Hell, after the 'competition' was announced, many commentators observed that it was pretty much written with Arlington, VA in mind, and the competition was less a serious competition and more a ploy to try to get a lot of subsidies for what their plans already were. It's also worth noting that the bids that were accepted (Arlington and New York) were some of the most miserly bids.
Drones are not a strategic weapon. When you talk to the Ukrainian military, with their actual expertise in drone warfare, the general consensus is that drones are an inferior replacement for artillery (note that ex-Soviet military systems are a lot heavier in artillery use than NATO military systems) that they use because they can't get the artillery shells that they need but they can get drones in sufficient quantities. It hasn't enabled any strategic breakthroughs in the Russo-Ukrainian War, it is merely served to lock in the grinding stalemate it's been in since October-ish 2022.
The US war on Iran also demonstrates the problems of drones too: the US is currently able to wage a war 6000 miles away from its shores, because of the use of an awful lot of weapons systems that aren't drones. Iran is unable to dislodge that military, or even meaningfully impact its ability to carry out said war, not 100 miles away from its shores, despite a heavy use of drones to attempt to do so.
The war also demonstrates another big issue... the continued delusion of many civilian and military leaders that strategic bombing alone is sufficient to win a war despite this failing literally every single time it's been attempted in the past 100 years.
> that they use because they can't get the artillery shells that they need
That used to be true, but I don't think that the case anymore. UA is now striking logistics ~150KM behind the contact line with drones. Regular artillery can't do that. Guided rockets maybe could, but they'd be more expensive and come in smaller quantities.
> US is currently able to wage a war 6000 miles away from its shores
For a rather restricted use of "wage a war". They did not stop Iranians from doing their thing. Bombing alone does not have a history of winning wars.
I live in a town with municipal power, and the general consensus in the area is that the towns with municipal power are loads better at it than the main private utilities in the area. There's no intrinsic reason why a publicly-owned utility should be better or worse at its job than privately-owned utility.
But to talk about broadband more specifically, one of the main reasons why municipal broadband started becoming a thing was because in many areas, where there is but one (private) broadband provider to choose from, that provider would proceed to refuse to upgrade the infrastructure even when municipalities offered buttloads of cash to pay for the upgrades. So the municipal broadband choice becomes "get municipal broadband at 1 gig, or private company broadband at 25 meg (asymmetric)."
We flirt with the idea of municipal broadband every couple of years (we built dense fiber connectivity throughout the village a decade or so ago for other reasons). But the economics are brutal; to pencil, you need significant uptake, and you're competing with AT&T and Xfinity, both of which (if you're clear-eyed) are better offerings than the muni can compete with, so you're not going to get that uptake.
The buildout issue is real, and is a reason to explore public-owned broadband in underinvested areas. But even if we had only AT&T here, none of the arguments really work. Even the monopolism concern isn't operative (AT&T and Xfinity don't jack their rates up in places they happen to be the monopoly supplier --- they quote nationally visible rates).
> There's no intrinsic reason why a publicly-owned utility should be better or worse at its job than privately-owned utility.
At scale, why would utilities be different than other government services, such as schools or transit?
I’m sure there are edge cases in parts of the country that are too poor or sparely populated to support a robust private sector. But I don’t live in a place like that, and most people don’t. I live in the suburbs of Annapolis. And I’ve lived in Chicago, Baltimore, New York City, DC, and Wilmington Delaware. Would I rather have Comcast run my internet, or the governments of any of those cities? More to the point: would I want to live in the counterfactual scenario where the 1996 telecom act had gone in a different direction, and those cities had built broadband networks that were now 30 years old in whatever shape they were after decades of maintained by those cities?
My experience with the municipal services these cities do run says “no.” And that conclusion is counter to my ideology. I like public infrastructure. I structured my life around commuting over the DC Metro and Amtrak for years. But, for example, the DC Metro deferred maintenance to such a degree that the automated train control built in the 1970s had to be shut off in 2009. Headways got longer, the ride got much rougher. It stayed that way for fifteen years until they turned ATO back on last year. So in 2026, the big achievement is that we’re back to the ride smoothness we had in 1980.
