This practice actually has a name, it's called transfer pricing, and the government was about to crack down on it (I believe some time back in 2007) and a bunch of companies simply threatened to move overseas if it happened. And quite honestly, in order for them to remain competitive with other foreign companies, they would HAVE to do exactly that. That is, even if they didn't move overseas, their operating costs would be so high that they'd eventually be driven out of business anyways.
Re:Conflict of interest? "Volunteer and commercial
on
Krita 2.8 Released
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If that's true, then there should have long since been limitations in the Linux kernel that you have to pay a premium for in order to get.
I bet that in such a situation, you'd reach a point where we see an interesting market where the parts to the device sell for less than it costs to make them.
I mean think about it: Instead of stolen smartphones being exported to china, they're instead parted and sold domestically, flooding the parts market.
We could possibly solve that problem by making it illegal to part out phones that are known to be stolen. Dealers that sell parts could also be required to certify that they came from legitimate sources (and be held liable for contributing to theft if they aren't.)
Actually meat won't raise your cholesterol. Or at least, it's unlikely to. In the last few years, we've found that most of what we thought we know about cholesterol to be wrong. Dietary cholesterol (that is, the cholesterol figure you see on food labels, as well as the cholesterol found in meat and eggs) doesn't actually raise your LDL (bad) cholesterol levels. What actually does is saturated fats, which are less likely to be found in meats than many vegetables.
In fact, the infamous 1986 to 2008 "Harvard Study" that is often cited by vegans as being the reason you shouldn't eat red meat, doesn't actually suggest what they claim it does. Some group interpreted the raw data to place a link between various forms of cancer and heart disease with those who eat red meat, but they made a critical mistake. The group that ate red meat also happened to include a lot of smokers, drinkers, obese people, and people who otherwise just didn't bother watching their diet, whereas among the vegetarian group you saw less of this occurring (really any form of diet at all tends to cause one to be more conscious of what they consume.)
However one critical trend that these people didn't spot was that the vegetarian group almost universally had bad cholesterol levels. Did that make the headline news? Nope. But the "red meat is bad" news did, and so lately there's been a fad to eliminate it from our diets, which I don't think is well advised.
Anyways, don't believe anybody who thinks eating meat causes bad cholesterol, because there's no evidence to support it.
There's zero luck involved in it. It's just a form that you fill out. That's it. Nothing special, no roll of the dice, no need to land on the free parking. You just fill it out and you get a pell grant. Pretty much the only thing that can disqualify you is if you've been in jail a few times, and even then it's still possible to get it anyways (if it does, you've got worse issues than worrying about student debt.) Either that or you YOURSELF make too much money, in which case I must ask why the fuck do you need a loan anyways?
My grades were only responsible for the extras I received above and beyond, but everything was already paid for before those.
I frequently do 30-50 miles in the dead of summer in Phoenix. The temperature is literally 110 degrees fahrenheit during those times. It really isn't as bad as it sounds, when you're cycling you've got the wind to keep you cool.
Even when given the choice to telecommute, I often choose not to. I often find its much easier to get work done face to face, that and when you're in an actual work environment (or at least, aren't at home) there are fewer distractions.
Tell me, which is more lazy: Blindly paying top dollar for an education that ultimately may not be worth a whole lot because you didn't bother to shop around (e.g. shitty schools like University of Phoenix,) or looking for a way to get a legitimate education (by that I mean actual accredited schools, and in my case state colleges and universities) at a low cost?
I know several other people who do the exact same thing.
You know what I'm also unicorn-rare minority in? Not paying interest on my credit card, even though I use it for literally everything I buy, and it actually pays me $100(ish) per year. I started doing that at 18, by the way. You know why? Because when it comes to finances I'm notoriously well disciplined. And that's all it takes really, is just discipline, you don't even have to be smart about it, you just have to spend prudently. I do the exact same thing with my college expenses, which is why I don't need huge ass loans for them.
Suck my dick you smarmy fuck. I never qualified for FAFSA because my parents were members of the disappearing middle class.
Yeah, and so were mine. Pro tip: If you file as an independent on your taxes, then FAFSA doesn't give a shit what your parents make. It's always been this way. Try not being a dumbass and hold your head above the flock for once and you might figure stuff like this out. Fuck, don't even need to stick your head in the air, just look down on the damn form, it's even written on it (note the big section you have to fill out if you are a dependent, which asks for your parents tax info, among other things...If you didn't get the hint from that, then you're a retard.)
