Cynicism like this only leads to self imposed amorality. It makes stagnation a self fulfilling prophecy.
You're basically making a bandwagon argument that humans historically have abused power, so this frees anyone in tech from any obligation to try to not abuse power. This is an absurd argument because it precludes progress.
There's a fair criticism of bleeding heart syndrome in the article. It's not the job of "tech" to solve every problem. But this doesn't mean we should just say "fuck it" when confronted with moral ambiguity because millions of people died in the Congo. The only way things improve is by large numbers of people speaking out. Power has no inherent motive to change, people need to push. And if pushing veers into silliness sometimes, who cares.
"The only way things improve is by large numbers of people speaking out. Power has no inherent motive to change, people need to push."
Please provide a real-world example of when this has most recently happened in any situation important enough to actually "count". The abuse exists everywhere you look, and there is never, ever, any serious backlash against it. The problem is that 99.99% of the population can care, but it only takes 0.01% willing to take advantage of the remaining population.
There will never be a sense of justice in such things. People who want the power will always take it, and there is nothing that will change that. Cynicism is not a negative trait, it's the bloody goddamn truth of our species. It sucks, but that's how things work. There is no changing this. It's simply not in the cards. Anyone who disagrees is either full of themselves or totally blind to the way the world works.
One recent real world example of "things [improving] by large numbers of people speaking out" is gay marriage in America.
It took time and victory had some false starts (i.e. Prop 8 in California), but now gay people are equally entitled to ruin their lives with marriage.
In all seriousness, legalizing gay marriage is clearly one that far more than 0.01% of the population cared to oppose the issue, and yet they still eventually lost to an informed and vocal majority.
I love the ideal, but the reality is that a lot of people are getting a half-assed effort from one company that has no economic incentive to improve. Even the threat of governments coming in can provide some of that incentive to make service better. Add to this that the cities that have created their own broadband networks have done it extremely well, and it's hard to make abstract private/public arguments.
In Chattanooga, TN:
Public: 1 gigabit, $70 a month;
Comcast: 25 mbps, $45 a month (I just looked it up for a zip code in the city)
25 mbps / 1 gbps = 0.025
Assuming linear scaling: 1gbps at Comcast would cost $1800/mo. Holy shit.
This is exactly what economic theory predicts will happen in the absence of competition. What's often ignored is the efficacy of the government getting stuff done is largely dependent on the competency of the officials. But if you have good officials, the government solution to the high speed problem is a fantastic one.
Chattanooga isn't a very good example. The Internet is cheap because the city already had a fiber network around for the power lines. There is no way that $70 is actually paying for capital costs.
Look at the various information floating around about Verizon's ROI on FiOS. There is a lot of speculation that they don't even break even on the average deployment unless the customer buys the bundled video services.
I don't know about Grande, but ATT is mostly building out FTTN rather than FTTP. They also bundle television service. Nobody knows the profit story behind Google fiber. Google gets very aggressive regulatory concessions in terms of only agreeing to serve neighborhoods with sufficient demonstrated interest. A huge part of the cost of fiber deployment is having to build out to neighborhoods where enough people won't subscribe. Also, they have the advertising tie in with Google services.
> Google gets very aggressive regulatory concessions in terms of only agreeing to serve neighborhoods with sufficient demonstrated interest.
So you're saying $70/month can cover capital costs, and its terribly inefficient regulation that's causing excessive costs; and that Google is able to sidestep that costly regulation, whereas Comcast and other incumbents can't.
No one begs Comcast or Time Warner to come service their community like what occurred with Google Fiber. I think that's pretty damn telling.
Nobody knows whether $70/month covers capital costs. Google has been totally tight-lipped about the financials of Google Fiber. All we know is that $70 + value of tie-in from more use of Google services + the political value of shaming incumbents + unprecedented regulatory concessions makes Google Fiber worth the company's while in a small number of cities.
We have more insight into Verizon's financials: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/a-bear-speaks-why-v.... This article estimates that Verizon will ultimately lose money on FiOS. Indeed, if anything the estimates in the article, written in 2010, are a bit more optimistic than what turned out to happen. Verizon really struggled with uptake, which have only touched the 40% assumed in the article this year. That means the interest and marketing costs in the calculation are probably too low.
The numbers also explain why the company is reluctant to expand the service:
> Through 2010 the company will pay an average of $817 to run the fiber past the 19 million homes, on poles or under the ground. It will also incur $172 per home passed in other costs related to the video infrastructure.
It costs $1,000 to run the fiber past each home. The uptake rate is crucial--if only 10% of people in a neighborhood actually subscribe, then the cost just to run wires past the house is $10,000 for each subscriber. If 50% subscribe, that cost drops to $2,000 per subscriber. Verizon has thus resisted expanding to cities like Baltimore, where only a small sliver of the city really has customers who can afford $70/month for fiber. Google gets around this by only building out to neighborhoods where enough people sign-up to subscribe. Indeed, before they had to change their procedure in Kansas City due to marketing backlash, their sign-up process left most of the poor neighborhoods in the city without fiber.
You can call these build-out requirements inefficient regulation, and they are, but they're unavoidable in U.S. cities, whose political structures are dominated by those representing lower-income people.
