honestly, instead of using the heavy hand of government to force motor companies to meet higher and higher emission standards, why not just offer tax incentives/cuts/deductibles to consumers for buying the most 'clean' cars. That way you incentivize consumers to reward companies for buying greener vehicles, and companies feel the need to compete and build the best product.
The problem with this attitude is that the consumer has no way of knowing whether the vehicle is low emissions, or just cheating, on their own. They have to rely on something that's hopefully objective, which takes us back to testing. If you give consumers an incentive to buy a low emissions vehicle, the manufacturers will figure out a way to meet that demand, and as we've seen with their current willingness to cheat, that doesn't mean that they will necessarily be producing low emissions vehicles.
The real solution is to start changing the way that we think about transportation, and to reduce the total number of passenger-kms that are driven in private vehicles. I personally drive an '06 Jetta TDI (pre-emissions scandal). It's paid off, low maintenance, and cheap to operate. Assuming that I am going to keep the vehicle, and thus pay to insure it, at this point it is still cheaper for me to commute to work in it rather than take mass transit. If the cost of mass transit were to drop below the cost of driving, either through reduction in pass prices, or because my employer was incentivized to give me a pass, I would do that instead. Until then, I'm going to take the least expensive option.
This proposed tax (like all other taxes) is an economic leakage. Money is being taken out of the normal economic system. Now governments may use this money to buy goods and services, or they may choose to distribute it in some other way. But it remains an economic distortion. Taxation != buying bombs, jewelry or food.
On the other hand, it's a tax that I can quite easily reduce, through my own actions, legally, thus reducing my tax burden. I can choose to live close to my job and walk to work (reducing the taxes that would be on the fuel my car uses), I can choose to better insulate my living accomodations, thus spurring additional economic activity, and reducing my tax burden. I can choose to turn my thermostat down a couple of degrees and reduce my tax burden.
Done properly, if anything, a carbon tax adds money to an economy. The way that you achieve this is that as you add the carbon tax, you reduce your income tax by a corresponding amount, starting with the lowest tax bracket. One of the realities of our economic system is that the people at the bottom spend proportionately the most, and they're the ones that keep the economy moving by pumping money around. They're not hoarding it in banks, or in luxury vehicles, or million dollar homes. They're spending every dollar they get to live their life. If you cut their income taxes by the same amount that you add a carbon tax, initially they're no better or worse off than they were before. As they are able to build in additional efficiencies into their lives, this gives them more money that will be spent, and directly contributes to the economy, which helps everyone.
For the truly impoverished, who don't earn enough to pay any taxes, then yes, done blindly, a carbon tax hurts them the most. The only real solution here is to have some form of compensation to make up the difference. That said, it's not outrageously hard to calculate, and it's really an edge case.
The same thing goes for corporations. You're a general contractor who needs to get from point A to Point B, with your tools and supplies. It might be pretty nice to drive around in that big Ford F-250 crew-cab, but the reality is you could probably achieve the same thing in a much smaller pickup truck, saving money and reducing the tax burden.
Anyhow, the long and short of it is that done correctly, the only people that suffer long term are those who are in the fossil fuel industry. For everyone else, it incentivizes increased efficiency, and generates a whole new whack of business to help improve that efficiency.
Even more importantly, business travelers aren't generally allowed to buy anything other than a Trip, they have to use some Travel Management Company who is essentially an Online Travel Agent but with a shitty interface and a corporate policy enforcement.
Exactly this. These corporate travel agents are a waste of oxygen, and need to be eliminated. My current employer forces me to use one of these abominations, and each and every trip I book, I always forward along what I would have booked given my own choice. Invariably, what I could have booked myself is cheaper, more flexible, and better meets my own needs.
If you know how to work the system (ITA Matrix, and some of the other search engines) and have a bit of a clue when it comes to location and booking, you can do a lot better than the idiots at travel agencies who have no clue about where you're going, and don't seem to know anything about the airports in between.