And by the way, even after FAFSA and university grants (not part of FAFSA) paid for it, my total college expenses were about $15k. Oh and did I mention that those are the only two grants I ever received? Everything else I obtained was from winning an IT competition (the Avnet Tech Games to be specific, three times at $1,000 each) and doing Honors assignments ($325 per semester) and my internship which brought me $8k. The internship I did during one summer that I took off from school. That combined (about $15k, give or take, not including the cash I was given by the school each semester) was what I used to spend on every day things and monthly expenses, and I still have plenty left over.
If you're paying $40k for college, you're paying about twice as much as you should be. With the program I went through, my tuition costs were $700(ish) per semester at community college, where I did 90 credits, with one of the state universities allowing me to finish the final 30 credits there at about $5,000 per semester. Books were cheap because I made them cheap. For example, one book we were expected to pay $150 for at the campus book store who claimed to be cheap (yeah right,) whereas Amazon (my usual source) was $80 used, however I found it used on chegg.com for $10. I rarely had a net cost of over $50 for books per semester, I think only one time I had a net cost of $400 for some crappy accounting textbooks that had no resale value (which by the way, if you ever get the chance to pirate an ebook from cengage, do so, because that company is a scam.)
But if you're too stupid to look for ways to get a legit education on the cheap, then you know what they say about a fool and his money....Perhaps you do deserve a lower paying job with no security, because you really aren't intelligent enough to be worth a shit.
Well you can already stop the half-assed assumptions. While I go to a state university, it isn't ASU, and getting into the schools you mentioned is often more about who you know than what you know, not to mention I'm the wrong color (your chances of getting admitted into them if you're white or asian are quite reduced thanks to affirmative action.)
No, if you think it is a forced choice, then you're just an idiot. I graduate this May, and haven't accrued a single red cent in student debt, and the only work I've done is as a paid intern during one particular summer.
What's stupid is I've often had both the government and the university encourage me multiple times to pick up the student loans (which would have given me $9k in cash per year) and all I had to do to receive them was not uncheck a little box on an online form. Yes, they were quite literally opt-out in my case, and every time I had to renew my university grants and uncheck that box, I would always get numerous emails for months afterwards warning me that my student loans are unclaimed.
As a matter of fact, the FAFSA and University grants were both in excess of my tuition and books costs by about $1,500 every semester, so I effectively got paid to go to school. Most of my peers however are taking out loans...why they do this is beyond me, especially when here in Arizona you can live rather comfortably on $400 a month and don't spend all of your money on stupid bars and clubs.
In fact, I'd love to see a study done on what people actually spend this loan money on, because I'm betting that tuition and books don't figure into it in most cases. In fact I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if a lot of it is spent on "partying," which in maintaining a 4.0 GPA myself I've never found the time to do.
I've bought produce from both there and wal-mart, and I weigh more with the wal-mart food, namely because my wallet has more cash in it at the end of the day.
It's actually the used computer equipment that gets sold to the third world that ends up in places like Africa. They do actually end up using most of it, until it either breaks or they find something better, and NOBODY buys their used stuff, so THAT stuff ends up in these photographs you are seeing here. The only way WE can prevent that is to completely deny the third world access to technology, which I don't think is an ideal situation.
But basically this is unwarranted environmental alarmism, exactly like the imagined (and never realized, and never will be realized) threat of so called overflowing landfills:
No, it doesn't come from them either. It comes from people accepting bitcoin as a form of settlement of any kind of debt (aka payment.)
Here's why: Bitcoin isn't intended to be something you invest in, it's intended to be a medium of exchange. What you are saying is akin to saying the dollar wouldn't have any value unless people see a story on CNN and say "how do I get in on this dollar thing?"
In any case, he's correct. I sold bitcoins I mined using GPU's I've owned from gaming, which was about 5 months ago, and even at the time MtGox was generally recommended against using because of how long it took to get your exchanges done (not only that but moving money to them was very costly.) I personally used coinbase to sell my bitcoins. Made a $700-$800 profit off of it.
With regard to MtGox, some lessons can only truly be learned while in the process of making mistakes. This is one of them. Likewise, what happened at MtGox is probably a good thing that it happened this early in bitcoin's lifespan (personally, I'm going to call anything within the first 15 years or so of bitcoin operating as "early," unless it meets a sudden demise within 40 years of its lifespan, which I somewhat doubt.)
By the way, while this didn't make much fanfare, you can buy stuff on tigerdirect using bitcoins.
