Honestly, if Australia could roll out a national fiber backbone (almost a decade ago!) across the same approximate landmass as the contiguous 48 states at less than 10% of the overall population; there is no valid reason that the wealthiest nation to have ever existed can’t also do so.

Did Australia lay a national backbone as you said, or did they connect individual neighborhoods, or individual homes? Because all three of those are very different situations with very different costs associated.

I mean the US has had a national fiber backbone since 1995, but that doesn’t really mean anything about fiber to the home. I’m not sure rolling out a fiber backbone 10 years ago is really anything to brag about. However, extending the backbone to connect neighborhoods would be extremely helpful in lowering the costs to get fiber to the home, if that’s what they did in Australia, then that would indeed be laudable. If at the national level, they payed for fiber rollout to every home or every street… Well that would surprise me, but that would also be awesome!

So yeah, what did they do?

Well, now they know what it’s like to have a bachelor’s degree in any other field. Welcome to the club.

If you want a guaranteed job right away, go into medicine, or plumbing, those are safe bets. I expect people will always get sick and need to shit.