>At $3/coffee (black, nothing fancy) purchased on average four times per week across 4.5 years of school, the total came to roughly $1,700
$3 x 2 people x 365 days = ~$2K
A decent fully automatic Espresso machine is ~$1K. You load the beans once per week, water every day, and run the descaling cycle once every few months. And these things are modular as hell: if you are not intimidated by reading a service manual and know how to get around with a multimeter, you can get replacement parts from specialty shops and maintain them yourself at reasonable cost.
And the best thing is, you don't need to go anywhere. You wake up, crawl to the kitchen, press the button and enjoy the coffee.
Sadly, this is not very practical. A lithium cell in itself is a chemical time bomb: if it gets mechanically damaged or short-circuited, it has enough oomph to burn your device, skin or house. For factory-produced battery packs this effect is mitigated by having protective circuits that monitor charge level, temperature and a bunch of other parameters, cutting off the power if the cell is deemed too dangerous. But once you take a random lithium cell off the street and try to revitalize it, you are opening a can of worms: depending on how it was used, it might be full of dendrites [0], ready to cause a fiery short-circuit a few charges after. It might have structural damage due to gas buildup, or someone literally stepping on it. It could have been under direct sunlight for longer than it should, and so on.
It's fine to tinker around with it for your own experiments, but you don't want to ship it to anybody who's not going to be using it in a fireproof lab wearing eye protection.
A better idea would be to find a way to properly recycle the raw materials (i.e. extract the lithium from a dead cell), but that could be several orders of magnitude more challenging.
> But once you take a random lithium cell off the street and try to revitalize it, you are opening a can of worms: depending on how it was used, it might be full of dendrites [0], ready to cause a fiery short-circuit a few charges after. It might have structural damage due to gas buildup, or someone literally stepping on it. It could have been under direct sunlight for longer than it should, and so on.
Yeah exactly what I was thinking.. I'm sure the cells used in these disposable devices weren't exactly the cream of the crop in manufacturing either. Probably cells that didn't pass QC or something.
It's pretty risky messing around with them like that.
On the contrary, I bet these cells are perfectly good cells (initially, after sitting on the side of the road they should definitely be considered dangerous). Remember that "a completely functional lithium battery pack, sometimes with charging and protection circuitry" is sold pre-charged as a "top up" pack for mobile phones and meant to be thrown away after.
Lithium batteries are absurdly cheap, and it's not too expensive to buy essentially off the shelf, rated capacity and lifetime cells in order to be reasonably sure 99% of your products last for 99% of their rated puffs.
If your disposable vape doesn't produce as much as competitors because you cheaped out on your lithium cell procurement, your competitor will happily scoop up that business as word of mouth spreads.
I find it rather worrying in the long term. Russia has been an extremely inefficient and corrupt state for the past 2 decades. Export oil & gas, import everything else, let the cronies pocket the proceeds, while having most manufacturing, defense and tech exist mostly on paper. People like Rogozin were promoted based on the loyalty and willingness to give a cut of the pie further up the ladder.
Currently this trend appears to be reversing. The country is getting increasingly authoritarian [0], the economy is switching from a highly corrupt trickle-down-oil-money model, to centrally managed industrial economy driven by the war needs.
I don't like where this is going. If Russia is pushed back into its borders, it will take a couple of years to ramp up weapons production and will retry. If it manages to successfully take over Ukraine, it will very likely press forward to attack other ex-USSR states. If China decides to join the party and rally out against Taiwan, we pretty much have a guaranteed WWIII until mutual exhaustion.
Ukraine gets massive support from the club of the richest countries on the Earth, and, unlike Germany or France, the Anglo-Saxon behemoths seem to be committed in full. So is Poland, the necessary logistics hub for supplies. Russia is alone, even Iran refused to sell their drones to them.
The full impact of this economic and military imbalance cannot be seen yet. The Ukrainian army is in midst of switching their entire weaponry from the old Soviet models to the new Western ones. This is a grueling logistical task even in peace, much more so in war. But with each new type of equipment mastered (HIMARS, M-777, Panzerhaubitze 2000, in the future possibly Western tanks and jets), the total capability edge of the UAF over their Russian counterparts grows.
You can already see how the Russian offensive momentum has evaporated. They only managed to take very modest pieces of land over the last month or so, and basically none in July.
HIMARS is a very formidable addition to the arsenal, but in general quantities supplied are extremely modest to really turn the tide. Hopefully the deliveries will step up.
They are enough to f*ck up Russian logistics behind the lines. Without a massive supply of shells from the rear to the guns themselves, the Russian artillery is incapable of executing their beloved "bomb everything into pieces" WWI-style doctrine.
And the Ukrainians have destroyed an untold number of Russian ammo dumps in the last weeks. Some of the explosions have been truly spectacular. This isn't something you can easily remedy. Any new ammo dump in range will be quickly spotted by either American spy satellites or local Ukrainian spies that are probably still active in Donbass - and get blasted to hell.
HIMARS is not enough to reconquer the lost territories, true. But it is enough to give Russians a forced operational pause.
The thing that the west is unwilling to do is give the Ukrainians cruise missiles. The Russians have lots and lots of these in the form of Kalibr and Iskander missiles that they launch from ships and mobile launchers and it seems to be making all the difference.
Think instead of the people who have authority over these weapon systems. How much time they spent training to use those weapons. How important it must feel to them that their weapons are used.
The fact that the intelligence needed to give them valuable targets is a secondary concern. Their main concern is the readiness and cohesion that come from pressing the fire button.
Well west is unwilling to supply modern tanks so Cruise missles look to be def. of the table. Ukraine is even short on basic armored personnel carriers and even regular consumer trucks widely used by military (mostly supplied by volunteers).
