Throughout my life, things have always gotten worse.
I've come to the conclusion that for any major investment, the time to invest was the early 2000s, and the second best time is right now, because it's only going downhill from here.
Unless it's tech, because early tech is almost always shit compared to later versions of the same... To a limited degree. Eventually it all gets enshittified.
Can we replace BGP, just because it's a flaming dumpster fire?
Hi. I'm a network specialist. The Internet is not a big truck (it's a series of tubes).
To explain simply: time, distance and money. That's why nobody is doing it. All the humans are spread out over too much land, and to span the vast distances between places, you need either a really long cable (see: fiber optics) with permission to run said cable over that distance, or you need wireless relays (these don't have as much bandwidth).
The main problem isn't getting the power to reach a particular destination... You could fire a wireless signal from New York to LA if you had line of sight with relatively little power.... The problem is, the damned earth gets in the way.
So what do we get if we try? A bunch of independent communities with spotty connections to nearby communities, and it's likely that as soon as you go any significant distance, the demand on bandwidth would vastly outstrip any bandwidth you have.
Great, now the internet is slow, shit, and half the time, doesn't connect to what you want to access.
The Internet is set up the way it is because it's efficient and economical to do it this way. Let me talk at you for a minute and explain.
ISPs in your local area use copper wires, such as telephone or cable TV lines that were put in place more than a generation ago, to handle the "last mile"... The fact that we can get as fast of service down 20+ year old lines is a miracle half the time. Also, anyone with fiber, go sit in the corner, you're in a different class.
So all these last mile runs go to their distribution building that amalgamates them into a small number of high speed, high bandwidth fiber lines that go towards the nearest exchange. Not telephone exchange, internet exchange. They're usually located in data centers.
Internet exchanges act as a nexus of cross connectivity between ISPs, and corporations that host internet services like Meta, Google, etc. As well as transit providers, international data connectivity service providers that own undersea cables.... Everyone and everything that wants to communicate on the internet is connected at these points, which is why they're in data centers. The data center is attached to the internet exchange, not the other way around.
IX-es are connected to eachother over long distance fiber cables, usually run along utility properties, like those used for high voltage power transmission towers, or run along railroads or similar. Basically anyone who has a long, uninterrupted stretch of land, probably has been approached by transit providers to run fiber across their property between locations.
It's a huge, complex web of companies that have agreed to move customer traffic between locations.
Recreating all of that is an insane technological challenge especially for a rag tag group of volunteers and hobbyists with little money, and no resources.... From scratch.
I like the idea, but implementation is going to be nigh impossible.
A local Telco had a plan they called "my 5" which was pretty simple: you get unlimited calls and texts to 5 numbers, and everything else costs money per minute/text.
I didn't have 5 people for my 5 so I just stuck to pay as you go on my PCS phone.
Short story. A former employer did almost everything "server less".
So, instead of any physical servers, there would be AD controllers, file servers, and remote desktop servers in azure VMs instead.
I'm pretty sure that some of the largest deployments were nearly as expensive per year as the hardware would have been to just run it in house. Like, you can buy a whole-assed server, capable of running your entire workload, every year that you run "server less"
And what did I do? Well, I managed and maintained server VMs that happened to be in azure instead of a device that the company owns.
The whole thing was baffling. Why anyone would do things that way just amazes me.
I'm near the start of the millennial generation, my older brothers are Gen x and more in-between than I am. There's about 5-6 years between all of us and we represent two generations in varying degrees.
Ehh. They mostly rode the coattails of the boomers. I dunno if I can reasonably get angry at them for taking advantage of the opportunity that the boomers made for them to prosper.
It's the boomers that own, and frequently still run the companies that are ruining the economy. That's for fucking sure. Gen x just got a free ride.
Of all the people I know, the Gen x are the most likely to just be coasting through life because they were downright given all the opportunities and never really struggled for much.
This is the justification.
My only comment to that is: the "women's washroom" sign isn't going to stop an attacker.
I'll say this. If any of those people represented in the ad exist, they can afford the medication that's being sold by the ad.
Those are the people who buy the things that people say "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" about.
You all forget, there's legions of people who are wealthy, but not the ultra rich. They bring in millions of dollars a year. Far more than you or I possibly could, but they're not notable because they're part of the 1% and the 0.1% are much much worse.
What they don't get, is that their wealth is closer to the bottom 99% than the top 0.1%. they should be on our side, but they won't get involved because they're a bunch of fence sitting assholes that just do enough to keep up their lifestyle, but not so much that anyone notices.
Maybe, but also, relationships take a lot of time and effort and sometimes your significant other is just crazy and you have to break it off.
It seems like getting a real-enough experience with a "real doll" and then not having to deal with another person or their drama, may appeal to some.
Not me, I've been in a long term relationship for going on 10 years now. I can just take my bias out of the discussion and consider other perspectives.
The most significant insulin development in recent years is glucose reactive insulin.
I would argue that any development short of GRI is not significantly different than any other insulin treatment. You have to take insulin and either regulate how much insulin you take for how much sugar you consume, or regulate how much sugar you consume too match how much insulin you're taking.
The intervals/amounts differ, even methods of administration differ, but they are not drastically different.
GRIs actually regulate blood glucose "automatically" like a pancreas would. Which makes treating diabetes with a GRI, not dissimilar to treating any other condition that requires a single dose of medication every day. You take the medicine and go about your business, not giving your condition a second thought in your day to day activities. That's huge.
This is all well and good, however, GRIs are little more than a lab experiment at the moment. Human trials are set up begin in 2025 sometime.
So my point stands, make insulin cheap, let people live for a few more years until they can see the release of GRIs; where there is a real, tangible change in how they manage their condition.
Everything else, is just variations on the same, bad, theme.
My brother has used so many different brands and types of insulin, from long-acting to short, in vials, pen-like dispensers, and even a couple pumps.... They're all varying levels of bad. The least bad has been the pumps, but the pump isn't dependent on what brand or type of insulin you use.... It's a tool to make it easier to manage the amount of insulin being recieved at any given time. Everything else is little more than a difference in labeling.
I never knew someone with an analog cellphone at the time, so that one isn't something I experienced. I was one of the first at my high school to have a PCS phone, and I remember that not all PCS phones could text.
Depending on what tech the carrier used, you either could text, or not. GSM phones came with the feature as standard, while CDMA and TDMA phones were distinctly lacking the feature for a long time. It's funny to me that the feature that made cellphones really explode with the younger generation (texting, aka SMS), wasn't even a universal feature when the PCS networks went live. Eventually we all switched to HSDPA, and eventually LTE which both had the feature.
Aah those were the days. Everything was slow and it was still great because the alternative was nothing.