Heh. This is what I always think when I hear about things like a house blowing up because of a gas leak. "Well, looks like we now know where the ex-CIA assassin lived."
While sort of true, I've never seen any sort of tradeshow where the power is metered. Typically you just pay a flat rate for the number/size of hookups you need.
Right, but show organizers are not running a sinking ship. It's like health insurance, most will not use enough power to equal the amount they paid per hookup, and are subsidizing those that underpaid.
I know. My comment was clearly tongue in cheek. As someone who worked in a company that makes Smart Home devices (Nest) I'm pretty aware that most devices have "safe" modes when they are not fully functional.
That said... I still find smart lightbulbs kind of overkill.
oh so true. On Jan. 2, tried to start the year positive, but my train was held for 30 minutes because the tracks were on fire... that basically seems to be a good theme!
So much brainpower and investment in the US is being devoted to building great software. Meanwhile, US infrastructure, which was the envy of the world 50 years ago, is now crumbling everywhere: roads, bridges, tunnels, trains, train stations, airports, etc. Power grids too.
The problem is not lack of brainpower, but rather lack of political will. Specifically, the fact that one of the major parties has no interest in governing and that the pitiful state of compulsory education has created a populace too stupid to stop voting for them.
I'd love to live in a world where all political problems were concentrated in a single party that enjoyed no support from smart people. I don't think that's our world, though.
Is it a question of political will or a function of capital needs and barrier-to-entry? One of the biggest boons of software development is the only true "capital" need is time. With almost no money or resources people can, and have, built disruptive software from nothing but an idea.
The same cannot be said for infrastructure. No matter how compelling an idea and the expertise behind it, the reality is that it will always be easier to start a website than to start an infrastructure project. Hungry, tech-savvy people know this and i believe it contributes heavily to the choice of medium for most companies.
To me it seems more that the world has become beholden to the spreadsheet.
The basic problem is that maintenance can't be filed as an investment, and thus gets filed as an expense.
And while investments can be written off over years, if not decades, expenses has to show up as a negative for the year (if not quarter) i gets approved.
All the smart people with very good ideas in the world doesn't do any good when the people who control the funds are self-interested and short-sighted idiots.
As one of the first responders who actually went to this incident, I completely agree. Seems like it should have been staggered/staged down.
The other thing I dislike about this incident is the "Lakewood Mayor warns a fatality/accident would happen soon", which though prophetic, the derailment had precisely zero to do with what he was talking about (which was, several miles north, the layout, offsets of pedestrian crossings of the track in the urban area).
Ironically, power grids are failing due to the same market structure many people want to impose on Internet infrastructure. Power grids by and large are not built with public money. Instead, local power companies (sometimes private, sometimes municipally owned) are granted monopolies to build transmission infrastructure, and various governing agencies set rates to allow them to recoup their investment and operating costs at “acceptable” rates of return. The idea is that transmission infrastructure (as distinguished from generation infrastructure) is a “natural monopoly” that warrants government rate regulation. Of course, there is tremendous political pressure to keep electric rates low, which leads to underinvestment and predictable results. The same basic problem plagues water and sewer utilities too.
Of course this problem seems to be unique to our implementation rather than inherent. Other countries use the same structure, but don’t chronically under invest (and their electric, water, and sewer rates reflect that!).
I would pay _good money_ for my paid privately-provided services to be as reliable as my utilities, but despite the hallowed "powers of markets" I don't even have this option. (>90% of my last 10 years of housing has had no option outside of Comcast, at laughably low speeds) On top of this:
I can't remember the last time I had to call my water/gas/electric providers threatening to cancel service unless they undid a stealth rate raise.
I can't remember the last time I had a major utility outage that lasted multiple months while the provider tried to justify that it wasn't their fault, leaving me without the service I was paying for.
I can't remember the last time I found out a utility provider was throttling/filtering/negatively impacting my service in unexpected fashion. (Parallel to p2p throttling, throughput caps, ad injection, sudden limitations to tethering on my phone)
While there are many fair arguments to be made against imposing municipal ownership, comparing it to our current state of internet infrastructure is laughable.
As you say, other countries seem to manage much better than we do at utilities. So why not address these issues rather than demonizing what may still be an incremental improvement to the even worse situation present in our communication providers? (for the record, I see the same very vague meta-problem of misaligned incentives and low accountability as the root to both utility degradation and ISP misbehavior)
Customer service is not the only consideration. Anne Arundel County, where I live, has exemplary customer service. But at the end of the day, its water and sewer rates are too low to fund necessary infrastructure, and the net result is that untreated sewage gets dumped into the Chesapeake Bay after major rainstorms. Such problems, and related problems like failure to replace aging lead pipes, are a problem all over the country. Same thing for transit and roads, which are also uniformly abysmal.
