> After the expansion completes, old blocks remain with their old data-to-parity ratio (e.g. 5-wide RAIDZ2, has 3 data to 2 parity), but distributed among the larger set of disks. New blocks will be written with the new data-to-parity
Sure, but you can't just classify everything as a business expense.
And regardless, that's not really a carve out for the wealthy, that's just a policy we have because we think it encourages business growth, which is generally a good thing.
> Sure, but you can't just classify everything as a business expense.
If the business is buying it, then sure you can. There's limits on this for sole proprietors as the tax authorities will argue that the businessman who bought a yacht "for the business" only ever uses it for himself.
But the rich folk, who have 20% of the company (the largest share, usually), can force the company to buy a yacht where use is limited to that single shareholder ... once again proving that the rich would pay less tax than the poor.
Depends on how you structure it. It also depends on how much in assets you have (many people start with a heloc). As if the market takes a dip or long term low inflation you can end up stuck. You also have to be careful not to overleverage yourself. As you can end up borrowing to pay back another loan. It is why you see 'rich movie stare declarers bankruptcy'. It is not risk free. But with discipline you can do it. Also remember you can 'own' more than one company. Perhaps one company owns 5 houses which one of those you happen to live in...
Find yourself an accountant. They will show you how to set it up. It is also usually decently complex enough to be a pain to do in the day to day running of it (hence the accountant).
Also up above I said 'long term low inflation' can hurt? Look at what is going on and you can figure out why suddenly we have lots of it. Think about borrowing at 2-3% and inflation is 5%.
That's covered under the "standard deduction" in US federal taxes. I'm not saying it's fair--that deduction doesn't really cover rent in most places--but that's the intent. Basically, you can't use the same system because the tax code is rigged in favor of the wealthy.
I live in South Africa. Myself and all my friends are sitting on around 100 Mbps up/down uncapped unshaped, no fair use policy each at around $100 USD monthly. A few of my friends are on Gigabit down, 200 up.
How is America behind on this? Everything is hosted there and cached there. Is it big business lobbying politicians to prevent them from having to compete? In South Africa we have dozens on ISPs and as an economy we're probably not far off from one US state. The competition has been great for consumers.
USA built out its internet infrastructure earlier than most of the developing nations, who now, almost universally, have better connectivity.
That caused two things:
1. Coming later to the game, you don’t need to deal with legacy infra, that’s there, costed huge amount of money, and replacing it will cost even more (like cable connections to the houses)
2. USA has a general approach of building out infra in sprints, and then neglecting it until next sprint. Few examples - credit cards and their security, roads, space program, internet infra. And while it’s more complicated, politics are large reason for it. It’s much less catchy to say “I’ll spend $500B to maintain X”, then “I’ll spend $1000B to build Y”.
While the sentiment is generally understood, you should really mention that the type B didn't fix the main issue of Type A, in that it didn't recess the face and/or extend the prongs with a protective sleeve.
There is no single situation in "America" with respect to broadband. We're a federation of 50 different states that's almost the size of the entire EU. Broadband is mainly a state level issue and it varies by state. Here in Maryland, over 60% of people have access to fiber. I have two different fiber providers to my house, more than an hour outside a major city. Symmetrical gigabit here is under $80.
It doesn’t matter how shitty the deal is because exclusivity arrangements are illegal. But that doesn’t mean anyone actually wants to serve an area.
Baltimore has a non-exclusive arrangement with Comcast. But, as of 2016 when they were trying to get Google Fiber, literally no company had ever asked to come in and compete. It’s not worth it. Baltimore requires wiring up the whole city. A third of the city lives at or under the poverty line—it simply makes no business sense to build a fiber network that covers all of Baltimore.
That’s the basic constraint. Municipal politics makes it impossible to build a network just in the neighborhoods where people would sign up. There is a reason Google Fiber took its “fiber hoods” approach to cities in red states like Missouri and Kansas. At the same time, it makes no business sense for providers to foot the bill to wire up those poor areas, and the municipality doesn’t want to spend the money to do it.
> At the same time, it makes no business sense for providers to foot the bill to wire up those poor areas, and the municipality doesn’t want to spend the money to do it.
On the other hand, college neighborhoods are largely not wealthy and was one of the first places in my city to get fiber. I think it's because they tend to have a much higher density (e.g. a 2 story house likely houses 2 households) and I would guess are more likely to pay for faster and/or more stable internet.
Based on how telcos have been acting, I think they just wish everyone would pay $100 for 512k down and 64k up forever, while they get and keep government subsidies for broadband initiatives that never get rolled out.
I'm not even in a big city, just a solidly middle class red exurban county that makes it cheap to build infrastructure. We didn't even have public sewer and water in my neighborhood until 2015.
