How we can make the COUNTRY great again
Locked
How we can make the COUNTRY great again
 
|
Eric Schmidt posted an interesting article about the digital divide in both urban and rural America on Google+ and Twitter recently (I don't use Facebook). https://goo.gl/GYrBGg Do the digital divide and the urban-rural divide have something in common? Here in Germany they seem to have a lot in common, all the people want to live in the big cities like Munich, Cologne, Hamburg or Berlin, where the digital startups and agencies are, and the surrounding country often feels as if it were empty, there are no jobs here, and you will have difficulties to get a Taxi because there is simply none. The manufacturing jobs went to China long ago, and the European rust belt from Gelsenkirchen to Gliwice suffered a similar fate as the American one. In the county there is lots of affordable space but no jobs, while in the urban regions there are plenty of jobs but no affordable space to live. How can we make the COUNTRY great again? It would make much more sense if people would move out of the cities back into rural areas, in the moden digital age people can work remotely from everywhere as long as there is a good Internet connection. The cities in turn would gain more space and could get greener. Let us say Google or Apple would move their headquarters to St. Louis, Kansas City or Albuquerque. In the modern digital world it doesn't matter where are you are located as long as you have a good Internet connection. Suddenly San Francisco would have a lot more affordable space to live, and St. Louis or Albuquerque would thrive. If the big IT corporations can not relocate their headquarters, maybe government agencies can. CIA and NSA are both located near Washington, D.C. If their headquarters would move to Kansas City or Albuquerque than these town would prosper and more affordable space to live would become instantly available in the capital. In Germany the CIA counterpart BND moves just now into the opposite direction, from the country to the capital. I think that's wrong. One thing that the NASA space program did well was to consider the whole country and every state, the Kennedy Space Center is in Florida, the control center is in Houston, Texas, the JPL in California, etc. Regards, Jochen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: How we can make the COUNTRY great again
|
Administrator
|
Santa Fe, and New Mexico in general, is interesting in that regard. SF is not a large city, and is the state capitol. (Not unusual for the capitol cities to be small in the US). Yet it has the Santa Fe Institute and quite an active techie crowd (our sister list, wedtech, for example). NM has a spaceport: https://en. And there is LANL, the lab that (shudder) built the bomb. And Sandia Labs. And RedFish and Friam :) But then there is a lot of the countryside that is left out of this. I really like the idea of making the Country(side) important. In NM there issues with the tribal lands which are poorly served, but it's getting better. Nice meme, let's make it go viral! -- Owen On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 2:05 AM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: How we can make the COUNTRY great again
|
Administrator
|
This is where we are glad Nick is looking into how to take interesting Friam threads and putting them in a blog of some sort. Nick: any progress? Ideas on how to proceed? On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 9:40 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: How we can make the COUNTRY great again
|
|
In reply to this post by Owen Densmore
I have been working here in Ecuador to provide internet access to poorly served areas, and it is a challenge, albiet not an insurmountable one. Wireless technology from smallish companies like Ubiquiti, Mikrotik, and Mimosa to name a few, is pretty inexpensive, even here where import duties are high. The big challenge where I'm working is getting line-of-sight between nodes, where there is a lot of dense forest cover over 20 meters high.
