SteveGerencser

I worked in New Mexico in the 90s with a 'gravel' operation that was selling off the gravel left over from mining operations decades and decades before. Tall piles of just rock we loaded into trucks and sold.

At some point they discovered that the old timers left enough gold in the tailings piles that it made sense to use modern techniques to reclaim that already out of the ground gold before selling the gravel. That triggered a multi-year legal fight to 'stop them from raping the land through gold mining'. Not only did they want the 'mining operation' stopped, now they also wanted the current owners to 'properly' remediate ancient mines scattered through the property. Some of these mine were legitimately historical places where South American's were coming north to mine Turquoise and Silver several hundred years ago.

We ended up not only losing access to the tailings piles for gravel use, but were then required to clean up the mess left by mining operations that had not existed for a hundred years or more. It shaped the way I view most people that claim to want to save the environment to this day. There is rarely any middle ground anymore and has become and all or nothing platform.

Agreed. If the NCAA catches you buying dinner for a college athlete you can lose a number of scholarships for several years. Why wouldn't these violation of H1Bs come along with a fine and a loss of H1B access for x number of years? That would go a long way toward solving the problem.

Like most features that Google releases, I believe that they use them to train their algorithms and once they get enough human input on a feature from people using it, they remove the feature and turn it over to the machine. We see it on the SEO side all the time. Release a feature, call it a ranking factor, thousands of SEOs jump all over it. The algo learns and then the features importance is removed. NoFollow links are a great example of this.

Yahoo had a system along time ago where you could slide results more toward shopping or more toward informational. Like most features like that, it didn't last very long.

He and I have had a very close relationship for a very long time. That had a lot to do with him taking me seriously and me willing to spend the time needed to talk with him. While I call it a conversation, it was a lot of conversations over several months. And after many of them he wouldn't talk to me for a few weeks. It really was a process. Without the underlying relationship I suspect one or the other of us would have simply walked away from the other. But that is a hard thing to explain in a short HN post.

I had a friend who was fired from, or quit, every job he had for nearly a decade. He response was always the same, "the boss is a moron" or "the people there are idiots". We had a long conversation where I laid it out for him. The odds that after 10 years everyone he worked with was an idiot or a moron were pretty slim and the only thing every single one of the those people had in common was him.

Fortunately he took me seriously and had a lot of growth in a short period of time. He's been at his last job for 15 years and moved to the head of his department and gets a bit of a laugh now when he hears that people working for him think he's a moron.

The same thing can happen with Google Ads Accounts. I've seen a several ad agencies get totally destroyed when a client does something that violates the TOS and then you get the 'guilt by association' ban. Then this propagated out to all of their other client accounts because, well, guilt by association.

Rather than Google taking the time and effort to identify the single issue, it's FAR easier for them to just ban anything that touched those accounts. It is hands down my single biggest worry when working with Google. And why I immediately revoke access for anyone (including me) that does not need direct, active, access to any account. There is simply no way to talk to a real human and say, look, I've been working with you since you launched and this one account way over here that's 'new' did something you don't like and now I'm banned for life?

Sounds about right. They wanted me to pay $180k for 10mb fiber to my place. It was a 12 mile pull for them with plenty of people along the way for them to sell to though.

It's been that way since the beginning. I went to a small school in Northern Indiana in the mid/late 80s. The board refused to invest in any computer technology other than the DEC they had because they felt that computers were a passing fad.

Right, but it doesn't go up and down like a jackhammer when the weather is rainy, windy, sunny, hot, cold, or dry. And yes, we are 3.1 miles from a CO and the nearest fiber drop is 14 miles from here. The service guys are at the CO resetting equipment to get me back online so often I know them all by name and they know what the problem most likely is when my address comes up on a service ticket.

Because I also have a wife that wanted to live in the country? Where people live is rarely about 1 single thing, it's a compromise between all the needs and wants. For us, living in the country on a small farm checked an awful lot of boxes. And we were "told" that there was decent internet here - 25Mb was normal. After moving we found out that 2 or 3 was normal and TDS just flat lies about their offers.

I prepaid for Starlink 4 or 5 months ago and just waiting for my turn to get it.

We did talk about setting up a community point to point system but the 'old guys' that run the area are more interested in getting (forcing) more people on to 'city' water than anything actually useful because city water fees are the only thing keeping this town alive.

We moved to a small rural community where a T1 isn't even available. I can get a 3Mb DSL connection or satellite. I have both because I need to redundancy.

I did call to see what it would cost to have 'real' internet brought out here. They were happy to bring out a fiber line from the nearest town to serve our area. But it was going to cost me around $5k/mo with a 3 year contract for a 10Mb dedicated line. It's cheaper to do point to point relays from that far.

The real issue is that the telcos have been collecting fees for years specifically aimed at rolling out broadband into rural communities and they have done nothing but pocket the money.

Vaguely - This client was in the fitness niche and made the mistake if upsetting the vegan bodybuilder niche. The vegan bodybuilder group went hard after anyone that said it was harder to put on muscle with just plants. No shadiness, no spam, just a disagreement about building muscle.

