Tag: issues

Categories
politics technology

Time for a Poll

In our country, which is run by polls anyway, I think that it is time to take a poll to find out Is Cheap Broadband Un-American? According to the article “cities . . . recognized broadband access as a basic public utility—no different from water, gas or electricity—that they could provide.” So the question is, what defines a public utility. Telephone and cable have been considered quasi-utilities and they have been regulated accordingly. We should take a poll to see if internet access has penetrated the population more deeply than telephone or cable access. I think it’s pretty close. Not only that, but cities can provide internet access much more easily than they could provide other communications options.

I have written about this topic multiple times so my position should be clear that internet access and broadband should either be regulated or provided by the government because the industry refuses to play nice with customers.

Categories
culture technology

750000 reasons to spam

I just read on Wired News about a spammer who was just convicted for “pumping out at least 10 million e-mails a day.” Why would a person do that for a living? Later in the article the answer came to me loud and clear as I learned that “prosecutors say he grossed up to $750,000 per month.” That’s a very compelling argument – especially to someone who recently viewed $12,000 per year as a raise.

As a bonus he never had to worry about his internet access since he used 16 high-speed lines for sending out all that email.

Categories
politics

More Daylight

What difference will more daylight savings make to those of us outside of Arizona? Not much that I can see.

If the politicians want to pass this I don’t mind it. I would love to use more sunlight, but let’s not fool ourselves that this will make a big difference in our oil consumption. If we save 10,000 barrels per day for an extra five weeks out of the year it would take us 57 years to save one day’s worth of oil at 20 million barrels per day (our current usage level) so it will not make us noticably less dependent on the Arabian peninsula.

Categories
politics

When Will We See the Light

It is about time that we acknowledged the truth of what happens when Lobbyists have so much sway in our system of government. I don’t think there is anything else to say after what Mr. Lessig wrote. This is more than simply the access to broadband that I have written about previously. In both the specific case and the general trend we must take back democracy so that it is not subsumed by capitalism.

Categories
politics technology

As I Was Saying

I had a thought when I posted Excess Capacity. Now I have seen this story in a few different places and I cannot stay silent on the subject. Basically, the story can be summed up like so:

“Whether building a wireless system, installing fiber directly to homes, or exploring broadband over power lines – or some combination of these options – local communities are finding they can get better service for less money if they do it themselves.

“Big telecom and cable companies have responded by furiously working to slam the door on community wireless. The telephone and cable giants are trying to use their lobbying clout in state capitals to pre-empt local control, preserve higher prices and preclude competition.” (thanks to Matt Barton for quoting this perfect synopsis from Freepress.net)

Everybody should realize that the telecom companies have nothing to gain when municipalities prove that broadband can be affordable. Somehow they need to be held to the standard of capitalist doctrine and forced to actually compete to create a system that provides the best service possible for the lowest price. If the municipalities can offer equal service for less than the telecoms then the telecoms should get out of the business.

Categories
politics technology

Excess Capacity

I enjoyed reading about the Laffer Curve as it relates to taxes. I found it especially interesting because I have been thinking about the Sam Walton approach being applied to broadband internet access. I admit that I am wishing that I had bradband access at home and claiming (privately until now) that dialup internet access is no longer considered reasonable access to the internet.

We have the technology and the capacity to deliver broadband to everybody. I realized that this went even farther than broadband. We have 6% of our workforce not working right now and we have people who do not have access to every good thing that they want because of prohibitive costs (college students have plenty of use for broadband, but can rarely afford to pay $50 per month to pay for it). I am convinced that both telephone providers and cable providers could still make a profit on broadband while offering it for $20 per month – which would be affordable enought to virtually eliminate dialup service.

Wait for a later post where I will list some of the benefits that I see of having universal access to broadband.

Categories
politics

Nugget of Truth

It is not often that I agree with Maureen Dowd more than grudgingly, but in her article about female interrogators torturing detainees in Iraq I found myself agreeing with her without reservation. She put the perfect perspective in one sentence: “However the Bush White House is redefining torture these days, the point is this: Such behavior degrades the women who are doing it, the men they are doing it to, and the country they are doing it for.”

