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Open Letter to FCC Chairman Powell
Adina Levin writes "An open letter to FCC chairman Michael Powell signed by internet and tech industry pioneers explains why the government shouldn't prop up the ailing telecom behemoths. Telecom companies bought expensive network technology with long bonds. That technology has been made obsolete by gear getting faster and cheaper all the time by Moore's law and Metcalfe's law. The telecom companies are asking for the equivalent of a bailout for their investments in sailing ships after the advent of steam. The way to speed the deployment of broadband to homes isn't to prop up businesses based on old technology, but to let uncompetitive businesses 'fail fast', and let new competitors play."
Doesn't their existing infrastructure, and social dependency on that infrastructure, give them a somewhat legitimate need for a bailout? If other, smaller, more efficient companies can replace everything the telecom behemoths do, then let the big boys suffer, but is that the case? Can smaller tech savvy companies do everything the large telecoms do or are we talking strictly about broadband internet?
sig.
Like the UK railroads these days?
This is where the government bailout would help, by allowing access to areas that would be under-served, and allow time for solutions to that problem.
Jeez, pretty hefty rant this early on a Tuesday. Must be fear of sniper-related traffic in DC.
LETS DECOMPOSE & ENJOY ASSEMBLING
Nahh. Privatize everything. It works.
You are trolling, aren't you. In case you don't know about it, go look up Railtrack - the UK privatised rail company that recently declared bankrupcy, leaving the UK govt with the options of a bailout of closing down the rail network. They chose the bailout. The sucessor company (Network rail) is a not-for-profit co.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
IANAE, but what happens when major telcos start to go under? As they struggle to maintain profit margins, how despirate will they get? Can replacement technologies and companies absorb the workforce that will be laid off? How often will this type of thing happen? Think about it, the current plain old telephone system is no good unless it is ubiquitous. That's why the telcos are in trouble. They needed to put entire systems in place before they where useful. Fiber is fantastic except when it comes down to two little wires in the last mile. In for a penny, in for a pound. Telecommunications systems need to be complete or not at all. How do we get the technoloy in place before it's obsolete?
It seems to me that the long term goal of replacing outdated infrastructure and ancient business models may be reached sooner by this "fail fast" proposal, but the chaos produced would be devastating to customers. Service outages, price fluctuations, and provider changes could cripple customers large and small. The industry that might come out of such a proposal may be worse off for the experience.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Capitalism one day, Socialism the next, whatever keeps the dollars rolling in, that's what they'll ask for.
How many of us have stakes in these "fail fast" companies via pension funds?
Government subsidies are bad.
Riiiight. The streets around your house will look awful funny when only 70% of your neighbours pay their road construction bills. 30% of your street will be dirt road, the rest paved?
I suppose education should be completely privatized too. That way, the only chance a child from a lower economic class has to make something of themselves will be torn away because their parents can only afford to choose two of these three alternatives: 1) feed them 2) clothe them 3) educate them.
I suppose, by your logic, that I should have to pay for my own dedicated wiring from my house to the electricity provider of my choice, right? Would we really have, like, 99% of all houses connected to the electical grid (therefore, accelerating the growth of other technologies like electrical appliances) if distribution was privatized? Would there be any incentive to have a step down station in bumsville, nowhere?
Markets work, u know?
Markets work with quite a bit of help. Do you think they'd work if we didn't have laws regulating fraud, disclosure, etc.?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Seems like a self-serving whine by people with a vested interest in the 'failure' of older technology. No matter how carefully worded, I smell money in someone's pockets.
We need to remember that the internet was designed to be able to communicate with defense authorities during times of national strife, as in nuclear war. It shines because it is nearly impossible to kill all the telco communications capabilities at once. Old, yet trusty technology. Just look what YOU are doing with this technology today!
signed by internet [...] pioneers
Who are they? Is it reasonable to call someone an "Internet pioneer" even if he or she hasn't (co-)authored an RFC carrying a three-digit number?
The recent spate of government bailouts (airline, steel, etc.) reminds me of the S&L scandal in the 80's. I believe Japan had a similar problem as well. Instead of letting some 'creative destruction' take place, as our govt. did, the Japanese bailed the incompetent banks out.
Result: their economy has been stagnant for a decade.
Let's hope the govt. has learned from their mistakes.
If you look at all the telcos of various types, it is the incumbents (RBOCs, Baby Bells, ILECs, PTTs...) who are surviving quite well and even prospering. They didn't get sucked into the IP-based boom/bust as much as others, and more importantly their legacy phone switches make significant money through well-established per-minute billing. Wireless operators who charge per-minute are also doing OK, although 3G will probably kill some of them off.
It's precisely the next-gen telcos (CLECs, ISPs, xSPs) who invested in the new IP technology that ran into the boom/bust and are struggling or going bust. WorldCom is something of a special case - it had a lot of legacy technology that should have tided it over, but the accounting shenanigans were too much to survive.
This doesn't mean that IP-based networks are a passing fad, though - all that's happened is that the pioneers have gone through the normal bleeding-edge live/die cycle. Some of them have made it, some have gone bust, and all the old-line telcos have adopted the same technologies.
I agree that failing telcos should normally not be propped up - as long as someone can step in to maintain services by buying up their assets, particularly local loops that are hard to recreate, the customer shouldn't notice that much interruption. My problem is with the analysis that the legacy technology is why telcos are going bust.
