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predictions reveal more about today than the future.2016. DHS sues City of Oakland to overturn local surveillance-limiting laws.2016. OUSD adds practical street actions to middle school civics curriculum.2017. 150 thousand people attend July's First Friday festival.2017. City government connects fiber to all its buildings.2017. Council asks the public to ground their drones inside the chamber.2018. Raiders win Super Bowl. Then leave Oakland for Bakersfield.2018. Activism charter school launches. Fills up in 36 hours.2018. Biohacker Row draws genomic and nanotech startups to High Street neighborhood. Protests follow.2018. Half of all mayoral campaign money comes from outside Oakland (Open Disclosure).2019. City mourns passing of canine mayoral candidate Einstein. (Einstein for Oakland)2019. The countercultured Sudo Room partners with Starbucks to roll out Sudo Space maker spots in 400 locations, 17 in Oakland. Sudomate added to the menu.2019. Comcast and AT&T sue Oakland to prevent municipal fiber initiative.2019. Oakland triples the number of trees in the city, funded by carbon credits.2020. Oakland passes safe haven laws for The Pirate Bay.2020. Oakland Parks and Recreation department hosts fourth annual Fly In The Park Day for UAV hobbyists.2020. The number of churches falls by one-third from 2010; the number of brew-pubs, hacker labs, and coworking spaces double.2021. Oakland matches federal drought-proofing funds.2021. City approves distribution of marijuana anywhere cigarettes used to be sold.2021. City requires free Android device and data plan for all social service recipients and students as condition of mobile operators to do business in Oakland.2021. OUSD opens technology transfer office to commercialize discoveries and innovations by students and faculty and to invest in student startups.2022. City elects first intersex mayor in California. A Republican.2022. Oakland's first driverless smart-car sideshow reboots car culture.2022. Sales through bodegas, convenience stores, street markets, and delivery services outpace supermarkets, big box stores.2022. Chinese property investment stops during economic contraction; skyline full of half-built buildings for four years.2023. Oakland falls from list of most violent U.S. cities. Drug decriminalization credited.2023. 43 thousand people participate in VR town halls with city council and mayor.2023. Staff member resigns after budgeting to solve geezer homeless crisis by buying bus tickets out of town for seniors.2023. AC Transit retires last non-electric buses.2024. City completely recovers from massive earthquake damage in three years. High density housing replaces thousands of homes.2024. Oakland Congresswoman Kaplan runs for U.S. Senate.2024. Two percent of Oakland being farmed; half for food.2024. The City of Piedmont asks to become part of Oakland in exchange for assumption of employee retirement obligations. Oakland says no.2024. Protests over police monitoring of Internet-connected subdermal devices of people walking in public.2025. Port of Oakland finishes new automation, quadruples tonnage moved with fewer workers.2025. CSU Oakland MOOC serves 135,000 students with biotech, ganjabiz, and the arts dominant.2025. Last BBQ restaurant closes.2026. Last year Karl the Fog seen online or in Oakland.2026. Oakland hires consultants to manage variability in the dollar/bitcoin exchange rates.2026. Council votes for civil engineering bonds to dike and dam bay water incursions into 22% of Oakland.2027. Oakland falls from list of most violent California cities. Credits a mix of aging population, gentrification, universal connectivity.2027. OUSD adds mindfulness and meditation to school core.2028. Second and third Transbay Tubes open with new stations at Jack London Square, KoNo/PillHill.2029. New gentrification wave pushes median income to $7k, monthly rent to $5k.2030. The Oaklander diaspora drive ups rental and homeowner prices along the Bay-Sacto corridor and from Pleasanton to the Central Valley.2030. 50th mile of dedicated bus rapid transit. [thanks to Ian Wooley]2031. Cafés shift to cool drinks in seventh drought year as coffee prices soar.2031. Twentieth anniversary of Occupy Oakland honors retired mayor Jean Quan for her police reforms.2031. Mandarin eclipses Spanish as Oakland's second most widely spoken language.2031. Oakland celebrates opening Pacific Coast bullet train station, one of three in the Bay Area.2032. Oakland's floating city has 23k permanent residents in the bay.2032. Oakland's 100th public library goes online, connecting every neighborhood to the city's mesh backplane.2033. Oakland's Chinatown reborn as tourist mecca for prosperous PRC men seeking American wives as China's gender imbalance continues to play out.2034. San Franciscans complain Oakland's growth is pushing up their property values.2035. Oakland doubles its 2010 population to 800k.Please suggest additions, edits, and corrections. Thank you!