Further, STEM is kind of broad, and even includes accountants (the M part, mathematics.) It doesn't just include engineers (that's just the E part.)
Yeah, we're pushing out a lot of STEM graduates, but are they actually in demand? No, they aren't. What a lot of businesses are wanting is engineers and IT workers who also understand how to solve business problems, not just technology problems (or more precisely, using their knowledge of solving technology problems for the purpose of solving business problems.)
This attitude I often see on slashdot where some people talk up how smart they are and how stupid their boss is usually have a complete lack of understanding of business, or at least the broader implications of it. These are the type of people who end up struggling to find a job, because they lack vision. Usually their boss understands business, but they don't, so they don't understand their boss. They think that being a good software programmer should automatically mean they're smart and entitle them to a six figure salary, but they're sadly mistaken.
Granted there is a true case PHB syndrome sometimes, it's pretty rare.
Here's an example: I often see popular opinion on slashdot being that CEOs who oversee a company while it falls into bankruptcy should face eternal punishment of never running a single business ever again. The people who say that are morons, here's why: If this were the case, then Larry Paige and Sergey Brinn should never have gone on to found Google, and Microsoft's Windows would still be the dominant OS platform. Everybody has their failures, and most businesses do eventually fail. Sucks when it happens, but it doesn't mean your career is over. It very often happens that after a catastrophic failure, some CEO moves on to a new business that changes the world for the better.
In the past businesses have always been allowed to refuse service to anybody at any time for any reason. Why does this suddenly need to change? It's probably not good business to refuse service to a tenth of the population, but if that's what you want to do, then so be it.
Let the market decide which businesses should continue running. I'm sure those customers would happily take their business elsewhere.
Besides, does it really make you feel any better to force somebody you hate to accept your money? (Read: you are PAYING this person YOUR money.) Think about it.
Communism invariably ends up authoritarian if it isn't already, either that or it just falls apart. Every. Single. Time. Marx was predicting that communes would start authoritarian and move on to democracy, but that has NEVER been the case. Even in communes that are run by elected members and don't have an official government end up resorting to a command structure (see the Icarians in Nauvoo, IL, whose system gradually required more and more strict controls until finally a command system had to be in place, and then it disbanded when nobody wanted to be ruled by an authoritarian system. When this happens on a national scale, there is no option to leave, so authoritarianism is the guaranteed result.)
Capitalism is generally agnostic of the government that runs it, though fewer government controls tend to lead to more entrepreneurism (people are more likely to take risks in new ventures if they are confident that the government won't just one day take over their business,) which tends to lead to stronger economies. (Mind the distinction between economic controls and laws - for example, you still need laws to make sure that e.g. the mafia can't take over your business either.)
The difference is that in the capitalism, the spying is done because they want to know what kind of clothes and other goodies they should make to get you to want to give them money.
In communism, the spying is done because they want to know whether or not they need to make you mysteriously disappear without a trace one day on the off chance that you might be or might become a political opponent that they would *gasp* have to compete with.
That system is also responsible for why broadband is so slow to deploy in the US. Google Fiber only exists because they've been able to escape the rules that most broadband providers are shackled by.
Am I saying that by unshackling them things will suddenly improve? No, not exactly. But when you have a billion ordinances to live by in addition to corrupt small-time politicians telling you where you can and can't build, you just say to hell with it and not build at all. Local city ordinances are THE number one reason why broadband deployment is so shitty here. This is why Google left Overland Park. They knew that the city council was about to do the typical political maneuvering so they just said "build your own fiber then, goodbye." Now that city has nothing and will have nothing for years to come.
I get that you might complain about cherry picking for the best places to actually deploy it, but you're going to have to make a choice.
What's better: 1) A cherry picked deployment that will in all likelihood permeate the entire area over several years. 2) No deployment at all because the rules and regulations are so strict that you're guaranteed to not break even for a good 15 years, and by the time that day comes your shit will all be obsolete anyways with the government bitching at you for not keeping up with the times.
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This practice actually has a name, it's called transfer pricing, and the government was about to crack down on it (I believe some time back in 2007) and a bunch of companies simply threatened to move overseas if it happened. And quite honestly, in order for them to remain competitive with other foreign companies, they would HAVE to do exactly that. That is, even if they didn't move overseas, their operating costs would be so high that they'd eventually be driven out of business anyways.
If that's true, then there should have long since been limitations in the Linux kernel that you have to pay a premium for in order to get.
