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> We could be running fiber-optic cable to every house in America, and we even know how much it would cost. That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. Of

> We could be running fiber-optic cable to every house in America, and we even know how much it would cost. That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. Of course we can fix everything, we could also do everything in the universe, but the question is at what cost? So here's my modest proposal: > I am here to remind you that it will only get worse unless we do something. The problem isn't painful enough. Have you ever had a tough time convincing your team to address some looming problem, the problem actually manifests, and surprise! It becomes top priority. COVID was a great example of this. When the problem is painful enough we as a society can do a lot. So maybe instead of the Sisyphean task of "fighting the good fight", maybe we just ... make it more painful first?

croes 3y ago
>COVID was a great example of this. Was it? How many fought against social distancing, masks and vaccines? Same with climate change, how many fight against necessary measures.
- junofan 3y ago
  The problem here is we need solutions that work, not magical thinking. Otherwise credibility goes in the toilet. It’s self-evident in the face of an aerosol-generating respiratory pandemic that social distancing, surgical face masks, and immunizations that don’t produce a muscosal response do not constitute a complete solution. At best, they’re good things to do that may help a bit. Likewise, ending our own reliance on fossil fuels by decree won’t work—energy transitions are driven by economic viability.
- xboxnolifes 3y ago
  A lot of the people fighting against these things are not feeling the pain. Many people in my family are some degree of anti-vaccine / masking mandates. I can guarantee you that if a single close family member ended up hospitalized due to covid, their tune would do a fast 180. All of their beliefs are based on whether someone they care about had something happen to them.
  - speedgoose 3y ago
    A family member died from Covid-19, and another family member stayed against vaccine and social distancing. We aren’t all very bright on every topic.
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    That's funny, the people who are dumb and emotional in my entourage are those who are still completely afraid of COVID even after like, 5 boosters, even if they are in their thirties, no immune condition, etc. They don't go out, don't see anyone, only order stuff online, and actually think that they are smarter than everyone else who just... lives their lives. (r/zerocovidcommunity is a good example of that, just to give you more than a personal anecdote) To me that's a much more emotional take on life than anti Vax lunatics because they at least "live their life" as it has always been. Which might be a bad thing in this case, but to me it is much less insane than becoming a hermit over something that is objectively not an actual danger to them anymore, unless they believe their 5 boosters don't help. So I'm not sure that reducing it to caring or not is actually helpful. You can care about something but disagree about the method. I guess my point is that I don't think antivaxxers don't believe in vaccines because they just want people to die, they don't believe in vaccines because they think it doesn't help people from dying. They actually believe vaccines don't work, it's not just pretend play. It's very very dumb, but I don't think that framing as is just not caring until stuff happens to them is helpful. If you didn't believe that for example, homeopathy works, you won't suddenly think that it should be used if someone close to you dies. Maybe in desperation, but that's different from believing it. Obviously the difference is that homeopathy doesn't work, and vaccines absolutely do. But remember, that's literally what antivaxxers disagree with!
    - xboxnolifes 3y ago