This is not really about "willingness". Modern Western tanks are a logistical nightmare, and Ukrainian logistical capabilities to support them are limited. In order not to overextend them, everyone concentrates on doing what is most effective.
In the case of this war at this very moment, it is long range high precision artillery. HIMARS eats rockets like crazy, it needs to be supplied constantly.
Once those supply chains are fully built and safe, they can talk about adding tanks to the mix.
> The Russians have lots and lots of these in the form of Kalibar and Islander missiles that they launch from ships and mobile launchers and it seems to be making all the difference.
Do they still have them or have they used most of them up?
IIRC, for all the attention they get, the US has surprisingly few cruise missiles and would use up its stockpiles pretty quickly in a war like that in Ukraine.
But a lot of those missiles have been stored somewhere in Siberia for 40+ years. Their condition is probably less than stellar. Who would regularly inspect and maintain random ammo dumps located five timezones away from Moscow in the middle of nowhere?
I suspect that at least some of those missiles are outright out of commission and others are unstable enough to be a danger to the Russians themselves.
IDK, but that is hardly relevant to the current situation. We aren't trying to one-up each other in a "who is worse" rhetoric content, but looking at the situation at the Russo-Ukrainian front.
From what I get, Western stuff delivered to the Ukrainians is in working order, while the Russians shells seem to have a fairly high percentage of duds - usually an indicator of a fuse degraded by long and inadequate storage.
And if shells frequently fail, so will other long stored equipment.
> Maybe but those are big assumptions. Does the USA inspect it's missiles in the middle of nowhere?
The US almost certainly does, but the Russians might not. They've been shown to have neglected routine maintenance in ways that caused very critical problems for their military (e.g. they lost a lot of expensive advanced vehicles, because their unmaintained knock-off tires disintegrated).
Both these videos are long, but they had a lot of interesting ideas and insight on this topic:
First, there is no proof of the original claim, other than words of Ukrainian mayor.
Second, this explanation is much more logical than the version with russians firing superexpensive anti air weapons to random ground targets.
Third, there were photos of these missiles, and they belong to older series of rockets. Russia dismissed these old s-300 long ago, but Ukraine have plenty of them.
Very observably not. Russia seems to be actually incapable of buying any modern weapons for the billions of euros it receives from Germany. Even China considers such cooperation too risky.
The technical level of Russian equipment deployed in the battles in Ukraine has gone downhill since February. Now they are pulling really old stuff (designed or even manufactured in the 1950s-1960s) from storage. And some of their auxiliaries from the separatist republics literally use WWI and WWII small arms.
Money matters in war, but it cannot substitute for a missing/inadequate supply chain. You can't bury the enemy in an avalanche of euros, you actually need to procure the necessary equipment.
There is no need in sophisticated weaponry or even artillery when you have endless literal cannon fodder. Hide or deny losses and drag on just enough to exhaust your opponent.
A year of slow territorial gains? Two? More? Not a problem as long as economy is propped by European money, Germans don’t bother sending enough weapons and Western media is tired of war and looks elsewhere.
Russia already had poor demographics before and now it is possibly spending years losing military age males?
Russia as a low prospect J-curve state might not be entertaining to the western media but it is basically the outcome the US has been gunning for since Gorbachev left, always with a lot of resistance from Germany. After a few more years of setting up alternative gas routes, I'm not sure Germany will even have a way to offer Russia yet another chance.
Russia doesn’t have endless cannon fodder. And has had a lot of difficulty sourcing troops. They are fine losing troops but their army isn’t as big as people imagine. And the logistics needed to get people to the front with basic supplies is hard.
Russia is itself the 2nd supplier of weapons on the international market and buying from the 1st (the US) is pretty pointless as whatever the US is selling is incompatible with the Russian systems. Who you envision Russia would need to buy weapons from?
It seems overall Ukraine isnt doing as well as the constant media spin says they are.
TikTok is full of videos show uk guys running from conscription. I know a whole team of developers who fled to Poland early.I think they lost the morale war, and it's just a matter of time until Nato intervenes directly to start Ww3
There’s also plenty of evidence that says that Russia isn’t doing so well, they have 100s of people in some battalions refusing to fight (likely because all their friends turned back up home dead).
There’s tonnes of HIMARS strikes taking out command and control points of Russias behind the front line. The VDV (Russian paratroopers) and it’s leader ship have been decimated by this war.
I don't doubt that some of their guys dodged conscription. In every war, someone does.
But "losing the morale war" would probably manifest itself in localized frontline collapses, and this does not seem to be happening. The recent retreat in Luhansk oblast wasn't a rout, and other sections of the frontline are barely moving.
"UK Goverment fell" - it didn't, only the PM did. Johnson appointed a sexual predator to be the Chief Whip of the Tory faction in the Parliament and it was one mistake too many. It has nothing to do with sanctions against Russia. The government will continue under a new PM.
"Bulgaria Goverment fell" - Bulgaria has had by now four(?) early elections in a row, which predate the war in Ukraine. The Bulgarian political situation is an internal mess.
"Italy's PM resigned" - Italy has had 69 governments since WWII, nothing unusual there.
"Estonia Goverment fell" - Estonia is very anti-Russian in practice. Their next government is likely to be formed by the very same PM.
The EU has some 30 countries. Unlike Russia or odd exceptions like Merkel, their leaders come and go fairly frequently. Even 8 governmental changes in a year wouldn't be particularly strange in a club of 30 democracies.
Thank you. So there is some connection. But I would still claim that in case of Italy, a quick change in government is not an unusual phenomenon. Italian governments come and go so fast that most people outside Italy have trouble remembering the current PM's name.
The UK government fell because Boris was a lying fool to the wrong people. Be careful not to assume that because something big happened it must be the cause of something else.
