supertrope

US providers used to have cellular data caps on their mainstream plans to hold down usage and therefore their spending on capacity upgrades. At $10/GB people learn fast to limit their usage, far faster than any ad campaign. Providers now have more capacity and fixed wireless is their way of monetizing idle capacity. They don't allow fixed wireless sign ups in congested areas.

The economic incentives are different. AT&T was the monopoly phone company subject to rate-of-return regulation. The more they spent on CAPEX the more they could raise prices. So naturally they spared no expense in maximizing the reliability (99.999% uptime) and quality of their network.

Then cellphones and the Internet happened (as much as they fought it). Why invest in a dying industry? Now phones are used to send picture messages and get addicted to watching one short form video after another.

People value mobility and having one phone bill over toll quality voice. People get much more annoyed at "All circuits are busy. Please try again later." errors or 5 cents per minute than mushy call quality. Making phone calls from a car or walking on the street is always going to be noisier than at home.

Germany has non-profit sickness funds (Bismarck model). So you don’t have to ban health insurance companies when rolling out universal healthcare. Their freewheeling excesses have to be reined in. Access is a right. Standardize coverage and prices on both the insurer and hospital/doctor ends. Once everyone is in the same risk pool, there will no longer be a perverse incentive to deny claims for profit. A single standard plan will also have the negotiation power to drive down prices.

Uber checked the first few digits of your debit card to filter out police officer credit unions to evade taxi regulation enforcement. They use your phone’s battery level as one factor to estimate your elasticity of demand. They have teams of economists to adjust personalized prices to as high as you can bear and pay for drivers as low as possible.

Chromebooks are cheap and are a good fit as a banking only computer.

There's no way to expand the address space without breaking compatibility. A router is expecting IPv4 addresses, not 10.15.100.252.xxx.yyy addresses. All routers, firewalls, operating systems, programs, smartphones, etc would have to be replaced to support "IPv4 with 56-bit addresses."

Hexadecimal is shorter than the equivalent decimal representation. An 128-bit address would be 10.15.100.252.111.222.333.444.555.666.777.888.999.000.111.222. Use DNS!

Any mass transit system with more than 15 minutes between vehicles is a joke.

Many (flyover) states make up for the "lost" fuel tax revenue by charging a flat rate EV fee on yearly registrations. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/electric-vehicle-ev...

Some states add this for plug-in hybrid cars and even hybrid cars.

The bus stop spacing problem is very real. Buses stop every other block in my area. The average speed end to end is no faster than riding a bike! If you suggest deleting some stops people scream about their own convenience or pretend to care about the disabled. By trying to cater to every single constituency, we've designed a bus route that serves no one's interest. A slow bus might not exist at all. People will just buy a car, going into high interest debt if need be.

Fuel taxes only cover half the cost of roads. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/gasoline-taxes-and-...

Not much. People plan for the lowest common denominator. If service levels surge during certain days or hours that's great, but people don't want to get burned by a period of thin service. Imagine if Fedex said overnight mail could no longer be delivered on Thursdays in certain towns. You'd have to remember to check if today's Wednesday and if the recipient's town is a low service zone. Or you could just switch to a more consistently available network like UPS.

We don't expect roads to be profitable. We don't expect airports to be profitable. But there is a solution to this as well. If the train operator owns the land around each station and collects rent on the shops and homes, they can become profitable.

I think even more important than balance sheets is land use. There's a vicious cycle of car dependency. Things that make driving easy make alternatives bad (government built toll-free roads, mandated parking minimums, restrictive zoning, lack of sidewalks, lack of protected line lanes, wide and high speed urban roads).

A train service only earning 50% of its costs through ticket sales is okay if it provides a useful transportation network. But because we are so dependent on cars, people fight removing parking spots for a dedicated right of way. So public transit get stuck in traffic, and funding is kept at skeleton/welfare service levels resulting in 30 min to an hour between vehicles. The useful public transit network can't even get off the ground because no one believes there will be a critical mass of support to fund and build a useful network.