      > That's funny, the people who are dumb and emotional in my entourage are those who are still completely afraid of COVID even after like, 5 boosters, even if they are in their thirties I have a few friends like this, though to a lesser degree as their worries have disappeared by now. > I guess my point is that I don't think antivaxxers don't believe in vaccines because they just want people to die, they don't believe in vaccines because they think it doesn't help people from dying. They actually believe vaccines don't work, it's not just pretend play. It's very very dumb, but I don't think that framing as is just not caring until stuff happens to them is helpful. I wasn't trying to frame it as "all covid deniers just don't care unless it impacts their family" or something similar. It more subtle than that. And what I said was not supposed to be a generalization at all. It was specifically about my family members. I do think some portion of all people fall into this group though. Yes, they might truly believe the covid vaccines do more harm than good. But also yes, they would immediately line-up for a covid vaccine if a close family member became hospitalized and visually looked bad. Nothing about the dangers of the vaccine changes in this scenario, and covid didn't suddenly become more dangerous to them. It just became more emotionally visceral. That's not desperation. It's straightforward emotional persuasion, and is the "feeling the pain" as originally commented about. I do think there is many more social dynamics at play, but I don't feel confident in articulating my scattered thoughts on them well. How people adjust how they act based on social groups, or with very little information people form very strong opinions, how information bubbles impact what topics you see or how they're presented, etc.
grecy 3y ago
>the question is at what cost? The world will be a wonderful place when schools have all the funding they need and the Air Force must hold a bake sale to pay for new fighter jets. The US spent $8,000,000,000,000 on the "war on terror" [1], while 21% of adults are illiterate [2] [1] https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar [2] https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statistics https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statisti...
- Fbnkigffb66tfbj 3y ago
  > $8,000,000,000,000 It's a lot more readable to just write $8 trillion. Writing out all the zeros doesn't make your point any more convincing.
  - chthonicdaemon 3y ago
    $8 trillion is ambiguous and forces me to understand whether you're using long or short scale (particularly for me, coming from a long scale culture, it trips me up often) [1]. I've often wondered though why scientific notation or SI prefixes have never caught on for currency. 8 T$ or $8e12 feel both shorter and less ambiguous. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion
    - grecy 3y ago
      > 8 T$ or $8e12 feel both shorter and less ambiguous. To be honest, I wrote it out longhand because I think it's important not to make it feel shorter or somehow less significant. It is an enormous sum of money that humans are not equipped to comprehend, so anything we can do to covey the scale more clearly is important. A single trillion is an absurd amount. Now make eight of these: https://www.rogerebert.com/scanners/what-does-one-trillion-dollars-look-like https://www.rogerebert.com/scanners/what-does-one-trillion-d...
- smsm42 3y ago
  You are implying the cause of illiteracy is the lack of funds. It is not so - in fact, the very worst schools often spend per pupil the same as the very best ones, or at least very close to it. Throwing money at the problem is not the solution - it would cause the worst schools spend even more and keep churning out ignoramuses. The bad schools are bad not because they can't find money to become good but because the whole system there is broken and it can't be fixed by just giving the same incompetent, ignorant and apathetic people more money to waste.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
- smsm42 3y ago
  What work do you imply?
smsm42 3y ago
> When the problem is painful enough we as a society can do a lot. For example, we lie about how the problem came to be, institute a censorship framework to prevent scientists from discussing it, spend months preventing solutions from reaching the consumers because we can't figure out how to issue permits, institute policies guaranteed to make the problem much worse, rally against solutions that could make it less bad because it allows us to take cheap shots about political opponents, lie about various aspects of the problem because it looks to us more convenient if people behaved as if they believed the lies, institute draconian policies that make absolutely no sense but allow the politicians to declare they are "serious about it", allow the same politicians to blatantly and constantly violate the same policies, dial the censorship to 11 to suppress public discussion of these policies, spend enormous amounts of money on things that do not work, distribute even more enormous amount of money to fraudsters, because we don't have time to bother checking who needs help and who doesn't, and so on, and so forth... Yeah, you are right, as a society we did a lot. We shouldn't have done most of it, but there's no denying it, it is a lot.
