *must* be a race or a competition, and if one entity in the perceived competition is behind then they shouldn't even bother - it doesn't matter that none of the actual entities themselves see themselves as being in a competition or race, they dont matter, its an external thing being forced on them by observers.

The concept that an entity can be entirely about their own milestones, rather than judging their progress by measuring against another entity, is rapidly becoming an impossibility in many peoples minds.

You see it all the time, with SpaceX being used as the thing to measure against - someone hops a rocket, oh but they are a decade behind SpaceX so why are they even bothering. Someone launches a new rocket but its not reusable, doesn't matter than it meets all the internal requirements of the project and the project sponsors, its not reusable so they are so far behind SpaceX so why are they even bothering. Blue Origin launches a sub-orbital rocket, entirely meeting their own internal goals, but its not orbital so they are so behind SpaceX, so why are they even bothering...

Not everything has to be a competition.

Any criminal gang with two braincells to rub together will simply download any one of the free and secure cryptography libraries, any one of the free and secure messaging protocol libraries, put the two together with a Bootstrap based UI, and ... enjoy secure communications while the rest of us have our messages read by some sweaty oik eating cheetos in a dungeon office somewhere in Austria....

Google bugs me a few times a week to use Chrome on iOS because I use the Gmail app...