Small world; most of my ISP complaints come from just north of you in Baltimore.
Although I think it's unfair to call the numerous problems of monopolistic ISPs "customer service" alone (service interruption, quality?) we certainly had our fair share of main breaks, probably once every few months/years you would see a fountain up through some major intersection, so I'll give you that. But they were fixed. Rapidly, and often motivated political will for higher investment, although unfortunately that never seemed to cross over past "reactionary" to "planning ahead."
Meanwhile. when Comcast has an exclusive agreement with an apartment complex, and their connections in a leaky electrical box are so corroded that 20%+ packet loss was the norm, there was effectively 0 avenue for improvement.
However, you've summarized the problem well for infra: There's simply a lack of funding/costs are not being accounted for. To my mind that's a MUCH simpler problem than convincing a free market to guarantee equivalent service for something that isn't "optional" in modern life, and that might not have effective competitive pressures. (It's not like our internet service market is miles ahead of competing first world countries, even within large cities where America-scale isn't as big a problem)
> To my mind that's a MUCH simpler problem than convincing a free market to guarantee equivalent service for something that isn't "optional" in modern life, and that might not have effective competitive pressures.
I’ve lived in Baltimore, DC, and Annapolis, and at each address I’ve had Verizon FiOS in competition with Comcast. (At my house, both companies offer fiber). Service was good enough where I’d take the duopoly over BGE any day. I think in most places, you can support enough competition (even with the "natural monopoly" tendencies of the market) to outrun poorly-run U.S. municipal governance/regulation. If you live in a reasonably-sized city or suburb and don't have competition, blame the government. (E.g. Baltimore doesn't have FiOS even though 80% of the rest of Maryland does, because the city denied Verizon a franchise.)
I had always heard a different story about why Verizon wasn't coming to Baltimore, I tried to dig up some articles to read up more but since most of the events were in 2012 it was sparse; what I did find however suggested that not only is "blame the government" not true in this case, "blame the corporation" might, as I couldn't find any references to it being the Baltimore Govt. and not Fios who made the decision in this matter.
From a former councilwoman and president of Baltimore Development Corperation:[0]
“The City Council had nothing to do with the fact that Verizon FiOS doesn’t exist in Baltimore city,” said Cole. “The city didn’t stand in their way. They made a business decision.”
And from Verizon's own communication in response to redlining accusations:[1]
Verizon is not deploying FiOS in Baltimore City or in any other new areas in Maryland or across the country at this time because we’re now focused on delivering our FiOS services in those communities where we already have approved cable franchises and where we already have begun to build our FiOS network.
As an aside, While BGE had a handful of outages, usually mid-winter, Comcast had it beat for me by a long shot, across 3 different apartments. I unfortunately had Comcast or DSL as the only options. (And CLEAR, which was surprisingly good ~8 years ago for what it was)
Baltimore wouldn’t give Verizon a cable TV franchise, which is necessary to make the business model work when cable companies sell broadband/TV bundles. A number of buildings in Baltimore actually have FiOS (my apartment did), so Verizon is clearly interested in building there.
In a way, cable cutting will be a huge boon for broadband deployment. Municipalities’ right to regulate technically only extends to cable television service. Historically, most people have wanted cable television as part of the deal. (Almost nobody in my Baltimore apartment actually subscribed to FiOS because they couldn’t offer TV.) But if everybody switches to streaming, that dramatically restricts municipal authority over deployment.
TechCrunch reported a two hour power outage. Funny as always the official press release, it acknowledged just a few minutes.
"Today at approximately 11:15 AM, the Central Hall and South
Hall bridge meeting rooms at the Las Vegas Convention
Center lost power. Power in the South Hall was restored
within minutes, and power has now been fully restored to
all areas"
The TechCrunch article is great, it mentions several other incidents that were quite funny to read. As always, such gems of articles get buried so no one can read them later, what a shame.
Props to Brian/Techcrunch for the shout out to my favourite Everything But The Girl song!
> (2:13PM PT) According to the CTA, the culprit was, in fact, the rain. Here’s a link to a relevant Everything But the Girl video and here’s the official statement on the matter.
51 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] thread(Which makes me think all sorts of things about movies, but we won't go there.)
* Version XXX of Popular Software Released
* Provocative Study/Article about Male Genitals (Circumcision articles fall under this)
That said... I still find smart lightbulbs kind of overkill.
The same cannot be said for infrastructure. No matter how compelling an idea and the expertise behind it, the reality is that it will always be easier to start a website than to start an infrastructure project. Hungry, tech-savvy people know this and i believe it contributes heavily to the choice of medium for most companies.
