Hacker News Reader

> I'm not particularly bothered that religious communities are struggling at the moment.

Would it be fair to assume religion doesn’t play a central role in your life? It doesn’t in mine, but I have lots of family to whom it does. And they’re hurting.

Practicing ones’ religion is also a fundamental right. For many, education is equally as important as religion.

Yea, hacker news is pretty anti religion and people generally don't care about things that don't effect them or their views.

I am also not religious but I find this sentiment sad as many of us are in the position to help bridge the digital divide.

Many of us do not want to enable activities or messages that we are morally opposed to.

Morally opposed to religion or helping people?

Yep, religion plays no part in my personal life.

My spouse is deeply religious though. She has the freedom to pray every day, read her book and sing her songs. There's no need to have collective worship. No religion stipulates this as a requirement. Collective worship is only important with regards to collecting money from a congregation. It's a money making scheme, not a religious prerogative.

My sons, however, needs teachers to educate them. My wife can school them in any faith she desires, but I want someone with a knowledge of Shakespeare, Geometry or Classics to be teaching my children.

A minyan requires 10 individuals.

> There's no need to have collective worship.

There is probably at least a billion people on earth who disagree with you.

Curious if you were raised in American Evangelical Protestant Christianity? It sounds like the kind of thing I hear often from exvangelicals.

> Collective worship is only important with regards to collecting money from a congregation. It's a money making scheme, not a religious prerogative.

Those tv preachers who have gotten filthy rich probably disagree with the necessity for corporate worship to make money. They’re probably seeing the covid lockdowns as a great way to make even more money.

I do strongly agree with you in teaching our children about Shakespeare, geometry, and classics though. We might have different motivations for doing so, but I’m glad to see that even a non-religious person sees a necessity for those things.

> There's no need to have collective worship. No religion stipulates this as a requirement. Collective worship is only important with regards to collecting money from a congregation.

This is not true in Islam (the religion of my home country) nor in Christianity. Worship within a community is a critical aspect to the practice of both of those religions. It's necessary for supporting each other, socializing children, etc.

> Then there's bandwidth. I am luckily able to provide computers to my two children, but when myself, my spouse and my kids are all online at the same time, as well as every other person in our estate, there are understandable capacity issues.

This is off topic, but lack of sufficient bandwidth is only due to government sponsored monopolies such as Verizon and Comcast. There is no reason fiber can’t be extended everywhere. Somehow, the great US of A can get water, gas, sewer, and electrical utilities to a vast majority of homes, but not fiber internet.

Therefore, I don’t think one should accept lack of bandwidth as “acceptable”. It’s only a political consequence of lobbying by entrenched interests. The municipalities that have cleared this political hurdle enjoy access to plentiful bandwidth.

> There is no reason fiber can’t be extended everywhere. Somehow, the great US of A can get water, gas, sewer, and electrical utilities to a vast majority of homes, but not fiber internet.

I would be surprised if water and sewer serve a 'vast' majority of homes. Lots of rural and semi-rural homes have wells and septic. Same thing with gas, but more so, rural might have propane tanks; but many homes have all electric, some have electric and heating oil, etc.

But that wasn't really your point. The vast majority of homes (in the US) have electricity, and some phone service, why don't they have fiber?

It's because it costs a lot of money to construct, and there won't be many customers to amortize the costs over. I've got a recent quote to install municipal fiber of about $30k to do 6000 feet of aerial fiber on the right-of-way to get to the pole at the corner of my lot; then about another $20k to get 600 feet from the pole to my building. (Might be able to do better on site with a contractor, will see about quotes on that). The monthly service charge is a little more than local incumbents, but it's not quite apples to apples because the speeds are different and the fiber option has better quality of service and time to repair.

I think electric construction costs are higher than that, but you don't sell a house with no electric service, and it's hard to sell a lot without a plan for service. But either way, it's a hard sell to say for $50k you can get what you have, but a little bit better, and if you built it for the neighborhood, it would be less per house, maybe $30k per house because a lot of the cost is undergrounding to each building... but people wouldn't likely pay that for a little better.