There is no other point that could be made. It would be better in the long run to not have the intelligence gotten by such deplorable means then to stoop to such a level of depravity.

Categories
National politics

The Fastest Way Out

I drive around the city and see a smattering of yard signs saying “Bring the troops home now.” I feel that those who post the signs do not care about the welfare of the Iraqis. No matter how bad their lives are now with insurgents, the worst course of action we could take would be to walk away right now. After reading Friedman’s “Pop-Tarts or Freedom?” I had an interesting thought about those who display those signs. Undoubtedly those who post the signs disagree with the Bush administration regarding the war in Iraq. Friedman suggests that the fastest way to get the troops home is to hold elections. If people believe that then these people who don’t support the administration would have to support the stance of the administration in not postponing the Iraqi elections.

Categories
National politics

Cracking the Blocks

Thanks to electoral-vote.com I discovered the efforts of Colorado Democrats who hope not to be disenfranchised in the presidential election this year as reported in the Rocky Mountain News at the beginning of August.

This is exactly in line with what I was advocating in response to the New York Times editorial about abolishing the electoral college. Right now there are too many states taken for granted in every election but if we put the vote of every elector in play to some degree we will have a much more democratic system as it was designed to be. I suggest that the voiceless Republicans in California and New York try to get similar measures on their ballots for November.

Categories
National politics

Right Data – Wrong Conclusion

When the New York Times publishes an editorial I always read carefully. I do not agree with some of their columnists, but I have never disagreed outright with the columns of their editorial board – until they said that we should Abolish the Electoral College. I fully agree that “the Electoral College makes Republicans in New York, and Democrats in Utah, superfluous. It also makes members of the majority party in those states feel less than crucial.” But I cannot agree that “The small states are already significantly overrepresented in the Senate.”

The apparent disparity built into the electoral college by the founding fathers was not an accident based on a desire to not have to count each individual vote nationally back when it was more difficult to count each vote. The fact is that even back then every state had to get a tally of each vote within the state to choose the electors and even today it would only take a couple of minutes with a paper and pencil to add the numbers certified by each of the fifty states.

Let’s think about the effect that abolishing the Electoral College would have on national campaigns to remind ourselves why it was invented in the first place. We have seventeen states in play during this election. Without the Electoral College a solid majority in the ten largest states would allow a person to get elected so long as they did not lose by large margins in the other forty states. Not only that but since the concerns of voters break more along regional lines than strictly along state lines the campaigning would actually take place in two or three regions that comprise a solid majority of voters. That is not any better than the current situation. It actually sounds like the situation with the South when Lincoln was elected in 1860. It would mean that we would always know which ten or fifteen states all the campaigning would take place in well ahead of time. If you live in one of those largest of states it makes perfect sense to call for the abolishment of the Electoral College where the politicians will pander to your wishes perpetually.

As for the smaller states being over-represented in the Senate, that fact is balanced by their underrepresentation in the house where agreement of the ten largest states can override the interests of the other forty states and all the other representatives in the House. These “smaller” states tend to be among the largest states with regard to land and resources for the nation. In these under-populated states the federal government often controls huge amounts of the land which means that they must have adequate representation lest their rights be trampled by states with higher populations and far different concerns.

It is presumptuous to say “it’s a ridiculous setup” without allowing the system to function as it was designed – which it does not do currently. We must eliminate block voting by all the states which, unlike the Electoral College, is not established by the US Constitution if we are to see how the Electoral College was meant to work. Until we have tried the more representative version of the Electoral College that the founding fathers envisioned we cannot accurately say that it is fundamentally flawed.

It would probably be useful for me to note here that Maine and Nebraska do not practice block voting. In Colorado the Democrats are trying to put a referrendum on the November ballot to stop block voting there as well. I know that in these states the votes corresponding to their representatives are divided proportional to the vote and the votes corresponding to their senators are blocked for whoever carries the state. That is one example of how to not vote as a block. I am sure that there are more options than how these two states do it or straight block voting.

It is possible that we could still find that the Electoral College does not work and that we need to change the system but we should try to fix the problem without altering the constitution before we jump into yet another ill-conceived constitutional amendment debate.