Ugh this isn’t what HOAs are for!

HOAs are intended to harass and discriminate against black and brown people so that they don’t move in, or at least immediately leave.

Not white guys with majestic beards.

He must’ve been giving water to black or brown people, it’s the only justifiable reason.

They fined him with stage 4 cancer? That must be some sort of cruel and unusual punishment, right?

Kindof? I guess that’s a corollary. What I’m saying is that despite being objectively larger and more successful companies, they don’t have nearly the innovation we got from the collaborative efforts of US (i.e. DARPA) and Bell’s research.

It demonstrated that looking out on a very long timeline…decades, if not longer…and investing on projects that won’t show any returns for just as long…if ever…but it can reap massive rewards for everyone.

But…capitalism…pure capitalism…only allows that through monopolies. Which of course is their own can of worms.

Regulated capitalism is just as bad, if not even worse, because there is no incentive for companies to work together on a long enough timeline for it to matter. It results in everything being measured on a quarterly/yearly scale and expecting immediate results, while also disincentivizing publishing or any other dissemination of knowledge

Hence it falls on the government to bankroll these things through grants.

I was curious so I asked ChatGPT. The answer was surprising…all of them tower over Bell by nearly every financial measure…

Was Any Company Bigger Than Bell at Its Peak?

Short answer: Yes — by some metrics. But Bell was unique.

📡 Bell System at Its Peak

The Bell System (AT&T and its regional Bell companies) was a government-regulated telecom monopoly until its breakup in 1984.

• Revenue (early 1980s): ~$70–80B/year
  → ~$220–250B today, inflation-adjusted
• Employees: Over 1 million
• Market Cap (est.): ~$100–150B in 1980s
  → ~$300–400B today
• Market Share: ~90% of U.S. phone service
• R&D: Bell Labs (invented transistor, UNIX, lasers, info theory, etc.)

In short: Bell controlled the entire U.S. telecom backbone and set the pace for global innovation.

🦷 Big Tech Today (as of 2025)

• All exceed Bell’s revenue and market cap, even adjusted for inflation.
• Amazon rivals Bell’s employee count, but largely due to warehouses and delivery.

🧠 Influence Comparison

🧾 TL;DR: Is Anyone “Bigger”?

By market value and revenue? ✅ Yes
By number of employees? ✅ Amazon
By influence on infrastructure, science, and policy? ❌ No — Bell was foundational

Bell wasn’t just a company — it was the nervous system of American communication.

Even worse, if it were, NASA would be the last place to cut.

NASA actually sees a return on investment.

You know, one of the modern problems is we aren’t investing nearly enough public funds into R&D. Like 90% of 20th century American technological investment came from Bell Labs and public research.

Bell could invest a lot in research because they had money and weren’t concerned with competition. One of the benefits of being a protected monopoly.

In retrospect, it’d be nice to have had the money without having the monopoly.

I don’t know the numbers but I wouldn’t be surprised if any FAANG is bigger than Bell was at its peak. But they aren’t really monopolies to the level Bell was, so they keep most of what they develop and learn as proprietary/internal.

Edit to add: you know what country is putting a lot of public money behind R&D and subsidizing future industries? How do you think this will play out in 20 years? Chinas playing the long game and we are destroying decades of institutional knowledge for tiny quarterly gains. Absurd.

If you turn your head, the letters OGC look like a man with his legs bowed out, jerking off.

That’s what I’ll think of whenever I hear this name. A bunch of jerk-offs circle-jerking.

As others have said, highly location dependent.

I switched from Xfinity to T-Mobile 4 years ago because tmobiles speed (raw speed) blew Xfinity out of the water…especially for upload. Latency and jitter suffered a bit but not enough to greatly effect voice calls. It didn’t help my online gaming skills, but likely would’ve if I were a higher-caliber gamer. For me, the latency between chair and gamepad was much more impactful.