I met this guy Sean when my marriage was ending. We met through MySpace and learned that we had attended the same private Catholic schools all of our lives.I was a cheerleader for the basketball team he played on. He was a few years older than me, so we didn't have the same friends, but we knew of each others friends.We crossed paths so many times that we even kissed in a bathroom at my friend's store before I started college. Neither of us remembered until we were a couple years into our relationship and I brought up my friend and it clicked.Shit, we even received the same fortune cookie message on two different occasions at two different Chinese restaurants. We were both only children. There was not a doubt in my mind that we were soulmates.He was so amazing. He often sent me flowers at work. All my coworkers feigned jealousy, but were actually excited to meet this thoughtful and caring man. He bought me a beautiful Tiffany's necklace and many other expensive items as well.And he seemed like a good person. He told me that, after high school graduation, he went off to college in Hawaii on a full baseball scholarship and graduated with his BA degree in Sociology.He often shared stories of the times he volunteered at summer camps for children who were mentally and physically disabled and how rewarding of a job this was.He never used his sociology degree for its purpose and had gone into sales shortly after graduation. He had a pretty decent job selling technology to businesses. He was at least good at what he did and was compensated appropriately.Sean had his own apartment and he helped his elderly parents with money, food, and a place to live because he didn't want to see them suffer. His mother had a lung disease and it was no longer easy for her to work to support the family.He absolutely loved children and animals. He was very loving and patient with my children and they grew to love him. He even got my daughters names tattooed on his arm.He wanted to get married and he asked me, but I had just divorced so I was not ready for anything too serious. He told me he would wait for me.Sean explained that he actually he had some money coming to him from a settlement. He was in a bad car accident when he was in his early 20s. As he was sitting at a stoplight, a bus hit him in his car, totaling his brand new car and injuring him pretty badly. He had set up an account that would release the money when he was in his mid 30s. He said this would work out perfectly because then I could have the wedding of my dreams.In 2011, the New London CT police department issued a 30 year no contact order against Sean. He is not allowed to contact me through family or friends until I am in my 60s.Shortly after our relationship started, I noticed some of his stories didn't seem to have consistency. Because I was so in love with him, I failed to recognize that these inconsistencies were actually lies and there was a very good reason for all his deception.Sean was a recovering heroin addict who lived with his parents in THEIR apartment. He wasn't helping his elderly, sick parents, they were helping him.He never graduated college. He left after the first semester.I am not sure about his volunteer work, but I am sure that his bus accident settlement didn't exist or was spent long before he had even met me.He had a great job at one time, but was fired due to his drug use. He sold all his belongings numerous times to pay for his habit and when he didn't have any money or drugs left, he would crawl home to mommy and daddy. Once he was in the protective comfort of his parents, he would steal from them to support his habit until they threatened to kick him out or they let him sleep in his car long enough for him to find a rehab where he would clean up and present himself to the world as a recovered person.He struggled with sobriety, overeating, gambling, stealing, jealousy, anger, and violence.After we were together two years, he admitted that he used heroin intravenously when he was younger. He said he had not done it since.Oh yeah, and the scars on his arm, they weren't actually from the time some people robbed him with a knife, they were from using needles.I was heartbroken when the truth of his past slowly trickled out.I decided to sleep at my house one night and I told him I was tired and needed to get some rest in my own bed. He lost his temper over this statement and accused me of going to meet some guys for sex. This was the last thing I wanted to do, but he didn't believe me. He took my car keys and threw them far into the woods. I was pissed. I went into the bathroom to pee and phone a friend for a ride. He broke down the bathroom door, grabbed my cell phone and snapped it in half(before the days of smartphones).He then threw me on the ground and dragged me out of his house.Neighbors had heard this commotion and began opening their doors. One man offered to call the police and let me sit in his apartment