Vimeo is not for the same purpose. It’s more B2B. I read somewhere that after a certain threshold they start billing you for views.

I’m into it. All of the news is bad news for him and I love it. It’s like a house burning for a year and I just like checking in on it every few days.

Agreed. Nobody wants the eBay police, but sellers and buyers should be the ones held accountable.

I heard about the bill a few weeks ago on The Daily. Shortly after I was on LinkedIn and noticed that some of the devs from my company and a company that mine contracts with would only list a last initial. It made me wonder if the reason for that was because of caste discrimination.

Sorry, but Elon is about 40 billion in the red compared to this guy so I think he’s got Unity bosses beat by a lot.

I agree with the other commenter that it sounds a bit like the Fediverse. It’s interesting to think about. I think part of what draws people to any messaging platform is continuity with the other services on the platform. The actual messaging experience can be duplicated or exceeded by anyone, like how RCS has made the humble text message more powerful and compatible than anyone at Apple could comprehend.

With this idea, would any messaging platform that became ultra successful be then required to allow other platforms to message their users? Which platforms are allowed? How is spam managed? What about special privacy features like what’s built in to Signal or Telegram? How do the platforms manage linking to content embedded in other parts of the platform (think Instagram posts/reels/messenger).

There are a lot of difficult issues to work out.

Well, all sewer water requires treatment before it’s used again but this water doesn’t go into the sewer, it’s evaporative cooling so it goes into the air.

No shit, it’s the monopoly game all over again. I worked for a local provider for 4 years in engineering. I would personally like to see greater restrictions on ISP M&As, investor ownership of communication providers, and media company owners of communication providers.

At my company, we were purchased by another provider that had mismanaged themselves to the brink of bankruptcy only to be saved by some investors at the last second. Our staff was cut by about half. A year or so after that we were bought by the biggest bunch of soulless monsters I’ve ever worked with. From there the company went growth-by-acquisition crazy, purchasing every Mom and Pop provider they could get their hands on.

Years later I was working an IP address consolidation project when I came across an FCC filing from the late 90s written by former management at my original company asking the FCC to reject the GTE purchases that resulted in Verizon as we know it today. I was amazed, and also saddened. It was all coming true.

Police are a little shitty, but that’s up to them too.

Tesla removed the LiDAR from their cars, a step backwards if you ask me.

Edit: Sorry RADAR not LiDAR.

I was highlighing the absurdity of the fee structure.

To expand on what I said in my second comment, the tax was probably created by the government to serve a relevant purpose that I don’t know about. I trust that there is a reason for the tax. The fact that it was being applied inappropriately to customers was the absurd part. It’s like an electric vehicle being taxed for highway tailpipe emissions.

Whether the tax was valid or not I have no input on. Taxes are created for many reasons but our method of assessing it on customers who should not have been paying it was wrong.

A few years back I worked for a regional Internet service provider in the northeast US. One day a guy who did finance and regulatory work for us asked me how many of our customer point to point links with A and Z locations in different states were either dedicated to voice traffic or carried more than x percent voice traffic.

After asking a few thought provoking questions like if the percentage was based on traffic measurements or link capacity and how we would make that calculation on a circuit with asymmetrical speeds, I explained that it would be nearly impossible for us to tell unless the customer declared it to us.

He then told me that there was some new federal tax on interstate circuits carrying voice traffic and that if we couldn’t tell if a customer circuit was carrying voice traffic or not, that we would just need to start charging them all the tax no matter what. It might even apply to regular Internet services where the edge router and customer site were in different states.

And that is the story of how the ISP that I worked for added yet another fee to all of its customers.