I bet that in such a situation, you'd reach a point where we see an interesting market where the parts to the device sell for less than it costs to make them.
I mean think about it: Instead of stolen smartphones being exported to china, they're instead parted and sold domestically, flooding the parts market.
We could possibly solve that problem by making it illegal to part out phones that are known to be stolen. Dealers that sell parts could also be required to certify that they came from legitimate sources (and be held liable for contributing to theft if they aren't.)
Actually meat won't raise your cholesterol. Or at least, it's unlikely to. In the last few years, we've found that most of what we thought we know about cholesterol to be wrong. Dietary cholesterol (that is, the cholesterol figure you see on food labels, as well as the cholesterol found in meat and eggs) doesn't actually raise your LDL (bad) cholesterol levels. What actually does is saturated fats, which are less likely to be found in meats than many vegetables.
In fact, the infamous 1986 to 2008 "Harvard Study" that is often cited by vegans as being the reason you shouldn't eat red meat, doesn't actually suggest what they claim it does. Some group interpreted the raw data to place a link between various forms of cancer and heart disease with those who eat red meat, but they made a critical mistake. The group that ate red meat also happened to include a lot of smokers, drinkers, obese people, and people who otherwise just didn't bother watching their diet, whereas among the vegetarian group you saw less of this occurring (really any form of diet at all tends to cause one to be more conscious of what they consume.)
However one critical trend that these people didn't spot was that the vegetarian group almost universally had bad cholesterol levels. Did that make the headline news? Nope. But the "red meat is bad" news did, and so lately there's been a fad to eliminate it from our diets, which I don't think is well advised.
Anyways, don't believe anybody who thinks eating meat causes bad cholesterol, because there's no evidence to support it.
Well two reasons that wouldn't apply:
I was a veteran at age 19 (Discharged from the Army for having CSNB; Honorable Discharge which includes all veterans benefits.)
I was about age 27 when I first applied for FAFSA.
Anyways, go for it.
if someone wasn't as lucky as you
Stop right there.
There's zero luck involved in it. It's just a form that you fill out. That's it. Nothing special, no roll of the dice, no need to land on the free parking. You just fill it out and you get a pell grant. Pretty much the only thing that can disqualify you is if you've been in jail a few times, and even then it's still possible to get it anyways (if it does, you've got worse issues than worrying about student debt.) Either that or you YOURSELF make too much money, in which case I must ask why the fuck do you need a loan anyways?
My grades were only responsible for the extras I received above and beyond, but everything was already paid for before those.
Or probably just an editing mistake.
I frequently do 30-50 miles in the dead of summer in Phoenix. The temperature is literally 110 degrees fahrenheit during those times. It really isn't as bad as it sounds, when you're cycling you've got the wind to keep you cool.
Even when given the choice to telecommute, I often choose not to. I often find its much easier to get work done face to face, that and when you're in an actual work environment (or at least, aren't at home) there are fewer distractions.
Tell me, which is more lazy: Blindly paying top dollar for an education that ultimately may not be worth a whole lot because you didn't bother to shop around (e.g. shitty schools like University of Phoenix,) or looking for a way to get a legitimate education (by that I mean actual accredited schools, and in my case state colleges and universities) at a low cost?
I know several other people who do the exact same thing.
You know what I'm also unicorn-rare minority in? Not paying interest on my credit card, even though I use it for literally everything I buy, and it actually pays me $100(ish) per year. I started doing that at 18, by the way. You know why? Because when it comes to finances I'm notoriously well disciplined. And that's all it takes really, is just discipline, you don't even have to be smart about it, you just have to spend prudently. I do the exact same thing with my college expenses, which is why I don't need huge ass loans for them.
Suck my dick you smarmy fuck. I never qualified for FAFSA because my parents were members of the disappearing middle class.
Yeah, and so were mine. Pro tip: If you file as an independent on your taxes, then FAFSA doesn't give a shit what your parents make. It's always been this way. Try not being a dumbass and hold your head above the flock for once and you might figure stuff like this out. Fuck, don't even need to stick your head in the air, just look down on the damn form, it's even written on it (note the big section you have to fill out if you are a dependent, which asks for your parents tax info, among other things...If you didn't get the hint from that, then you're a retard.)