I think generally backups are badly managed. I don't think most management sees them as all that critical. I suspect admins likely get tired of trying and just go with the flow after awhile.
This is why I always try to build/design my systems with active/active fail-over type mechanisms, doing my best to avoid the single point of failure. During normal operations, both systems are in operation and responding to needs. They are being constantly updated, constantly tested, and constantly monitored. The tricky thing is to ensure that should one of them fail, the other can take the full load.
I used to think that a liberal education program was stupid for technical fields. I thought it was dumb that I had to take all of these core classes that weren't related to Comp-Sci.
Whenever I talk to kids who are just starting out at University, my single biggest piece of advice is always "Take at least a couple of classes that are completely useless for your degree, but interest you personally." It's the one chance in your life to learn something from someone who is usually going to be an expert in their field, and in the grand scheme of things, the cost isn't enormous. Plus, you never know who you might meet in those classes, and it's always good to have contacts and friends outside your normal social group.
Someone pointed out about how they moved away from being a hobbyist shop to an overpriced electronics shop and never moved back into the hobbyist market when the hobbyist market picked back up
RadioShack: You have questions, we have cell phones.
In colder regions, this is already done. Many of the greenhouses in BC are setup such that in the winter, they run their boilers during the day, blowing a portion of the exhaust into the greenhouse to increase the CO2 concentration. The hot water produced is stored in large insulated tanks. At night, the hot water is used to keep the plants and greenhouses from freezing.
A carbon tax, as far as GHG emissions goes, is applied universally, and thus no one can "skip out" on the damages.
The other thing that a Carbon tax does (assuming it is applied universally) is provide a direct incentive for people, and corporations to become more efficient in their use of energy, and potentially select less carbon intensive energy sources.
I volunteer with an organization that is next to an environmental remediation site where the runoff from an old mine is being put through a treatment plant. Due to the remoteness of the location, they are currently powering the treatment plant using Diesel generators, and burning roughly 180,000 gallons of diesel a year to do so. They're right next to a good sized creek that could easily have a small scale hydro plant built on it to produce sufficient amounts of power. (We run a similar plant on a tributary creek, we know the flows in the valley). They've been reluctant to do so because diesel is cheap enough. If they suddenly had to pay a $60/ton carbon tax, that would change their calculus, and there would be an optimal solution achieved.
I'm with you... I love anything Tomato, as long as it's cooked. Sun dried tomatos? yum... Sauces, diced, canned, etc... ? Yum... Catsup? well, that's mostly just corn syrop, vinegar, and spices, but it's fine in moderation.
But raw tomato? no thanks. I've tried many, including those where I'm told their fantastic, and they just don't sit well. I'll eat them if served to be polite, but I'd rather not.
Of course, you neglect the fact that the patent isn't for the concept of a "Bezel-Free" display, rather it is for a particular implementation of it. Is their implementation new or unique?
The same thing goes for the touch-id embedded in the display. The patent is for a novel way of achieving this, not for the concept itself.
2) Is the implementation they're patenting somehow different and novel, compared to what their rivals are doing?
Exactly this. The example I always like to use is the Sony Trinitron patents. They developed a unique, and generally superior (at the time) way of building a CRT display. Getting the details just right was hard R&D, and for that they were properly rewarded.
The patent also had the effect of forcing other CRT manufacturers to really up their game, and improve competing technologies to try and match what Sony was able to do.
Once the patent expired, you started to see clones on the market, and they were quite good too... And then we made the switch to LCD, and didn't look back.
This is precisely how the patent system should work. It rewarded a unique and better design, and drove the competition to improve their own products. When the patent expired, the technology became generally available.
This. As a Computer Engineer myself (Though I hesitate to call myself that, as I don't have my designation), in my view the sign of a competent Engineer is someone who can make an initial estimate reliably. Of course those are backed up by calculations later, but the first pass can always be a reasonable estimate.
The bombing of Air India flight 189. It was the deadliest terrorist incident involving an aircraft prior to the September 11th attacks. The bomb was concealed inside a piece of stereo equipment being shipped as baggage. It detonated in the forward compartment of the aircraft, and caused it to break up at 31,000' off the coast of Ireland.