When the Federal, state, and local government direct 97% of transportation infrastructure spending toward making driving easy, we should not be surprised when 97% of people choose to drive their daily trips.

That's virtually all businesses.

#1 Executive bonuses

#2 Shareholder value

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#NaN customer trust

#NaN security

Nvidia Shield now costs $300 too.

Stores are now installing e-ink price tags to save labor updating price labels. They're not going to turn back from centralized HVAC/fridge monitoring and control.

oatmeal1 is right. The largest components of most people's budgets are housing and transportation. Restricting new construction constricts new supply which results in rent/mortgage payments being higher than they need to be. Zoning which makes driving easy and anything else very hard makes buying and maintaining an automobile a de facto necessity. It also exposes you to oil shocks.

Banks want attested terminals and for the customer to pay for them. An even better deal for the bank than ATMs, kind of like of how cable TV boxes enforce DRM on the customer and are paid for by the customer.

This is the entire usability/footgun issue with SSH public keys. For the tech savvy being able to copy and paste id_ed25519.pub into their online account settings would be a dream. But who will train the masses to do that? A lot of people would accidentally paste their private key. Just like how journalists learning OpenPGP emailed over their private key compromising it. For low tech savvy people having direct access to key material is an anti-feature. They can lose it. They can leak it or be phished into giving it up. They don't want to manually sync it between devices or generate per device keys and enroll all of them. Then companies exploit this need for user friendly design to create vendor lock in.

Microsoft Authenticator

Demographics matter. Organized religions encouraging big families means high population growth. Democracy lets the majority rule.

It depends. Predatory salesmen are happy to oblige a customer's desire for a $299 monthly payment, while glossing over the 84 month schedule and 12% interest. They have a very short term view. Uninformed customers are like shooting fish in a barrel.

A mainstream bank takes a longer term view. They offer financial literacy info for customers who are interested. If a customer overdrafts less frequently and is able to leave significant amounts of money deposited the interest spread is more profitable than collecting overdraft fees.

Economics class is usually in high school and it's optional.

Schools are really expensive to operate. Most districts and schools make it easy to graduate to maximize their graduation rates. Standardized testing is suppose to catch local lowering of standards but state departments of education are also under pressure to maximize test pass rate. So resources flow into pulling the bottom quintile of students up to a minimum standard. This means teaching to the test on math and English, and de-prioritizing other subjects or dropping them entirely.

We could expand the breadth of educational basic standards. This would require a cultural shift in valuing formal education more, increasing teacher training/recruiting resources, making schools year round, more centralization of education budgets at the state or even Federal level.

Generally speaking public schools tend to be better in states like Massachusetts than Kansas.

Auctions are great because it's harder to game than a lottery. If a company truly believes there is a shortage of rocket surgeons and they need to access to the global market of these specialists, they can bid high. No hand wringing about not being able to find American rocket surgeons (willing to work for low income country pay scales). No stuffing a lottery with tons of entries - bids incentivize applicants to not waste slots. No worrying that a Federal department made the wrong decision on total supply, price, or who the recipients are - auctions self-adjust and update.

Auctions are bad because need is not entirely measured in money. Highest bidders win is not egalitarian. Sometimes we do want to subsidize rocket surgeons visas for disadvantaged parts of the country.

So learn to code?

A nearby amusement park touted that they pay $20/hr. However it's seasonal, not year around. They raised wages because COVID-19 and current Administration policies decreased the supply of foreign college students who somehow had work authorization.

During World War II the US Government controlled prices and pressured unions not to strike. The war ended and price controls were still in effect for a few years. Since employers could not increase wages, they offered increased non-wage compensation such as health insurance. The IRS agreed that employer sponsored health insurance is not taxable income. Thus tying affordable health benefits to your job. (And giving employer health plans a big tax advantage over buying it yourself).

Bombs or anthrax are probably a bigger security concern than illegal drugs.

A private bureaucracy compiling data into a consumer dossier. The dossier is then used to judge you. The Fair Credit Reporting Act ought to be applied to this.