Living in a downtown area is pretty much guaranteed 1gbps fiber, outside of that is almost certainly garbage (cable/dsl/satellite) unless your neighborhood was built recently.
My congressional district has a Comcast call center located in it. So my representative bends over backwards to support Comcast because they 'provide so many jobs' in the area. It's pitiful.
No, it really means "they provide jobs." I encountered this dealing with environmental issues (on the public interest side). Exelon (the power company) doesn't need to donate money to candidates (which is illegal anyway). Having a big source of jobs in a particular district is plenty of leverage.
> doesn't need to donate money to candidates (which is illegal anyway)
While it is true that the direct donation of money is illegal, the running of political ads for or against a candidate is legal in the US, no matter how much is spent. I don't see any moral difference between "I will give you $100k to stop this regulation." and "If you stop this regulation, I will donate $100k to a PAC that supports your reelection." Both are, in my opinion, complete bribery and abuse of an office, but the latter is completely legal.
Yup. A bit offtopic, but these kinds of legislative plays are why something like the military-industrial complex is so hard to break.
Yeah, it'd be great to shut down that UTC plant that subsists entirely on defense contracts, but it's been in the community for 50 years and provides thousands of jobs. Good luck running for that district on a platform of wanting to kill local jobs.
They are political monopolies, not geographic. Congress created a telephony and cable video regulatory regime based on monopolies to subsidize the buildout of those technologies. Congress has only halfheartedly moved away from this system because cable and telecom are the largest political donor groups. Some states have made progress moving to more competitive models but for the most part the system is a rats nest of federal, state, and local regulations designed to block competition.
This is an area where the cynical conventional wisdom just doesn't hold up to actual facts. Congress made it illegal for localities to grant monopolies back in 1992. Many municipalities are trying to get more competition, not block it. But they insist on imposing public interest obligations that make it unfeasible to build competing systems.
> “We’ve, in fact, asked other cable operators if they’re interested in coming into the city and, so far, nobody else is,” says Minda Goldberg, a chief solicitor in the city’s Law Department.
> She was explaining things to Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke during a hearing on Sept. 22 on the renewal of Comcast’s 12-year-old franchise agreement. Clarke had asked if the agreement was an exclusive one with Comcast.
> Franchise agreements between a local government and cable operator are non-exclusive. That means anyone with the money can operate in Baltimore. And under federal regulations, the agreements apply only to cable television service.
The reason Comcast is a monopoly in Baltimore isn't "political donations." It's because the city insists that any competitor must build out to the whole city--which means running fiber to vast swaths of the city where people are too poor to pay what it would cost to recoup the investment. That, in turn, would force the company to recoup that investment from paying customers, which would drive up prices compared to the cable that's already in the ground.
> which means running fiber to vast swaths of the city where people are too poor
Imagine the sad state of affairs if they didn't have government programs for these same problems with electricity and phone lines in the 30's through the 60's. Not just in relatively dense city areas, but even rural areas.
There were plenty of things wrong with Ma Bell, but having short-term profit rule all else is just one more systemic issue that keeps poor areas poor.
Sadly, I doubt this will ever get better; the system is too entrenched, and can protect it's interests better than any other human system in the past, making it nigh-impossible to topple.
Reminiscing back to electrification in the 1930s overlooks a larger problem: cost disease. The US couldn’t afford to build any of the infrastructure we built back then. NYC can barely afford maintain its subway. Just extending the existing 120-mile long network by less than 10% will take longer than it took to build the whole to work in the first place.
People perceive it as a political problem, and in a sense it is, but they’re viewing it too narrowly. The US has enormous trouble building all sorts of infrastructure that other developed countries build relatively cheaply.
I would argue that in itself is also a political problem. Either you play with monopolies that drag things out and milk you for all your worth, or you play with local municipalities that have a byzantine rule set and politicians who love lobster dinners, or deal with a federal government that is influenced by the individuals and companies who want their pound of flesh, or...
And even without corruption, in a fair world: you have to not damage property, have safe practices, and pay your workers well. While I'm in favor, doing any of that balloons costs.
The solution - to have an efficient, fair, non-corrupt system - is simply not possible today, and likely never will be. Unless you are already a monopoly that can do whatever you please and abuse whoever you want, building infrastructure will forever be very expensive.
>This is an area where the cynical conventional wisdom just doesn't hold up to actual facts. Congress made it illegal for localities to grant monopolies back in 1992.
Apparently, it did not stop states from granting monopolies:
> Congress has only halfheartedly moved away from this system because cable and telecom are the largest political donor groups
The benefit telcos provide Congress are in letting them target employment and benefits. There are few other industries where a Congressperson can reliably create X jobs and headline benefits for their district, specifically and tangibly. That, much more than campaign contributions, explains their clout.
