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All the same "profit" arguments you're making against Telco's hold equally well against Starbucks or Home Depot or anyone else for that matter. Bad, risky inves

by codexb 2y ago

All the same "profit" arguments you're making against Telco's hold equally well against Starbucks or Home Depot or anyone else for that matter. Bad, risky investments are bad and risky no matter how much you try to subsidize them. I agree that throwing tax money at corporations without clear deliverables is bad policy. It's also bad policy to waste taxpayer dollars building bridges to nowhere, which is precisely what broadband access in the middle of nowhere is. Access to infrastructure makes places more desirable to live. It increases property values, which in turn encourage more development. I get it. I understand why local governments throw incentives to telcos to artificially make their cities more attractive and lucrative for business. It's not just telcos. We do it for sports stadiums, factories, movie productions. By and large, these policies end up being wealth transfers from the poor and middle class to wealthy people.

dcow 2y ago
I get what you’re saying. I think you’re over simplifying. Building a bridge to a town of 10,000 is hardly nowhere. What you’re saying sounds like we should all just live in cheap concrete studio apartment complexes in one big city where we can hyper optimize human existence and squeeze maximal profit out of society… A bridge to a town of 10k can be quite profitable. Maybe not as much as a bridge to a town of 10 million, but my point is that because these companies are so big they shy away from projects with smaller rewards. Small locally owned mom and pop ISP would step in and fill the gap, but big telco has the monopoly on infra and won’t do the build out. Nobody is running negative and the line still doesn’t get deployed.
- codexb 2y ago
  I think people should choose to risk and invest money and projects as they see fit. There are plenty of smaller and less densely populated towns with fiber broadband. > A bridge to a town of 10k can be quite profitable If it was, someone would do it. That's the beautiful thing about capitalism.
  - dcow 2y ago
    You don’t seem to be understanding the nuance that public infrastructure is not a free market. We can opine about living in a libertarian paradise, but we don’t.

by codexb 2y ago

dcow 2y ago

I get what you’re saying. I think you’re over simplifying. Building a bridge to a town of 10,000 is hardly nowhere. What you’re saying sounds like we should all just live in cheap concrete studio apartment complexes in one big city where we can hyper optimize human existence and squeeze maximal profit out of society… A bridge to a town of 10k can be quite profitable. Maybe not as much as a bridge to a town of 10 million, but my point is that because these companies are so big they shy away from projects with smaller rewards. Small locally owned mom and pop ISP would step in and fill the gap, but big telco has the monopoly on infra and won’t do the build out. Nobody is running negative and the line still doesn’t get deployed.

codexb 2y ago
I think people should choose to risk and invest money and projects as they see fit. There are plenty of smaller and less densely populated towns with fiber broadband. > A bridge to a town of 10k can be quite profitable If it was, someone would do it. That's the beautiful thing about capitalism.
- dcow 2y ago
  You don’t seem to be understanding the nuance that public infrastructure is not a free market. We can opine about living in a libertarian paradise, but we don’t.