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Phone hacking, the next generation
The problem is that if the telephone system becomes based on the Internet, there will be catastrophic security breaches in our telephone system.This is because every node on the internet can have packets directed at it by any other node. That's the whole point of end-to-end. But that means any joker with a PC can log in to his ISP and start up h4x0r scr1pt5 to start cracking phone switches.
With the current phone system, control signaling is out of band - end users can only control the phones at each end of the connection, and cannot control the functioning of the switches in between. You can command the switches by dialing a number, but you can only route your call this way, not control the basic functioning of the switch.
To a large extent security can be maintained by keeping the telco equipment in securely locked buildings.
But the protocols used for the phone system apparently aren't designed with security in mind, so that when they are adapted to the Internet, they become gaping security holes.
Potentially someone could do some clever work and bring down a whole nation's phone system, if it were on the Internet.
The convergence of the telephone system and the Internet has already been going on for a while. It is quite common for long-distance calls to be routed over the Internet, so you get phone-to-phone VOIP without the user being aware of it.
It is also common for telcos to be ISPs, and they just use the same fiber for voice and data. It's more economical to use the same data formats and protocols for voice as well as data, so they transmit all the voice calls with the Internet Protocol.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Why are the Bells forced to lease out their DSL connectivity to other companies at below cost? Does this really spur investment? The reason that most people do not have access to DSL is that the Bells will NOT invest until they are allowed to compete against cable companies DIRECTLY
Do cable companies have to let the telcos use their cable at below cost?
What will happen to the parasites (CLECs) when the hosts (Bells) die?
Deregulate the Bells and let true competition take hold. You will not regret it, Mr. Powell
I sincerely hope that you are joking, or playing devil's advocate. The "market economy" is a fiction, created by government contrivance. Do you really believe that it is some sort of objective truth? or that it is the ultimate expression of human desire for advancement?
The market economy has done such an excellent job in protecting the environment and promoting individual liberty. Ironically enough, the "free market" has given us the most blatent interferences in market freedom that we have seen.
This is not to say that the market is undesirable or is not an excellent allocator of (some) resources - just that is it insufficient as a complete societal model.
I want to mention that Hayek, at least in "The Road to Serfdom", does not call for an abolishment of government. He seems to acknowledge, as many of us do, a need for it. Our founding fathers did.
The problem is, combined federal, state and local government here now represents about 50% of the market place, as opposed to around 5% prior to 1910. Truly this is *the* metric that shows clearly the US is now a collectivist / socialist enterprise.
History shows (Russia, National Socialist Germany, etc..) us that such a model does not work. It is a non competitive model. At best it can limp along, but will not provide liberty, self determination, self actualization. It cannot provide *opportunity* for a middle class. "We're in a tight spot!" - Oh Brother.
The states now feel the pinch (punch) of this last fed induced mania. For some excellent data and commentary on the current state, see Michael Hodges "Grandfather Economic Report". Best, Dave
The role of the government is primarily to establish a level playing field. The private sector, in the long term, is far more efficient than government services.
For example, the wave of privitization in the early 90's in India. Consumers benefitted tremendoulsy from the competition.
In the USA, if you start a business and it fails you are allowed to raid it's funds to shore up your own pockets... I.E. the rich man that tried to pull a fast one get's richer while the small investors and employees get shafted. the laws need to be changed that when a business fails the executives personal finances are to be seized, audited, and if any hint of wrongdoing raided completely and distributed to the shareholders, employees and finally creditors... EVERY PENNY AND PHYSICAL ITEM IS TO BE TAKEN AND LEAVE THE CEO'S PENNYLESS.
this just might keep the scumbags from starting a business with plans to fail from the start (Loki for example.. that scumbag robbed lots of people, including his awesome employees... they need to take everyth he owns and give it to the employees and shareholders.)
Telecom companies provide a needed service, a phone is considered a necessary household item, and an Internet connection is becoming that.
Now, in many countries a telco has been forced to provide it's services to all parts of the country, even in sparsely populated areas, to get the telecom license. Now it is possible, with the new technologies, for startup telco replacements to start offering their services in big cities. By offering data connections and VoIP there, they can get all the traditional telco customers to switch to the new services. This may of cource take time, since big companies may have made investments in their own infrastructure and are unwilling to do a forklift upgrade.
But this leads to telecom companies going bankrupt and sparsely populated areas losing all service. A telco can easily make a profit in densely populated areas, but may run to red where there is only one customer every few kilometers.
Pumping money to failing companies is just rewarding badly run businesses, since there was no law that prevented incumbent telecoms from offering these same new technologies to their customers. They would even have been in a better position to do it, since they already had the customer base.
Sooner or later it becomes a problem when something that people need in their normal everyday life is run by market forces. Banks and railroads are good (or bad?) examples.
It is an easily-verified historical fact that the size and scope of the American economy is as much the result of governmental actions as it is reliance on so-called 'natural' market forces.
It's not just that they got caught buying the wrong equipment, the big telecoms players have specficially resisted IP over ethernet in order to keep entry costs as high as possible. The most ridiculous thing in the world is these suggestions that they had to stick with ATM and Sonet in order to cash in on the huge potential of video conferencing and video on demand and all this utter crap that only seventy year old technophobe shareholders would believe.