I don't know the financials of Chattanooga's system, but if they're losing money (when you don't count tax revenue) the price comparison isn't very useful from an economic standpoint, at least without introducing another argument like that wealthier people ought to subsidize Internet access for poorer people.
> This is exactly what economic theory predicts will happen in the absence of competition.
Well, I would expect competition to emerge in the absence of competition, if the existing firm is charging so much that competition can be profitable (and if competition isn't prohibited by force). It's true that in an actual natural monopoly (which, remember, I think is rare for Internet access) the monopoly firm has notable market power (the ability to set prices higher than marginal cost). But that market power is not unlimited, and the government solution to a natural monopoly requires the government to be both able and willing to produce at a favorable marginal cost and set prices accordingly.
> What's often ignored is the efficacy of the government getting stuff done is largely dependent on the competency of the officials. But if you have good officials, the government solution to the high speed problem is a fantastic one.
Certainly true. That would be one of the "inputs" I mentioned in my previous comment. Of course, "good officials" probably doesn't mean much more than "true Scotsman."
Good points—the only thing I'd say is that we're talking about a really capital intensive industry where the incumbent may be able to drop prices to compete with a newcomer. Example: If company B comes to a town where company A is already operating, company A can just offer new subscribers the same terms as B, making it hard for B to compete. If B can anticipate A's action (not that hard in this case, because I can do it after a couple of beers) then B may choose not to invest because B's road to a profit requires producing at a lower marginal cost than A and undercutting A's prices. They actually have to pull subscribers away from A. If A is already producing at a low marginal cost but overcharging, then A has the flexibility to fight a price war (and potentially win).
Ha maybe I'm banking too much on those competent government officials. The variance in quality is certainly high.
"unfair competition" is all you really need to hear to understand that these companies hate the free market. so do the politicians that make laws to secure oligopolies.
the doublethink on this issue is amazing: the telecom companies are providing crappy internet, so let's make a law preventing competition, which is the nominal foundation of our economic system.
I'm fine with the phrase "unfair competition"; I want the competition between peers regulated. The horrible part is the assumption that the public is a peer, rather than the authority under which corporations are allowed to operate. If the public decides that it will be more efficient to provide some service itself, why would it grant special status to a project to provide that service less efficiently?
It's unfair to private corporations that we can do it cheaper without them?
As a student in a Ph.D. program, I can't help but think I'm caught in the grant-driven world and am being steered away from deeper consideration of big ideas. It's an easy track to get stuck on, mostly because grant-proposing is a game, identifying a minor unexplored area is relatively simple, and there are short-term rewards for doing so.
What's really getting at me is the arrogance of established "experts." It's kind of baffling (because it should be about curiosity, not certainty), and when you come across someone who has made it through the academic system and still retained curiosity, independent-mindedness, etc., it's a really refreshing sight.
That being said, a lot of what I do is unfulfilling and I've discussed several times leaving the academic world for some kind of tech startup life, although I'm not sure if that is a pipe dream or grounded in reality.
That data is aggregated. You have everyone from a CEO to a college student with no financial support from her parents on there. It doesn't show who's buying which phone, nor does it show the shift from "feature phones" to smartphones. The trendsetters were (are?) buying iPhones, which has always been a premium device which Apple wants to make substantial profits on. Samsung competes on price,
This is a really interesting bit of speculation. Obama's consistently "just off" statements (i.e. saying an executive order that hadn't been implemented yet would have protected Snowden) make me think that Obama & his advisers doesn't have a good handle on what the NSA is doing and how the law applies to the "secret state." One could say that "Obama is lying," which may be perfectly true, but it could also be that the politicians are genuinely uninformed and/or think protections exist that don't.
I could see this being the case because politicians train to talk about health care and the economy, while the details of NSA programs are rarely discussed and so politicians have little incentive to be up on the facts.
There's no way Obama didn't know. Remember that Obama just appointed James Clapper, who was caught lying to Congress about there being dragnet surveillance on the American people, to a committee to investigate the NSA and make sure these programs are in check. If he didn't know, it seems like he would be rather pissed at Clapper and reluctant to let him investigate his own agency.
I don't think it even has to be that extreme. When one starts out as a politician, even small-potatoes stuff like inflated tax exemptions would be enough to influence the ambitious. Later, once one is president, they have recordings of all the noxious shit you've done at their command. This is basic spy agency tactics.
It's quite probable that Obama knows about shit the various agencies have done that would make GG's hair curl. It's also quite probable they've done much worse shit that he doesn't know about.
I'm in a well regarded sociology department and there's a huge gap between the sociologists who take technical things seriously (programming, stats) and those who don't. People have actually rolled their eyes in classes when we read papers about simulations. I was lucky: we have a core group of students who program and gather data using modern tools, but I gather this is rare both within my discipline and without.
You're basically making a bandwagon argument that humans historically have abused power, so this frees anyone in tech from any obligation to try to not abuse power. This is an absurd argument because it precludes progress.
There's a fair criticism of bleeding heart syndrome in the article. It's not the job of "tech" to solve every problem. But this doesn't mean we should just say "fuck it" when confronted with moral ambiguity because millions of people died in the Congo. The only way things improve is by large numbers of people speaking out. Power has no inherent motive to change, people need to push. And if pushing veers into silliness sometimes, who cares.