> If Russia is pushed back into its borders, it will take a couple of years to ramp up weapons production and will retry
Or the current regime will collapse. That often happens with large scale defeats, especially without a democratic outlet for internal change within the system.
> I saw very few regime collapses unless an army steps into the capital. That's not going to happen to Russia (Mutual Assured Destruction.)
The reference to MAD makes sense only in the context of foreign armies (and with the M only those of major nuclear powers), but if you look at the two immediate predecessors of the modern Russian Federation (the USSR and the Russian Empire), both fell without a foreign army entering the capital, and are hardly unique in history in doing so. And to the extent status as a major nuclear power is relevant to that, the USSR had it just as much as the Russian Federation does.
The army of Russia has explicitly been kept underpowered just for that reason and generals get rotated around a lot. A strong army is a threat to Putin. Source : CSIS.
People in Russia can swallow poverty, injustice, corruption no problem. But they cannot swallow war defeat. This tsar is weak, need a better tsar who wins.
Theirs nothing weak about HIMARS and 500 T72 tanks, this myth of weak arm supplies is nothing more then that, a myth.
Ukraine is getting heaps of weapons and decimating Russian logistics and command and control with it. Enough that even the Russian propaganda is complaining about it.
> Judging by weak arms supplies by Europeans who don’t want to anger their gas supplier - Putin is far from defeat.
The subthread was discussing what would happen in the event Russia was forced to abandon the invasion, if you want to object to discussing that possibility as reasonable, the place is several posts upthread.
(Also, Western aid delivered since the major escalation by Russia this year has been several multiples of Ukraine’s annual defense spending and a sizable fraction of Russia’s annual defense spending. It is not “weak” arms supplies by any reasonable standard.)
Historically—not universally, of course, but frequently enough to be noteworthy—people have been observed to be displeased with leadership that unproductively transforms large numbers of their youth into corpses.
Listen to recordings of calls to Russian soldiers’s mothers. The families fully support invasion. They are glued to TV and Telegram which explain that Ukrainians bomb themselves and Russian soldiers are brave liberators fighting against gay Nazi Americans.
Besides that soldiers send a lot of stolen goods back home. There was an infamous video from the office of a transport company with dozens of soldiers sending loot like washing machines.
Most of the country was miserable, malnourished and in poverty for years anyway. It’s not like Putin’s elites care. It’s basically a serfdom. As long as people obey, and Putin’s clique can build palaces, it can go on for decades.
I do. Worst case, we wind up with Russia under China’s thumb. Not ideal. But Pyongyang isn’t rolling tanks over its borders.
Best case: a disassembly of the Russian empire. Why Moscow tells Siberians and Tatars what to do is an anachronism, start to finish. It sort of made sense when the Kremlin had its head screwed on straight. Now, it doesn’t.
We're not there by far. Russia is doing really really bad on the battlefront.
But i do agree it could become dangerous if China gets stupid ideas too.
But, they currently don't have the capacity to strike an amphibious assault + their military seems to be similar to the Russian one.
So yes, it could become worrisome if it happens. But i don't think that China has much to gain with attacking Taiwan from my POV.
Ukraine had found a gas supply in Crimea in 2008, that could replace all Russian gas imports in Europe. That's very different than a chip factory that is set to selfdestruct during an invasion and that needs machines that are literally made by ASML+ Imec ( Europe)
Ps. I was more worried about that part at the start of the war than now.
> But i do agree it could become dangerous if China gets stupid ideas too.
China has been backing Russia and it's anti-Western allies in the region (e.g., Serbia). Mostly, I think, for the value of keeping the West focussed on Russia in Europe to any “stupid ideas” they might try in their region.
> Russia has been an extremely inefficient and corrupt state for the past 2 decades.
not 2 decades. it’s been a corrupt inefficient machine since the bolsheviks. the lying and the corruption persisted throughout the ussr. the whole country and it’s precursor are just lies built one on top of the other and the westerners actually believed most of it.
I feel like a protracted proxy war in Ukraine was never really on the table.
What we've seen so far is the US and its allies forcing Russia to pay a "price" for its adventurism. The value of this is both to act as a deterrent against future actions and to strengthen Ukraine's negotiating power when it ultimately surrenders.
I suspect that at a certain point everybody will be satisfied with the level of pain exacted, Ukraine surrenders, and Russia ends up with at least a large chunk of Ukraine.
Yes Ukrainian people is the bastion and are fighting bravely.
Feels like Europeans (namely Germany and France) will provide as little weapons as possible to exhaust Ukrainians so they get tired and surrender themselves.
Once Ukrainian public is ready, Biden will pressure Zelinsky. Biden has already said “we told him but he didn’t want to listen” hinting that he can throw Zelinsky under the bus if he doesn’t behave.
Surrender (“peace”) would be an awful option for Ukraine because Putin will regroup and in a couple of years launch a new assault on the remaining part of the country.
There won’t be mercy from him, judging by executions on occupied territory.
Poland will continue cooperating with America (who give most of the aid). The current government is anti-Russia and even if they lose elections, the only pro-Russia people are authoritarian right wing nutjobs who probably won't even win a single seat.
Yes Polish people have shown a lot of resilience and deserve great respect in this situation. Batlic states as well of course. Hope they won’t allow Germany sweep Ukraine under the rug.
Not a critically high price anyway. Gas prices cover everything and complicit German politicians don’t consider stopping paying. Looks like Putin’s gamble played well once again, he knows his European counterparts well.
The quality of the political leadership is a direct consequence of what average people want from their leadership.