Compare an OC3 from a Bell -vs- an OC3 from a native ethernet provider like Cogent. These are two different worlds of cost.
But hey, let the FCC do what they will, we'll just add it to the list of criminal frauds already commited when it's time to impeach and imprison Bush and his administration.
It is far more profitable to either kill or join with your competitors, than to compete with them by offering better products at lower prices. This is why a strong government is needed to ensure a working market, based a continues struggle to provide better goods at lower prices than your compatitors.
Without such a strong government, producents will join force in guilds, who keep the market closed to outsiders, by force if necessary. This was the situation until the development of nation states with a strong King as the leader.
Unfortunately, this violates the foundation for the Libertarian belief, namely that all evil is created by government and all good come from the market. And as always when belief and reality slashes, the believers are unable to see the reality.
Of course, this isn't an excuse for the government to take up other tasks than ensuring that players on the market follow the rules.
is that the technology changes TOO FAST. Normal depreciation cycles just don't work well for the way things have been changing. Assets go to zero worth in a very short amount of time. This means a constant investment cycle is needed.
This doesn't mean that you should have one group of companies, and then start to die off as you have the next group of companies invest in the next wave of technology. Later, rinse, repeat.
Of course, this doesn't mean that they don't have things to fix. They most certainly do!
The falacy that 'faster and cheeper' is better is what got us into the telecom disaster in the first place. If a new type of sewer pipe is devised, do we dig up every old sewer and replace it with the new? The old one still works fine (unless it is leaking).
Faster faster faster. The trend mongers in the telecom industry kept making bigger and bigger pipes. But they can't combine and break up the packets correctly. Thus they can pass one million gig of data, but they can't pass and deliver a million separate gigs to and from different places.
That is the scam. They kept saying faster cheeper. But they couldn't say better.
As an analogy: You don't need a ten inch pipe into your shower. You don't need a fire hose on your water cooler. You don't need a 1/2 inch pipe into your refridgerator.
It is too bad that the people who dole out the venture money don't actually know anything about technology (ok, they must know something).
If something works, you don't replace it. We don't need 1 gig into our house. We do need reliable phone and reliable power.
I don't need streaming video. If I want to watch a movie I will rent a tape or go to the cinema.
Exisiting infrastructure has the advantage of already being there.
...if some of the (hidden) corporate interest behind this goes something along the lines of:
"Please, please, don't bail out Worldcom! We all want to grab a piece of that 50% Internet backbone share for ourselves! Don't bail them out!" ?
Is it always about politics? What did W do now? I don't like his policies, and money monger oil people in general. But what did W do to be impeached and imprisoned?
Look at yourself. You envy the fact that he is in power, don't you? Impeach your envy, imprison your partisan attitude. We need to worry about being able to make phone calls. It isn't all a big conspiracy of the rich against the poor. It is about reliable local and long distance phone. If we let the phone companies all go out of business, how will you beable to post your hateful screes?
Following the Sailing to Steam Power analogy:
Government's do not scrap entire fleets when a new technology improves over what is in existance, they strat building new ships and as the older, obsolete ships either sink, are lost in battle, or are too old to maintain they are replaced.
There is some old technology out there, and anyone seeking a bailout on that should be denied. Airlines should be denied bailouts, unless the money is used to go toward improved tech. The $100,000 switch of yesteryear can be replaced with a more relaible $25,000 switch that can handle more traffic, then that is what the money should go for -- improvements.
If their business model is failing, many airlines are in this boat only because of the lessed travel, then they need to adjust..close hubs, discontinue routes, etc. Yes, it would suck for the people that are affected, but what is to stop them from forming a local company to fill the void? It may be too expensive to run a daily flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco for a major airline using a big jet, because there are only 30 people wanting to go each day on average, but a smaller company with a 10 passenger leer could make 3 trips a day, and probably be very profitable.
Government should seek to involve itself in National Defense and Policies, and Proteciton of the Populace -- everything else should be a local matter.
Sig? What's a Sig?
The private sector, in the long term, is far more efficient than government services.
I was responding to the original claim that everything should be privatized. I agree that privatization is good in some cases. However, there IS a reason for public funding of certain infrastructure.
You must admit that public education is better at establishing "a level playing field" than completely privatized education. Do you really think that the child of a wealthy person *deserves*, or has a *right* to a better education than any other child? Do you think it's acceptable that a child could miss out on an education because their parents can't afford it?
We have public funding for things we consider basic rights. We all think everyone has a right to an education, so we constructed systems to give everyone access to those services. We also think everyone should have access to clean water, so we have municipal water utilities. There is room for discussion of these issues, e.g. an American would say that health care is a priviledge, whereas a Canadian would say that access to basic health care is a right. That's why Canada has a universal health care system, and the U.S. does not.
The reasons why we choose to create public services is because of the argument that *everyone* benefits when access is available. To go back to previous examples: if you use public funds to connect everyone to the electrical grid, then you've increased the demand for electrical appliances. If you use public funds to build roads, then you make it easier for all companies and individuals to do business. If you use public funds to educate all children, then more kids will grow up to contribute to your economy, which makes everyone wealthier. So, in the long run, I would suggest that sometimes the private sector is *less* efficient.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Actually, with fully privatized education, competition would likely drive prices down to levels affordable to most people. Even if it didn't, there would be plenty of charities or other private organizations willing to help out. Even so, I don't really support fully private education. It seems to me there needs to be a heavily standardized educational "base." That's another post, though.