That last part is a thing. Dell and HP are now, finally, making some laptops that definitely do not suck, but I have no confidence these companies would help if their hardware went dead. OTOH, if you live near an Apple Store, show the problem to a tech, he takes the machine with a smile and two days later FedEx asks you to sign for the replacement... even if the machine is 6 years old.
While my daily driver is a Macbook Pro, and still one of my favorite platforms, one of the things that really used to impress me was the level of service that came with the purchase of the (business grade) Thinkpads, at least when they were still an IBM product. Back in my university days, my roommate had a Thinkpad T41, which over the years suffered from a couple of defects in the motherboard. Each time the motherboard had to be replaced, IBM sent out a technician to our house, who proceeded to do the motherboard replacement on our kitchen table. He would arrange a time, and they were prompt on arrival, courteous, and were out again quickly. Basically he was treated the same as customers who had huge support contracts, despite being just an individual owner.
I have a late 2011 MBP that has been through multiple trips to various war zones and come home desert tan on the inside from the dust. It's been squashed in airline seats, dropped multiple times, suffered getting wet from a leaking hatch while off-shore sailing (thankfully it was closed, so the water didn't get inside). It has been my daily driver, and is still more than adequate for my needs, and it's a lot lighter and nicer than a Panasonic toughbook.
I ran into the "Curse of the gifted student." I was able to do quite well through most of high school. I wasn't top of my class, but near the top, but I rarely had to study. I could pretty much just figure things out, do the minimum amount of homework, and get by. I got to University, and with the exception of a couple of subjects, I couldn't do that any more, and I failed hard.
That failure, though, is one of the best things that happened to me. It forced me to re-evaluate myself, and to work harder and change my ways to do better. I was never at the top of my class, but I did well enough.
Indeed. If there is a market for COBOL programmers (and it's clear there is), then the obvious solution is for unis and colleges to spit out more COBOL-literate CS graduates.
Oh, hell no. Universities and computer science departments are not trade schools, and we shouldn't be expecting them to teach any specific technology or language. That is not what the discipline is about. What they should be doing is producing graduates that grok and push the concepts that underlie computing in general. They should have a good grasp of algorithms, object oriented design, logic, and so forth. The language is incidental. A well educated grad should be able to pretty much pick up any language, and view it as simply another syntax, potentially with slightly different grammar. In practical terms, a good CS program is far closer to being an applied discrete mathematics degree, rather than a programming degree.
Not true. In Canada, the term "Engineer" is similarly protected to other professional titles. Not just anyone can claim to be a Lawyer, or Medical Doctor, or what not. If anything, Canada is much more organized in this manner (and we Canadian 'geers get to wear our secret iron rings!).
People are idiots and thing "processed" foods are bad, even though the exact opposite is true. Cooking food is "processing" it. Also, water is a chemical.
It's more of an issue due to the imprecise nature of the English language. Of course almost all food is processed to some degree, be it mechanically or thermally. What most people are referring to when they say "processed foods" are those that have had their fat, sugar, and salt content played with to the degree that they achieve the "bliss point." It's that high concentration of salt and sugars that is most bad for us.
Well, I'm going to be a pit pedantic, and remind you that a/24 necessarily a class C. After the arrival of CIDR, and the end of classfull networking, we've moved to a better solution.
That said, there is a very valid reason why a small organization might have an entire/24 even if they only have a few people. If you want to be truly multi-homed, with multiple connections to the Internet, announced via BGP, the smallest allocation you can advertise is a/24. It's better than in the old days, when most of the backbone cabal wouldn't accept an advertisement smaller than/19. All of this was/is done to keep the core routing tables at a manageable size.
Yes, because they're getting Uber's investors to subsidize their "transit" system. This is nothing more than the greater fool theory writ large, eventually it will come crashing down like all the other boneheaded dotcoms that have gone bust over the past 20 years.
