> But at a fundamental level, the channel space (~60 across all bands best case) is extremely limited but the potential growth in transmitters is unbounded.
> only 1 transmitter at a time per channel - across all WLANs, yours and your neighbours, with no deterministic way to avoid collisions.
That’s not correct. You and your neighbor can use the same channel at the same time. On your network, the transmissions of the other network appear will appear as noise. As long as the other devices are far enough away, however, your devices will still be able to make out their own signal.
This is a common misconception.. you and your neighbour can configure the same channel, you cannot successfully transmit at the same time on the same channel within range. Nor can you and your own AP successfully transmit at the same time on the same channel.
When you and your neighbour _appear_ to be transmitting at the same time, each adapter is actually spending most of it's time waiting for a clear medium and for various backoff timers to expire before attempting to transmit.
"Appear as noise" is not defined for Wi-Fi adapters. There is only "I received a frame addressed to me and acknowledged it" or "I sent a frame and either did or didn't get an acknowledgement back from the receiver". Receivers do not know why they didn't receive a frame, or, if they received a corrupted frame, why it was corrupted. They just wait for a retransmit. Senders ordinarily wait a certain time to receive an acknowledgement, and if they don't, the start the transmit wait cycle again. But they often then reduce the data rate to increase the odds of a successful transmission.
I'm glossing over some complexity here, because there's a sender and receiver to consider, and each has a different view of the RF environment, but the point is always correct when all transmitters and receivers (lets say the 2 APs and each has 1 client) are in audible range of each other. And this is most of the time. Note that "audible range" (where the signal is such that the medium is deemed as busy by the adapter) is much larger than the "usable range" (where data can be transmitted at reasonable speeds). So transmitters create interference in a much larger area than they actually operate in.
That means your neighbour transmitting at 6Mbps to his AP will indeed degrade the performance of your client who wants to transmit at 600Mbps because your client has to wait ~100 times longer for a clear medium.
> There is only "I received a frame addressed to me and acknowledged it" or "I sent a frame and either did or didn't get an acknowledgement back from the receiver". Receivers do not know why they didn't receive a frame, or, if they received a corrupted frame, why it was corrupted.
That's not correct. WiFi is "listen before talk." Radios listen to the channel, trying to decode preambles from other networks, before transmitting. In that process, they can detect other signals well below the threshold where they'll consider the medium in use (the CCA threshold). If you have an otherwise clean channel, the noise floor might be -95 dBm. Radios typically can decode the preambles 3-4 dB above the noise floor. Conventionally, the WiFi standards set the CCA threshold at -82 dBm. So the radio can "hear" a lot of signals that won't cause it to trigger collision avoidance. More recent standards allow using a CCA threshold as high as -62 dBM under certain circumstances to facilitate spatial reuse: https://arista.my.site.com/AristaCommunity/s/article/Spatial....
Also, what the Wifi standards do is less aggressive than what radios could do. The CCA thresholds are set to facilitate orderly use of the spectrum--they're not physical limits. To receive a transmission, you just need sufficient signal-to-noise ratio. An adjacent network transmission raises the noise floor, but if your radio is close enough to your AP, you might still have sufficient SNR.
At my inlaws house, they and all the neighbors have Comcast, with routers that don't allow configuration of the channels. And since Comcast doesn't know how to configure their routers properly, all neighbors are sharing the same channels on both 2.4 and 5. It's fine if you are in the room near your own router, but it works poorly on the other side of the house, where I pick up neighbor signals at the same level as the desired one.
Only if the difference in signal power is high (>40 dB). It’s like saying collisions aren’t a problem in situations where no collision actually occurs.
If I’m in the room with one of my APs, my closest neighbor is a hair under 40 dB lower. But I can see a dozen other networks on my street, which means the other signals are strong enough where my phone can decode the packets.
The point is that wireless networks can use not only the channel dimension, but the spatial dimension. That’s the basis of things like MIMO.
> In a functioning system the U.S. Supreme Court would step in and check the power of all legislatures to gerrymander
Based on what authority, and according to what standards? In Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court's holding was based on the premise that it lacked legal standards it could use to judge whether a map was gerrymandered or not. Researchers in that case proposed various mathematical approaches for creating compact districts, but the Court found that there wasn't an approach that would distinguish permissible from impermissible gerrymanders.
Subsequent research largely bore out that premise. https://gking.harvard.edu/compact/ ("The US Supreme Court, many state constitutions, and numerous judicial opinions require that legislative districts be 'compact,' a concept assumed so simple that the only definition given in the law is 'you know it when you see it.' Academics, in contrast, have concluded that the concept is so complex that it has multiple theoretical dimensions requiring large numbers of conflicting empirical measures.").
Legislatures today can use software that creates biased maps while meeting compactness criteria: https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/stlr/blog/vi.... How do courts strike down maps as gerrymandered when you can use software to generate a variety of maps with very different partisan leans that all measure reasonably compact mathematically?