The basic problem is that maintenance can't be filed as an investment, and thus gets filed as an expense.
And while investments can be written off over years, if not decades, expenses has to show up as a negative for the year (if not quarter) i gets approved.
Still is. Yes some internet is patchy in some places and US cities prefer cars over trains but US infrastructure is incredible.
I'm just going to leave this here: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42421417
The other thing I dislike about this incident is the "Lakewood Mayor warns a fatality/accident would happen soon", which though prophetic, the derailment had precisely zero to do with what he was talking about (which was, several miles north, the layout, offsets of pedestrian crossings of the track in the urban area).
Of course this problem seems to be unique to our implementation rather than inherent. Other countries use the same structure, but don’t chronically under invest (and their electric, water, and sewer rates reflect that!).
I can't remember the last time I had to call my water/gas/electric providers threatening to cancel service unless they undid a stealth rate raise.
I can't remember the last time I had a major utility outage that lasted multiple months while the provider tried to justify that it wasn't their fault, leaving me without the service I was paying for.
I can't remember the last time I found out a utility provider was throttling/filtering/negatively impacting my service in unexpected fashion. (Parallel to p2p throttling, throughput caps, ad injection, sudden limitations to tethering on my phone)
While there are many fair arguments to be made against imposing municipal ownership, comparing it to our current state of internet infrastructure is laughable.
As you say, other countries seem to manage much better than we do at utilities. So why not address these issues rather than demonizing what may still be an incremental improvement to the even worse situation present in our communication providers? (for the record, I see the same very vague meta-problem of misaligned incentives and low accountability as the root to both utility degradation and ISP misbehavior)
Although I think it's unfair to call the numerous problems of monopolistic ISPs "customer service" alone (service interruption, quality?) we certainly had our fair share of main breaks, probably once every few months/years you would see a fountain up through some major intersection, so I'll give you that. But they were fixed. Rapidly, and often motivated political will for higher investment, although unfortunately that never seemed to cross over past "reactionary" to "planning ahead."
Meanwhile. when Comcast has an exclusive agreement with an apartment complex, and their connections in a leaky electrical box are so corroded that 20%+ packet loss was the norm, there was effectively 0 avenue for improvement.
However, you've summarized the problem well for infra: There's simply a lack of funding/costs are not being accounted for. To my mind that's a MUCH simpler problem than convincing a free market to guarantee equivalent service for something that isn't "optional" in modern life, and that might not have effective competitive pressures. (It's not like our internet service market is miles ahead of competing first world countries, even within large cities where America-scale isn't as big a problem)
I’ve lived in Baltimore, DC, and Annapolis, and at each address I’ve had Verizon FiOS in competition with Comcast. (At my house, both companies offer fiber). Service was good enough where I’d take the duopoly over BGE any day. I think in most places, you can support enough competition (even with the "natural monopoly" tendencies of the market) to outrun poorly-run U.S. municipal governance/regulation. If you live in a reasonably-sized city or suburb and don't have competition, blame the government. (E.g. Baltimore doesn't have FiOS even though 80% of the rest of Maryland does, because the city denied Verizon a franchise.)
From a former councilwoman and president of Baltimore Development Corperation:[0] “The City Council had nothing to do with the fact that Verizon FiOS doesn’t exist in Baltimore city,” said Cole. “The city didn’t stand in their way. They made a business decision.”
And from Verizon's own communication in response to redlining accusations:[1] Verizon is not deploying FiOS in Baltimore City or in any other new areas in Maryland or across the country at this time because we’re now focused on delivering our FiOS services in those communities where we already have approved cable franchises and where we already have begun to build our FiOS network.
[0]https://technical.ly/baltimore/2016/03/03/broadband-got-hear...
[1]https://baltimorebrew.com/2010/02/28/waiting-for-fios-baltim...
As an aside, While BGE had a handful of outages, usually mid-winter, Comcast had it beat for me by a long shot, across 3 different apartments. I unfortunately had Comcast or DSL as the only options. (And CLEAR, which was surprisingly good ~8 years ago for what it was)
In a way, cable cutting will be a huge boon for broadband deployment. Municipalities’ right to regulate technically only extends to cable television service. Historically, most people have wanted cable television as part of the deal. (Almost nobody in my Baltimore apartment actually subscribed to FiOS because they couldn’t offer TV.) But if everybody switches to streaming, that dramatically restricts municipal authority over deployment.
> (2:13PM PT) According to the CTA, the culprit was, in fact, the rain. Here’s a link to a relevant Everything But the Girl video and here’s the official statement on the matter.
( that link is to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4sPkS8b62Q )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Show