Not necessarily true. Diesel-electric submarines are extremely quiet when running off their batteries. Canada has a (small) fleet of diesel-electric Submarines, and is often called upon to play the role of "Opposition Forces" in military exercises. In 2007, during an exercise in the north Atlantic, HMCS Corner Brook was able to sneak up on a British carrier (HMS Illustrious) and snap a photo through her periscope. All without being detected. It's also pretty routine for Canadian subs to "Sink" US carriers during exercises in the pacific.
Don't discount it because it's "just" diesel electric.
Now, when it comes to the North Koreans, wouldn't trust the reliability of their crews or vessels, but that's a different question entirely.
but in this scenario the city itself holds a privileged position as the provider of the infrastructure—by far the largest part of a local ISP's capital investment.
I would argue that in this kind of a situation, the physical plant is about as close to a natural monopoly as it can get. It isn't beneficial to the citizens to have multiple water mains, multiple sewer mains, or multiple electrical distribution systems. The optimal response to that situation, then is to have a well regulated monopoly that is responsible to the people it affects, not just those it serves, or some faraway shareholder. Back in the days of copper it made sense to have a phone system, and a cable distribution system. In the modern era, to me it doesn't make sense to have more than one fiber plant.
Now, I'm not going to argue that this should prohibit the deployment of other technologies. The satellite network I operate out of that region is dual-homed, one connection on the PUD fiber, the other on a cable modem on the old physical CATV plant.
I'm not going to argue politics here, it's just that I have seen it work very very well for the consumer and taxpayer in those regions. Those counties also have amongst the lowest power rates in the nation, because they also own and have well maintained a couple of hydro-electric power plants over the decades. Part of their incorporating papers is that the profits earned from selling power to the outside is plowed back into a) maintaining and improving their own infrastructure and b) subsidizing local rate payers. They were also able to use those profits to build out the fiber network.
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honestly, instead of using the heavy hand of government to force motor companies to meet higher and higher emission standards, why not just offer tax incentives/cuts/deductibles to consumers for buying the most 'clean' cars. That way you incentivize consumers to reward companies for buying greener vehicles, and companies feel the need to compete and build the best product.
The problem with this attitude is that the consumer has no way of knowing whether the vehicle is low emissions, or just cheating, on their own. They have to rely on something that's hopefully objective, which takes us back to testing. If you give consumers an incentive to buy a low emissions vehicle, the manufacturers will figure out a way to meet that demand, and as we've seen with their current willingness to cheat, that doesn't mean that they will necessarily be producing low emissions vehicles.
The real solution is to start changing the way that we think about transportation, and to reduce the total number of passenger-kms that are driven in private vehicles. I personally drive an '06 Jetta TDI (pre-emissions scandal). It's paid off, low maintenance, and cheap to operate. Assuming that I am going to keep the vehicle, and thus pay to insure it, at this point it is still cheaper for me to commute to work in it rather than take mass transit. If the cost of mass transit were to drop below the cost of driving, either through reduction in pass prices, or because my employer was incentivized to give me a pass, I would do that instead. Until then, I'm going to take the least expensive option.
Eh, we should just send him as the first person to land on the Sun... but don't worry, we'll land at night!
This proposed tax (like all other taxes) is an economic leakage. Money is being taken out of the normal economic system. Now governments may use this money to buy goods and services, or they may choose to distribute it in some other way. But it remains an economic distortion. Taxation != buying bombs, jewelry or food.
On the other hand, it's a tax that I can quite easily reduce, through my own actions, legally, thus reducing my tax burden. I can choose to live close to my job and walk to work (reducing the taxes that would be on the fuel my car uses), I can choose to better insulate my living accomodations, thus spurring additional economic activity, and reducing my tax burden. I can choose to turn my thermostat down a couple of degrees and reduce my tax burden.