> Court has instead chosen to fan the flames by reducing barriers to gerrymandering. (whether racial or political party based)
Your characterization of Louisiana v. Callais is backward. That case struck down a racially gerrymandered map. In Louisiana v. Callais, the legislature originally drafted a pretty straightforward map: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2025_Louisiana_congr.... The district court then ruled that the map had to be more gerrymandered, to create a second majority-minority voting district: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2025_Louisiana_congr.... If you judge the maps according to mathematical compactness criterion, the additional majority-minority district in the second map totally flunks that test.
That is an area where the Supreme Court does have a concrete standard by which to judge whether maps are racially gerrymandered. Was race explicitly used to create the map? Then it's an unlawful gerrymander.
FWIW, my cousin lives in Canada and feels similarly to you. He structured his business deliberately around maximizing his exposure to the U.S. economy and minimizing his exposure to the Canadian economy. He tries to work for American clients, getting paid in American dollars.
> GDP/capita is often a relatively useless metric in modern times.
"Often" is the wrong modifier. GDP/capita aligns very closely with material standard of living for the median person. If you look at the GDP/capita growth in India and China since 1990, or South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, since 1950, that reflects very real increases in material standards for ordinary people.
There's two, relatively well-understood situations where GDP/capita isn't reflective:
1) Countries where the economy is dominated by resource extraction or tourism
2) Tax havens
But it's pretty easy to tell whether one of these exceptions applies. It doesn't in the case of Poland, which has a broad, diversified economy with a high level of industrial production.
> GDP/capita aligns very closely with material standard of living for the median person
GDP is an average, not a median, so it might align with the average person, not the median. The average/mean can hide many things (see Anscombe s quartet) which is one of the problems with GDP IMO.
It depends what you’re using the data for. If you’re comparing across countries, or looking at a developing country over time, it’s a relatively small factor. The ratio between the average and the median isn’t that big even in the U.S. (about 1.3). Meanwhile, Poland’s GDP per capita has tripled since 2005: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location....
I don’t know that there is any way to calculate a median value of GDP/capita. You can look at income distributions and find a median income and compare that to a mean income, which could allow an estimation, but beyond that, GDP is an intrinsically composite number which cannot be easily (at all?) broken down to individual contributions. I assume income is what the parent commenter is basing the median-mean comparison on, but it’s kind of out of nowhere with no explanation.
For purposes of comparing countries to each other and the same country over time, it’s not 30% off. The average skews higher than the median everywhere, so it’ll be 1.3/1.x.
If you have reported median incomes that are calculated the same way across countries and over time, that would be better. But many countries don’t reliably track that data, and the ones that do calculate it in completely different ways.
That all sounds reasonable. My concern was with your quote
> GDP/capita aligns very closely with material standard of living for the median person
GDP per capita is an average. This means it does not align with the _median_ person, but with the average. I believe this is factual and undeniable. No doubt it is interesting too to try to find other metrics for different usages as well.
> For purposes of comparing countries to each other and the same country over time, it’s not 30% off
You said the ratio for the same country between gdp mediand and average is 1.30. That means it is 30% off. Again, we can keep moving the goalposts and I could agree, but for the quoted statements i believe the above is true.
> GDP per capita is an average. This means it does not align with the _median_ person, but with the average. I believe this is factual and undeniable.
That’s why I used the word “align” instead of the word “is.” If the ratio of mean to median is 1.3, if the mean doubles, the median also will double—the movement of the two values will be “aligned” even if one is offset from the other.
That means when you’re talking about the economic growth of a country, Poland in this case, the mean is a reasonable proxy for the median unless there has been a massive change in the ratio of the median to the mean.
> align: to be the same or similar, or to agree with each other; to make two things do this
But I get it, you are using it as correlation.
Still, if gdp per capita average is 130 and median is 100 (ratio is 1.3) there is a 30% difference. This is exactly why, even if they correlate they are not very similar aka they "do not agree with each other" as per the definition above. With your definition they "align".good enough for me. It aligns even better (more closely) to the median.
No economy is K shaped. The vast majority of US income (78%) is earned by people outside the top 1%. It was as high as 90% during the bad economy of the 1970s. Since 1975, real GDP per capita has increased by a factor of 2.8. So the proletariat have 12 percentage points less of a number that’s 2.8 times bigger.
It’s a tragedy that scholars don’t study Singapore more to understand what it did right. When my dad was born in what was then Pakistan, Singapore (then part of Malaysia) was a poor country. Today it’s rich but the subcontinent is still poor. The best thing all these so-called “humanitarians” could do to improve the human condition would be to study Singapore to understand how that model can be translated to all the poor countries in Asia and Africa.
I agree. I worked in Singapore for a short while and I was so very impressed by the people and the government.
Singapore is a great place. It is breathtaking to see a government govern in the interests of its people. I live in the USA and we have two institutions, the democratic party and the republican party, that do little except cater to special interests.
I remember when I was younger there was a TV series showing the differences between how things are done in Singapore and my home country.
The show showed how efficient, clean, organized, fair Singapore is. An example, how they prevent traffic jams by providing licenses to roads which forced people to find and organize ride shares.