For the past decade or so the modus operandi has been:
1. Print more money, give it to bureaucrats and corporations
2. Toss in some non-monetary issue that will piss of ~50% of the population, while making the other ~50% feel entitled.
3. Promise one half to serve their interests by punishing the other half.
4. Print more money, give more to bureaucrats and corporations.
5. Rinse and repeat.
It seemed to work for over a decade: people gave up dreams of retirement, property ownership, having children, we were headed straight for normalizing living with parents while eating factory-produced bug proteins. Thankfully, the black-swan COVID-19 happened, the money printer got too cocky and people finally started to notice a problem.
The quality of life will decrease in the short term. But once enough people admit it's a bigger problem than being offended by what somebody on the Internet said, there will be finally demand for competent politicians offering viable solutions.
It's from a press-release that is intended to minimize the fears among investors. So the number likely includes part-time youtube moderators, cafeteria staff, and a lot of other minor jobs with incredibly high churn.
I'd bet the farm you are right. At the same time, I've worked at Google-sized companies (non-FAANG) for about five years now. And in my experience like anything else in corporate politics, the appearance is everything. Many of them will hire developers, PMs, designers, etc as 1099 employees and say "we treat you like everyone else!"
But you are maligned in little ways all the time. You get a desk and a computer like everyone else, but you're not invited to certain meetings. Or maybe you're forced to use only the shitty parking spaces. Worst of all you often don't get health insurance (though sometimes you do, especially if you're in a more white collar role).
I'm off on a tangent here. I've been burned by this system before as I'm sure is obvious now. But the point is, in my experience the same system that hires those people often happily will take advantage of any opportunity to include contractors as "Part of the family!" when it involves no effort beyond appearances for themselves and offers only good optics that may or may not benefit them.
>You don't get anything "for free", and cutting supports like this will inevitably doom a sputtering economy, when the actual solution was almost certainly more government spending, not less.
Government spending isn't free magic money either. You increase the amount of money in circulation, hoping that people will produce more goods. Instead, you increase the size of the bullshit economy - low-effort activities that only exist under the abundance of money. So more and more stuff gets imported from China because nobody in the right mind will take a $1/hour factory job if you can be a wellness youtuber for a multiple of that. The amount of useless bureaucracy grows, the number of people willing to take responsibility dwindles, but everyone is happy because, well, Mother Government takes care of us all.
Occasionally you notice that the wages don't grow and the housing is unaffordable because the workers don't really have any leverage anymore, but you brush off those thoughts because there are far too many distractions anyway.
Then BOOM, that fragile supply line involving slave labor in China and natural resources from Putin's friends gets broken, and suddenly, we have a shortage of everything, can't manufacture our own stuff, and that freshly minted dollar can buy you many shitcoins, but won't get you any baby formula.
I think, we are about to find out that excessive spending was nothing more than borrowing from our future prosperity, and the time for that debt to mature is coming fast.
May I humbly ask for an example? In my personal experience, trying to rush a short-term solution while ignoring the long-term implications always makes situation worse. Like eating planting stock to address immediate hunger would cause a devastating famine next season.
Japan, Taiwan and South Korea all taxed the crap out of their people while poor to subsidise industry by controlling foreign exchange. It still would have been impossible without massive amounts of foreign investment. They had to borrow the money abroad to invest in industrial infrastructure. Same for the US in the 1800s. Britain had the capital. The US had the exciting investment opportunities.
The UK took so long to get to the Industrial Revolution because it had to save the money itself. Everyone since then has been able to rely on capital other people in order countries have saved to jumpstart their economic growth.
Yes. But his point is that what we have been doing is more like taking on credit card debt to spend on booze than taking a bank loan to buy machinery. And assuming that being the case, your statement completely misses the mark.
Let’s say you have land but don’t have any planting stock or enough money to buy it. So, you borrow some from a guy who has extra, promising to give him twice as much back next year. You grow food, and collect enough planting stock to pay back the lender and plant next year’s harvest.
And example of "borrowing against the future to kickstart today"? Pretty much all businesses borrow to grow. All governments borrow, especially in times of need. Pretty much all people borrow to buy a home.
Like it or not, the mainstream liberal arts education has devolved into a religion of its own. For instance, we treat climate change not as an engineering problem worth solving (how many "climate studies" prepare actual engineers for building nuclear power plants?), but as a source of irreparable guilt used to push back on ambition and launch personal attacks on people that do not agree with this viewpoint. This is textbook original sin straight from the medieval times. There are many other examples. Trying to call it out publicly very quickly gets you labeled with one of the modern-days equivalents of a heretic, and anyone trying to defend you will be considered a heretic by association.
There are many, many people who are not happy with the status quo, and they are looking for others who share their opinion. And since the media and the social networks are actively working on deciding who's opinion gets amplified, and who gets memory-holed, the people disagreeing with the mainstream agenda will have no choice but to join existing opposing organizations and adopt some of their views, even if they don't fully agree with them.
That's polarization of the society happening in front of our eyes.
There is no shortage of engineers for nuclear plants. However, it is engineering, physics, programming or other specialization. And it requires exactly that specialization.
Climate change is something else and there is zero reason for itself to try to overtake actual quality engineering, physics etc programs that existed for years.
> the people disagreeing with the mainstream agenda will have no choice but to join existing opposing organizations and adopt some of their views, even if they don't fully agree with them
This confuses me a bit. For convenience, can we refer to the "mainstream" climate-change-as-religion group as M, the dissenters as D, and the opposition as O.
If we're taking the single issue of how climate change is presented, why would D go and side with O despite not fully agreeing with them, instead of M who they don't fully agree with?
Concretely, it seems to me that O are likely to not prioritise climate change in any way. Are D willing to give up climate change action for other principles? Why should D not join M and push for change, or be the faction that is more welcoming of other "heretics"?
I've been thinking of this and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality in recent months.
He describes how Christian + Jewish morality came about, and what might happen as religion fades away. I think you're hitting the nail on the head. Same same but different.
