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Cake day: February 15th, 2025

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  • The US taxpayers literally paid TWICE to privatized telecom companies (telco) to run fiber optic to the home, once in the 90s and again that last early “surge” of FTtH(fiber to the home aka “last mile”) when google started competing direct against telcos that would not get the lead out so they all buried a fuckton of (dark)fiber that they then kept artificially turned off and sat on their excess bandwidth instead of releasing that excess supply to the market to do bare standard minimum of using their good taxpayer funded fortune AND their privatized, ridiculously gained profits from the calculable increase of use in the information age YOY to offer it for reasonable prices. We could all be on $25 a month or less no cap 1GBps fiber in many places but again, the market forces at work at this point seem more actively just hostile to the rest of us on ground level here now. It’s a fascinating and also infuriating subject as an ex-IT person that helped build out this infrastructure that only could watch as it all remained dark. I was stuck in rural nowhere where we still had a small local telephone cop-op. They took that money, laid fiber and sat on their asses with it while they charged exorbitant rates for 56k dial up service while Netzero and the such took dome of that broadband at a time when independent local ISPs were cropping up, teaming modems and some fiber to offer a service with a saner price structure and this was all before data caps and bandwidth throttling was evenr a thing because all you needed was single rack in strateic locations , set the equipment up and basically forget it with the only fixed costs was your mainline fiber, equipment, colocation etc and such yet they STILL offered 100% FREE dial-up internet, co caps off those systems(of course subsidized by ad networks).

    htps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund








  • I dunno how many vacuum cleaners I’ve scrapped for free from damn near everywhere and 90% of them only have a mega clogged hose. 5 minute fix usually and I made my own skookum twisted wire reamer in 5 minutes with wire and a drill. People throw away good stuff without bothering with it and just buy a new one instead of saving themselves time and money by eliminating the obvious. If a vacuum design gets too complex, I simplify with sheetrock screws. Warranties are made to be broken by making it work yourself. The things you learn that way also helps other areas in life all around.