In the case of Alaska, the oil is literally on land owned by the State of Alaska (as in, the titleholder of the land is the state itself), and the rights to oil extraction is leased by the state to oil companies.
By contrast, data centers are generally going to be on land owned by the operator, and corporate offices are either owned by the company or leased to the company by some commercial real estate operator you've probably never heard of. In neither sense are they on land owned by any local, state, or federal government.
> It is privately owned only insofar as the state wills it.
you mean as the people/voters wills it. Private ownership of land is pretty sacred law in the US, I don't see those laws being changed any time soon. Even logical things like the concept of eminent domain is very controversial.
Holy shit a realpolitiker. There is a God called "state" that WILLS the laws. Only by the power of prayer can one communicate with the sovereign, who whimsically discards centuries long legal traditions because a midwit read Schmitt or something.
Article 1, Section 8 has the general taxation clause:
> The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
but Section 9 has the apportionment clause:
> No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.
The term "direct tax" isn't fully explained, but it's generally been held that taxes on property (including wealth) would classify as a direct tax. Congress imposed an income tax, but SCOTUS said in Pollock v Farmer's Loan & Trust Co that a tax on rental income is effectively a property tax, and so must be apportioned.
The 16th Amendment was enacted specifically to overrule the Pollock decision, and allowed for income taxes to not have to be apportioned. In many respects, it's probably unnecessary because even without it, it's probably fairly likely that Pollock would have been overruled as just being bonkers reasoning anyways.
I'm not sure which part you're calling inaccurate. The 16th amendment:
> The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
Allows taxes on incomes (but not wealth) without apportionment.
According to your own post:
> it's generally been held that taxes on property (including wealth) would classify as a direct tax.
Implying that unlike income under the 16th amendment, a federal tax on wealth would have to be apportioned. But apportionment isn't something people are likely to accept in that context because then you can't put the screws to people in New York or Texas without extracting the same amount per capita from the people in New Mexico or Arkansas.
> In many respects, it's probably unnecessary because even without it, it's probably fairly likely that Pollock would have been overruled as just being bonkers reasoning anyways.
Unclear how that reasoning could be bonkers without Wickard v. Filburn being even worse, since the logic is pretty similar. The 16th amendment itself had exactly the result apportionment was intended to prevent, i.e. states with structural political advantages (swing states, lower population states with more US Senators per capita) quickly set up massive federal transfers to themselves at the expense of other states.
Judging from reported figures, roughly 80-90% of households in the US [1] have a household net worth of at least $0. That means that most people do in fact have an estate.
Median household net worth is in fact somewhere in the $100k-200k range, which is definitely something that could be meaningfully called an "estate." (Most of this tends to be the house, the median net equity in which is about $190k as of 2022).
Sure, but it's not actually easy to just change your pricing model. Most gamers do not want to pay subscriptions even though they would pay for DLC and battlepasses. Free-to-play needs microtransactions that people actually buy so they tend to be pay-to-win or convenience items (inventory/bank space) that punish free players.
One of my first lessons in open source was just because I could imagine an architecture where a feature was easy did not mean that the software had an architecture where said feature was easy. And I don't see any reason to doubt GP's assertion that existing server architectures are not in a position to comply with the law.
The problem in this instance is not that the legislation effectively mandates that companies move away from particular server architectures (I mean, there's room to debate the wisdom of that, but it is a pretty explicit goal of many proponents of this law). But if you want to seriously push companies to do that move, you also have to recognize the ways to actually entice them to do that. And you know what is a very good way to ensure noncompliance with your regulation? Tell companies they have 6 months to make core architectural rewrites of not only to-be-released games, but games that they are currently selling and expect to continue selling. That kind of timeframe is just not possible.
First off, Mamdani does strike me as the kind of politician who is genuinely happy in his role and not someone who's treating it as a stepping stone to a higher office.
Secondly... the track record of NYC mayors' post-mayoral careers is abysmal. Not one mayor appears to have successfully held elected office after their mayorship. There's one failed bid for NY governor (unexpected primary loss to the senior Cuomo), and four failed bids for president, the most successful of which being Bloomberg's 4th place showing in the 2020 Democratic primary. So as a springboard to higher office, NYC mayor is absolute garbage.
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