Internet in NZ used to work a bit like the US does now with one large ISP that is also the network operator and gave exactly zero shits about quality of connections or internationally competitive pricing, except they got greedy and charged their retail arm half what they charged their competitors. Anti-monopoly folks got very pissy about this and managed to get the largest fine permitted by law, forced them to split their wholesale arm off into a separate company, banned them from tendering on the government-funded fibre network (which cost them literally billions of dollars) and then changed the law so that if they did it again there wouldn’t be a cap on the penalty they could impose.

In 20 years we went from ~35th of the 38 OECD countries in internet speed and accessibility to 9th. Markets only work long-term if you actually regulate them

Yeah, pretty much. The way the rest of the world deals with it is by splitting the infrastructure maintenance and retail sides to eliminate the profit incentive to not do maintenance.

You have a company who owns a/the fibre network in an area and is obligated by anti-monopoly rules to sell access to the network at the same rate and terms to anyone who wants it. They have a profit incentive to maintain the network to a reasonable standard because having a functioning network is how they make money. In a lot of places this wholesale provider will be at least part government owned given that the government usually pays a good chunk of the cost to build out large national infrastructure projects like fibre networks.

Separately, you have retail ISPs who buy access to the fibre network (or 4g, satellite, …) and sell it to the public along with value adds like tech support, IP addresses, peering agreement etc.

It’s never work in the US because holding private companies accountable for how they spend public money and maintaining well regulated competitive markets is communism or something.

If you follow it, you quickly end up with the Infinite Improbability Drive from The Hitchhikers Guide - if you have an infinite number of typewriters, an infinite number of them will be loaded with paper that already has the complete works of Shakespeare written on it

Something like

!“A line with exactly 0 or 1 characters, or a line with a sequence of 1 or 3 or more characters, repeated at least twice”!<

Syntactically valid Perl

• Back up your data now
• Reseat the cables for the drive
• Run a self test on the drive - smartctl -t long - if it doesn’t pass, then the drive is trash. If it does, then it might limp along a bit longer before catastrophically failing

It’s not the issuance that’s the headache, it’s the installation. There are more things that need valid certs than just webservers

Unless you’ve got an absolutely stellar CV, I don’t see you getting a chance to explain that

Poor kid

I agree with your analysis of the law, but I do get why people are a bit uncomfortable with this. Elon has been a shit human, rocket launches have impacted wildlife and SpaceX and Tesla have been toxic places to work for a long time, but that’s only become a problem recently because he’s been getting more involved in politics? The whole point of having a regulatory state separate from the rest of the government is so they can set and enforce rules fairly and impartially.

Imagine the most stereotypical Australian you can. Now imagine he has a PhD in chemistry but no money for a lab, so does all his work out of a literal tin shed full of spiders using stuff he found at the hardware store

But it’s all the government’s fault for having regulations that stop him doing what he wants - he’d be on Mars by now if it wasn’t for the stupid government stopping him from poisoning a protected nature reserve and crashing rockets into people.

Don’t they understand? It’s really important to get people to mars so there is a place for rich assholes to go when the environment on earth is completely trashed beyond repair

“how do you explain this gap in your job/education history here?”

Makes it harder to get a job overseas though I’d hope

Idk, if I was in a position to be hiring people and I saw “served in the IDF 2023/2024” in the job history section of a CV that’d probably count against a person the same as a conviction for rape or murder.

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Strongly agree. The fact that a nazi shithead felt safe enough to out himself in public means that more nazis need to be seeing public consequences for being hate filled oxygen thieves.

Being a nazi should be like being a pedo; you should be living in constant fear that someone is going to find out and that when you eventually get out of prison your friends, family and society at large want nothing to do with you

Misappropriating funds to buy religious texts for a public school while insisting that the text includes the constitution that makes it misappropriation in the first place is some next level bullshit

The only real use case for VPNs is to bypass geo blocking on streaming sites, and the VPN providers know this. They also know that if they lean too hard into that, eventually someone will sue them and their business model will evaporate - so they add the “iT MaKEs yOu mORe SeCurE” nonsense as a fig leaf so they can say with a straight face that they operate a product with legitimate uses

Not mine, but there is a certain compelling logic to this: https://bruces.medium.com/the-mysterious-visit-of-mr-babbage-by-bruce-sterling-2017-7c941028c4d8

tl;dr - accepted history is that Charles Babbage designed a series of mechanical computers in the mid 1800s, and the underlying theory behind them would go on to influence work a century later when the technology had caught up to the idea, but they were never built. There are a bunch of coincidences and unexplained meetings that suggest that maybe he sold his plans to Italy who then built one of his designs in secret. This is also supported by modern attempts to build a computer from his plans - there was 1 measurement wrong across tens of thousands of parts, and it worked perfectly. Babbage was a skilled engineer but to get all that correct, on the first go, entirely from theory is maybe a bit much