> For instance, we treat climate change not as an engineering problem worth solving (how many "climate studies" prepare actual engineers for building nuclear power plants?), but as a source of irreparable guilt used to push back on ambition and launch personal attacks on people that do not agree with this viewpoint.
But climate change is largely a social problem at this stage, not a technical problem. We can't even begin to solve the technical issues surrounding it until we get stakeholders on board with the plan to solve it. That isn't possible because people deny that it exists and/or actively fund denial in others.
The utterly inefficient and overpriced Canadian telecoms exist only because we allow one specific behavior:
1. A new local player comes to town, builds their own infrastructure (e.g. connects one building to fiber) and starts offering competitive service.
2. Rogers/Shaw/Bell/Telus immediately offer better terms for the residents of that building.
3. The competitor runs out of money and leaves.
4. The telecoms revert to their usual pricing.
This hurts competition, this hurts customers, this hurts long-term infrastructure resilience, but not a single politician ever comes close to even admitting the problem. I understand you cannot do it on the federal level where both major parties are on the telecoms' payroll, but it could be a very low-hanging fruit for someone running for a municipal position to address. But nope, identity politics, words, feelings and fighting climate change with paper straws seem to be what the electorate wants instead. Sad.
> 2. Rogers/Shaw/Bell/Telus immediately offer better terms for the residents of that building.
I was about to write a whole comment about how I've never seen this myself and to disagree with you I was going to compare the price of Bell Fibre in my building to Beanfield. The latter of which I have at $50/mo at 1Gbps.
But then I loaded up Bell's availability page and entered my address... it was almost like a sick joke. The spinner was saying "Checking availability" or something like that. However, I could see the page with prices behind it darkened out while it was running. It was $115/mo for 2 years and $125/mo after that for 1Gbps fibre. But when the spinner was done and they "checked my availability"... well what do ya know! It's now magically $50/mo. Pretty disgusting that they can get away with that.
Man those prices, Ill use other currencies to be more precise, but in Paris, the 1Gbps was 30 euros and now that I live in Hong Kong it's 250 HKD. Canadian prices could be explained by the increasing cost with lower density, but damn, high speed dedicated fiber is still a luxury in some place, we forget, us dense cities' people.
Competition is not the only thing, in France we have 4 highly regulated fiber providers who must compete or pay fines, but in HK it's way more shady and we choose building and flats to get the best ones (cable is shit, former public telco is expensive, new kid is fast and cheap). It's still nowhere near your prices: a shit cable is 98HKD and an expensive HK Telecom is 500...
The density argument is utter BS. A vast majority of the population is concentrated in 5 very dense cities, and no one is asking the incumbents to provide FTTH to every house in Nunavut.
It’s cartel behavior at its best. The Canadian telecom landscape is a sick joke.
The rural argument also never made sense because why not just start a nationalized ISP or subsidy that purely serves the rural north? Why sarcrifice the competitiveness of whole countries ISP market for a very small part of the country?
The same argument is used for keeping the postal service public when you could just subsidize the parts of the market that wouldn’t be self-sustaining rather than propping up the entire money-losing crown business. Burning tax dollars at the parcel delivery business in the age of e-commerce is a sad joke.
The whole “rural people are being protected” seems like a cover story for powerful friends of politicians to keep the money train rolling, and regular people eat it up on social media.
Plus Starlink et al has rendered the rural argument moot.
Well in downtown Budapest 1Gbps is like 5 euros a month.
There's no wonder why so many people become developers in Eastern Europe. Cheap and fast connectivity is key. The sooner western leadership realizes this the better.
That's still pretty good. In Austria that's 80 euros since telecoms here have the same government protected cartel as in Canada. And it's not even available in every building of the city, but you need to check before you move whether you have fiber or not in the building.
Similar in Germany.
One of the things I miss from Eastern Europe is the fast and cheap internet that's available in any building in the city.
I use 1Gbps symmetric Bell fiber small business package which includes static IP. Pay $129/month and generally happy. Static IP is important as I host some stuff right in my basement. You got me curious with this Beanfield. It is indeed $50 for 1Gbps symmetric (no static IP of course) but when I looked at their business package it is $300 for the same speed. Static IP is extra. I wonder what does such a big difference include.
You can use a Dynamic DNS service and a dynamic (residential) IP, unless downgrading to a dynamic IP incurs severe tradeoffs like CGNAT and/or blocking port 25.
"markup" is one way to price things, but not necessarily the best way.
A better way, and likely the thing in play here, is to price according to a mix of value provided, and the ability of the market to pay.
If you are spread enough this will result in some markets paying effectively a large markup, and done a much smaller markup, and some, potentially, less than cost.
The reason the package costs $300 is because that is what the market will bear, and the utility to the customer exceeds the value of that cash.
Incidentally that value may also be in support etc.
In summary, markup is one of the least effective pricing methodologies, and invariably leaves a lot of money on the table.
Is this not just competition working the way it's supposed to?
ie, another player shows up in the market, offers a more attractive price and forces the other players to reduce their prices or shed customers.
It's not like Bell, in this case, were offering 1Gbps for something absurdly below cost, like $1/mo or something just to drive the new comer out of business.
Matching and lowering prices is good for everyone. The new player running out of money and going out of business is really just a lack of foresight and planning on their part. It's pretty absurd to not expect the incumbents to reduce pricing when they are directly completed against.
I think the current answers to your questions are fairly inadequate - so I'm going to give you a more nuanced answer.
> Is this not just competition working the way it's supposed to?
Yes. This is competition working exactly as you would expect it to in a free market: One company is a dominant supplier, and they are able to match rates for a new entrant. They are able to out compete this new company, and they will do so - more marketing, lobbying, cost matching (or undercutting), etc. They have the ability to beat the competition, and they will.