One thing that I found interesting in the article that Jochen linked to is that the US FCC defines broadband as 25mbps down / 3mbps up. Maybe I'm just used to it, but I find about 2up/1down plenty even for video streaming. More is always better, of course :-) On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 11:40 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: How we can make the COUNTRY great again
|
|
No BroadBand at my farm in Central Massachusetts. Awaiting Gary’s International Assistance. Remember a few years back when Venezuela was supplying cut-rate oil to low income people in New England? Just Sayin’ Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz I have been working here in Ecuador to provide internet access to poorly served areas, and it is a challenge, albiet not an insurmountable one. Wireless technology from smallish companies like Ubiquiti, Mikrotik, and Mimosa to name a few, is pretty inexpensive, even here where import duties are high. The big challenge where I'm working is getting line-of-sight between nodes, where there is a lot of dense forest cover over 20 meters high. One thing that I found interesting in the article that Jochen linked to is that the US FCC defines broadband as 25mbps down / 3mbps up. Maybe I'm just used to it, but I find about 2up/1down plenty even for video streaming. More is always better, of course :-) On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 11:40 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: How we can make the COUNTRY great again
|
|
Space X just launched the first 10 (of 70) of Iridium NEXT low-earth satellites. https://www.iridium.com/company/industryleadership/iridiumcertus It’s not high bandwidth (about a 1MB/sec), but should be lower latency than HughesNet, Wildblue, etc. From:
Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> No BroadBand at my farm in Central Massachusetts. Awaiting Gary’s International Assistance. Remember a few years back when Venezuela was supplying cut-rate oil to low income
people in New England? Just Sayin’
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]]
On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz I have been working here in Ecuador to provide internet access to poorly served areas, and it is a challenge, albiet not an insurmountable one. Wireless technology from smallish companies like Ubiquiti, Mikrotik, and Mimosa to name a few,
is pretty inexpensive, even here where import duties are high. The big challenge where I'm working is getting line-of-sight between nodes, where there is a lot of dense forest cover over 20 meters high. One thing that I found interesting in the article that Jochen linked to is that the US FCC defines broadband as 25mbps down / 3mbps up. Maybe I'm just used to it, but I find about 2up/1down plenty even for video streaming. More is always
better, of course :-) On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 11:40 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: How we can make the COUNTRY great again
|
|
That's cool, but this type of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites seem to me more sutible for ubiquitous low bandwidth communication, e.g. satellite phones. I don't know how well it would scale - for example, I doubt that millions of people could simultaneously get their full megabit from a small LEO constellation. One alternative that looks intriguing to me is Facebook's Aquila drone, that flies at about 20km altitude - still low enough for microwave broadband communication, but high enough to avoid commercial air traffic. On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 1:32 PM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: How we can make the COUNTRY great again
|
|
Perhaps a hybrid GEO/LEO could be made? The bandwidths are not bad for the existing satellite internet solutions. From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]]
On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz That's cool, but this type of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites seem to me more sutible for ubiquitous low bandwidth communication, e.g. satellite phones. I don't know how well it would scale - for example, I doubt that millions of people
could simultaneously get their full megabit from a small LEO constellation. One alternative that looks intriguing to me is Facebook's Aquila drone, that flies at about 20km altitude - still low enough for microwave broadband communication, but high enough
to avoid commercial air traffic. On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 1:32 PM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: How we can make the COUNTRY great again
|
|
I don't have much experience with the GEO providers, e.g. Hughes, but I seem to remember that the minimum latency of about a quarter second round trip imposed by the speed of light makes them very unpleasant to use for VOIP, otherwise they are okay. Still, fiber is so much cheaper up until the "last mile" (in urban areas), which more or less equates with the "last ten miles" in rural areas. I have the impression that a lot of highways have fiber optic along them, as the easements are already in place and they connect urban areas capable of using the bandwidth from the fiber. But many rural roads extend for many miles or tens of miles, with a few houses widely scattered along them, so the cost of fiber is harder to justify there. On flat land, microwave works very well with little investment in towers, but the hillier the land is, the more towers and repeaters are necessary. So something like Facebook's drone idea seems quite attractive: use the drones as if they were extremely high towers, capable of relaying signal from fiber optic connections along the highways down to those widely scattered rural houses. One of the problems is keeping the antennas aligned, since the airfoil-design drones need to keep moving to stay in the air. I wonder if they have looked at using helium balloons for the lift, and only use drone technology to stabilize them. That should work if the wind is minimal at extremely high altitudes. On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 7:06 PM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: How we can make the COUNTRY great again
