IIRC, nerds were the primary drivers of the search engine wars.

How many of these would it take to drive down property values in a neighborhood?

How much more would you pay for a house with 1 or 2 neighbors instead of 4 or 8 neighbors?

There is your answer.

That's what North Dakota is for.

The number might be smaller.

If you take the Empire Builder from Chicago towards the northwest, one of the trains goes through North Dakota at night.

Every farm in the area has one of those mercury vapor lights in the yard, which are visible for tens of miles. If you sit in the scenic car then, you will see one of those farmstead perhaps every hour. It is very not populated.

If you're worried about how many neighbors you have, it sounds idyllic.

Well, if you fall ill, then you might decide that you have too few neighbors.

I agree! I think density is good, which is why I live in an urban area. What I don't get are the other people who live in urban areas who want them to be more like North Dakota.

I agree too. Far too many people want to live in an area with the services and vibrancy of an urban area, but with the number of people you'd find out in a rural area. It's just not practical or sustainable to build a community that way.

(Also, I get the need for peace and quiet sometimes, but it makes me sad how so many people in the US just... don't like to be around other people.)

Policy is a political issue.

But for modernity's sake, the site needs to add 100 MB of poorly-understood and maintained JavaScript dependencies that break the behavior you're describing so that it can be done entirely in JS.

Someone has to pay, but there's no requirement that someone gets to take a percentage as profit.

Where do you think a rinky-dink municipality gets the money to pay for infrastructure? They turn to capital markets, who will make a profit on the bonds or whatever.

They also don't build transformers in-house; they pay vendors for providing goods and services. Why do you think capital is any different from other services? If a private utility issues a bond, investors in the bond will also make a profit on the bond in addition to investors in the private utility making a profit on the utility.

Where does an investor owned utility get the money to pay for infrastructure? Because they're generally not cutting into profits to fund infrastructure improvements.

PG&E is paying 2.4 billion dollars a year in interest expense (at least in 2023), so it's fair to wonder if that's really any better.

What's the percentage?

"We have inferred that you need to learn more about Florzipan+ by Pajoobi."

I'd be very surprised if there's not at least a debug port onboard.

Sure, but FreeBSD also has a Linux compatability layer. For a company that's given up on the server market so many times, making MacOS compatible with _THE_ server OS makes a lot of sense.

Not if you're breathing through your mouth. Inhaled asthma medication has about the same consistency as brake dust.