jnsaff2 3y ago
> That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. Is it though? Or is it that there is not enough profit for someone to make from running fiber to every home? To be clear I’m not trying to lead with the question but actually ask something and that the difference might be useful.
- cortesoft 3y ago
  Profit isn't the only reason things cost to much. There is also just the fact that some things take too many resources to do. Take the healthcare example, of cancer that we have a cure for but costs $2 million so no one gets it. The instinctive response is to say that is horrible, and that we should spend whatever it takes to cure someone... but should we? Even if we said profit wasn't an issue, scarce resources still have to be allocated. Time and resources spent doing one thing means less to do something else. Imagine a cure for cancer that required 10000 people to work 1000 hours each to produce... surely that would be too much to be worth it, right? Those are hours we can't do something else. Even if we decided no amount of hours or resources were too many, we are still limited by the people we have and the resources available. We simply don't have enough to do everything. So yes, maybe we can fix ANYTHING, but we certainly can't fix EVERYTHING
- Gigachad 3y ago
  That’s the same as it costs too much.
  - jnsaff2 3y ago
    No it's not. The utility for the users is the same. The lobbying power trying to make that choice is completely different.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    For governments and infrastructure they don’t need to make a profit they can subsidise. That is somewhat the point of a government. Costs too much is still an objection but “no immediate profit” isn’t. Whether that is true for fibre, I don’t know it is a complex topic.
cbozeman 3y ago
This post is mind-boggling to me... > > We could be running fiber-optic cable to every house in America, and we even know how much it would cost. > That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. No it doesn't, and we already paid for it at least four times over. The large-scale ISPs (and even small-scale ones) have been given $400,000,000,000 by Congress since the 1990s until now to bring broadband Internet to people in America. They still didn't get it done. They didn't get it done because they used the money to buy back stock and give themselves bonuses after wiring up a few hundred thousand homes at most: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5839394 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5... And the reason we paid for it at least four times over, is because the Pentagon commissioned a study some time ago on the amount of money required to bring a strand of fiber-optic cable to every home in America. They estimated it to be around $50,000,000,000 to $100,000,000,000. There are a lot more problems we can solve with more severe punishments and more certainty of being punished. We can solve even more with re-instituting shame in our society. This idea that nothing is shameful is not only disgusting, but objectively stupid... and we can see where it's led us.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Oft repeated but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 lays out a compelling argument that maybe the government didn’t actually hand out $400B in subsidies/tax breaks but instead it’s an artifact of how the researcher for the book chose to classify profits but that you could make an alternative pitch. I’m not well-versed enough in the law to know but it sounded like this person did research vs quoting a summary of the book by its author. Not disagreeing with the rest, but if the other poster was correct it may be worth correcting the record on whether or not we actually did attempt to fund building fiber throughout America.
- pompino 3y ago
  Personally, I don't find it "mind boggling", but rather in-line with reality. Large mega-projects usually suffer major delays, massive cost over-runs, complications due to unforeseen events, and are at a high-risk for corruption. It is hard to believe we now have a handle on what it takes to do accurate costing of such large ambitious public infrastructure projects.