|
|
On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 8:46 PM, Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: How we can make the COUNTRY great again
|
|
Ah, here's a way to throw sand in the gears: The FERC has to approve interstate pipelines and energy transfer infrastructure. It was down to 3 of 5 members when Trump elevated one of the existing members to be the new chair, so one of the other members promptly resigned. (in a snit? can't tell). The commission no longer has a quorum to do its business, and it could take months to get a new member appointed and approved by the senate. Who knows how long it could take if someone put their mind to it. I wonder how many other federal commissions might be similarly poised to grind to a halt? -- rec -- On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 9:26 PM, Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: How we can make the COUNTRY great again
|
|
In reply to this post by Gary Schiltz-4
Gary, I would not like to be the helium drone trying to stay in one spot in a 120 knot jet stream, Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz I don't have much experience with the GEO providers, e.g. Hughes, but I seem to remember that the minimum latency of about a quarter second round trip imposed by the speed of light makes them very unpleasant to use for VOIP, otherwise they are okay. Still, fiber is so much cheaper up until the "last mile" (in urban areas), which more or less equates with the "last ten miles" in rural areas. I have the impression that a lot of highways have fiber optic along them, as the easements are already in place and they connect urban areas capable of using the bandwidth from the fiber. But many rural roads extend for many miles or tens of miles, with a few houses widely scattered along them, so the cost of fiber is harder to justify there. On flat land, microwave works very well with little investment in towers, but the hillier the land is, the more towers and repeaters are necessary. So something like Facebook's drone idea seems quite attractive: use the drones as if they were extremely high towers, capable of relaying signal from fiber optic connections along the highways down to those widely scattered rural houses. One of the problems is keeping the antennas aligned, since the airfoil-design drones need to keep moving to stay in the air. I wonder if they have looked at using helium balloons for the lift, and only use drone technology to stabilize them. That should work if the wind is minimal at extremely high altitudes. On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 7:06 PM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: How we can make the COUNTRY great again
|
Administrator
|
Hi Nick. The FAQ had a lot of interesting answers. Here's the one I also had about staying in one place. My bet is the "weather" up there may be more manageable for the flock?
-- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: How we can make the COUNTRY great again
|
|
Hi, Owen, I have a little knowledge about weather, and, as we all know, a little knowledge is a very dangerous thing. To give us some facts to work with, I have linked you to an upper air plot generated by a balloon released from east of Albuquerque earlier today. Now these plots are baffling even to experts, but some things are evident, even to us mortals. First notice the bright jiggly lines coming up from the center of the x axis. Notice that they take a sharp right turn about 12km (around 45kft). That’s the beginning of the stratosphere. The point where the right turns occur, is called the “thermopause”. At the thermopause, temperatures stop falling with respect to altitude and begin to rise again. If you brought the gasses at that level down to sea level, they would actually be quite hot. Now look over at the wind barbs on the right. The balloon passes on through the thermopause and continues to rise to the 100 mb level, over 50kft. At that altitude, only about ten percent of the atmosphere remains above. The motion of that atmosphere is from the NW at 30 knots, something like 35 mph, I think (Each feather on the wind barb represents ten mph.) Now here is where I reached the limit of my knowledge and perhaps steered you wrong. The balloon does not reach 65kft. So, I suppose it is possible that what remains of the atmosphere is stationary at that altitude. There is certainly no evidence of any “jet stream” at that altitude, so my taunting you with 120 kt jet streams was super unfair. But I cannot think of any reason why, given that we are already through the thermopause, that things would change all that much in the next 15,000 feet. So, if such a balloon were up there today, to stay in place, it would have to have some way to resist a 30 kt wind. I am puzzled by other aspects of your account. Wouldn’t a super pressurized balloon sink like a rock at that altitude? Others may dope slap me at this point (Roger is often a good candidate for administering dope slaps when I talk about weather), but I am guessing that the real issue is finding with a skin material that is so light that it doesn’t weigh the balloon down but so strong that it does not disintegrate as it expands. By the way, if you look at the windbarbs you can see the high altitude winds over ABQ. Bold triangular ‘feathers’ mean a wind speed of 50 mph or greater. So, the wind just below the thermopause tops out at 50 kts. Not much of a jet stream, because the Jetstream has migrated south and east in the last few days. See 100 mb level map. It’s blowing pretty good over Florida, nearly a hundred knots. So, if those winds continue up to 65kft, a balloon would have to pedal like an energizer bunny or be a hundred miles down wind for every hour it was up there. I trust I have done due penance. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore
Hi Nick. The FAQ had a lot of interesting answers. Here's the one I also had about staying in one place. My bet is the "weather" up there may be more manageable for the flock?
-- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
| Free forum by Nabble | Edit this page |