When we paid for national broadband access here in the US, it was not for fiber to the home. It was for DSL. Worse, the FCC measured coverage not by service address as it does today, but by census district. The phone companies merely had to assert that they could provide service to an address in the district and the FCC would count the whole district as covered. The districts aren’t very big, so in dense areas that was not a bad estimation. In less dense areas it was just a giant loophole. They could provide service to one house on the edge of the district and not bother with the hundreds of homes miles away out in the countryside. Officially we got exactly what we paid for.

As you say we could still nationalize these fiber networks and stitch them together into a real national network. Of course they don’t all use exactly the same technology, and it would be a huge political fight, but in principle I could see a government agency gradually buying networks from the ISPs and integrating them. Of course you know that if Trump proposes it then the Democrats will immediately oppose it on the general principle that Trump proposed it.

And that competition is definitely a good thing. Xfinity’s offering was far worse before they had competition because there was no incentive to offer anything better. They’ve even introduced a new idea to the market in order to win people back away from fiber: guaranteed fixed prices for five years. No surprises when promotional rates expire, no price increases, no shenanigans at all for five whole years. That alone is a breath of fresh air compared to their own business practices of just a year or two ago. Ziply had to respond by lowering their prices and ending promotional rates because they were losing customers. You know the old saying: as iron sharpens iron, so too does man sharpen man.

It would be better, of course, if the government were not mismanaging things. Switzerland’s solution is the better way to go than what we have today. Their government paid to build a nation–wide fiber network, and any ISP can service any customer on that network. That allows ISPs to compete on price and features without worrying about having to build their own competing and overlapping network. This is already how electric service works in many states, so it’s not even like we can’t make it work.

The good news is that modern fiber systems blow cable internet out of the water. It is far cheaper to supply symmetric gigabit internet to every customer over fiber than over cable. Fiber just has more bandwidth to go around. And because it’s a different technology it is not subject to the same local monopolies that cable is encumbered with. This means that the free market is correcting the problem and has been for a decade. In many parts of the country it is now possible to get internet that is faster and cheaper than what is available in the even the best built parts of Europe. The main obstacle to that build–out is probably local permitting. Many large cities require new permits, with public comment periods for each and every one of them, for every single block that an ISP lays fiber for. Cities like San Francisco have imposed a glacial pace on their ISPs.

And the many and varied opinions of the Canadian people don’t seem to matter very much either, since the Canadian provincial governments impose tarrifs on imports from the other Canadian provinces all the time. Sauce for the goose and all that.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49381517

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And most of them were never refugees. They were economic migrants who were already in the country illegally when Haiti had an earthquake.

If they were told that TPS protected them from deportation then they were lied to. All TPS does is pause enforcement. Once it ends their immigration cases are not paused any more. Their cases simply proceed from wherever they left off. Most illegal immigrants apply for asylum when they get caught but don’t actually qualify for it, so they’ll be deported. This isn’t racist, it’s just the reality of how our immigration laws work.

Alternatively just bind it to whatever key you prefer by editing your `~/.inputrc`. Add a line like this to it:

    "\C-e": edit-and-execute-command

Also, don’t forget that lots of other things use readline too. You can use the same key bindings in many interactive environments, such as your favorite programming language’s REPL, your SQL prompt, calculators like bc or units, your favorite debugger, etc. If you come across a command environment that doesn’t use readline directly you can run it with rlwrap to remedy that. The more you use them the more places you will find where they are useful, and the more utility you will get out of them.