So everything is going exactly as you'd expect - except the points from the parents comment still apply: the consumers in this market are actually getting fucked - the price drop will be temporary, the competitor will be forced out of business and leave, and the total infrastructure investment in the area will go down.
This is what's termed "Market failure". The free market here operates in a way that doesn't increase the well being of all (or even most) participants.
So yes - this is just competition playing out as we'd expect in a free market, but instead of doing what it normally does in an area (force infrastructure updates, service improvements, cost reductions, and higher efficiency as companies compete - all good things) it's doing bad things. Why?
Well - this case is the literal textbook definition of a "Natural monopoly". It turns out that when competition appears, Bell is able to outcompete them not by actually improving, but by leveraging existing infrastructure and scale in a way that the startup company cannot.
The free market isn't making Bell better - they're not having to work any harder or improve. That's great for Bell, but pretty bad for everybody else.
So (at least in theory) we regulate this case of the free market, because we've seen that "normal competition" doesn't actually work here.
> forces the other players to reduce their prices or shed customers.
Excpet they revert back to old prices once the competition is dead. This is textbook predatory pricing.
> It's not like Bell, in this case, were offering 1Gbps for something absurdly below cost, like $1/mo or something just to drive the new comer out of business.
What's the significance of "absurdly below cost" here? They are doing exactly what you describe except the exact number here is not 1 but 50.
When you price good below your production costs and have most of the market, then that is considered anticompetitive, monopolist behavior and is illegal in many places.
This is because if a large enough company does this, they can lower their prices locally to below cost whenever a new company enters a local market and subsidize this with their other markets. This creates a stranglehold on the market that can allow a company to charge artificially high prices for sub-par services.
This isn't just theory there is a well established pattern here and that is why laws prohibit it in many places.
> Is this not just competition working the way it's supposed to?
>
> ie, another player shows up in the market, offers a more attractive price and forces the other players to reduce their prices or shed customers.
No, because any time a company shows up that could pose an actual challenge to their stranglehold, all 3 companies gang up and lobby against them.
> The utterly inefficient and overpriced Canadian telecoms exist only because we allow one specific behavior:
> 1. A new local player comes to town, builds their own infrastructure (e.g. connects one building to fiber) and starts offering competitive service.
You forgot to mention that whoever is the ILEC in an area (Telus, Bell, etc) and/or the incumbent 35+ year early advantage local cable TV operator (Shaw, Rogers) has an immense advantage in owning and controlling existing right-of-way to reach whatever is the last mile service delivery location, whether it's aerial pole to pole or duct routes.
whether in usa or canada, local governments treat the incumbent local phone company and cable tv company as a default essential utility, so if it's not a legally enshrined right, it would certainly be shocking and weird if they didn't build to new places
of course in places where the local phone company or cable tv company shares aerial utility pole based infrastructure with the local power company, they're very close buddies as well
In most of the USA the local telcos are obligated to extend service to new construction as part of government grants they've received in the past. The obligation is usually for something like ~10 years, but the grant cycle is shorter than that.
The recent "RDOF" mega-grant has one of these clauses (at the census block level):
"All support recipients must serve locations newly built after the revised location total but before the end of year eight upon reasonable request"
These mega-grant things happen every 6-8 years. The last was "CAP II", preceded by "CAP I", etc. The telcos are basically treated like municipalities when it comes to federal grantmaking. This is basically the system that was lobbied into place after AT&T was broken up; the FCC just took over AT&T's local-loop capital allocation.
These observations are very true. A friend was living in a Toronto condo building, and I saw them choose to switch from Beanfield to Bell/Rogers for the same monthly price but higher Internet speeds. They took the bait and now everyone pays the price in the long run. And yes, Bell/Rogers gouges with high prices for houses/apartments that don't have an independent ISP like Beanfield, etc.
I recently moved to a newly built condo in Toronto and there was a special resident onboarding email, which happened to include a promotional offer from Rogers, advertising a rock bottom deal on internet that I couldn't refuse. I later asked the Rogers representative on the phone how they managed to score the deal with the building developer, and he basically told me that they have an ongoing relationship. They basically have the deal made as soon as the project gets off the ground.
That's a shame. I recently moved to Toronto and got Beanfield mostly by chance. I'm really pleased with the service, hope to stick with them for a long time.
After seeing how the telecom infrastructure was targeted in Ukraine, No sane government in the world can afford to maintain an oligopoly telecom infrastructure anymore; Ironically often in the name of national security.
I think the best way to address it is to open the industry for disruption by encouraging new players(without Billion dollars in market cap) by removing barriers for entry, With stringent monitoring/punishments for anti-competitive behavior including backroom deals among carriers and mobile ecosystem duopoly.
Last mile connectivity is a bit of a natural monopoly, in Australia they converted that to a government owned monopoly that leases their infrastructure to ISPs. I wonder if Canada should do the same.
On paper, yes. But over the last few decades our regulatory bodies have been subverted by influence from our telcoms.
Recently our telecom regulator (the CRTC) was considering whether MVNOs should be allowed in Canada. Our Competition Beaureau, which is supposed to be enforcing antitrust laws, provided guidance to the CRTC[1]. Here's an excerpt:
"MVNOs can drive lower prices and greater choice, but they also could threaten the demonstrated progress in enhancing competition in this industry to date."
That's right. "Increased competition and lower prices is bad for competition." "Demonstrated progress" in a country with some of the highest telecom prices in the world.
Let's not even get into how the chairperson of the CRTC is literally a former telecom lobbyist.
Ultimately, MVNOs were "approved", but with practically insurmountable requirements for new entrants, effectively blocking them.
There really should be a big investment in an anti-regulatory capture organization the way there are anti-trust lawyers and privacy czars.