What if it gets proven that the CEO was actually blameless and the fraud came from somewhere else? You already have the guy in prision before we even know the nature of the problem.
Do you believe in 'innocent until proven guilty'? Or are you like the Stalinists: arrest whoever and then kill them just because you don't like them?
Not all CEO's are evil money-mongers. The rich have a hard time to get to Heaven (eye of the needle) but that doesn't say that they can't.
It is wrong to think that all rich are bad and all poor are good. We are all BOTH.
Your plan of confiscation sounds good. I am glad that you are worrying about the obvious problem of the seemingly total corruption in our equity markets. However if you want to kill them all (metaphorically) then we won't have anyone that wants to lead.
A return to morals based business practices would be a better tact for improving the honesty on Wall Street. They should stop reading Ayn Rand and her ilk (where anything goes as long as you are happy) and start reading books like THE BIBLE, THE KORAN, THE TALMUD, THE ICHING.
Don't kill the sinner or you will kill everyone.
They can be redeemed, but not if they feel backed into a corner and hunted by envious left-wing rabble rousers.
Peace not pieces.
Sorry, that should read bailout or closing down the rail network
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
But economics, psychologists and other liberal arts types realize that human beings defy "nature" all the time. People who study economics essentially study the cases where economics don't work! Psychologists study why people are not rational/utility maximizers.
As far as the broadband/telecom connection goes, did anyone else read this article in Business Week?
It talks about how broadband providers are keeping prices artificially high because they would rather deal with slower adoption rates at higher margins than faster adoption at lower margins because THEY KNOW EVERYONE WILL ADOPT BROADBAND EVENTUALLY and they can force us to pay more. Cable broadband profit margins are about 50 percent now.
Makes you realize how much companies like Comcast can prevent high-speed adoption and screw over the telecoms in the process.
(I canceled my Comcast modem and television service last week. Originally, I just wanted to get rid of the television service, but they told me that if I did, they were going to jack up my cable modem price by $15. I told them to cancel everything.)
It seems to me there needs to be a heavily standardized educational "base."
I agree. I think that goes along with the whole "level playing field" idea.
But if privatization always works, why are airports going back to federally employed security? It's precisely because they're trying to enforce a standardized base level of security. The private security firms are great at providing low prices, but they don't seem capable of providing adequate security at the same time. It's the whole lowest bidder problem that we tend to get into whenever the government starts asking for bids.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
For a number of years now, there has been a large effort to take the ownership and management of a lot of the telecom (data comm) infrastructure out of the hands of the federal government. Outsourcing. Unfortunately, because the ability to communicate over this infrastructure has become so important to national security, the federal gov must make sure it remains functioning. Look at some of the postings from a couple of days ago relating to the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI). That project relies exclusively on the financial health of EDS, the prime contractor. These "Internet Pioneers" should remember that the federal government IS the internet pioneer and that the only reason most of them have a job to begin with is the fact that Uncle Sam was kind enough to give up most of the direct control of the infrastructure that the internet is based on. Wheew! Glad I got that off my chest....
You have people running big bussiness and people in the federal government. They're all friends. They went to Yale and Harvard and Princeton together... they drank at the same clubs. Their parents were friends, and their kids are going to Taft and Dalton and Exeter together right now.
Their goal? Simple. Take tax money out of the government, and get it into their pockets.
Back in the Reagan days, their favorite was the defense industry. It was perfect; there's relative secrecy associated with defense approrpriations, and the military bureaucracy is so intense that it took quite a while for the few people looking to find those $10,000 toilet seats.
We also saw a lot of "foreign aid" disappear into the ether, split up between the corrupt foreign officials and the corrupt local ones, all of it more or less going to Switzerland and Grand Cayman. Still do, actually.
More recently it's been Enron ("privatizing" electric utilities was already absurd, and anyone who followed it the time - including me - called it a blatant invitation to fraud; who knew they'd go all the way to turning off the lights to convince people of a fake shortage! Gives you an idea how little these people fear getting caught), the "airline bailout," the "farm subsidy," and of course, don't forget the "tax breaks."
Now it's a "telecom bailout."
All of these scams netted their perpetrators billions, and in some cases tens or even hundreds of billions. Almost none of the people involved have been investigated, let alone caught. It's the new American mafia, ladies and gentlemen.
Michael Powell is a notoriously corrupt FCC chairman; he's blatantly carried water for both the cable and bell monopolists, and under his watch telecom (and especially internet) service has been abyssmal (remember Northpoint? and what happened to the CLECs?) while prices have risen. It was easy for him, a smug "regulator" in a plum job snagged with handy nepotism; all he had to do was stand back and wink while the bells slaughtered their competition. You don't get a job like FCC chair under a Bush administration without knowing how the game is played... Anyway, this goofy letter to him is pretty amusing; you may as well write a letter to Satan.
Until heads start rolling in quantity (and believe me, once we started, by the time it's over we'd need to build a new federal prison), it's open season.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
When we run out of dinosaur fuels.
The existing telecom infrastructure is too slow, and the RBOC's have no interest in upgrading it primarily because it upsets their existing infrastructure and business plan.
I don't think the bailout is a good thing, but I'd point out an analogy.
