Just outside Perth, WA. I pay for 400Mbps 'fixed wireless', which became available last year (prior to that it was capped at 250). On a good day I get 200/14.

Starlink was approximately the same at a similar pricepoint but I switched to NBN because hey, Elon doesn't need my money and at least I have an alternative now.

That's not the argument here, the argument is that the free market delivers value, but only when it's well set up.

According to the article, US has effectively enshrined local fiefdoms for ISPs, so free market competition just doesn't take hold there. In contrast, Switzerland allows competing ISPs direct access to common last-mile infrastructure, and the free market forces there have incentivised better products and better prices.

The free market does work, when given the right rails.

> In parts of America, you can drive for 24 hours in the same direction without even crossing into a different state

Which US states can you do this in? You can drive across Texas from El Paso to Port Arthur in 12 AFAICT. Alaska maybe?

Now Western Australia where I live ... 36 hours from Cape Leeuwin to Kununurra, and we only have 10% the population of Texas.

I don't really believe this is true, there are schemes which allow limited use tokens but which don't compromise the ZK nature of things - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...

Those schemes will never see the light of day, attribution is by design. Without attribution you will just see those tokens sold by the penny.

If you read the link, that’s not necessarily how things have to work. You can make limited-use ZK schemes, plus you fall into the usual trap of binary thinking, that if something isn’t 100% effective it is necessarily 0%.

There are a variety of schemes possible that do not have these flaws.

There's an interesting post here which goes into some of this - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...

So -

> Yep!

Actually nope.

Thanks for sharing, this was interesting to read! I wonder if the approach in the "How to win clone wars" section would also work to limit the number of accounts one can have on a given service (the article seems to rather consider rate limiting). It would be refreshing to have a forum where everyone is guaranteed to have at most 1 (or perhaps 2, say one anonymous and one with your name) account that is also backed by a unique government ID (without disclosing to the government your account or even that you have one). This could help a lot with the bot spam and trust issues.

I don't know how well it translates to the EU countries, but there seems to be this idea in the UK that air conditioning is a decadent frivolity, and really only for the weak.

And yes it does seem to get singled out as bad for global warming, which is odd as people in the UK most often use gas to heat their houses, where AC is very efficient and can use electricity from whatever source. It also works as very energy-efficient heating in winter.

You really only need the banners if you're doing privacy-impinging things.

Much like the GDPR notices that a small industry of 'compliance' product companies sold seemingly to everyone as necessary, they aren't if you're only using cookies for functional reasons and not tracking people. Unfortunately that leads to lower margins for advertisers and we can't have that.

Social media as it has become now is a shitshow where a minority of angry and/or disingenuous posters dominate discourse.

Twitter (X) was never the public square, and now it's little more than a playground for propagandists. The rest of us do well to ignore it, and it seems that even the 'legacy' media are starting to realise the days of breathlessly reporting on tweet-storms weren't great for anyone.

In a recent survey of under sixteen year olds in a place where an under sixteen social media ban exists asked how many of them used social media found that 80% were still using it. Do you actually need a login to consume social media? The answer to that is no. You can doom scroll all you want on sites like Reddit with no account whatsoever.

It's funny how this played out in different countries.

In Australia there is no chance of anything happening, because the courts ruled that payouts were limited to provable incurred losses. You pirated a movie? The maximum awarded at the end of a court case is going to be about $20, and as you can't buy very much lawyer-time for $20, it's never taken to court and the copyright-holders have effectively stopped pursuing people here.

I imagine they still go after prolific totrenters