Which would have the dual purpose of employing researchers and public outreach and have powers to stop hires, limit grants/subsidies, and collaborates with with anti-trust.
But who are we kidding, politicians never bite the hands that feed them.
I'm interested in any and all ideas to mitigate regulatory capture, no matter how crazy.
My only notions so far:
- Add explicit carve outs for customers (of the regulated entity). Where the representatives are chosen by jury duty or sortition or other suitably random method, so they too are resistant to capture.
- The customer's have veto power. Maybe thru an ombudsman structure. Maybe thru majority of the regulatory body.
- Like citizen's assemblies, customers have investigatory powers. They can ask questions, they cannot be denied. They benefit from expert testimony.
- No artificial deadlines for deliberations. Some decisions just take longer.
- All decisions (laws, rules, procedures) have built-in expiration (TTL), and must therefore be regularly reauthorized.
- All artifacts and hearings made public by default.
- Pay board members and their staff. So that normal people can afford to serve.
> a big investment in an anti-regulatory capture organization
I think you're on to something.
I keep thinking of the law practice that makes terrific money suing pharmacy benefit managers (or maybe just the pharmas themselves) for violating pricing rules. Sorry, no cite.
Canada is rife with oligopolies and the government does nothing to make this right. Everything is much more expensive in Canada vs the US because there's simply no competition.
Isn't this a simplified version of what Rockefeller did with the oil market more than a hundred years ago? Drive out competition by financing any extra costs with profits from the markets where there's no competition.
Such behavior spawned lots of laws designed to prevent it from happening again. And, just like the telecoms extort huge subscriptions from their clients using extreme product bundling, politicians engaged in ideology and law bundling to get voters to flock to them attracted by some laws, enabling them to enact (or in this case, repel) the laws preventing them from going back to 19th century capitalist practices.
It’s good for the consumers, so government mandated. Free market yields the US or Canadian telco landscape with bought out regulators, no real competition, price gouging, and poor service.
You can, but profitability is limited. You can have 5/6 maybe max in a dense country. With 4 in France, they each slowly fibered the whole country reaching an approximate 25% coverage each and compete in wave: one day they are at 20MBps and suddenly one explodes at 100 and the rest run after to restabilize market share. If they dont they all get fined by the regulator looking at european average speeds.
Yes and: Profitability is predetermined. Converting public goods and services into securities. Ideally. So a public utility issues bonds, instead of stocks.
Not sure what you mean, bonds and stocks are different liabilities and a state utility by definition cannot issue equity or the state would lose ownership. It means they must pay their bond coupons and therefore are very risk adverse and change resistant.
A security-emitting entity doesnt need to pay back the debt too much (it should but doesnt have to, via dividend) and therefore can afford to try things to raise returns for both shareholders and management and absorb failure.
The worst situation is when a state utility tries to innovate and fails: this leads to privatization which actually transforms it in a public companies (the words are weird: state companies are not directly publicly owned by the citizens, private companies on the public market can be). If a public market private company fails to innovate and just produces riskless cashflow forever, it becomes a good candidate for state private ownership.
Seriously, the world will not end because more than two companies are laying fibre. Especially as the country grows in size.
This weak apologia for monopolies is what keeps them around. Even when the cost created via gov-backed pseudo-private monopolies are obviously worse than their hypotheticals.
Curious though what the government could do about this pricing scheme here? Seems like the solution is to setup a bureaucracy to watch pricing and then micro-manage the situation whenever its tried?
The ride-hailing services pulled this in various places around the world. Airlines in Canada did it as well. Feels like whack-a-mole.
The most straightforward solution would be to require the telecoms submit pricing tables to the regulator and force them to stick to them. If they want to make a change, they have to do it for the whole region, not just the area where small-time competitors have installed new service.
Price transparency in general is a huge issue with Canadian telecoms, it's well known that it's a "complaint based system" with the big three. They'll hook you with an introductory rate and then start jacking up the prices after a year or two. The usual dance is you go to one of the other big telecoms and get a quote for their introductory rate, and then go back to yours and threaten to leave unless it's matched. It's a pretty awful system that requires people to know how to navigate it. Most don't, so after their intro period expires they just get gouged. My father in law is paying almost $200 a month for internet and TV.
Verizon tried to get in Canadian market in 2019ish but top three telecom formed a mafia and didn't let that happen. Same thing with Delta, would be a much better alternative to Air Canada.
Verizon was already in the Canadian market once before, holding a sizeable stake in Telus. I would say that they, along with AT&T owning a stake in Rogers during the same period, and of course AT&T also establishing Bell Canada earlier, are responsible for the present state of telecom in Canada. There were a number of other players who were trying to compete, but is wasn't easy going up against the offspring of the American behemoths.
the government is the reason there is such a triopoly - Bell/Telus/Rogers is a triopoly set up and supported by the government itself. The CRTC last mile service rule (forcing the triopoly to let other vendors use their physical cabling) is the only thing holding back a complete closed market.
In Canada, the entire public apparatus (federal and provincial at least) is geared toward keeping big businesses alive and happy, no matter the costs, because that means keeping jobs, because people with jobs paying taxes is the only meaningful source of revenue for governments since corporations can evade most taxation.
So, the various Canadian governments will do whatever they can to maintain corporate status quo and keep the money flowing. That's how it works. Just please big players and the rest follows.
Then, don't expect too much. Canada has never been a real country, its people never decided to take over and govern themselves, it's just an ex-British colonial body from a bygone era (one of many), and has always been acting as such.
Because of that, it's also one of the few places in the world where true personal and community freedom can be achieved, probably because it's so harsh and so vast and so highly dysfunctional and so challenging and so unimportant. Whatever it is, it's nice to be a Canadian for the most part. I'm not proud of being one, but I don't have to be, and that works pretty well for me.