However Xfinity did some upgrades in my area and the roles have reversed so I’m back to Xfinity. Tmo is still absolutely usable, but Xfinity now offering 250mbps upload makes my mouth water.

In 1940s Germany, SS takes you.

In Soviet America, SS leaves you.

What a country!

Nuke it?

Not buying another modem when the ISP quietly upgrades the CMTS and makes more speed available in your neighborhood.

Nah wifi was actually originally on 5GHz spectrum, with 802.11a. It came out shortly before 802.11b, which used 2.4GHz, and was objectively better…but component shortages for 802.11a devices made the inferior 802.11b more successful on the market.

Then in 2009, after 802.11b and 802.11g came 802.11n, which used the 5GHz spectrum, and introduced dual-band routers to consumers.

Most recently, 6GHz got allocated with the advent of Wifi 6E and Wifi 7.

This exactly. Wifi is damn near unusable in dense residential settings. It’ll cut it for streaming and web browsing, but much more than that and you’ll feel the pain of interference from all the other wifi APs in the area.

Especially with most of them defaulting to 80MHz on 5GHz and many of those defaulting away from UNII-2. which leaves 4 non-overlapping channels (with one of them giving trouble with a lot of devices). We’re right back to where we were in 2.4. Even worse, I think, since wifi is more ubiquitous.

Isn’t that the plan?

“cheap” is a relative term.

Nobody should be buying a DOCSIS 3.0 modem these days. They are obsolete and for some reason still being sold.

A decent DOCSIS 3.1 modem is at least $200. A Next Gen like S34 is at least $220. At least at the big blue big box store. And then you have to get your own wifi.

(However, that big blue store also will give you a 15% discount on any networking purchase if you recycle an old network device…I traded in an old modem but you should be able to find a switch or router at a thrift store and still come out ahead)

It pays for itself pretty quick (by not paying rental fees), but that doesn’t necessarily make it cheap.

I absolutely prefer using my own equipment, and do…but it’s also worth mentioning that in many markets, Xfinity removed data caps if you have a rented modem.

Sure that’s great if a rich dude wants to set up a trust and run a theater or a museum or whatever after they die.

But the problem comes in when you have an NFP running a museum that’s beholden to one or two key benefactors who want to decide everything, and they gotta listen or else there’s no more money.

Libertarian types tell you all the time that this is what philanthropy is for.

No. No this is not what philanthropy is for, because the philanthropist can pull the plug anytime they want.

And charities can decide who to help. That’s probably the worst of it, and what makes libertarianism a thinly-veiled disguise for racism, or at the very least a caste system.

I think that wouldn’t work unless the mine is perfectly sealed.

The pulp would still get eaten and digested microorganisms and carbon released to air.

Plus there would be a ton of wasted carbon on harvest, pulpifying, transport…unless those are all done with green energy.

The reason why we have fossil fuels is because of the carbon that didn’t get released to the atmosphere. It got trapped in a hypoxic water/swamps where bacteria and microorganisms couldn’t decompose it.

We could build hypoxic lakes for disposal of large chunks of “organic” (as in alive) carbon to be sequestered…but it couldn’t be done at a scale to even begin to touch what we’ve released. Maybe if we gmod some bacteria or plankton to chew it up and poop it up real fast. And put all the carbon we can find into the pit.

Yes I think you missed the point.

If you are purged you can’t vote. That becomes a problem on election day.

You might get a feel-good provisional ballot but no real way to track that it got counted.

This is what happened last year, except by a bunch of randos claiming that so-and-so wasn’t a legal voter, with no proof or recourse.

So now they can just check against RNC registered voters and “disable” 10% of people who aren’t registered RNC and no way to prove or possibly even know until after the election passes.

No thanks.

Not to mention they could run this against the voter rolls, so you show as eligible if you check your registration status, but have your ballot tossed (or get turned around at the polling place) because you’re not on this other database.

Social Engineering is hacking cmv.

That means there are highschool seniors who weren’t even alive while Bill Gates was at Microsoft. Interns might not even know who he is.