Do you know why there are so many roads to every little hamlet, town, and farm in the United States? Courtesy of the US Post Office who would deliever mail to your mailbox only if the road was paved.
So there are examples of forced infrastructure upgrades having an economic benefit as a whole, so this is not without precedent.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
> The primary reason most people advocate capitalism is ETHICAL, not scientific.
In what theory is capitalism ethical? Nothing in my readings has any statements about an ethical dimension.
> Health care? You have only to go to a socialist country to see how that works. They won't throw you out in the gutter, but they will make you get in line, possibly for months to remedy serious ailments such as cancer.
So what happens if I have cancer, but no money for treatment? How is this different to the "socialist" case?
> You need to think about more than one possibility. Chanting to yourself over and over again "Government can solve my problems, government can solve my problems" is not going to work.
As opposed to chanting "Government can't solve my problems" or "Only the market can solve my problems"?
What needs to happen is to remove cable companies from content providing or allow telcos to provide content. That's the real reason DSL is not more popular--all the profit to be made from the upgrade is denied to the local phone companies that have to make the investment. They are still banned from providing content-games, movies, ect... they have to set it up and give it away.
The big media companies have done an end-around by purchasing cable companies and denying others media companies access. Now many of them also provide phone service taking away from the phone companies when the phone companies can't compete back! Even AT&T was broken up as only the long distance only arm has used the system against it's former children by buying cable comanies and offering data services over them which compete against the locals while still supporting the ban on locals from carrying long distance directly.
One has to die--Cable or Local Phone--they are now redundant. As far as our rights go we want the phone companies to win due to their common-carrier status. They cannot be censored as easily. (versus the RIAA/MPAA run cable co) This means that rules to open up cable to competition must be pushed thru--and allow Local phone to buy them up as they fail--but still have to offer competition.
Next time you say they should privatize Amtrak.
We're getting full railservice for around $1B a year.
Hell, 3 days of a war in IRAQ will cost more than that, and we won't actually get anything WORTHWHILE from that "Investment".
You must be very young and/or naive to think that a bankrupt company simply disappears assets and all. What happens is that the assets are sold off, auction-like, at a fraction of the cost to build them from scratch. For instance, the Iridum satellite phone system went belly up, cost billions to shoot 77 (88?) satellites into orbit, plus spares, ground stations, all that, sold for pennies on the dollar or less, and still running, and now it can stay in business because the initial R&D expense has evaporated and is no longer part of the return on investment equation.
Who loses? The original investors. So what, they bet on the wrong horse.
EVERY bankrupt company goes out like that. Original investors lose, R&D is written off, lost, gone, evaporated. If any assets have remaining value, someone buys them up for what they are actually worth. If they have no worth, they go to the landfill. But they usually have soem value.
Think of what would happen if you declared bankruptcy. Would your house, car, computer, all disappear in a puff of smoke? Would the bankruptcy court order them destroyed? Of course not! They'd be sold to pay your debts. Same thing for bankrupt companies.
Infuriate left and right
It's simple we should just pass a law that no business can go out of business, then no one will ever lose their job. And then the 40% we hand over to our respective governments can go for something good, like bailing out the company we work for. Wait why don't we all just start our own companies and when it fails the money we paid ourselves for doing nothing, we can give to the government to bail us out. What was I thinking!? Instead of that why don't we just work for the government! It just gets simpler and simpler.
Precisely. The problem with the system isn't privitazation, it's the absurd (in some cases) lowest-bidder way of choosing contractors.
Consider roads. American road constuctors don't have any incentive to lay quality roads. This is one of the reasons potholes are so common.
Oh, and in general, public schools in America suck . The schools themselves may be good, but the average student lags behind his counterpart in other nations. Private schools could compete and raise the quality of education. Vouchers would solve the cost problem. We're already seeing a similar model for universities (without vouchers, but with many scholarships). Most Ivys cost around than $35k a year, but the whole system turns out many high quality graduates. I think competition is one of the reasons why the American university system is one of the best in the world.
This had the effect of the goverment draining the telco's of all their capital and their ability to actually deploy the networks. This also left them very vurnable to market drops since the market had to grow at the usual high rate for them to make ends meet.
In my (and several market analyst) oppinion the politicians bears a lot of the blame for the current low in the telco business.
It's only fair that they restore the balance by giving the telco's a hand.
Disclaimer: I don't have shares in any telco's in fact I don't have any.
TCAP-Abort
I had a similar discussion at the bar the other day with a friend over telecomms and the Worldcom failure and all that.
We finally settled on a solution that would never be implemented, but in our non-specialist, non-economist minds would be the only real solution:
Separate infrastructure from services completely. Let your regional ILEC become an entity that does only one thing...own copper. Thats it.
And then they provide access to that copper to any and all service providers at a competitive rate. The same competitive rate for Earthlink as Jimmy-Joe's ISP and Crab Shack. If there is a technology that is coming that would provide great service that customers and the various service providers want, they can all (infrastructure and services companies) help pay the upgrade costs.
But as I said this would never be implemented. Disenfranchising the ILEC would make too many people upset.
What?
The best way to force a redesign is to throw a monkey wrench in the works.
wow, I'm re-reading atlash shrugged and am shocked at the type of stuff pulled all the time.
the novel is at points 'too unrealistic' then you read something like this.
good for the writers of the open letter, hopefully the reader(s) of the letter will understand and let systems/proudcts/companies fail/succeed on their merits.