until they came.Meanwhile, Sean went back in his parent's apartment (who were away on vacation) and fixed the door, disposed of my phone somewhere, and calmly waited for the police. He also planted a knife on the kitchen floor- the same knife I had used earlier with dinner, so it had my fingerprints on it. When they arrived, he asked them to step into his apartment. Thank goodness they had come so quickly! He calmly explained to them that he had been dating this woman with a drinking problem and quite possibly a drug problem. He had asked her to leave, but she refused and became angry and violent toward him. She attacked him with a knife. See, it is right there on the floor.I was 2 or 3 apartments down the hall crying hysterically because of what had just happened. My keys were gone. My clothes had been tossed off the balcony. My knee was bleeding from getting thrown to the ground and dragged. My phone was broken. And the man I thought was my soulmate was a violent guy who just attacked me.When the police questioned me, I was still crying hysterically and my story most likely made no sense because I was not in a good place mentally. The officers of the Nashua Police Department in Nashua NH (who didn't look like they were more than 19 years old) told me I was a liar and that I was under arrest for assaulting Sean.There are no words that could express how I felt at that moment…Pity, heartache, sadness, embarrassment, disappointmemt, fear, anger….I could not believe it. How am I the one being arrested?After my arrest, Sean called my best friend and explained to her what I had done to him that night. He said he needed to talk to her and that he wanted to bail me out because he had forgiven me.So she invited him to come over and they talked. She completely believed him. she anticipated a call from the police department for bail money. My friend was a single mother with two jobs and a car and mortgage payment. She didn't have a lot of money to offer, but she gave him what she could.He thanked her and left. And then went to buy drugs with her money.I won't bore you with the details of all the other times Sean put his hands on me and all the times I stayed with him because I believed he would change.I even moved across the country to get away from him, but three weeks later he was at my door professing his love for me and I took him back.I will tell you about the last time I ever saw that douchebag. I moved back to New England and ended up renting an apartment in New London CT with him. He was working in cable sales, going door to door signing people up for Comcast. I had my suspicions that he was using drugs again, but I wasn't sure. My grandparents who had raised me had just died-which prompted my move back home. I took care of my grandfather until his last day. They died 5 weeks apart. I was grieving their death and not so focused on what Sean had been up to.One night, Sean brought his coworker home to have dinner at our apartment. We all had a few drinks and laughed and had a good time. His coworker left and I started cleaning the kitchen. About an hour had passed when I started wondering where the hell Sean had gone. I looked upstairs in the bedrooms and bathroom and downstairs in the bathroom. No Sean. I went outside and looked for his car. It was still there. I checked on mine and it was there as well.Then I went into the basement and I found him lying on the floor in a pile of half unpacked boxes. I shook his shoulder a little and he didn't respond. I became scared and started yelling for him to wake up. He did wake up and that is when he tried to kill me.He was pissed. He got up and stumbled to one side of the room knocking everything over but he was able to chase me up the stairs. He caught me and grabbed my neck. He dragged me to the upstairs bedroom we shared and that is when he strangled me, putting all his weight on his hands that were wrapped around my neck.He pulled chunks of my hair out. He punched me in the face.I thought I was going to die, but I didn't. Eventually he got tired and grabbed my purse and ran out of the house. I called the police and went to the hospital.Thank God my kids weren't home to witness this.The police knew he had been arrested multiple times for assaulting me in different states. There was an out of state no contact order against him.I went home from the hospital. The police checked the house to make sure he wasn't there. I locked the doors and went to sleep.At about 4am, I hear the front door getting kicked in. He broke back into the house, jumped on my bed and told me I had better not have contacted the police. I lied and told them I had not. My body was so bruised that I could barely move. He was all wet and got mad at me because apparently he had pissed his pants, so he began attacking me again. He eventually fell asleep. I was too sore to move and I didn't want to wake him or call the police because if he suspected I was going to do that, he