I'm also a dev from NZ, and I worked in the US a few years ago. Honestly it's not all it's cracked up to be, and I wouldn't choose to go back there. Trump didn't factor into that decision, but now it's even less enticing.
Aussie dev here with a similar story. I lived and worked in the bay area for a couple of years a few years ago. I wouldn't choose to go back there either, especially now.
And I have Australian friends in the bay area now who are reconsidering which country they want their tax dollars to go to.
Homelessness in Sydney/Melbourne is extremely tame compared to SF. Especially areas like The Mission. I was floored on a recent visit at how bad the problem was.
I was in San Francisco. Admittedly, that's a very unique situation. But I was shocked to see so many homeless people, and that the streets were so dirty. I was shocked to hear so many reports of gun violence coming from Oakland. There is just so much hopelessness in America.
I had a really bad experience with health care. In New Zealand, I never had to think twice about visiting the ER or hospital, where it's free, very high quality, and there's no long waits. In the US, a few trips to the ER including x-rays cost me something like ten thousand dollars, even after health insurance. My startup's plan might have not been great, but I understand why so many Americans go bankrupt from medical debt. I have a friend who went through cancer, which ended up costing millions of dollars. His family would have literally lost their home without the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits lifetime limits.
Having said that, I do like most things about San Francisco. There's some great food, great people, and so many things to do. It's a great place to live if you are wealthy. I wouldn't go back there as an employee or a startup founder, but maybe one day as an investor.
New Zealand is pretty awesome if you're wealthy, enjoy nature, can work remotely, go to bed early, and enjoy driving everywhere. I think it's also an ideal place to raise a family.
Yeah, the U.S. is a diverse place. Even the American people don't understand their own diversity, as you can see from the shock about the results of this election.
Eh... The Prime Minister of Australia is actively working against the technology industry here, and he actually states that preventing Australians from having better internet access is his biggest accomplishment.
- Behold, the Australian "IT tax" makes everything 60% more expensive here Just Because™.
- There's absolutely nothing like Silicon Valley here. If there is I've never heard of it, and I live in Sydney, the most population-dense area.
Situation: the two political parties here (Labor and Liberal) have opposing ideas about how to implement our new fiber network. I forget who wants what (which says a lot).
- One wants fiber to the node, where you get a fiber termination box inside your house.
- The other wants fiber to the <some other term I forget>, where the fiber link terminates under the street or on a telegraph pole, and you get VDSL service along existing copper lines.
The problem: both solutions actually work, but the second one is a few million less expensive because fiber cable is a bajillion dollars per meter and it really does add up. (And then there's the problem that installers are nailing the fiber boxes to the first thing that looks like a wall because they have so many installations to do and insufficient resources, and then people are all like "???" when they realize their box is mounted to the ceiling... or at least that's what I think I heard...)
The other problem that nobody talks about: 1Gbps briefly got a "oh hey yeah that sounds awesome, we should look at that sometime around 2187" very early in the discussion a couple years ago, but I haven't really heard much to suggest this sort of capacity is actually going to happen anytime soon. And VDSL maxes out at 100Mbps.
It's a very difficult situation: do you create a technically-1Gbps-capable network capped at 100Mbps, or create a 100Mbps network for a few million less? Remember, there's no established Silicon Valley or similar scene here. Sure, there are tech companies, but it's not the same, there's no startup thing. (Case in point: how many .au companies are on Hacker News? Problem.)
Anybody can go out right now and get 500Mbps fiber for something like $499+/mo (business only - expensive Just Because™ \o/ (see? :/) and also due to SLAs etc) if you have fiber in your area (and the month has a Z in it), but that doesn't put it in the hands of random individuals. To enable the entire country (or at least the urban areas), the 1Gbps connectivity would need to be utterly ubiquitous, unconditionally deployed to everyone.
And so, in amongst all of this, all new dwellings are required (I think by law, or something close to one) to have fiber runs installed, and terminated in the street. Apparently the two new apartment blocks down the road from me have functioning NBN service, and I can see the "NBN" trench cover in the middle of the footpath outside the one I checked, so... it is rolling out, sort of, but all the political wrangling is creating a level of uncertainty that's slowing everything down horribly.
Oh, and the NBN (national broadband network)'s plan for rural Australia? 6Mbps satellite. What's latency? (Not much else they can do though :/)
I can relate in a certain way. In Germany, the state-owned Telekom wants to avoid the cost for building fiber networks, and instead squeeze multi-hundred-megabit connections through the existing copper wires with VDSL2 Vectoring [1].
They're the only one advocating this. Literally everyone else, from watchdogs all the way up to the EU commission, wants them to do proper fiber networks.
That's really interesting. I'm guessing they're doing it to save money. The idea of premature optimization comes to mind, but this is one area where the investment really does need to be made, and will be worth it in the long run - once it's set up it's unlikely to be changed for decades (!!).
I'm wondering if it's something nonfinancial, but I (honestly) can't figure out what it could be.
Fibre To The Node is to the street, Fibre To The Home is into your house.
