Monthly Archives: September 2023

WP is Broken… Again

by in Uncategorized | 25 Comments

Returning from a few days offline, looks like WP is again malfunctioning for me.

My phone is apparently now useless for anything more than getting logged-in to my own page.  But that’s about it.  And it seems like maybe Akismet, or some other internal malfunction, is blocking comments from the laptop I usually use for accessing WP from home.  At first, it was asking me to log in to my email account through WP before processing comments. (I’m not processing my email password through WP!)  Now, the comments just spontaneously disappear.

Maybe WP will sort it out… or not.  Looks like I can still “like” articles.  But that’s about it.  So you’ll have to excuse the “lurking”.

Cheers!

木漏れ日

by in Culture, Death, Existentialism, Japan, Luminous Aether | 23 Comments

“To acquire knowledge, one must study;
but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.“
– Marilyn vos Savant

Westerners like to define things.  And in that regard, the English language has great strength in its ability to be uncompromisingly precise in its implementation.  It’s a language that can be applied to distilling even one’s deepest thoughts into an inner voice of categorically detailed instructions.

For this reason, the vagaries of Japanese can sometimes be a little difficult to translate into English. And the title to this post is one of those cases, where the actual meaning to the expression is lost in its definition.  The whole purpose of what it says is to intimate the ethereality of a feeling through an image.

The three “kanji”, or logographic characters borrowed from written Chinese convey images to anyone familiar with their meanings, even if one doesn’t know how to voice them.  The first character represents a “tree”, and the second elicits an image of rain leaking through a covering.  The third character is the only phonetic Japanese, the sound “re”, suggesting an action in the previous character.  And the third and last kanji represents the day or the sun, or its light.

It is not rain that is leaking through the cover of trees.  Momentary fragments of light are what scatter into these shadows.

–

Last year, I lost a good friend who I’ll call “Dan”. In his early/mid seventies, he died in his sleep at his home in Thailand. He was a truly intelligent, worldly, and just friendly human being, and probably one of the happier people I’ve known. One of those stable, sounding-board types, I’m a little surprised at how much I miss him.

His wife still grieves terribly, and I understand why. She’s from Thailand, well-educated, and also a U.S. Citizen. Dan had made certain that she would be well cared-for if anything happened to him; but there are some things we just can’t replace. She still refers to him as, “My beautiful, Dan.”

Dan had been in the US Navy during the Vietnam War, as a radio operator. Apparently, the position had given him a security clearance of some sort. And afterward, that landed him with a job in his twenties as a personal courier accompanying packages and documents to their destinations in foreign countries. For a young man from in an insular backwater of Oklahoma, the experience left him unusually worldly.

Back in the US, he started a house-painting business, and then worked as a firefighter while setting-up a rental business in the Bay Area. But he kept traveling, mostly throughout Asia, and had fallen in love with Thailand. So during the mid 2000s real-estate boom, he sold everything, began pulling from his retirements, and then traveled to Thailand to propose to his wife.

Every summer, they would stay in their home here in the US to escape the heat.  And in the winters, they would travel back to Thailand to escape the cold.  But Dan mentioned on a couple of occasions that he’d be fine if his wife ever decided that she’d grown weary of the US.  “You and your husband should come and stay with us,” he’d say.  “We have a nice beach.  And you can be in ChiangMai, or DaNang or Singapore in a couple of hours.“

Dan was the kind of person who thrived on experience.  He had little use for status symbols, shiny cars or the latest tech. And he was a prolific reader. One of the last times I saw him, we chatted over coffees about how much Hong Kong had changed.  But where I focused on the academic aspects of economics and politics, he saw something more elemental.

He asserted that there was an aspect of Hong Kong that had created itself, exemplified in places such as the city’s “monster apartments”, sprawling night markets, the Chungking Mansions, or Kowloon’s “Walled City”.  And then he told me about once sitting atop a concrete wall at the end of the runway at the city’s notorious, Kai Tak Airport, closed-down in 1998, while jetliners took off just over his head.

