Here’s a gifted version, I think it still asks you to login but it’s not paywalled

https://wapo.st/3zKhYRV

That indeed looks like exactly what they are, which I should have known since I have a bunch of UniFi gear at home. I wonder what PennDOT is using them for.

I had no idea this factory was there and I live literally 5 minutes from Turtle Creek. I think more stories from media highlighting places like this that’s are often in people’s backyards can only help more folks see how the IRA helps their local communities, it’s not just some nebulous thing that only exists in news stories then.

These are small cell antennas, generally used for mmWave 5G due to the poor penetration the high frequency signals have or to increase capacity of a network where a lot of devices are used in a small space (places like stadiums, airports, city centers, etc) in which case they may have LTE antennas as well. They usually cover about a city blocks worth of area so you’ll see them spaced much like you describe.

The box on the ground is the actual radio and power supplies with the antennas behind the shroud on the pole. You’ll sometimes also see the radio cabinet mounted about 1.5m up the pole so it’s off the ground.

Source: a company I used to work for installed these (Crown Castle).

No, and there genuinely can’t be due to everything NOAA does. I used to work in the engineering group for NWS and there are so many parts to weather prediction and climate recording it’s not even funny. Sure there are satellites and radar, but there’s also over 200 weather balloons released each day across the US, there’s highly specialized software that fills the unique non-profit driven mission of the NWS, there’s advanced weather modeling run on super computers, there’s a whole network of thousands of volunteer observers that record temperature, dew point, soil temps, evaporation readings, and more to support agriculture, and then there’s the outreach both to places like schools but also to support things like amateur radio clubs and weather enthusiast clubs that all provide free observations and reports. Private industry consumes all of that data for free to repackage and sell as a product (they technically add value by tailoring it in many cases or use it to run proprietary models). All of that is just the NWS as well, NOAA does so much more that impacts everything from agriculture to fisheries and it’s so clear that the hard right pushing P2025 have no clue what they actually do. This single move would likely destroy the US position as a global breadbasket, and it’s just one tiny piece of P2025.

So the plan is to request an early ballot, then to take it to your polling place and assume the poll workers won’t follow the process and then you’ll take a picture of your early ballot to somehow own the libs? At least in PA the poll worker will just have you relinquish the unmarked early ballot and then you’ll vote as normal. If you don’t have your ballot then you vote a provisional ballot that is only counted once it’s confirmed your early ballot wasn’t returned. It’s not a hard thing and it’s well understood by poll workers on what to do.

Or you can use something like Squarespace or Wix and have a fully functioning website with everything you need in a few hours and start monetizing your views with ads. Both start at $16 a month so it’s a larger hill to climb sure but you get custom branding and don’t have to deal with the baggage of a Medium page (largely that it’s considered in many circles an untrustworthy source for pretty much any topic mainly because of how easy and barrier free it is to write there. They also have a pretty well established history of working to screw over contributors to profit off of your work including you automatically giving a full license to medium for everything you post).

If all you want is a newsletter though without a webpage to back it you can setup something in mailchimp with a custom domain (.coms start at about $10 from cloudflare). Again an hour or so of reading and configuring and you’re on your way, with an Adsense account you can even embed inline ads to your newsletter.

I’ve also never paid for a library card and I live in the US, so it’s clearly not always America. In fact most commenters here are noting they are paying small fees in euros so it seems this trend is common in Europe more so.

They are all SAG-AFTRA members as far as I know, and LoVM is a covered work so anything related to the show is likely on hold including con appearances (though it’s an animation work which seems to be in a grey area based on what I’ve read on SAGAFTRAs website). The stream though is not a covered work so can likely continue (and since they all need to make a living I would assume they will continue).

Food theory covered this in terms of Christmas trees. The answer is yes, mostly, with a lot of caveats, and also probably not really.

No, not by a long shot. They suffer the Linux problem because they are built and maintained by groups with narrow, specific, principled goals. Like Linux, fedi-services offer at best a 95% solution for the average user, and introduce a fair bit of friction to general usability. For some people that’s not a problem, they are willing to jump through some usability hoops because they find value in the concepts of decentralization and federated services. But most users just want to shitpost, troll, collect karma, and be with their friends. That place for better or worse is still mainstream services and it likely will be for as long as they exist.

Linux suffers from “works for me”, and “I don’t need that feature” by a lot of developers and maintainers of various distros. We already see that from Lemmy with the dev being clear that he isn’t going to be working on anything but bug fixes and if you want a feature then you have to build it yourself. But even worse was the removal of captchas in 0.18.0 and it took a fair bit of back and forth with the admins of various large instances pointing out that captchas, while not perfect, are really the only thing holding back giant waves of bot signups.

So while lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. may work fine for the devs and 10%ers, for the masses it’s just too much friction when Reddit, twitter, etc still exist and they aren’t principled in the same ways such that they will put up with the inconveniences for a solution that only meets most of their needs when one that meets all their needs and has none of those inconveniences works fine still.

Another option is to join as a contributor to one (or many) of the great apps already being worked on. This gives you a great way to learn how they work and to help the community with a much lower risk of failure since PRs are generally reviewed prior to inclusion and pushing new versions out.

I know a lot of fediverse users are very principled on federation and decentralization, but in think the real question is does it really matter? To the average user that just wants a website with funny pictures, bad memes, and posts looking for advice, why should they care that lemmy is decentralized other than the fact that it mages it harder for them to use the service in shell but real ways?

The fediverse has opportunities here to gain mass adoption, but taking a super principled stance that users should join small instances and avoid popular ones because that’s hire the fediverse is “supposed” to work pushed it into the sense problem Linux has for a very long time (and to some extent still does). The average person wants something to work and doesn’t really care if it’s free/libre or decentralized. If those things bring real, actual benefits then great, but if they introduce friction and trade offs then they will go right back to Reddit (or twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc). Some may say good riddance, but social platforms need people and if enough leave then the whole thing falls apart.

In general it’s because it’s difficult or impossible to fully monetize a user on a third party app. This could be because the API doesn’t serve ads (like Reddit) or because it’s harder to track and harvest user data when they are not using a first party app.

Essentially, platforms like Reddit make deals with advertisers that they will display an ad in a certain format near certain types of connect (and away from other kinds) and will show them to users with specific interests. They can’t really do that if the user isn’t coming through a platform the company fully controls (so their website or apps). On top of this, their apps are designed to keep you engaged as long as possible and to harvest as much information about you as they can without you getting upset and leaving. This lets them target ads more specifically (which means they can charge more for them) as well as sell that data to brokers for even more money (who then sell it to advertisers). It’s all about how to best turn your attention into money, and a third party app doesn’t allow that (either at all or as much as a first party experience).

Reddit specifically also wants to sell access to their data to companies like OpenAI to train large language models as additional revenue sources, to do that they need to lock down the API used by apps to work with the platform.

That isn’t at all what is happening, the world admin team has been very engaged with the project on GitHub with a ton of back and forth and various code pushes to fix the captcha pullback that’s in 0.18. The issue you are seeing is known and the belief is it should get better with the update to 0.18.1 that the devs have said is coming in the next few days. It seems to be partly due to the size of the world instance and the problems with web sockets. You’re likely being downvoted for appearing to be authoritative about this and blaming the world admin team (it’s more than a single person) when they know this is a symptom and have a plan they think will fix it that a little more digging into the history of why they’ve chosen to forgo the 0.18.0 update would have answered your questions.