(People tend to vastly over-estimate the value of campaign contributions. They're lifeblood to challengers. But for incumbents, they largely have value in not going to challengers than as a direct benefit.)
What employment? It takes the same number of people to operate wired infrastructure regardless of who owns it. No cable company or telco company has moved jobs or retained jobs in an area as a bargaining chip.
Building out new capacity as well as upgrading and maintaining existing capacity involves hiring and buying locally. By practical requirement. Often, too, by contractual obligation.
The incumbents are not building out new capacity or upgrading, which is why the whole conversation is happening. They're going to maintain regardless of what the politician does.
> The incumbents are not building out new capacity or upgrading, which is why the whole conversation is happening.
Your assertion is false. https://www.vox.com/2018/12/12/18134899/internet-broafband-f... ("Finally some good news: The internet is getting faster, especially fixed broadband internet. Broadband download speeds in the U.S. rose 35.8 percent and upload speeds are up 22 percent from last year, according to internet speed-test company Ookla in its latest U.S. broadband report... As of October, the U.S. ranked seventh in the world in broadband.").
> incumbents are not building out new capacity or upgrading, which is why the whole conversation is happening
Look up your local telco monopoly and look at the number of field offices, warehouses, et cetera they have. It's substantial. That's because telecom is tough. It's also because it wins contracts.
Electrical, telephone, and cable tv wiring actually have a huge first mover advantage.
Whoever wired the thing first gets most of the customers and can pay for the build out. If you overbuild a roughly equivalent network, you're unlikely to get a lot of customers and you're unlikely to be able to pay for your buildout.
It doesn't matter if you have an exclusive franchise agreement once your network is built; the business realities provide exclusivity.
> Is it big business lobbying politicians to prevent them from having to compete?
Correct. The politicians that US citizens habitually elect are in the pocket of telecom companies. These politicians have not elevated Internet service in the US to the level of, for example, telephone service which, as a result of government policy established by now long dead politicians, is available almost anywhere someone would care to live in the US. This allows telecom companies to cherry pick lucrative areas for Internet service and ignore everything else. The result is that both rural and poor urban areas have poor or no Internet service while suburbs and dense metropolitan areas have high performance network services.
One might assume that US citizens are fabulously stupid for continuing to elect such politicians. That's the easy answer, frequently offered, and like most easy answers it misses a great deal. There are political undercurrents in the US that create the alignments of power that explain our outcomes. Unfortunately it isn't possible to candidly discuss these currents in forums such as this without igniting flame wars, so I'll end here.
We don't invest in the future, only immediate profits. Look at any other infrastructure....subways, roads, water, electrical, government systems, education, recycling, etc. They're all crumbling.
Subways, roads, water, electrical, government systems, education, and recycling are generally government run. "Immediate profits" isn't the excuse, because that isn't part of the equation. It's the fundamental inefficiency of government.
If your description was accurate, Ford would still be trying to sell their Model T rather than continuously investing in the future at a cost of today's profit. Obviously, this hasn't happened.
They're "government run" in the sense that the government hires out contractors and there's horrible oversight and incentive to create conditions where you receive more work.
For example, with education we keep expanding funding for private schools (for profit) over public schools. With subways in NYC we give out absurd amounts of cash to MTA to run it and just hope they're being honest, but costs keep increasing and there's very little to be shown for it. With government systems we could invest in great infrastructure, but why invest in a long term solution that decreases maintenance when you can be charged ridiculous amounts by the only contractor that knows the frankenstein codebase that they purposely developed to be unmanageable.
I am an American with symmetric gigabit service (actually ~900mbps down, ~880 mbps up) with no caps and I pay less than $100/month. Of course, that is because I live in a huge urban area where ISPs actually compete with each other and do not have any local monopolies on service. The problem in America is that there are vast geographic areas where millions of people have no real choice in broadband service, and ISPs let their networks languish in those areas.
Funny that the rich only ever have rich friends. Who can really afford $1200/a for ..., well, what exactly? One can make the case today, that access to the Internet is essential (although I'm not quite convinced that this needs to be from home. An account at school or a public library would suffice methinks), but broadband? with bitrates even exceeding those needed for high definition video streams? C'mon.
I am also in the US and my connection is 10x faster than yours and 30% cheaper.
Half of the senators listed in this article represent states with population densities lower than any South African province other than Northern Cape. Colorado's density is 19.9/km2. Maine is 16.9/km2
Many of the servers which you connect to in the US are in the Northeast megalopolis, which is an area with a density of 359.6/km2
Yeah I wonder if in the future we won't see this as a terrible crime (pushing the next dopamine hit to a bunch of addicts) or if humanity needs to evolve to gain much much more self control.