Acknowledge that internet / phone service works much better as a utility and nationalize or highly regulate (i.e. fixed pricing schemes) the telecom companies.
Near the bottom it states that those companies are supposed to promote those plans. They didn't the last time I tried looking them up. Regulation is meaningless if there is a lack of enforcement.
(Note: I'm not saying that the pricing scheme is particularly good since it leaves the needs of many people unaddressed. On the other hand, it does address the needs of those who would have the most trouble affording phone service.)
Also consider the continual battle of third-party ISPs to provide affordable Internet access. The CRTC says the major providers have to lease out their lines and stipulate what those rates are. On the other hand, those third-party ISPs are constantly fighting to keep the rates low and are pretty much tied to providing service levels that match the major providers.
I thought I'd dive in and look for these plans, and as expected they're not at all easy to find.
For Telus, I had to go to four different plan/pricing pages before I found a link mentioning that cheaper plans are only available on Koodo (their lower priced brand). And then, the $35 plan is as lousy as they can make it and still comply with the CRTC - 3GB of data at 3G (only 2 generations ago, awesome) speeds, with overage costs of $13/100MB. Just absurdly bad. Or maybe you want something more reasonable, let's cut out that data access, you just want talk and text? That'll save you a whopping $3, at $32/month.
So that's the telecom situation in Canada; the first 3GB cost you $3, the next 3GB cost you $390.
Maybe re-examine the foreign ownership rules for telecommunications companies...
"As it stands now, foreign ownership of a telecommunications company is limited to no more than 20 per cent of a company’s voting shares and no more than 33.3 per cent of the voting shares of a carrier’s holding company, and an effective total limit of 46.7 per cent (as long as the foreign entity doesn’t have control). On top of that, at least 80 per cent of the board members must be Canadian citizens." [0]
(Although seems not to apply to small actors under 10 percent of the market share anymore)
The idea around the foreign ownership laws is to prevent jobs and knowledge from leaving the country hopefully creating entities that can compete at the global level. It has worked with banking but failed with internet providers. It costs regular citizens but not strategically doing this is costly.
The industry is large/stable enough to allow 100% foreign ownership.
I also remember Air Canada or WestJet doing the same to some small air company offering cheap flights from Kelowna (?), but I cannot find the news piece. Does anybody here have a better memory than myself?
The airport in Kitchener has a deal where an airline is offered exclusive rights to a new route out of the airport for, I think, two years. Westjet/Swoop was recently throwing up a storm in the media over this when Flair took advantage of the deal, calling it anti-competitive. Never mind that they had, and still have, access to the same deal.
The reality is that they were only interested in running those routes as long as another airline was. YKF has been down this road before.
Are you thinking of Flair or Swoop? Never flown them out of Kelowna when I was living there, but I remember both being a big deal when they finally arrived.
Swoop is owned by WestJet, it's just their discount brand. Flair's actually independent and used to be based in Kelowna but is now based in Edmonton – they're probably who GP is thinking of.
I'm incredibly thankful to Flair as my flight to Montreal now costs 1/3rd what it cost last year.
It's unfortunate that I need to visit a province that discriminates against my mother with its regressive laws, but at least I can pay my respects and get out without contributing to the oligopoly that runs the country.
While I believe that this is a tactic that gets used, it shouldn't work. And therefore it is points to probable regulatory failures. Note that the theory here is that the majors will offer cheap prices if the infra is duplicated.
That means "I" (my building) could build my (our) own fibre connection and then use that as leverage to get cheap internet without having to actually run it. It'd be a bit silly, but sounds long-term profitable.
The focus should be on enabling this sort of competition.
I was really hoping Musk would bring Starlink for cheaper then Rogers et all. I think for now they will mainly focus on rural areas but as time goes on hoping they lower the prices enough that even city folks with clear line of site to satellites can hook up and ditch Rogers.
Why do new local players invest in new offerings if it is apparently so obvious that the big telecoms will come in and undercut them long enough to exhaust their capital?
But people actually do sell books. It’s not the case that Amazon always comes to new book store locations and undercuts them on price just long enough for them to go out of business.
Amazon undercuts pretty much every bookseller on price. A few local/specialty shops can survive but Barnes & Noble is pretty much the only national competitor left in the US and they are on the ropes. My local B&N is now a pile of rubble, soon to be a fast food place.
Heat keeps leaking out. The amount of stored heat is proportional to the cube of the linear size, the leak rate is proportional to the surface area (square of the linear size). Hence, the bigger the storage, the higher the efficiency.
Same why a flea can jump >10x its height, and a human cannot (square growth of strength, cubic growth of weight).
The thermal resistance is the sum of 3 (or more) terms, and while the outer terms are indeed proportional to surface area, I'm not sure if the physical constants of the system aren't designed so that the middle heat conductive terms of resistance R=ln(r2/r1)/(2pikL) is the dominant factor.
The other issue is ‘heat quality’ (or temperature deltas). It’s easier to recover a given amount of heat from very hot sources than from only luke warm sources, and smaller heat stores will have a very pronounced difference very quickly, resulting in control issues.
Basically, if you only have a small amount of sand, it’s harder to keep it warm for longer (more surface area for the mass, so more insulation required), and harder to deal with effectively (fan needs to blow much harder when it’s only warm, much less when it’s hot), etc.
$3 x 2 people x 365 days = ~$2K
A decent fully automatic Espresso machine is ~$1K. You load the beans once per week, water every day, and run the descaling cycle once every few months. And these things are modular as hell: if you are not intimidated by reading a service manual and know how to get around with a multimeter, you can get replacement parts from specialty shops and maintain them yourself at reasonable cost.
And the best thing is, you don't need to go anywhere. You wake up, crawl to the kitchen, press the button and enjoy the coffee.