croes 3y ago

>COVID was a great example of this. Was it? How many fought against social distancing, masks and vaccines? Same with climate change, how many fight against necessary measures.

junofan 3y ago
The problem here is we need solutions that work, not magical thinking. Otherwise credibility goes in the toilet. It’s self-evident in the face of an aerosol-generating respiratory pandemic that social distancing, surgical face masks, and immunizations that don’t produce a muscosal response do not constitute a complete solution. At best, they’re good things to do that may help a bit. Likewise, ending our own reliance on fossil fuels by decree won’t work—energy transitions are driven by economic viability.
xboxnolifes 3y ago
A lot of the people fighting against these things are not feeling the pain. Many people in my family are some degree of anti-vaccine / masking mandates. I can guarantee you that if a single close family member ended up hospitalized due to covid, their tune would do a fast 180. All of their beliefs are based on whether someone they care about had something happen to them.
- speedgoose 3y ago
  A family member died from Covid-19, and another family member stayed against vaccine and social distancing. We aren’t all very bright on every topic.
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  That's funny, the people who are dumb and emotional in my entourage are those who are still completely afraid of COVID even after like, 5 boosters, even if they are in their thirties, no immune condition, etc. They don't go out, don't see anyone, only order stuff online, and actually think that they are smarter than everyone else who just... lives their lives. (r/zerocovidcommunity is a good example of that, just to give you more than a personal anecdote) To me that's a much more emotional take on life than anti Vax lunatics because they at least "live their life" as it has always been. Which might be a bad thing in this case, but to me it is much less insane than becoming a hermit over something that is objectively not an actual danger to them anymore, unless they believe their 5 boosters don't help. So I'm not sure that reducing it to caring or not is actually helpful. You can care about something but disagree about the method. I guess my point is that I don't think antivaxxers don't believe in vaccines because they just want people to die, they don't believe in vaccines because they think it doesn't help people from dying. They actually believe vaccines don't work, it's not just pretend play. It's very very dumb, but I don't think that framing as is just not caring until stuff happens to them is helpful. If you didn't believe that for example, homeopathy works, you won't suddenly think that it should be used if someone close to you dies. Maybe in desperation, but that's different from believing it. Obviously the difference is that homeopathy doesn't work, and vaccines absolutely do. But remember, that's literally what antivaxxers disagree with!
  - xboxnolifes 3y ago
    > That's funny, the people who are dumb and emotional in my entourage are those who are still completely afraid of COVID even after like, 5 boosters, even if they are in their thirties I have a few friends like this, though to a lesser degree as their worries have disappeared by now. > I guess my point is that I don't think antivaxxers don't believe in vaccines because they just want people to die, they don't believe in vaccines because they think it doesn't help people from dying. They actually believe vaccines don't work, it's not just pretend play. It's very very dumb, but I don't think that framing as is just not caring until stuff happens to them is helpful. I wasn't trying to frame it as "all covid deniers just don't care unless it impacts their family" or something similar. It more subtle than that. And what I said was not supposed to be a generalization at all. It was specifically about my family members. I do think some portion of all people fall into this group though. Yes, they might truly believe the covid vaccines do more harm than good. But also yes, they would immediately line-up for a covid vaccine if a close family member became hospitalized and visually looked bad. Nothing about the dangers of the vaccine changes in this scenario, and covid didn't suddenly become more dangerous to them. It just became more emotionally visceral. That's not desperation. It's straightforward emotional persuasion, and is the "feeling the pain" as originally commented about. I do think there is many more social dynamics at play, but I don't feel confident in articulating my scattered thoughts on them well. How people adjust how they act based on social groups, or with very little information people form very strong opinions, how information bubbles impact what topics you see or how they're presented, etc.

grecy 3y ago

>the question is at what cost? The world will be a wonderful place when schools have all the funding they need and the Air Force must hold a bake sale to pay for new fighter jets. The US spent $8,000,000,000,000 on the "war on terror" [1], while 21% of adults are illiterate [2] [1] https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar [2] https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statistics https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statisti...

Fbnkigffb66tfbj 3y ago
> $8,000,000,000,000 It's a lot more readable to just write $8 trillion. Writing out all the zeros doesn't make your point any more convincing.
- chthonicdaemon 3y ago
  $8 trillion is ambiguous and forces me to understand whether you're using long or short scale (particularly for me, coming from a long scale culture, it trips me up often) [1]. I've often wondered though why scientific notation or SI prefixes have never caught on for currency. 8 T$ or $8e12 feel both shorter and less ambiguous. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion
  - grecy 3y ago
    > 8 T$ or $8e12 feel both shorter and less ambiguous. To be honest, I wrote it out longhand because I think it's important not to make it feel shorter or somehow less significant. It is an enormous sum of money that humans are not equipped to comprehend, so anything we can do to covey the scale more clearly is important. A single trillion is an absurd amount. Now make eight of these: https://www.rogerebert.com/scanners/what-does-one-trillion-dollars-look-like https://www.rogerebert.com/scanners/what-does-one-trillion-d...
smsm42 3y ago
You are implying the cause of illiteracy is the lack of funds. It is not so - in fact, the very worst schools often spend per pupil the same as the very best ones, or at least very close to it. Throwing money at the problem is not the solution - it would cause the worst schools spend even more and keep churning out ignoramuses. The bad schools are bad not because they can't find money to become good but because the whole system there is broken and it can't be fixed by just giving the same incompetent, ignorant and apathetic people more money to waste.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

smsm42 3y ago
What work do you imply?