In retrospect, he was reminiscing about the profound exhilaration of those brilliantly existential moments once possible in the shadows of a sort of frontier culture that no longer exists.

–

“The gods don’t allow us to be in their debt. They give us sensitiveness to beauty in all its forms, but the shadow of the gift goes with it.”
― L.M. Montgomery

Life is about our momentary experiences, and those are entirely individual and subjective.  But I have found a few truths in the flickering patterns.  And one is that we hold on to things in an ever-changing world at our own peril.

I like to think that I’m pretty good at letting go.  But as much as we might like to believe in ourselves as autonomous and intelligent beings, all that really drives the natural-selection that has resulted in our species is that we humans can reproduce faster than we die-off.  So the sources of most human action (or lack thereof) consist of the avoidance behaviors that have kept our species going. And mostly, these are centered around fear, loneliness, and boredom.

I’ve never been a particularly fearful person… perhaps to my detriment.  And as someone else here once noted, boredom isn’t so much of an issue if you’re open to learning new things.  But the vast territory between requires traveling an ambiguous path, illuminated by the momentary radiance of others, brief revelations of beauty in the shadows.

Dying in the Last Mile

by in Hmmm..., Politics | 19 Comments

“…back in the thirties, the money went to infrastructure.  The bridges, the municipal buildings, the roads, those were all built with stimulus money spent on infrastructure.  …a $500 rebate check… That went to buy flat-screen TVs made in China.”
— Michael Bloomberg

The “Internet” is an infrastructure of patterns, pulsing and winding its way around the Earth. It’s the fiber-optic cables through which data in the form of laser-light flashes travel, and the flipped switches of electromagnetic “ones” and “zeros” that redirect information down particular sets of copper wires. And, it’s the business transactions that negotiate their passage.

“Tier-1” refers to the Internet’s spine. These are the fiber-optic cables that span the planet, crossing entire continents or passing under the seas to connect distant lands. They are always connected, continuously moving massive, collective bundles of data, like light-speed shipping containers filled with information. There are only a few such networks, owned and operated by global-scale mega-corporations such as the US-based AT&T, Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, or the Japanese NTT Communications.

“Tier-2” networks are also sometimes called “Internet Service Providers”, or “ISPs”. These are where the distal parts of the Internet connect with the Tier-1 networks and with each other in order for the packages of information to be delivered to their intended recipients. This part of the Internet is dominated by transactional “handshakes” between networks, constantly working out ways to move packets of information to their destinations most efficiently.

And then there’s the “last mile.”

This the part of the Tier-2 Internet infrastructure that moves data from an ISP’s final connections along utility poles or through underground cables and into neighborhoods, homes and businesses. It’s the last piece of physical infrastructure through which data is transported during its journey to your email client, web browser, or game console. And it’s the part of the Internet that actually connects individual customers to the rest of the network.

In the US, the last mile constitutes a problem that’s resulted in our having some of the worst Internet service in the world. This is due to two factors, one technical, and one economic. The former restricts the bandwidth needed for today’s internet traffic. And the latter is due to a lack of competition between carriers, resulting in little incentive either to improve services or to reduce costs.

A great deal of US infrastructure in general runs through old or outdated physical systems, and the Internet is no exception. Much in the US still uses copper wires not all that different from those of technologies invented more than a century ago.

These copper-wire infrastructures known as “twisted pair” and “coaxial cable” were originally designed for older, “analogue” telephone and television systems. Running modern digital signals through such physical infrastructure reliably requires using a number of tricks that result in either extremely costly systems or slow rates of data transmission.

When the data from that high-resolution, streaming video you just clicked on reaches the last mile, it suddenly finds itself having to transition from a fiber optic cable to copper. And since the copper can’t carry anywhere near the bandwidth of the optical fiber, the data suddenly finds itself going from a relative superhighway to being choked into a traffic-jammed 2-lane. And if that old copper-wire system has deteriorated or corroded or has any poor connections, it can become like creeping down a potholed road with washouts.