would attack me again.The next morning, the police were at my door to arrest him. They noticed the broken door and became concerned. I answered and I was afraid to tell them he was in the house.But they weren't stupid like the police from Nashua NH. They found him and arrested him. He spent 1 year in jail.And I have never seen him again.And when I turn 60 something, I will be sure to have that no contact order reinstated for another 30 years or until I die of natural causes.I've definitely learned a lot about myself from this relationship. I've learned to trust carefully and walk away from people who even slightly break my trust.Please refrain from asking me why I stayed with him after the first time.I don't know why.If I had to guess, I would say that getting arrested actually made me feel like I had done something wrong. And so I viewed the abuse as a result of my actions. I learned that if I just didn't piss him off, we could have a perfect relationship.And when things were good, it was the most satisfying, romantic, loving relationship I could ever dream of having.But things that existed only in his mind would be enough to set him off and that is no way to live.And to be quite honest, if the police hadn't forced that 30 year no contact order, I might have ended up back with him.

For a long time, it pretty much was. Ever since the breakup of "Ma Bell", the system of "local loops" between telephone exchanges and subscribers, aka the "last mile", was treated similarly to the local roads (or in more recent years with deregulation, like the national power grid); a local provider maintains it (with a combination of subscriber and government money), but anyone is allowed to use it to provide you with services. UPS doesn't have to use their own roads to get a package to your house, and telecom providers don't (or didn't) have to run a line to your house to provide phone service; all they needed was to get to the central exchange office your phone line terminates at to establish a "point of presence" for their service, and then they could use this local loop connection to connect calls to your house, even if the local loop, and indeed the exchange office, was built and maintained by their competitor.When the internet first became a household thing in the mid-90s, dial-up access over the phone system was pretty much the only choice for residential and even many business customers, and that allowed a similar disconnect between Internet service providers and network providers; all an ISP needed was a phone number for you to call, with a hunt line system behind it large enough to handle the total number of concurrent subscribers using it, and a means to transfer the data coming in over the phone lines to a "level 1" network provider operating a high-speed backbone (which was typically some sort of leased line, either copper, fiber or microwave). This led to dozens of ISPs getting their foot in the door in the late 90s, with a few like CompuServe, AOL and Earthlink gaining national name recognition.In 2002, however, a critical decision was made by the FCC regarding the fledgling broadband data infrastructure; it was not subject to the same "free access" rules governing the last mile of phone lines, but would instead be treated as similar to the cable TV networks; if you built it, you own it, and you control who can use it. This decision would come to dominate the U.S. telecommunications market as the digital revolution fully took hold; as more and more traditionally analog communications networks became digitized, the carriers of those services argued that the networks they owned and serviced were digital broadband data networks, so under the 2002 decision, they had the right to be the exclusive carrier on said network if they wished, even though these networks more or less replaced the older analog POTS system that wasn't exclusive to the circuit provider.The 2002 FCC decision runs counter to a lot of U.S. policies in place before and enacted after it. Airlines don't own the airports, they just rent the gates from the airport authority that owns and operates it, so you typically have a choice of at least a couple carriers to get you between any two cities. We've discussed the phone system and how any provider could utilize the local loop, and the local road system and how any parcel carrier can use it to deliver mail, not just the USPS. The power industry deregulation by the DoE and FTC around the same time took exactly the opposite tack to the FCC decision, basically treating the entire national power grid as shared by generators and subscribers (with a few middlemen making a buck by selling you power they neither generate nor distribute).Virtually every other industrialized nation went the other way on the nature of data networks as well; their view was that a concerted effort to build, maintain and upgrade one grid, shared by all providers, would be the most economical use of everyone's