Done properly, if anything, a carbon tax adds money to an economy. The way that you achieve this is that as you add the carbon tax, you reduce your income tax by a corresponding amount, starting with the lowest tax bracket. One of the realities of our economic system is that the people at the bottom spend proportionately the most, and they're the ones that keep the economy moving by pumping money around. They're not hoarding it in banks, or in luxury vehicles, or million dollar homes. They're spending every dollar they get to live their life. If you cut their income taxes by the same amount that you add a carbon tax, initially they're no better or worse off than they were before. As they are able to build in additional efficiencies into their lives, this gives them more money that will be spent, and directly contributes to the economy, which helps everyone.
For the truly impoverished, who don't earn enough to pay any taxes, then yes, done blindly, a carbon tax hurts them the most. The only real solution here is to have some form of compensation to make up the difference. That said, it's not outrageously hard to calculate, and it's really an edge case.
The same thing goes for corporations. You're a general contractor who needs to get from point A to Point B, with your tools and supplies. It might be pretty nice to drive around in that big Ford F-250 crew-cab, but the reality is you could probably achieve the same thing in a much smaller pickup truck, saving money and reducing the tax burden.
Anyhow, the long and short of it is that done correctly, the only people that suffer long term are those who are in the fossil fuel industry. For everyone else, it incentivizes increased efficiency, and generates a whole new whack of business to help improve that efficiency.
Even more importantly, business travelers aren't generally allowed to buy anything other than a Trip, they have to use some Travel Management Company who is essentially an Online Travel Agent but with a shitty interface and a corporate policy enforcement.
Exactly this. These corporate travel agents are a waste of oxygen, and need to be eliminated. My current employer forces me to use one of these abominations, and each and every trip I book, I always forward along what I would have booked given my own choice. Invariably, what I could have booked myself is cheaper, more flexible, and better meets my own needs.
If you know how to work the system (ITA Matrix, and some of the other search engines) and have a bit of a clue when it comes to location and booking, you can do a lot better than the idiots at travel agencies who have no clue about where you're going, and don't seem to know anything about the airports in between.
I think generally backups are badly managed. I don't think most management sees them as all that critical. I suspect admins likely get tired of trying and just go with the flow after awhile.
This is why I always try to build/design my systems with active/active fail-over type mechanisms, doing my best to avoid the single point of failure. During normal operations, both systems are in operation and responding to needs. They are being constantly updated, constantly tested, and constantly monitored. The tricky thing is to ensure that should one of them fail, the other can take the full load.
I used to think that a liberal education program was stupid for technical fields. I thought it was dumb that I had to take all of these core classes that weren't related to Comp-Sci.
Whenever I talk to kids who are just starting out at University, my single biggest piece of advice is always "Take at least a couple of classes that are completely useless for your degree, but interest you personally." It's the one chance in your life to learn something from someone who is usually going to be an expert in their field, and in the grand scheme of things, the cost isn't enormous. Plus, you never know who you might meet in those classes, and it's always good to have contacts and friends outside your normal social group.
Someone pointed out about how they moved away from being a hobbyist shop to an overpriced electronics shop and never moved back into the hobbyist market when the hobbyist market picked back up
RadioShack: You have questions, we have cell phones.
In colder regions, this is already done. Many of the greenhouses in BC are setup such that in the winter, they run their boilers during the day, blowing a portion of the exhaust into the greenhouse to increase the CO2 concentration. The hot water produced is stored in large insulated tanks. At night, the hot water is used to keep the plants and greenhouses from freezing.
A carbon tax, as far as GHG emissions goes, is applied universally, and thus no one can "skip out" on the damages.
The other thing that a Carbon tax does (assuming it is applied universally) is provide a direct incentive for people, and corporations to become more efficient in their use of energy, and potentially select less carbon intensive energy sources.
I volunteer with an organization that is next to an environmental remediation site where the runoff from an old mine is being put through a treatment plant. Due to the remoteness of the location, they are currently powering the treatment plant using Diesel generators, and burning roughly 180,000 gallons of diesel a year to do so. They're right next to a good sized creek that could easily have a small scale hydro plant built on it to produce sufficient amounts of power. (We run a similar plant on a tributary creek, we know the flows in the valley). They've been reluctant to do so because diesel is cheap enough. If they suddenly had to pay a $60/ton carbon tax, that would change their calculus, and there would be an optimal solution achieved.