This isn't much different than when Google de-indexed millions of .co.cc domains. They determined that there were so many spammers on those domains that it was better to just remove them all and stop worrying about it. It did get a very few legit sites in the process, but not enough to care.

I get that the people here want more control over their devices, but to be fair, anyone posting here is at the extreme end of the tech spectrum when compared to your average phone user. Those phone users want someone else to help them. It's why I have spam assassin crancked super tight on the mail server that my parents use. They would rather miss a few legit emails and texts than get flooded with spam.

The .co.cc discussion was here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733352

I'm surprised it's taken this long for them to get somewhat serious about this. I've worked with clients who have hate brigades that report everything they do and publish in an effort to get their pages and ad accounts shut down. I've gone as far as finding in infiltrating Facebook groups that openly talk about this while planning their next attack. Reported the groups for months and no one at FB cared.

Early on 'dealers' would set up shop and build up the market for a particular car brand. In many cases the manufacturers would see which markets were 'best' and then setup their own sales floor directly competing with the car dealers.

They could easily undercut the dealers and drive them out of business. The law was designed to protect the dealers from the manufacturers.

We are seeing it more and more now in many markets and niches as manufactures are cutting out dealers that built the markets and selling 'direct to consumer'. The difference is that most manufacturers saw what happened to the car companies and are trying to carefully avoid having the same thing happen to them.

I always assumed that the movie Airborne killed it.

This was tried in many large cities in the 60s and 70s. The apartment buildings were ugly and generally became havens for gangs and crime. So.much so that most of them were eventually torn down. Cabrini Green is an example of this.

Building housing alone does not solve the issue. There is a massive support issue that also needs to be addressed. Jobs, child care, food, and so on.

We used to refer to these things as press release politics. There is no goal to enforce any rule or punish anyone, they are designed for those on the political side to say, see, look how hard we are working for you, then the business consents to some minor thing with zero punishment and gets to say, see, we worked with the people in politics and we have all made things better.

You can see this see this at all levels of politics and business.

Very much this. I also work in wood and it amazes people that it can often be easier to make 5 or 10 of something than just one simply because of the jigs we make.

But then he would have broken the law by passing a knowingly bad check.

The problem is much deeper than that for sellers. Enough negative reviews can end your ability to sell on Amazon. Add to that, reviews are part of the ranking algorithm, positive reviews will play a role in where you place in a product search.

As someone that helps clients with their Amazon stores, this is not a surprise, what is the surprise is that so few people know about. Review scamming has been an issue on Amazon for a very long time and each time that Amazon rolls out a new method of combating it the review sellers simply pivot and keep right on rolling.

The hardest part for a lot of smaller sellers is that with enough negative reviews you can have your account locked or even cancelled and there is nothing (not much) you can do about it, just like dealing with a Google or Facebook lockout. There is no recourse for most people.

Many years ago I managed a small company that gave out bonuses. It was miserable for the most part. People did come to rely on those bonuses as if they were actual pay.

I worked with the owner to develop a system where if the quarterly bonus was over a specific amount 6 quarters in a row we translated that into a pay raise for everyone and that would effectively remove/lower the bonus but give the employees more stability. It has been a lot of years since I have been there, but the last I heard the bonuses were very small but the avg. pay was nearly 2x over any other company in the same industry. Turnover is near zero and the number of people waiting to get a job there was significant.

Just think of all those low quality links placed there for SEO reasons that are about to vanish.

I priced having a 10m fiber connection brought out here. I was quoted just over $5k/month with a minimum 3 year contract. I assume they were expecting me to just pay for the new service to the entire area for them to resell.

Wife wanted to live out here. So we traded my being able to work easily for amazing views and lots of land. Not entirely unhappy with the trade, but there are days when I think about just renting an office in town. (30 minutes away).

I love these posts. They remind me that there are places in the world where technology is moving forward. Where we live in Tennessee I have to run 2 internet connections to be able to have a service when I need it. 3gb DSL and a 5gb satellite connection. The sat connection has the additional bonus of being capped at 150Gb per month. All these new streaming services may as well not even exist for those of us in rural areas.

I don't recall where I heard this, if it was a serious suggestion or a comedian, but the idea was simple. When a person reaches legal drinking age they get a drinking card allowing them to drink and buy alcohol. Not use their driver's license.

Do something illegal that involves alcohol, lose your drinking license for x years to forever. Get caught selling/serving alcohol to someone without a card, that's a 'crime' now.

Additionally, since you are not removing their driver's license as punishment, they can still do things like go to work, take care of kids/family and so on. they just can't drink legally. Obviously lots of issues and ideas, but that is the basic idea.

Electric fences only encourage containment with our cows (Highlands). One of our bulls steps between the wires and lets the fence shock him on the back for minutes on end with him only moving slightly to reposition the shock. I think he is doing his own TENS treatment for a sore back. I really need to record him doing that one day.