And by the way, even after FAFSA and university grants (not part of FAFSA) paid for it, my total college expenses were about $15k. Oh and did I mention that those are the only two grants I ever received? Everything else I obtained was from winning an IT competition (the Avnet Tech Games to be specific, three times at $1,000 each) and doing Honors assignments ($325 per semester) and my internship which brought me $8k. The internship I did during one summer that I took off from school. That combined (about $15k, give or take, not including the cash I was given by the school each semester) was what I used to spend on every day things and monthly expenses, and I still have plenty left over.
If you're paying $40k for college, you're paying about twice as much as you should be. With the program I went through, my tuition costs were $700(ish) per semester at community college, where I did 90 credits, with one of the state universities allowing me to finish the final 30 credits there at about $5,000 per semester. Books were cheap because I made them cheap. For example, one book we were expected to pay $150 for at the campus book store who claimed to be cheap (yeah right,) whereas Amazon (my usual source) was $80 used, however I found it used on chegg.com for $10. I rarely had a net cost of over $50 for books per semester, I think only one time I had a net cost of $400 for some crappy accounting textbooks that had no resale value (which by the way, if you ever get the chance to pirate an ebook from cengage, do so, because that company is a scam.)
But if you're too stupid to look for ways to get a legit education on the cheap, then you know what they say about a fool and his money....Perhaps you do deserve a lower paying job with no security, because you really aren't intelligent enough to be worth a shit.
Well you can already stop the half-assed assumptions. While I go to a state university, it isn't ASU, and getting into the schools you mentioned is often more about who you know than what you know, not to mention I'm the wrong color (your chances of getting admitted into them if you're white or asian are quite reduced thanks to affirmative action.)
In fact, here's a nice anecdote of how these so called "student" loans are being spent:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...
No, if you think it is a forced choice, then you're just an idiot. I graduate this May, and haven't accrued a single red cent in student debt, and the only work I've done is as a paid intern during one particular summer.
What's stupid is I've often had both the government and the university encourage me multiple times to pick up the student loans (which would have given me $9k in cash per year) and all I had to do to receive them was not uncheck a little box on an online form. Yes, they were quite literally opt-out in my case, and every time I had to renew my university grants and uncheck that box, I would always get numerous emails for months afterwards warning me that my student loans are unclaimed.
As a matter of fact, the FAFSA and University grants were both in excess of my tuition and books costs by about $1,500 every semester, so I effectively got paid to go to school. Most of my peers however are taking out loans...why they do this is beyond me, especially when here in Arizona you can live rather comfortably on $400 a month and don't spend all of your money on stupid bars and clubs.
In fact, I'd love to see a study done on what people actually spend this loan money on, because I'm betting that tuition and books don't figure into it in most cases. In fact I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if a lot of it is spent on "partying," which in maintaining a 4.0 GPA myself I've never found the time to do.
I've bought produce from both there and wal-mart, and I weigh more with the wal-mart food, namely because my wallet has more cash in it at the end of the day.
If you throw away e-waste, it ends up in a domestic landfill at the worst, recycled in a domestic processing plant at best.
http://www.bloombergview.com/a...
It's actually the used computer equipment that gets sold to the third world that ends up in places like Africa. They do actually end up using most of it, until it either breaks or they find something better, and NOBODY buys their used stuff, so THAT stuff ends up in these photographs you are seeing here. The only way WE can prevent that is to completely deny the third world access to technology, which I don't think is an ideal situation.
But basically this is unwarranted environmental alarmism, exactly like the imagined (and never realized, and never will be realized) threat of so called overflowing landfills:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
Not really, no. Hollywood rarely lobbies in favor of republicans, and the few it does aren't ever in the white house.
Chris Dodd (former US Senator and now MPAA lobbyist) once openly threatened to switch sides if he didn't get his way.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/er...
http://www.foxnews.com/politic...
The Obama admin is a wholly owned subsidiary of the MPAA. What makes you think they'd ever do anything against their wishes?
No, it doesn't come from them either. It comes from people accepting bitcoin as a form of settlement of any kind of debt (aka payment.)
Here's why: Bitcoin isn't intended to be something you invest in, it's intended to be a medium of exchange. What you are saying is akin to saying the dollar wouldn't have any value unless people see a story on CNN and say "how do I get in on this dollar thing?"
In any case, he's correct. I sold bitcoins I mined using GPU's I've owned from gaming, which was about 5 months ago, and even at the time MtGox was generally recommended against using because of how long it took to get your exchanges done (not only that but moving money to them was very costly.) I personally used coinbase to sell my bitcoins. Made a $700-$800 profit off of it.