>I would be surprised if water and sewer serve a 'vast' majority of homes. Lots of rural and semi-rural homes have wells and septic.

Many sources I searched for say only around 20% of US homes use septic, so I presume the others are connected to sewer systems.

https://www.epa.gov/septic/septic-systems-overview

>It's because it costs a lot of money to construct, and there won't be many customers to amortize the costs over.

It does cost a lot to money to construct, but I highly doubt it's anywhere close to $30k per house for the vast majority of Americans. There are far more people living in urban/suburban environments than rural, and I don't see why it would need to be undergrounded.

The reason the incumbents won't do it is because they already know they are the only option for people for internet. They can charge $50 to $200 per month for shitty internet, and people don't have a choice, so why would they bother investing in infrastructure upgrades. Plus they can sell cable TV on top of internet to double dip, when there is no reason for cable TV to exist anymore.

> but I highly doubt it's anywhere close to $30k per house for the vast majority of Americans.

That's roughly the hookup cost to go from the end of the street to the house in a basic suburban neighborhood.

In the rural parts of the country, just getting power from the poles on the street to a house (with no digging) can cost tens of thousands because the setback are so far. A standard suburban house might have a 20-30ft setback, while a rural home might be 100-200ft from the road.

You also have to deal with properties that are tandem, with narrow strips on the side that allow for extra long driveways that are, in effect, their own roads. Basically a person builds a house on five acres of land, 150ft from the road, then later they sell the land behind them and a house is built some 300+ft further back from their house, with a long driveway servicing the home. This house could easily be 800+ ft from the main road. And this is not rare in the country.

Those houses may only make up 20% of the population, but they are going to make up a very large portion of the costs. A street might have an eighth of the houses per mile with 10x longer setbacks for each house. Plus, travel costs are not insignificant once you start working two+ miles out from a "major" metro.

> This is off topic, but lack of sufficient bandwidth is only due to government sponsored monopolies such as Verizon and Comcast. There is no reason fiber can’t be extended everywhere. Somehow, the great US of A can get water, gas, sewer, and electrical utilities to a vast majority of homes, but not fiber internet.

Verizon and Comcast are not "government sponsored monopolies" (which are illegal under the 1992 Cable Act). And you overlook the fact the U.S. has tremendous difficult building infrastructure of all kinds, not just fiber: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/2/6/the-american-co....

Water, sewer, gas, electric, etc., infrastructure was either built long ago, before costs exploded, or has been rolled into the very high county infrastructure fees that are common across the U.S. For the most part people don't notice those costs, because they're rolled into the price of new housing, but they run to tens of thousands of dollars. My subdivision did not have public water/sewer when built in the 1920s.[1] However, the county came in and built that infrastructure a few years ago, charging every house $30,000 to be hooked up. If state and local governments were willing to impose those kinds of costs to build fiber, we could have widespread fiber in the U.S. as well.

[1] My house doesn't have gas either. We rely on oil and propane tanks for heating/cooking. However, we have had fiber since 2006, a decade before we got public sewer/water! Thanks to Verizon... I actually had another fiber line installed, from Comcast...

> And there's more. You could be fairly affluent and have four children, each with their own console and mobile phone, but struggle to use corporate video conferencing software for them all in a single household, especially when parents and guardians also work from home. How many families have six computers?

Do they need computers? zoom/teams/webex all work on phones/tablets.

Try submitting an essay on a mobile phone, while simultaneously engaging in an online lesson. How many of us here use dual monitors just to cope with work? Could you meet, write documents, and submit them to your boss, all just on a shitty phone with a limited data plan?

You share a room with 20 other students at school, you can share a table with two siblings.

You don't need a computer, you can use your phone, though kids should get their own computer before a smartphone.

The difference being that in a classroom the 20 kids are all performing the same task at a time. Not the same as 3 kids at the same table all doing different things- one could be taking a math test, another playing the trombone while the third is doing jumping jacks.