Word of caution to anyone thinking of using this for pfsense: the realtek 2.5G drivers are not included in the pfsense image and have to be installed manually. A real pain if you don't have easy access to another freebsd machine.
As a cyclist, I'm super excited about one day being run over by one of these things. The giant vehicle trend is getting a lot of people killed.
And why does any vehicle need to accelerate that quickly? It's irresponsible on public roads. I would really love to see acceleration and speed limiters on vehicles.
I understand that there's a lot of other things in the bill; I'm not trying to dismiss that. But I think the big thing front and center is the desire of the government to bring chip manufacturing back to the states. That's what's driving the majority of the bill, it seems.
I love the idea of funding universities for prototyping and discovering new technologies, but the tech developed needs to be open to all, not locked behind a patent owned by MIT.
I don't see any functional difference in tax credits vs money up front. At the end of the day, the company reaps that benefit at the expense of our taxes.
I'll have to check out links 3 and 4 and see about sending in my comments, thank you.
I don't see any language around how we're going to recover those funds, if they are not spent in ways that align with the requirements laid out in the bill. Did I miss that section? It is a pretty big bill.
I do see a section that would allow the suspension of new funds, if it's found that these companies aren't upholding the agreement. I don't think suspension of new funds is sufficient.
Why should tax dollars be sent to a private company without anything but a promise in exchange? The promise of "jobs" isn't enough, as evidenced by just about every single other time that these programs (including the tax cuts) happen. Further, how are we going to hold these companies accountable for their promise? What comes to mind immediately is when we gave telecoms a bunch of wire up rural America, and they purchased and consolidated the cell providers instead.
If we just write them a check, they'll do whatever they want with it. They need to be held accountable, and ownership percentage is a way to do that.
Alternatively, the gov could take this money, start up a corporation of their own, and make their own fab. The language in part of this bill is that they are trying to ensure that older tech and DoD stuff is made in house. So let's make it in house.
We don't necessarily need to say "we're buying intel or nvidia", but we can make the money available to any company in exchange for the ownership percentage. That eliminates the "playing favorites" issue, I would think.
So the federal government wants to give these chip companies a bunch of money as long as they pinky promise to uphold the requirements of the bargain? Why does this situation sound familiar...
We should, at the very least, get some ownership of these companies in return for our investment, like any other private investor might.
I'm all for investing in these sorts of programs to bring manufacturing back to the US, but not like this.
The car-hate posts can be quite emotional for a number of (valid) reasons, but understand that reducing cars and car trips doesn't happen in a vacuum. No one is arguing to instantly and immediately eliminate every vehicle out there. It's part of a larger process to replace personal vehicles with transit, walk-ability, bike-ability, and generally car-free or car-reduced places where people live.
How old are the tracks and the cars? Anecdotally, the streetcars in Dublin are quiet and don't make any sort of racket. Same for the (single, sad) streetcar in Atlanta.
Streetcars (and buses) work best on dedicated or semi-dedicated routes. The problem with their reliability, in the case you describe, is the cars that are creating the traffic.
Ideal world would be seeing the laws preventing municipally owned ISPs struck down. I'd also like the see the right of ways municipally owned as well, to better facilitate competition with new providers.