Do you plan on having s Kubernetes storage provider? I like the idea of present a POSIX like mount to s container while paying per use for storage in S3
The hostPath provisioner has just RWO access mode, which means only single node. For RWX (read-write in multi-node), Goofys could be used via CSI though.
It's also relavant because there is a huge debate in defence community right now.
On the one hand you have many saying that the aircraft carrier might go the way if the battleship - more and more redundant in a world with landbase anti ship missile systems.
On the other hand there are some saying that ships will envolve to meet the threat.
There isn't a one-size-fits-all replacement, though there are a couple of ideas. The USMC has their expeditionary advanced bases concept which is certainly an option. The idea is to leverage the fact that the F-35B can take off and land on improvised runways, like a parking lot or a flat grassy strip somewhere. You have a flight of F-35Bs and maintain 3-4 of these improvised bases, each meant to only support a couple planes. And every few days you pack up one of these bases and move them to another spot. Since you're always moving your opponent has to continuously search for these bases, and even if they find one and destroy it, they've only destroyed some supplies and maybe 1 or 2 planes that happened to be on the ground at that base at the time. And locating these bases will be difficult since they will be small, and there's a continuous CAP looking to shoot down surveillance aircraft, as well as SAM batteries. The big question is if they will be able to transport enough fuel, munitions, and spare parts to these bases to support them, and if the F-35Bs will be reliable enough. It also requires that you have friendly territory, or at least secured territory, to operate from. In the case of a Sino-American war, I believe the idea is to use islands in the Philippines, or Japan. This has some info on how it could work: https://warontherocks.com/2019/12/expeditionary-advanced-mar...
That isn't really a replacement for a carrier, though, more of a supplement.
Along that same line of thought; What do you think about developing fighter sea planes and then have two or three fighters and a support boat at whole bunch of different/changing sea locations?
Another idea. For the expense of a carrier could we just keep planes in the air? Especially if they’re drones and don’t have to take care of pilots.
Actually read an article recently about the sea planes idea: https://warontherocks.com/2020/07/bring-back-the-seaplane/ . It's an interesting idea, but something where there will need to be a lot of research before it is viable. It's unclear if you can create a decent modern fighter that is also a sea plane. However, if you could, using those with a seaplane tender would be much easier from a logistics standpoint than the EAB. Even if you can't make a decent fighter seaplane, having a seaplane tanker would be very helpful for extending the range of the carrier air wing, as mentioned in the link.
For the drones, it's complicated. Airborne refueling has been a thing for decades, but off the top of my head there's never been airborne re-arming. But even if you had that you would still need to land for maintenance. But still you could probably keep these drones in the air for multiple days, maybe even a week at a time. But the logistics of managing so many tankers gets complicated fast. Check out the Black Buck raids for an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Black_Buck . And that's just for a bombing raid, if you want to maintain a combat air patrol you'll need even more tankers running continuously, and a bunch more fighters since for every one on station there will be multiples coming to/from a base or a tanker. I think long-range drones will definitely be a part of future warfare, but I think you still want a carrier to base them. I think all you need to do is move the carrier further away from anti-ship missile platforms, and increase the striking range of the air wing to compensate. There's a very lengthy write up on this if you are interested: https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/CVW_Report_Web_1.pd...
My first cluster was Raspis and ODroids. The two issues I had - not everything runs on Arm (yet) and memory constraints were tough to work with.
My second cluster - 4 Atomic Pis. The (Intel Atom) quad cores were fine but the 2GB of memory was a real problem when I started playing with more interesting workloads.
The current "production" home cluster is 4 old laptops. They're earlier gen i7s and I've dropped 16GB of memory and 1TB spinning disks in each one. I've never been happier with a cluster. I've been free to spin whatever I want up and it just works. Using RKE to setup Kubernetes takes about 5 minutes to build a cluster and I'm using Longhorn for replicated container native storage. I've run experiments for work and my own experience. Whether its Redis / Cassandra cluster or a Kubernetes Operator I wrote, it can always handle it.
This sounds like a neat setup - i used to run a set of 3 old compuets, a Nuc, and old laptops. But they were quite low spec, so i sold them and bought a small htpc instead, quadcore, with 16 gigs of ram and 512Gb nvme.
Also using RKE, it looks like the best cluster 'distro' around.
I used longhorn but found it a little slow, putting it on SSD was a bit of a waste. I tried ceph, it was much faster but i just do not understand how it works, etc. Well enoguh to fix anything if the cluster goes wrong.
> After the expansion completes, old blocks remain with their old data-to-parity ratio (e.g. 5-wide RAIDZ2, has 3 data to 2 parity), but distributed among the larger set of disks. New blocks will be written with the new data-to-parity