resources. As such, the policy implemented in most other countries was that of "local-loop unbundling" aka shared last-mile; the government assumes primary responsibility for maintaining and upgrading it, and will contract with and fairly compensate local providers to achieve that, but you don't have to build or maintain a last-mile network yourself to provide service on it; you just have to pay the fees and taxes used to do these things.So why did the FCC make a different decision? Its hope was that this approach would foster competition between providers to build superior competing infrastructures and innovate to provide new ways to get data into homes. It was hoped the decision would jump-start the digital communications revolution instead of relying on government oversight to maintain and upgrade a last-mile network that was already increasingly obsolete.Has our decision worked? Well, kind of. Most major metropolitan areas have their choice of getting their internet through their cable TV network, their land-line phone network, their cellular phone network, by satellite, or in some areas by fiber-to-the-premises networks. We typically have a broad choice of mobile data providers, most of which will sell you a "residential hotspot" to provide Wi-Fi internet access via cell tower.However, not all of those networks are available in all areas, and you have virtually zero choice between competitors that use a "hard line" format involving a local loop. Because your phone line is now part of a broadband data network, you can't get Verizon DSL if your local loop is maintained by AT&T, and vice-versa. If Time Warner is the cable provider in your area, you can't get your internet from Comcast. FiOS, which is Verizon's "fiber-to-the-premises" top-tier offering, is not available everywhere, and neither is U-Verse, which is AT&T's competing "fiber-to-the-neighborhood" service. You can get your internet from Verizon or AT&T via 4G hotspot in most major metro areas, but this is less of an option in smaller cities and not at all in many rural areas, and it's expensive, relatively high-latency, and often involves quotas. Satellite internet via Dish Network or DirecTV is similarly expensive and restricted, and is basically the last option when there isn't fiber or a 4G tower anywhere near your home and the nearest exchange office for your phone is beyond range of DSL. Because you typically have at least two options (even if one is dial-up), and because the cable and phone providers are regionalized so mergers don't decrease consumer choice in a local market, the FTC says that there is sufficient overall competition in any given area for phone, TV, and internet so as to not create a monopoly threat. This is currently being hotly disputed with the Comcast/Time Warner merger, along with other concerns such as both of them owning major content providers and a large portion of the U.S. data "backbone" (which would allow the combined company significant leverage over internet content in the wake of Verizon v. FCC, which basically held that the FCC has no authority to enforce Net Neutrality rules).How does local-loop unbundling work in Europe? In France, virtually everyone has the option of several providers all using a shared local-loop network, with varying levels of "FTTX" from neighborhood to curb to premises, and most people can get a 28Mbps ASDL connection for about 30 Euros (about US$40). In the UK, you can buy your internet from any of about a dozen companies if you're anywhere near London, Manchester, Cardiff or a similar city, and in London you can get 1Gb internet from Hyperoptic, with Virgin working on a competing service level. Cost? About 50 pounds, which is about US$83. The "budget" tier in regions where FTTH is still an option is the US$40-equivalent 100Mbps level.Contrast that with US prices, where TWC's $40 option is 20Mbps and their $75 option is 75Mbps, AT&T's best U-verse tier is up to 45Mbps for $65. Residential FiOS tops out at 75Mbps download for $70, and business-class starts at $130 a month for 150Mbps. DishNET is $70 for 10Mbps with a 15GB quota.I would posit that the biggest contributor to these discrepancies in cost per Mbps and in maximum available bandwidth is that every telecom provider has to get their services into your home on their own last-mile network. That dramatically increases the cost of doing business by essentially requiring all providers to duplicate each others' work. A lot of economists and policymakers in the U.S. are now openly wondering what would have happened in the U.S. if we'd gone the other way.So, yes, there is a case for "nationalization" of the telecom infrastructure in the form of local-loop unbundling, as is commonly seen in other industrialized nations. However, making the argument that other countries have found success with local-loop unbundling will take you about as far with some people as a similar argument about universal healthcare.