5 ms·
How many water, sewer, garbage, and electrical services do you subscribe to at home?
by NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
How many water, sewer, garbage, and electrical services do you subscribe to at home?
- isoprophlex 3y agoMy toilet only spies on me after I took three hits if acid
- arwineap 3y agoI know this was in jest, but most municipalities are collecting metadata through sewage treatment This is where some of the most reliable COVID data came from
- devjab 3y agoYour toilet actually spies on you quite a lot. Just not you individually, but your city and health officials actively monitor your “output” to keep track of things like disease spreading. Doesn’t just stop there though, your acid usage might well have ticked into some drug monitoring program.
- palata 3y agoSounds better anonymized than any bullshit "we remove your name and IP from your data and call it anonymized", though.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoYeah it's a good thing that there is nothing in our sewer output that could be directly traced back to individual persons like an IPv4 could. /s
- palata 3y agoPlease answer this question: say I give you a hair I found somewhere in the city. How do you proceed to identify who the owner of that hair is? Not theoretically; in practice, right now. Now compare that to an IPv4. Do you get my point?
- Smaug123 3y agoOne of each, but is your point that those are essentially monopolies in many places? Email still isn't a monopoly, even if most people do use Google!
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoNo, my point was that the GP said: > Being tied to one service is never good And furthermore, I could ask if you're multi-homed on the Internet? Got your own ASN with a BGP session and a /24 delegation? Your ISP's not a monopoly, so why are so many people "tied to one service"? What about your health insurance? BCBS and UHC as a backup? Do you have more than one PCP?
- Smaug123 3y agoAh, but it's not good being tied to one of each service; it's just extremely impractical to have parallel infrastructure in some cases. (I've been without plumbed water before because the water service failed locally. It would certainly have been nice to have a competitor available.) The fact that monopolies exist isn't evidence that more monopolies is what we want. The answer to the rest of your questions is "… yes, isn't this pretty normal?". Multi-homing your Internet connection is in a completely different category of service because it's so trivial to fail over, but in fact my phone is routinely multi-homed (to a WiFi network and through 5G), and my laptop will fall back to its hotspot, so yes; aren't many people? That redundancy is enough for me not to run my own Internet infrastructure. I have two parallel medical infrastructures (the NHS and private insurance), which I routinely switch between as appropriate; again, in my social class this is common. I have multiple credit cards, which is the closest I come to PCP, which is again common, and again I routinely switch between them.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoThat depends on who is defining "good" and what your criteria are. There are drawbacks and there are advantages to these things. You've faced some practical realities and admitted that we can't always have this idealistic consumerist candyland choice of a box of chocolates full of providers of every rainbow service under the sun. Please don't make blanket generalizations about value judgements that may have different factors for different people or organizations. It's paternalistic and condescending.