- The anti-competitive forces that foil speedy, affordable broadband
Big players such as AT&T routinely issue press releases touting new deployments. But on closer examination, many of those touch only a few homes or businesses in an entire census tract, thus inflating the actual scope of the deployment, says Joanne Hovis, the president of CTC Technology & Energy, the company that prepared the broadband report for San Francisco. “The FCC’s data is very flawed,” she says.
What’s more, roughly half of the new fiber deployments cited recently by the FCC were mandated as a condition for approval of AT&T’s acquisition of DirecTV, says Ernesto Falcon, legislative counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And deployments have slowed because the major players have already cherry-picked the neighborhoods that offer the best prospects for high-paying customers, he says.
- In a WeWork World, Finding an Office Buddy Is a Social Minefield
Co-working requires a special set of social skills. Nisha Garigarn was visiting the Wing, a women-focused work and community space in New York, when an acquaintance from an event at another venue three years earlier approached her.
“She kind of inserted herself into the conversation I was having with my co-working friends,” said the 28-year-old co-founder of the co-working app Croissant. “It was really awkward.” Unable to extricate herself, Ms. Garigarn pulled out her laptop and pretended to read her email. Another friend got up to use the bathroom. Later, Ms. Garigarn watched a YouTube video on how to end a conversation gracefully.
- Universal basic income: The plan to give $12,000 to every American adult | Andrew Yang
In an UBI economy, corporations (especially retail) will view these funds as a subsidy and find ways to pay employees less, and squeeze out more profit. - Repairing All the ‘Structurally Deficient’ Bridges in the US Would Take More Than 80 Years
The ARTBA’s 2019 Bridge Report said that 8 percent—or 47,000 of the country’s 616,087 bridges—are “structurally deficient,” which the ARTBA estimates would cost $171 billion to fix. The report, published this week, is an analysis of data from the US Department of Transportation’s National Bridge Inventory.
“There’s a lot of conversation on Capitol Hill about investing in infrastructure; it’s the one thing both Democrats and Republicans agree should be done,” John Schneidawind, vice president of public affairs at the ARTBA, told Motherboard in an email. “But there’s little agreement yet on how to fund that investment.”
- How to (Politely) Get Someone to Sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement
“In the interest of maintaining good governance with future investors, we’re asking that anyone closely involved with this project at this early stage sign an NDA.”
What you are saying is that you’re planning to approach investors who will want to see that you follow best practices in the way you run your business. The fact that you can produce a list of people who have been exposed to the concept and who have signed an NDA will bode well with professional investors doing due diligence. It will also prevent them from using this as an excuse to nibble down the valuation.
Photo by Simon Maage on Unsplash