This is a decent summary of the situation in Australia. The NBN rollout map, however, makes things look better than they are. There are places that have been stuck at “in development” for about three years now, and none of the areas that I ever look at seem to change. NBN has been much hyped, but has fizzled much more than you’d expect. Or hope.
I want to move out of Melbourne to a place in the country with good Internet supply (Stawell vicinity, mostly), but it’s surprisingly difficult to find housing in NBN-connected areas. Take Stawell for example: at a broad level you look on that map and see it’s covered. But it’s not: everywhere around it is covered, but Stawell itself is not covered. I’m not certain why, but I’m guessing there are difficulties in the line-of-sight fixed wireless installations.
> Fibre To The Node is to the street, Fibre To The Home is into your house.
OH, that's why I couldn't remember the second one, I confused it with the first one. Thanks.
> There are places that have been stuck at “in development” for about three years now, and none of the areas that I ever look at seem to change. NBN has been much hyped, but has fizzled much more than you’d expect. Or hope.
I see. I've talked to Telstra people (instore tech support) while discussing other things, and my understanding of their consensus was that if a given area doesn't seem to be moving, you could probably use it's stuck-ness as structural support for something.
> I want to move out of Melbourne to a place in the country with good Internet supply (Stawell vicinity, mostly), but it’s surprisingly difficult to find housing in NBN-connected areas. Take Stawell for example: at a broad level you look on that map and see it’s covered. But it’s not: everywhere around it is covered, but Stawell itself is not covered.
I'm in the North Shore area of Sydney myself, smack bang right in the middle of the new Sydney Metro project (a ~20 minute bus ride away from the closest station), and to be honest I do wonder if the NBN service to those new buildings (which does light up green on the map...) is actually live and functioning. There's no cable in this area and my current ADSL2+ is... right now my modem says 13102kbps - 12.79Mbps. My situation is similar: little dots of NBN connectivity (I see where all the new developments are!) but... crickets chirping where I live. Which, to be fair, isn't a major town center, just a suburb like any other, but still. I'm glad I'm moving soon.
> I’m not certain why, but I’m guessing there are difficulties in the line-of-sight fixed wireless installations.
Wait, what? I thought the NBN was all fiber and satellite. How does this work?
There are three levels: fibre, fixed wireless and satellite. Satellite is only for those who don’t have anything better available. Start at http://www.nbnco.com.au/learn-about-the-nbn/network-technolo... for more details, but it can be a bit hard finding all the right details.
Wireless can do 25/5 and now, I believe, 50/20. So it’s pretty good, better than ADSL2+ in bandwidth anyway (no idea about latency).
I do some astronomy as a hobby, and it really drives home the point that the great circle path is not the shortest distance between two points. At midnight, if you want to point to the Sun, it's basically straight down (modulo latitude/season/DST).
Or easier. Hillary is a face of western corruption to much of the world. So long as Trump delegates the tech stuff properly and doesn't do anything too unusual the moral choice of the US should be easier.
Not true here in France or most of Europe, for that matter.
The only people happy about Trump is ultra-right wing/neo nazi panopticon of odd figures - Wilders, Le Pen, Farage, Orban ... Really the "crème de la crème" of Europe. And, of course, Putin.
The rest is worried now - people are seriously questioning what happens, for example with NATO, after Trump's remarks on not unconditionally supporting the allies. Is Trump going to divide Europe between himself and Putin, e.g. in exchange for Syria? Is Putin going to have a free hand to invade Baltics now? What about Ukraine, Moldavia? Are we going to go back to the Iron Curtain era where Soviet "borders" were the ones with West Germany? These are serious issues which you don't feel on the other side of the Atlantic, but for us living there it is a big deal.
What about business? Trump made some remarks about erecting trade barriers to protect American markets. So, of course, this concerns us too.
On the other hand, the misogynist, racist, xenophobic BS he was producing during the last few months is mostly seen as disgusting, but finally mostly your internal problem. I am sure someone like Merkel is not going to be personally happy to have to sit next to him at some official function, but people do respect the result of the election and are professionals. GWB was not seen as the sharpest tool in the shed in Europe neither but everyone survived it.
Clinton was seen as a continuation of the US policies, so naturally people would have preferred her - nobody likes to rock the boat too much when it comes to foreign policy or business. Trump is seen as unpredictable, unreadable and incompetent in this regard, unfortunately.
Tread carefully; while I suspect most of Europe doesn't care too much about Trump, the media and rest of the left wing in the UK labelled anyone pro-Brexit as ultra-right wing / neo Nazi types - they're still being called uneducated and racist by presenters on TV as I'm typing this.
Then the vote for Brexit won a majority. They're not all scum at the extreme end of a political spectrum.
If France goes down the same naive, name-calling route Le Pen will surely be next to capitalise on it.
Read carefully what I wrote. I didn't write that supporters were "scum" or "nazis". However, do check who was the first to congratulate and cheer Trump's victory:
Nigel Farage - former head of UKIP in UK, a party with extreme right wing history and some of the most vile and xenophobic rhetorics during the recent Brexit campaign.