Fast forward to a few years ago, I had the privilege to fly there for a few days on vacation.
I got into 2 taxis there. One of them explained how corrupt the country was by the banking industry and the other, more memorable one, was a guy in his 70s that still had to work long houes while his wife was on her death bed at home. He called her while I was in the taxi, I saw the conversation and burst out crying myself. I ended up tipping him 100 USD.
Singapore can undoubtedly be brutal to some. But it's surrounded by countries where that brutal existence is the norm for almost everyone. My dad tells stories like that about his village in Bangladesh. He has a hard time denying my kids treats when they ask. When he was a kid, one of his cousins had asked for his favorite meal and his parents told him they'd have it the next day. But he got a fever and died overnight. That's a common story in Bangladesh, and it used to be a common story in Singapore. But in my dad's lifetime, Singapore became richer than Europe, while Bangladesh is still mired in hopeless poverty.
The poverty and dysfunction in Asian countries feels inescapable and permanent. My dad wanted to take my kids to see his village, but they overthrew the government last year so those plans are on hold indefinitely. I have no confidence that Bangladesh will ever be a place I want to take my kids. Singapore somehow managed to escape that trap. If it took a brutal, regimented society and economy to achieve that, then so be it.
The ironic thing is that the latter taxi driver I mentioned was actually Bangladeshi-Singaporean (I believe ~9% of Singaporeans are of Indian descent).
Reading the book Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus really opened my eyes to the instability and poverty in Bangladesh.
Yeah, Yunus is good at self promotion. But people like him are the reason that poor man’s wife died alone, thousands of miles away from her family and homeland. You see that story as a failure of Singapore. But in reality it’s a failure of Bangladesh, its founders, and its people. Singaporeans could have been in that same situation today if it hadn’t been for the actions of its leaders after independence.
Cheap foreign labor flocks to Singapore because it's much richer than the countries around it. But that's not how it got rich in the first place. Singapore had a restrictive policy on foreign workers until the 1980s. But by that point its GDP per capita was already almost as high as the UK's: https://emergenteconomics.com/2012/03/12/718/
And insofar as Singapore has such a policy now, the rest of the world should take notes. Creating wealth from poverty within a few generations is miraculous, and the system that achieved that should be emulated.
If the Sinaloa could turn an impoverished asian country into Singapore, I’d like to hire them and help overthrow the government so they can get to work. If you’re in such a country, everything is secondary to economic growth. GDP per capita growth translates directly into saving the lives of children.
Lot of places have a strong tradition of corporal & capital punishment for social transgression and aren't like singapore in other ways. Iran and China have the most similar policies and you don't see a lot of HN people singing their praises for it.
> and the interests of workers are far more similar than people realize.
You're confusing "experiences" with "interests." Worrying about paying your mortgage isn't an "interest" you have in common with someone else. It's an "experience." But people with similar experiences can and often do have conflicting interests.
One of the things Marx got right was to analyze society in terms of economic interests, and realizing that there was an intermediate class whose interests are more linked to that of the upper class than to the interests of the masses.
In feudal times, kings and barons needed lesser gentry to carry out their plans. "Billionaires" likewise need armies of professionals to run their organizations. This group "works for a living," but that's a superficial distinction. In reality, those peoples' financial interests are strongly linked to the interests of the billionaires. There's a lot of people who "work for a living" that sent their kids to college by helping paper up deals that moved factories and jobs to China. The fact that those lawyers and accountants and bankers also "work for a living" was only a superficial similarity they shared with the factory workers whose jobs were outsourced. What dominated was the material interest--one group had skills that enabled them to benefit from globalization. And another group lacked those skills and suffered from globalization. You'll see the same from AI.
Your "class solidarity" has had the opposite effect of what you probably intend. The more the upper middle class started seeing themselves as "part of the 99%," the more they diluted the mission of organizations that advocate for working class interests.
Perhaps incentives among workers will align better as those lawyers, accountants, bankers and other billionaire-supporting professionals themselves also start getting discarded by the billionaires in favor of AI and automation. The material interest alignment will evaporate the second the billionaires don't need those professionals.
I suspect you're correct. But people's behavior is driven more by what has happened, not what will happen. And what has happened is that the upper middle class has gotten much richer in material terms over the past 50 years. The top 0.01% has obviously gotten richer much faster if you count all the paper money locked up in the stock market. But it's not clear to me that Sergei Brin consumes more actual resources than a Rockefeller did. But their respective bankers and lawyers almost certainly do. If you look at the established, affluent suburbs where these people live, everything is much bigger and nicer than it was in the 1990s.
I doubt it. At least in the States, lawyers can always generate more make-work for themselves and are not seriously threatened by AI.
Courts will probably punish self-representation by AI just as heavily if not more so than self-representation without AI.
Lawyers have a de facto monopoly on legal practice, and too many politicians are lawyers or ex-lawyers for that to change any time soon. There’s not much opportunity for class consciousness to manifest there.
You’re overlooking the spatial dimension: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_multiplexing
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