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Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

Well that might be an assumption that it will never be used. Maybe if people had it they would use it?

But also I'm interested in if/whether this builds infrastructure resilience as well.

Would be interesting to see a well-thought cost/benefit analysis there. In America at least given that every ISP without exception is a giant piece of crap, mandating them to do things I'm going to generally approve of, especially if ISPs would be against it since I don't trust them whatsoever.

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You say you prefer steak to cabbage, but maybe if you had more cabbage you would eat it? Therefore I think we should mandate 50% of your food purchases should be cabbage.

Anecdote is not data, but I have a fiber connection and I pretty much never use the upload bandwidth I have.

Not today you don't, but imagine the technologies that could take hold if we could take for granted that people have decent upload as well as download. More real-time sharing/collaboration tools and decentralized social platforms would suddenly have a viable platform/market. And I’m sure there are other use cases I’m not considering.

Thank you for seeing it that way, I like to think the same. It’s so sad and disheartening to see such a lack of imagination on a forum dedicated to new ideas in tech of all places. Making better things available just begets things that can take advantage of them. We’d all still be on POTS and dialup if it weren’t for some things pushing the status quo forward and people would still say you’ll never have a use for anything faster!

Maybe if we mandated that everyone buy a hula hoop, people would find creative uses for them. That's not a great way to steer public policy.

Sure but that's also a bad way of thinking about it, because hula hoops aren't useful infrastructure

Maybe if everyone had hula hoops people would figure out ways of making it useful infrastructure? Like attachments that turn them into umbrellas

No we wouldn't so that's a bad idea.

I get where you and others are trying to go with this, but it's just not a good argument and it doesn't translate at all into discussions about public policy. A more appropriate argument would be showing that it wouldn't be worth the cost or potential upside versus awful analogies.

For example, you can talk in abstract about infrastructure resilience for example with decentralized networks or enabling internet services via fast connections. You can't make such an argument about hula hoops. Unfortunately this "I hate everything and everything sucks" mentality is becoming more prevalent.

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