revets

My wife was in the Peace Corps in Bulgaria in the 2000s. Not too long after the program was closed. Her impression was while most everyone was very receptive to her role, there was a small contingent of Bulgarians that found it slightly... humiliating maybe... to be part of that program. As though it put their country in the same category as true third world countries unable to provide drinking water or other basic necessities. She speculates that's among the reasons the program ended there. Any similar feedback in Ukraine?

Jumping in with a nearby resident's opinion... I think a big Napa Cabernet is in a class of it's own but, being just middle-class, I can't justify the purchase price of them. I could spend $70-$120 for a bottle and have on rare occassion but I often find I don't enjoy drinking it at $20-$30 a glass in the back of my mind. I also cringe at $20-$25 tasting fees. Besides top-tier cabernets, nothing else in Napa seems particularly better than what can be found the much less trafficky and much less expensive nearby Russian River valley.

That said, besides the excellent brand Napa has made for itself, the tasting rooms are often quite a bit more elaborate in Napa as are the nearby hotels, spas, etc. That helps make it the premier wine destination along with the neighboring and sometimes indistinguishable Sonoma proper. Places like (west) Sonoma county lack those prestige attributes and other regions like Monterey county or San Luis Obispo lack the density of wineries to make it as attractive.

When friends are coming up to the area specifically for a wine tasting vacation I tell them look to Napa. When friends are coming up and want to just wine taste for an afternoon I tell them to head to the Russian River valley.

Pick a California city and google "(city) ten most wanted".

Net neutrality is "Telecom companies can't discriminate data".

Again though, why should I care about ensuring Netflix' data? The ISPs aren't targeting Aunt Minnie's online bead store. Presumably there are real costs associated with adding network capacity to handle the surge of video streaming. Why am I concerned if those costs are absorbed by my ISP versus by my streaming provider? Somehow I'll be paying for it one way or another.

It sounds like a Ticketmaster situation to me - who basically volunteer to be the bad guys on their fees when in reality the venues and artists get most of those fees kicked back to them, but customers blame Ticketmaster almost exclusively for the charges. The large content providers want the ISPs to assume the Ticketmaster role and the ISPs don't want that.

The only real resolution is competition and regulating the shit out of ISPs doesn't seem the way to encourage that.

Why am I supposed to rally behind Netflix or Google/YouTube at the expense of Comcast? Comcast is the only ISP to actually invest in my neighborhood (at one point I hoped you guys would look into Rohnert Park but you seem only interested in fiber in the the city and Silicon valley the past few years).

If it wasn't for Comcast I'd be sitting on some crappy 768K DSL line at this point. Frankly I'm more appreciative of that multi-billion dollar corporation than the other multi-billion dollar corporations who want me to scream bloody murder on their behalf. Somehow I doubt Comcast is going to target my smallish sites - they seem to want the massive traffic producers to cover some of the expenses which doesn't sound so outlandish.