Marine Le Pen - head of the French Front National, another extreme right party, with documented history of antisemitism, racism, xenophobia and outright neo-nazi tendencies. Their former leader (Le Pen the elder) famously said that holocaust was only "a detail of history", even going as far as joking about not enough Jews going up in smoke ...
Geert Wilders - the Dutch extreme right politician, well known for his anti-Europe and anti foreigner views
Victor Orban - the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary, known for his xenophobic policies, coalition government with the neo-nazi Jobbik party and negative views on liberal democracy - which he is successfully dismantling in Hungary.
With Le Pen I am afraid you could be right - here in France she has consistently around 30-40% of support already and a lot of people see her as a saviour against the "Arabs" (mostly people of North African descent - Moroccans and Algerians, both legaly and illegaly here and, by extension, all muslims), which are despised by many. The recent terrorist attacks and incompetent governments didn't help neither, but the animosity goes deeper and longer back than that.
However, the French system of presidential elections works differently than in the US, with two rounds where the 2 strongest candidates qualifying into the second round. She will likely lose there, because the racist, antisemitic past of her party is unpalatable to many. On the other hand, if the major parties don't put forward a sensible and popular candidate, anything could happen ...
That's what you get when you generalize over all media and, especially, not knowing any of them.
European media are on both sides of the aisle, you will find both left and right leaning ones, including crazy tabloids.
However, what you likely won't find is something like Fox News, with conspiracy theory pushing nutcases being regulars there.
BTW, this theory about a "media conspiracy" is not new, nor something that Trump or Putin invented. Lügenpresse ("lying press") is a term widely popularized by (not invented) and mostly associated with National Socialists in Germany - in Hitler's Mein Kampf, for example.
Most people parroting this unfortunately don't care - anyone having a different view has to be a part of some complot or aiding the "enemy" (whoever that happens to be).
True story, when in Europe the cheerers are the ultras we all get it as a sign that something is not going in the "right" (ironically right) direction.
Anyway, too many actors, too many variables too many things to come. Just wait and see!
Silencing people you don't agree with by calling them misogynist, racist, sexist, etc. and expecting them to convert to your side does not work.
Marginalizing them does not work.
Not in Europe. (Brexit)
Not in the US. (President)
This strategy is 0 for 2.
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
Not only that, but you are also wrong on facts. There is no unconditional support of NATO allies by the US. See article 5:
"It commits each member state to consider an armed attack against one member state, in Europe or North America, to be an armed attack against them all."
Consideration of something is not unconditional support.
I don't know where you get your facts from, but the way the world sees the Clintons (whether corrupt or not) is as "expedient, better work with them, good things might come out of it." The way the world sees Trump is "what the fuck? This guy used to be a reality TV star in a program that didn't really make it outside of the US? What? He also says all this bizarre things?"
If you thought American image around the world was at its lowest it could reach during GWB's presidency, oh boy you are in for a surprise.
A lot of people are making categorical statements about whole countries, on what I can only assume are their own experience. I'm surprised that after Brexit, you can still be this categorical about "the will of the people".
Then that's a pretty bad argument that Trump's election will make software developers from "Europe, Australia, NZ, etc." more willing to come to the US.
I'm not actually. It was a reference towards the belief of many but not most that most of the west is dominated by a special political class that strikes underhand and immoral deals which they justify through the claim that they were democratically elected despite not having been elected for anything resembling those actions (often completely ignoring things they were elected for) and despite the process through which they were elected not actually being 'completely' democratic.
For these people Hillary and her ilk represent a local minima, and votes for her a stagnation or move away from actual democracy. The harm Trump will cause is indefinite and the claims that have been made are hard to substantiate, whilst he is obviously not an ideal POTUS it is not obvious that Hillary would be better.
Not obvious that Clinton would be better? It is certainly obvious to economists that taxing the increased economic welfare from trade and using it to help workers whose industries move is better than restricting trade. It is obvious to scientists that speeding up the movement from fossil fuels is better for managing Earth's climate than trying to bring back coal. It is obvious to criminologists that community policing is better for managing crime than stop and frisk and adversarial policing. It is obvious to sociologists that allowing gays to marry as they please increases their well-being and allowing women to control their pregnancies decreases poverty and crime. I can't find a single reason why Clinton would be worse.
Hillary is a face of western corruption to much of the world.
No, to 99% of the rest of the world she's just a former Secretary of State and the wife of a former president whose era is often viewed through a nostalgic lens compared to current turmoil.
No ruler manages bureaucracy alone. Trump will have to bring in classical Washington. We'd like to think that Trump will perform a full-on house cleaning, sourcing principally from his business connections, but the reality is that everyone needs classical Washington because each person you bring on is a king of his little fiefdom in the NSA, CIA, FBI, armed forces, etc.
You mean the torch/pitchfork mob has "proof" of it, much like the witch burning sheriffs of yesteryear. Either way, neither of them are getting convicted of anything, but not because Clinton is especially colluding, and that Trump is clean, but because they're both rich white people.
But if you actually believe your second part, you've obviously only acted towards your own confirmation bias and are incapable of seeing truth.