Internet connections to things like virtual environments, Internet gaming, and streaming HD movies simply require far more bandwidth than can be accommodated by copper wire. So ISPs must lay optical fiber, upgrade the servers that feed them, and spend more on the engineering and maintenance of these systems in order to keep them working in ways that meet users’ demands. But that costs big money… tens-of-thousands of dollars per mile (pdf warning) according to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. And this is only half of the problem.

In most other industrial and post-industrial countries, ISPs must either compete to operate infrastructure, or they’re regulated as public utilities and required to adhere to specific standards. However, last mile infrastructure in the US is controlled by a government-permitted and effectively self-regulated oligarchy.

Just four big companies: Comcast, Charter, AT&T, and Verizon have virtual, territorial monopolies on the lion’s share of US hard-connections to the Internet.  And without competition, there’s no incentive for any of them to improve infrastructure.

Moreover, the exclusive infrastructural rights allowed by the US government permit setting any price for a service, regardless of the quality of the product. The result is that many Americans really have only a single, costly choice for “broadband”, with the term being almost meaningless according to its FCC definition. So it shouldn’t be any surprise that US Internet services are among the world’s most unreliable, slow and expensive.

—

Why I’m writing this…

Almost two decades back, maintaining a 1-megabit connection to a file-server that I used for my work required a subscription to two, coaxial-cable connections that cost me several hundred dollars per month.  My ISP even added $10/month to the price of my service because I didn’t (not a typo) also want to pay for cable TV.

At the same time, a friend in Okazaki, Japan (near the city of Nagoya) had a single, 12-megabit coaxial-cable connection that cost her the equivalent of about twenty-dollars per month.  In the Tokyo area, about ten-dollars more is presently the cost of a 500-megabit to 1-gigabit, fiber-optic connection.

Compare that to my current, $75/month service as documented here, and by the company’s own system.  Yes… 10.3 megabits… and that’s in the morning.  In the evening, when there’s more local Internet traffic, it drops to more like 8-megabits.  And yet, my Internet service provider claims that I have a 300-megabit connection (though I notice that their new modem is only rated to 250-megabits).

By the FCC’s own metric of 25 megabits per second download and three megabits per second upload as meeting the definition of “broadband”, my old ISP has never given me access to such a service, despite their own incredible claims to the contrary.  And yet, the most recent (December 2018) broadband deployment report from the FCC has found that very nearly everyone, everywhere in the US has broadband. Really?  Is it just me that’s been left in the last decade?

Put bluntly, last-mile Internet service in the US has become another corporate scam.  And because few Americans are familiar with comparable services in other countries, we don’t realize how bad things have become.  As large internet providers have settled into comfortable niches with little fear of meaningful regulation or competition, Internet infrastructure in the US has been allowed to languish.

ISPs are entirely capable of delivering better speeds and better service. But a focus only on short-term profits simply kicks the can down the road, making long-term investments in infrastructural improvements increasingly costly.  And the 2020 Frontier bankruptcy demonstrates exactly where this inevitably leads.

From a broader perspective, this is a fundamental flaw in the US approach to either officially or de-facto allowing for the de-regulation of monopolized corporate management of critical US infrastructure.  And it’s not an issue confined to just the Internet, or to one particular political party. US regulatory agencies are routinely headed by appointed political nods to the very industries they are tasked with regulating.

The result has been decades of massive profit-taking at the expense of maintaining systems that benefit all Americans. From water and electricity to highways and air-travel, so much US infrastructure has been neglected for so long that merely maintaining what we have now has become almost impossible.  And if government has supplied anything, it’s merely an analogy in empty rhetoric, questionable management, and aging anachronisms that are barely able to make it the last mile.