If she floats, she's a witch.
"The owners and employees who started the telcos and grew them and maintained them have already been amply rewarded - they were paid while they were doing it and they got to see the value of their stocks grow. If they want more money, they have plenty of other options besides being subsidized by the Federal Govt."
What would happen, hypothetically speaking, if, say the Telecom Behemoths all decided to dismantle ALL their network equipment, disconnect all their landlines and started selling Wisconsin cheese?
Do any of these little phone companies (CLECs) have the capital to invest in nationwide networks that bring phone service TO YOUR DOOR? A service many people take for granted by the way..
Karma: Bad (but who really cares anyway?)
The old Eastern Bloc happens to be an excellent example of what happens when governments are not strong enough to enforce the rule of law and make everybody play fair.
You cannot have a free market and foreign investment without a certain degree of government intervention. Otherwise you see the situation prevalent in the more-backwards parts of the world where businessmen find it cheaper and more convenient to use unethical means to dispose of the competition than follow the rules.
Russia is an excellent example. Quite a few people have been rubbed out by their business competitors because the government is either unable or unwilling to impose a sufficent level of rule-of-law. I believe that just the other day, a regional governer got shot in the back of the head in broad daylight, apparently an organised hit by disgruntled businessmen. Check out the photo.
The nature of the problem was that all the switches were running the same or very close versions of the software, and they all had the same bug. It's a good thing MS isn't making much headway in the server, firewall and router spaces, or we would have lots of problems like this one already. (ok, it's a lame joke really, but not too hard to imagine a real scenario)
signed by internet and tech industry pioneers
So, does that mean that Al Gore signed this letter? I mean, after all, he is the father of the Internet.
Phil
You seem to be confusing libertarianism with anarchy. Libertarians are more than happy to pay taxes to provide military and police force--protecting people from physical harm is what the government's job is.
lynch mob for a meticulous and professional criminal investigation leading to a fair and open trial.
Actually, the police do little to stop real crime (i'm not talking speeding tickets here i'm talking robberies, assault, murder, etc.). They are
little more than glorified paper pushers labeled as a deterrent. Basically you have to commit murder before any investigative part of the police
force is brought in. The local police where I live, always give the lame excuse that they are undermanned (even though there is like 1 cop per
100 people in the city). Its more like they are to busy enforcing traffic violations and petty civil issues (loud music, arresting people who haven't
paid their late tickets etc.) to do anything except show up and write an incident report when a real crime occurs.
I am apparently one of the few people who doesn't take the "we need more police" line seriously. More police != lower crime rate. Even
though that is usually the reason given to hire more. Instead I see 50 cops standing on street corners "showing presence" in groups of three or
so on a friday night when I go downtown to drink. Since, the town I live in is pretty laid back its rare to actually see them doing anything. Most
of the 'disturbances' probably occur in the bars which already have hired security there to check id's and deal with such problems.
Basically what i'm getting at, is you probably have a better chance of stopping crime if nearly everyone carried a gun. Effectively, you have
a 99% of the population as a police force. Instead of the first instinct being "call the police!" the first instinct should be "lets go stop that!" Five
to ten minutes later when the police show up there is a good chance that the burglar has run off with a few valuable things, the rapist has
finished up and ran away, or the murderer is half way across town.
But are libertarians willing to have the governent break up monopolies and "guilds" of producers that band together to drive everyone else out. Like a certain software maker? Of course, due to the way our "just" court system works the big corporations are very difficult to actually stop with legal means, but the goverment is at least trying.
Perhaps our schools should teach students about corporate bailouts/handouts right before the students learn about capitalism, so that the students grow up realizing that the USA is a SOCIALIST NATION!!!
How is that flamebait?
Bruce describes the problem thusly: "Within the C software was a long "do... while" construct. The "do... while" construct contained a "switch" statement. The "switch" statement contained an "if" clause. The "if" clause contained a "break." The "break" was supposed to "break" the "if" clause. Instead, the "break" broke the "switch" statement."
The upshot was this: the new System 7 software provided a safety net in case a switch had issues. It would rid itself of all calls, then reboot itself, and when it came back online, it would send out an "OK" signal. The problem was, the "OK" signal would cause all the switches on the net to bookkeep the fact that the other switch was back online. While bookkeeping, the flaw arose: If two calls came in at almost exactly the same time while in bookkeeping mode, the data would get garbled due to the glitch. Then the switch would drop all calls, reboot itself, and then send out an "OK" signal to all the other switches. See the problem forming? A cascade of ups, downs, and "OK" signals floods within ten minutes, and nightmare scenario occurs.
Remember this, it was not a hack. It was simply poor programming.
You're either misreading or dense, but such is the sad state of civics education these days. The US Constitution does not grant any rights. It enumerates some of the rights which every citizen inherently posesses, which the government cannot deny them. Not to mention that the rights enumerated the sole ones possesed (c.f. Ammendments IX and X).
It's not that people under the regimes you're mentioning aren't granted the same rights, but that they're being denied their inherent rights.
See my post here. There is nothing inherently evil with monopolies that come about due to actual free-market competition.
Why are cable companies giving away service to compete with dial-up? Why aren't cable providers overloaded with customers?