I'm with you... I love anything Tomato, as long as it's cooked. Sun dried tomatos? yum... Sauces, diced, canned, etc... ? Yum... Catsup? well, that's mostly just corn syrop, vinegar, and spices, but it's fine in moderation.
But raw tomato? no thanks. I've tried many, including those where I'm told their fantastic, and they just don't sit well. I'll eat them if served to be polite, but I'd rather not.
Of course, you neglect the fact that the patent isn't for the concept of a "Bezel-Free" display, rather it is for a particular implementation of it. Is their implementation new or unique?
The same thing goes for the touch-id embedded in the display. The patent is for a novel way of achieving this, not for the concept itself.
2) Is the implementation they're patenting somehow different and novel, compared to what their rivals are doing?
Exactly this. The example I always like to use is the Sony Trinitron patents. They developed a unique, and generally superior (at the time) way of building a CRT display. Getting the details just right was hard R&D, and for that they were properly rewarded.
The patent also had the effect of forcing other CRT manufacturers to really up their game, and improve competing technologies to try and match what Sony was able to do.
Once the patent expired, you started to see clones on the market, and they were quite good too... And then we made the switch to LCD, and didn't look back.
This is precisely how the patent system should work. It rewarded a unique and better design, and drove the competition to improve their own products. When the patent expired, the technology became generally available.
This. As a Computer Engineer myself (Though I hesitate to call myself that, as I don't have my designation), in my view the sign of a competent Engineer is someone who can make an initial estimate reliably. Of course those are backed up by calculations later, but the first pass can always be a reasonable estimate.
The bombing of Air India flight 189. It was the deadliest terrorist incident involving an aircraft prior to the September 11th attacks. The bomb was concealed inside a piece of stereo equipment being shipped as baggage. It detonated in the forward compartment of the aircraft, and caused it to break up at 31,000' off the coast of Ireland.
That last part is a thing. Dell and HP are now, finally, making some laptops that definitely do not suck, but I have no confidence these companies would help if their hardware went dead. OTOH, if you live near an Apple Store, show the problem to a tech, he takes the machine with a smile and two days later FedEx asks you to sign for the replacement... even if the machine is 6 years old.
While my daily driver is a Macbook Pro, and still one of my favorite platforms, one of the things that really used to impress me was the level of service that came with the purchase of the (business grade) Thinkpads, at least when they were still an IBM product. Back in my university days, my roommate had a Thinkpad T41, which over the years suffered from a couple of defects in the motherboard. Each time the motherboard had to be replaced, IBM sent out a technician to our house, who proceeded to do the motherboard replacement on our kitchen table. He would arrange a time, and they were prompt on arrival, courteous, and were out again quickly. Basically he was treated the same as customers who had huge support contracts, despite being just an individual owner.
All trackpads suck, give me TrackPoint any day
To each their own, but you can keep your keyboard nipple. It's not the early 80s any more, I'd rather not control my computer with a joystick.
I have a late 2011 MBP that has been through multiple trips to various war zones and come home desert tan on the inside from the dust. It's been squashed in airline seats, dropped multiple times, suffered getting wet from a leaking hatch while off-shore sailing (thankfully it was closed, so the water didn't get inside). It has been my daily driver, and is still more than adequate for my needs, and it's a lot lighter and nicer than a Panasonic toughbook.
I ran into the "Curse of the gifted student." I was able to do quite well through most of high school. I wasn't top of my class, but near the top, but I rarely had to study. I could pretty much just figure things out, do the minimum amount of homework, and get by. I got to University, and with the exception of a couple of subjects, I couldn't do that any more, and I failed hard.
That failure, though, is one of the best things that happened to me. It forced me to re-evaluate myself, and to work harder and change my ways to do better. I was never at the top of my class, but I did well enough.
