Internet in NZ used to work a bit like the US does now with one large ISP that is also the network operator and gave exactly zero shits about quality of connections or internationally competitive pricing, except they got greedy and charged their retail arm half what they charged their competitors. Anti-monopoly folks got very pissy about this and managed to get the largest fine permitted by law, forced them to split their wholesale arm off into a separate company, banned them from tendering on the government-funded fibre network (which cost them literally billions of dollars) and then changed the law so that if they did it again there wouldn’t be a cap on the penalty they could impose.

In 20 years we went from ~35th of the 38 OECD countries in internet speed and accessibility to 9th. Markets only work long-term if you actually regulate them

Yeah, pretty much. The way the rest of the world deals with it is by splitting the infrastructure maintenance and retail sides to eliminate the profit incentive to not do maintenance.

You have a company who owns a/the fibre network in an area and is obligated by anti-monopoly rules to sell access to the network at the same rate and terms to anyone who wants it. They have a profit incentive to maintain the network to a reasonable standard because having a functioning network is how they make money. In a lot of places this wholesale provider will be at least part government owned given that the government usually pays a good chunk of the cost to build out large national infrastructure projects like fibre networks.

Separately, you have retail ISPs who buy access to the fibre network (or 4g, satellite, …) and sell it to the public along with value adds like tech support, IP addresses, peering agreement etc.

It’s never work in the US because holding private companies accountable for how they spend public money and maintaining well regulated competitive markets is communism or something.

Not in the US; in NZ most houses will have a “wash tub” - essentially a sink in a metal cabinet specifically for doing “dirty” jobs like laundry. That will have water hookups for the washer, so that goes next to it where there is space, then the dryer will do next to that or on top of the washer.

The last few places I’ve lived in have all had the tub in a corner with space on its left, so it’s been dryer, washer, tub. Annoying, my dryer door opens to the right and the washer to the left, so it’s harder than it should be to move clothes between them

“Doctor” is a title you become entitled to use by virtue of holding a PhD - you have the option to use it, but nothing compels you to do so if you don’t want to.

Note that the reverse isn’t true - representing yourself as holding a doctorate when you don’t can be a fairly serious crime - if you did for the purposes of getting money from some, then it’s probably some kind of fraud

• Back up your data now
• Reseat the cables for the drive
• Run a self test on the drive - smartctl -t long - if it doesn’t pass, then the drive is trash. If it does, then it might limp along a bit longer before catastrophically failing

It’s not the issuance that’s the headache, it’s the installation. There are more things that need valid certs than just webservers

Unless you’ve got an absolutely stellar CV, I don’t see you getting a chance to explain that

Poor kid

I want to see the high-octane action thriller where the grizzled old hand and the renegade upstart trek to the remote compound in the woods of Montana to find Bob, the last man alive who understands how some obscure part of the IRSs core systems works and bring him back in from the cold for one last job… to save America(s neglected computer systems from decades of under investment)

I agree with your analysis of the law, but I do get why people are a bit uncomfortable with this. Elon has been a shit human, rocket launches have impacted wildlife and SpaceX and Tesla have been toxic places to work for a long time, but that’s only become a problem recently because he’s been getting more involved in politics? The whole point of having a regulatory state separate from the rest of the government is so they can set and enforce rules fairly and impartially.

But it’s all the government’s fault for having regulations that stop him doing what he wants - he’d be on Mars by now if it wasn’t for the stupid government stopping him from poisoning a protected nature reserve and crashing rockets into people.

Don’t they understand? It’s really important to get people to mars so there is a place for rich assholes to go when the environment on earth is completely trashed beyond repair

“how do you explain this gap in your job/education history here?”

Makes it harder to get a job overseas though I’d hope

Idk, if I was in a position to be hiring people and I saw “served in the IDF 2023/2024” in the job history section of a CV that’d probably count against a person the same as a conviction for rape or murder.

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Strongly agree. The fact that a nazi shithead felt safe enough to out himself in public means that more nazis need to be seeing public consequences for being hate filled oxygen thieves.

Being a nazi should be like being a pedo; you should be living in constant fear that someone is going to find out and that when you eventually get out of prison your friends, family and society at large want nothing to do with you

Transposition error

…

So awhile ago I worked on a system that moved education records between 2 different systems at a university. It kept choking on one particular record; turns out the date of birth was in 1499, and MSSQL won’t store dates from before the start of the Gregorian calendar unless you specifically configure it to do so.

We sent a request through to have the record corrected - clearly someone has just typoed 1949 - and moved on, but maybe…

Misappropriating funds to buy religious texts for a public school while insisting that the text includes the constitution that makes it misappropriation in the first place is some next level bullshit

The only real use case for VPNs is to bypass geo blocking on streaming sites, and the VPN providers know this. They also know that if they lean too hard into that, eventually someone will sue them and their business model will evaporate - so they add the “iT MaKEs yOu mORe SeCurE” nonsense as a fig leaf so they can say with a straight face that they operate a product with legitimate uses