The answer is two-fold -- first of all, a dialup delivers more than my desired quantity of spam and the content-rich sites I desire to see at very low cost.
I think the broadband market is saturated because there is no compelling and inexpensive content to be had via broadband.
Finally, competition is only healthy when there are competitors. If we lose the telecom services then broadband providers can get all the revenue and deliver shoddy service at high prices. I say let's keep telecom companies healthy until they are redundant.
McDonalds cost an insane amount of money. It cost $15 for a Happy Meal.
Oh please! You are either lying, or was severely ripped off.
I am Swedish, and there is a lot to say about this country. But the parent post seems rather trollish...
I mean, $15 for a happy meal for christs sake!
As for comparing New York with a city with roughly half a million people. Well, that's just plain stupid.
I will leave the rest of your troll uncommented, as it is not worth the time. I've already bitten and I hope you are satisfied.
Enjoy your $15 Happy Meal benzapp, and don't let people sell you any more bridges!
Btw. Gotenburg really is a dump, but that's just my opinion.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
My issue is this - why should I have to pay for a substation just because somebody wants to live in bumsville? (I assume you are talking about a substation serving one or two houses located remotely from anybody else - not one serving a slum with 5000 families living in it.)
I submit that if people had to pay to be wired up, they would think twice before building a house out in bumsville in the first place.
In America houses tend to be dispersed all over the place due to cheap transportation. In Europe they tend to be clustered due to high gas costs. In this case, the gas cost is artificially imposed, and I do not agree with this. However, in cases where costs are genuine (such as running 300 kV lines out to the middle of nowhere) I think that people should be given incentive to cut costs. When people are shown the true costs of their activities, they will make choices to make the most efficient use of their resources - saving both them and the provider of those resources money.
Now, if bumsville is the site of gold and oil deposits and it makes sense to build out there, then whoever is doing the building would gladly foot the bill.
A sense of entitlement is dangerous. We should definitely give people opportunities to get out of circumstances that are BEYOND THEIR CONTROL (such as a child born in a poor family), but we have to preserve incentives for people to be innovative and to make wise choices.
In some places in Europe (for example Sweden) the licences was handed out for free to those who promised to actually deploy the network the fastest and widest.
Stupid companies made stupid promises, and though they never paid a penny for the licences they still demand a bailout from their own completely voluntary promises from a few years ago.
Hopefully, the governments in those countries will just sit back and let the whiners fail. They dug their own hole, and now they get to sit and sulk in it.
Their places will be taken by the more realistic telcos, that didn't promise the princes and half the kingdom for a license and because of that are much better of now.
They can always buy their network from the loudmouth companies when they start to bleed.
This is a great example of how things should work. The people get a network, the smart companies trive and the stupid fail.
A little darwinism for the corps.
It's a sweet irony that the same companies who are now begging for a bailout are the same ones that used to be the strongest opponents to government involvement in the 90's.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
The call for unlicensed spectrum allocations in the open letter may be a clue to what the letter-writers think the answer is ... unfettered competiton for last mile would benefit firms poised to play there.
Fast failure, yes; and that should apply to firms who overpaid for 3G spectrum as well as those who over-invested in glass or POTS. And for HDTV. But free access to unlicensed spectrum for all? Expand bluetooth vs WiFi until it interfers with the ambulance radios? I don't think that's a good idea.
internet and tech industry pioneers ? There may be some second tier ISPs in the list, but Frankston (Bricklin's co-inventor of the original spreadsheet program etc) is the only pioneer I recognize in that list.
Yeah if these busniess fail before the compietors can pick up the pieces then where are the couple million people who work for the telcom companies going to go. Im not sayinng we should prop them up but at least try to push them in the right direction. You think all the little telcom compietors can pick up the slack in a multibillonare arena i think not. If anything cable should be pushing for the internet. That would push the telcoms to become real compietors with out the telcoms losing there customer base.
One who advocates maximizing individual rights and minimizing the role of the state.
anarchism Pronunciation Key (nr-kzm) n.
The theory or doctrine that all forms of government are oppressive and undesirable and should be abolished.
As the previous poster suggested, in either case its survival of the fittest, or the law of the jungle if you prefer. Just remember this warning when you're lying in the gutter being butt-fucked by AOL/Time Warner and the local warlord at the same time.
Because they are the only two choices?
I very much enjoyed your post. I don't agree with all of your points, but you nailed the gist of it: anarchy is NOT a reasonable form of government. It's tyranny in that it's the law of the jungle replacing the rule of law. It never ceases to amaze me how one man's wasteful program is another man's vital public service. I think that, overall, the Founders were pretty bright guys. And if they wanted EVERYTHING to be dictated by a market, there would be no postal service, no census bureau, no govermental services at all. They didn't go that route. I'm a rabid capitalist, but I recognize that in a civilized society, some things should be publicly available to all. You can debate what they are, and at what level services should be provided, but it's foolish to just say "let the market handle it".
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I live in rural Tennessee. You say we shouldn't be allowed electricity. Should we be allowed doctors? Or should only the people who can afford them be allowed? How should we deal with people who get comunicable diseases, but can't afford a doctor or treatment?
Should we have schools? We can see what poor quality schools have done in the "inner cities". Smart people abandon their neighborhood or go into the drug trade and other criminal enterprises where they can use their gifts to get ahead.