With regard to MtGox, some lessons can only truly be learned while in the process of making mistakes. This is one of them. Likewise, what happened at MtGox is probably a good thing that it happened this early in bitcoin's lifespan (personally, I'm going to call anything within the first 15 years or so of bitcoin operating as "early," unless it meets a sudden demise within 40 years of its lifespan, which I somewhat doubt.)
By the way, while this didn't make much fanfare, you can buy stuff on tigerdirect using bitcoins.
Further, STEM is kind of broad, and even includes accountants (the M part, mathematics.) It doesn't just include engineers (that's just the E part.)
Yeah, we're pushing out a lot of STEM graduates, but are they actually in demand? No, they aren't. What a lot of businesses are wanting is engineers and IT workers who also understand how to solve business problems, not just technology problems (or more precisely, using their knowledge of solving technology problems for the purpose of solving business problems.)
This attitude I often see on slashdot where some people talk up how smart they are and how stupid their boss is usually have a complete lack of understanding of business, or at least the broader implications of it. These are the type of people who end up struggling to find a job, because they lack vision. Usually their boss understands business, but they don't, so they don't understand their boss. They think that being a good software programmer should automatically mean they're smart and entitle them to a six figure salary, but they're sadly mistaken.
Granted there is a true case PHB syndrome sometimes, it's pretty rare.
Here's an example: I often see popular opinion on slashdot being that CEOs who oversee a company while it falls into bankruptcy should face eternal punishment of never running a single business ever again. The people who say that are morons, here's why: If this were the case, then Larry Paige and Sergey Brinn should never have gone on to found Google, and Microsoft's Windows would still be the dominant OS platform. Everybody has their failures, and most businesses do eventually fail. Sucks when it happens, but it doesn't mean your career is over. It very often happens that after a catastrophic failure, some CEO moves on to a new business that changes the world for the better.
That would mean most world currencies must fail eventually. I can't think of a single one that is backed by any kind of asset.
This.
In the past businesses have always been allowed to refuse service to anybody at any time for any reason. Why does this suddenly need to change? It's probably not good business to refuse service to a tenth of the population, but if that's what you want to do, then so be it.
Let the market decide which businesses should continue running. I'm sure those customers would happily take their business elsewhere.
Besides, does it really make you feel any better to force somebody you hate to accept your money? (Read: you are PAYING this person YOUR money.) Think about it.
Communism invariably ends up authoritarian if it isn't already, either that or it just falls apart. Every. Single. Time. Marx was predicting that communes would start authoritarian and move on to democracy, but that has NEVER been the case. Even in communes that are run by elected members and don't have an official government end up resorting to a command structure (see the Icarians in Nauvoo, IL, whose system gradually required more and more strict controls until finally a command system had to be in place, and then it disbanded when nobody wanted to be ruled by an authoritarian system. When this happens on a national scale, there is no option to leave, so authoritarianism is the guaranteed result.)
Capitalism is generally agnostic of the government that runs it, though fewer government controls tend to lead to more entrepreneurism (people are more likely to take risks in new ventures if they are confident that the government won't just one day take over their business,) which tends to lead to stronger economies. (Mind the distinction between economic controls and laws - for example, you still need laws to make sure that e.g. the mafia can't take over your business either.)
The difference is that in the capitalism, the spying is done because they want to know what kind of clothes and other goodies they should make to get you to want to give them money.
In communism, the spying is done because they want to know whether or not they need to make you mysteriously disappear without a trace one day on the off chance that you might be or might become a political opponent that they would *gasp* have to compete with.
That system is also responsible for why broadband is so slow to deploy in the US. Google Fiber only exists because they've been able to escape the rules that most broadband providers are shackled by.
Am I saying that by unshackling them things will suddenly improve? No, not exactly. But when you have a billion ordinances to live by in addition to corrupt small-time politicians telling you where you can and can't build, you just say to hell with it and not build at all. Local city ordinances are THE number one reason why broadband deployment is so shitty here. This is why Google left Overland Park. They knew that the city council was about to do the typical political maneuvering so they just said "build your own fiber then, goodbye." Now that city has nothing and will have nothing for years to come.
I get that you might complain about cherry picking for the best places to actually deploy it, but you're going to have to make a choice.
What's better:
1) A cherry picked deployment that will in all likelihood permeate the entire area over several years.
2) No deployment at all because the rules and regulations are so strict that you're guaranteed to not break even for a good 15 years, and by the time that day comes your shit will all be obsolete anyways with the government bitching at you for not keeping up with the times.