smsm42 3y ago

> When the problem is painful enough we as a society can do a lot. For example, we lie about how the problem came to be, institute a censorship framework to prevent scientists from discussing it, spend months preventing solutions from reaching the consumers because we can't figure out how to issue permits, institute policies guaranteed to make the problem much worse, rally against solutions that could make it less bad because it allows us to take cheap shots about political opponents, lie about various aspects of the problem because it looks to us more convenient if people behaved as if they believed the lies, institute draconian policies that make absolutely no sense but allow the politicians to declare they are "serious about it", allow the same politicians to blatantly and constantly violate the same policies, dial the censorship to 11 to suppress public discussion of these policies, spend enormous amounts of money on things that do not work, distribute even more enormous amount of money to fraudsters, because we don't have time to bother checking who needs help and who doesn't, and so on, and so forth... Yeah, you are right, as a society we did a lot. We shouldn't have done most of it, but there's no denying it, it is a lot.

jnsaff2 3y ago

> That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. Is it though? Or is it that there is not enough profit for someone to make from running fiber to every home? To be clear I’m not trying to lead with the question but actually ask something and that the difference might be useful.

cortesoft 3y ago
Profit isn't the only reason things cost to much. There is also just the fact that some things take too many resources to do. Take the healthcare example, of cancer that we have a cure for but costs $2 million so no one gets it. The instinctive response is to say that is horrible, and that we should spend whatever it takes to cure someone... but should we? Even if we said profit wasn't an issue, scarce resources still have to be allocated. Time and resources spent doing one thing means less to do something else. Imagine a cure for cancer that required 10000 people to work 1000 hours each to produce... surely that would be too much to be worth it, right? Those are hours we can't do something else. Even if we decided no amount of hours or resources were too many, we are still limited by the people we have and the resources available. We simply don't have enough to do everything. So yes, maybe we can fix ANYTHING, but we certainly can't fix EVERYTHING
Gigachad 3y ago
That’s the same as it costs too much.
- jnsaff2 3y ago
  No it's not. The utility for the users is the same. The lobbying power trying to make that choice is completely different.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  For governments and infrastructure they don’t need to make a profit they can subsidise. That is somewhat the point of a government. Costs too much is still an objection but “no immediate profit” isn’t. Whether that is true for fibre, I don’t know it is a complex topic.

cbozeman 3y ago

This post is mind-boggling to me... > > We could be running fiber-optic cable to every house in America, and we even know how much it would cost. > That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. No it doesn't, and we already paid for it at least four times over. The large-scale ISPs (and even small-scale ones) have been given $400,000,000,000 by Congress since the 1990s until now to bring broadband Internet to people in America. They still didn't get it done. They didn't get it done because they used the money to buy back stock and give themselves bonuses after wiring up a few hundred thousand homes at most: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5839394 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5... And the reason we paid for it at least four times over, is because the Pentagon commissioned a study some time ago on the amount of money required to bring a strand of fiber-optic cable to every home in America. They estimated it to be around $50,000,000,000 to $100,000,000,000. There are a lot more problems we can solve with more severe punishments and more certainty of being punished. We can solve even more with re-instituting shame in our society. This idea that nothing is shameful is not only disgusting, but objectively stupid... and we can see where it's led us.

vlovich123 3y ago
Oft repeated but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 lays out a compelling argument that maybe the government didn’t actually hand out $400B in subsidies/tax breaks but instead it’s an artifact of how the researcher for the book chose to classify profits but that you could make an alternative pitch. I’m not well-versed enough in the law to know but it sounded like this person did research vs quoting a summary of the book by its author. Not disagreeing with the rest, but if the other poster was correct it may be worth correcting the record on whether or not we actually did attempt to fund building fiber throughout America.
pompino 3y ago
Personally, I don't find it "mind boggling", but rather in-line with reality. Large mega-projects usually suffer major delays, massive cost over-runs, complications due to unforeseen events, and are at a high-risk for corruption. It is hard to believe we now have a handle on what it takes to do accurate costing of such large ambitious public infrastructure projects.