Indeed. If there is a market for COBOL programmers (and it's clear there is), then the obvious solution is for unis and colleges to spit out more COBOL-literate CS graduates.
Oh, hell no. Universities and computer science departments are not trade schools, and we shouldn't be expecting them to teach any specific technology or language. That is not what the discipline is about. What they should be doing is producing graduates that grok and push the concepts that underlie computing in general. They should have a good grasp of algorithms, object oriented design, logic, and so forth. The language is incidental. A well educated grad should be able to pretty much pick up any language, and view it as simply another syntax, potentially with slightly different grammar. In practical terms, a good CS program is far closer to being an applied discrete mathematics degree, rather than a programming degree.
And yes, that's a US-only phenomenon.
Not true. In Canada, the term "Engineer" is similarly protected to other professional titles. Not just anyone can claim to be a Lawyer, or Medical Doctor, or what not. If anything, Canada is much more organized in this manner (and we Canadian 'geers get to wear our secret iron rings!).
People are idiots and thing "processed" foods are bad, even though the exact opposite is true. Cooking food is "processing" it. Also, water is a chemical.
It's more of an issue due to the imprecise nature of the English language. Of course almost all food is processed to some degree, be it mechanically or thermally. What most people are referring to when they say "processed foods" are those that have had their fat, sugar, and salt content played with to the degree that they achieve the "bliss point." It's that high concentration of salt and sugars that is most bad for us.
Well, I'm going to be a pit pedantic, and remind you that a /24 necessarily a class C. After the arrival of CIDR, and the end of classfull networking, we've moved to a better solution.
That said, there is a very valid reason why a small organization might have an entire /24 even if they only have a few people. If you want to be truly multi-homed, with multiple connections to the Internet, announced via BGP, the smallest allocation you can advertise is a /24. It's better than in the old days, when most of the backbone cabal wouldn't accept an advertisement smaller than /19. All of this was/is done to keep the core routing tables at a manageable size.
Yes, because they're getting Uber's investors to subsidize their "transit" system. This is nothing more than the greater fool theory writ large, eventually it will come crashing down like all the other boneheaded dotcoms that have gone bust over the past 20 years.
Not necessarily true. Diesel-electric submarines are extremely quiet when running off their batteries. Canada has a (small) fleet of diesel-electric Submarines, and is often called upon to play the role of "Opposition Forces" in military exercises. In 2007, during an exercise in the north Atlantic, HMCS Corner Brook was able to sneak up on a British carrier (HMS Illustrious) and snap a photo through her periscope. All without being detected. It's also pretty routine for Canadian subs to "Sink" US carriers during exercises in the pacific.
Don't discount it because it's "just" diesel electric.
Now, when it comes to the North Koreans, wouldn't trust the reliability of their crews or vessels, but that's a different question entirely.
but in this scenario the city itself holds a privileged position as the provider of the infrastructure—by far the largest part of a local ISP's capital investment.
I would argue that in this kind of a situation, the physical plant is about as close to a natural monopoly as it can get. It isn't beneficial to the citizens to have multiple water mains, multiple sewer mains, or multiple electrical distribution systems. The optimal response to that situation, then is to have a well regulated monopoly that is responsible to the people it affects, not just those it serves, or some faraway shareholder. Back in the days of copper it made sense to have a phone system, and a cable distribution system. In the modern era, to me it doesn't make sense to have more than one fiber plant.
Now, I'm not going to argue that this should prohibit the deployment of other technologies. The satellite network I operate out of that region is dual-homed, one connection on the PUD fiber, the other on a cable modem on the old physical CATV plant.
I'm not going to argue politics here, it's just that I have seen it work very very well for the consumer and taxpayer in those regions. Those counties also have amongst the lowest power rates in the nation, because they also own and have well maintained a couple of hydro-electric power plants over the decades. Part of their incorporating papers is that the profits earned from selling power to the outside is plowed back into a) maintaining and improving their own infrastructure and b) subsidizing local rate payers. They were also able to use those profits to build out the fiber network.