Natural selection is a great principle in the long run, but most of us don't live in the long run. In the very short run, it stinks. I'm glad my better armed neighbors don't see me as a possible source of food for dinner tonight.
Increasing my access to modern infrastructure improves my chances of adding to the common good. I may not pay that investment off for a long time or at all. Or I may invent a clean fusion motor or [add your favorite innovation here] tomorrow. And if I do should I share with the guy who wants to take my electricity away?
We need to find a happy medium.
sed 's/commun/terror/g' mccarthy > bush; sed 's/terror/saddam/g' bush > bush_wacked
Indeed - you only have to look at the fine examples of capitalistic ethics provided recently by companies such as Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossing etc to realise how unnecessary government regulation in the free market is.
You are citing real world examples. That isn't fair.
Objectivists have based their entire philosophy on Ayn Rand's fictional novels, of which The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are just two. This is in contrast to other schools of capitalist, socialist, and even communist thought, which, however flawed they may be, at least have insight enough to cite serious academic studies as the foundation of their ethos and philisophical views.
Does this mean a world view based upon a fictional work is false, or one based upon a scientific or academic study will yield better results? Not necessarilly, any more than we can know with certainty that science will yield a more accurate understanding of the universe than religion (of whatever flavor) will.
However, the vast majority of evidence is that science does yield better practical results than religious dogma, and rigorous academic studies more useful insights than works of fiction.
Having said all that, in Ayn Rand's defense (and I say this despite disagreeing with many of her assumptions and rather myopic views on a number of subjects), she was nowhere near as extreme as many of her adherents.
BTW - When I lived and worked in Germany I made two interesting observations:
1. German taxes were not significantly higher for middle and upper-middle income people there than they are in the United States, despite their having an excellent social net, including a form of socialized medicine (socialized via a strictly regulated insurance industry and policies paid for with public moneys for those who cannot afford the premiums), and
2. The healthcare I was provided there was vastly better than what I have in the United States, despite having one of the better PPOs currently available. The American system appears to be designed to subsidize high-end medical procedures, available generally only to the very wealthy or very well insured (two groups which are quickly becoming synonymous) through vastly higher costs for standard medical procedures (like getting a checkup or an allergy shot).
We in the United States pay three times as much for our less adequate healthcare than the rest of the industrialized world does for the "less effecient" socialized healthcare -- a fact which should put to rest once and for all the myth that the free market is always more effecient than a public works equivelent. In the area of healthcare, where the customer is captive by nature of the fact that without it they will suffer and possibly die, clearly the power of the customer to choose, or reject unacceptable conditions of service vs. the power of the provider to coerce or set their own conditions, is so degraded as to make a "free" marketplace in any meaningful sense impossible. This leaves corporate oligarchies and trusts vs. socialized medicine as the two real choices we face, and the experience of the entire developed world, outside of the united states, indicates that the socialized approach is vastly more effecient and effective.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I really had to cringe when I saw this response rated a 5. Government-funded road projects don't fit the definition of "subsidies" very well -- they can be more accurately described as the taxpayer simply getting one of the services that he paid for.
A better example of a "subsidy" is when the government pays a farmer for not growing crops. Here, it's much harder to make the case that the farmer is simply getting a service that he paid for with his taxes.
This "5-rated" response was a heavy-handed smackdown that missed the mark, due to a lack of thoughtful contemplation by the author.
Why should the federal gov't give taxpayer $$$ to a bunch of crooks?
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Like health care? "Sorry, sir. I know there's a gaping wound in your skull and that it hurts, but your credit is no good here. Please go away and die outside in the gutter with all the other poor people."
Give me a second to go call the media so the people in this town can get all riled up and come and firebomb your hospital... oh, or what were you saying about treatment?
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
A better example of a "subsidy" is when the government pays a farmer for not growing crops. Here, it's much harder to make the case that the farmer is simply getting a service that he paid for with his taxes.
It would be hard to argue that this is what the original poster meant by privatization, though. Farmers are privatized, but they get government subsidies.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Was I being unfair to someone? What an interesting debate that would make.
"sarcasm"
Why don't you read what happened under Clinton's FCC and then, when you have any idea what you'd be getting into, come back and drop a line.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Telephones systems are like electric power systems: a "natural monopoly." As in the electric power industry, if more companies are going to get in the game and make money, then there has to be more money available to them. The way the industry will get more money is by either expanding the market to include more customers or charging the existing customers more. The phone system is like the power system in that nearly everyone is a customer. The market is completely saturated and the number of potential customers is insignificantly small. This means that for companies to realize the opportunity to make money, they will be extracting more money from each consumer.
My phone bill is high enough now.
"We all think everyone has a right to an education, so we constructed systems to give everyone access to those services. We also think everyone should have access to clean water, so we have municipal water utilities."
Education and clean water are NOT fundamental or basic rights. Rights are concepts that flow from man's nature as a rational being. The rational part of man's mind requires certain conditions to function--namely, the freedom to exist (life), the freedom to act (liberty), and the freedom to the products of those actions (property). If these conditions are denied, man lives on the level of a beast. If these conditions are supplied man can flourish. All true rights can be traced back to these fundamental rights. For example, you may note that "Freedom of Religion" is not specifically enumerated in the three fundamental rights, but it is, in fact, a corollary of liberty, or the freedom to do as one pleases while not infringing on the liberty of others. In order for the system of rights to be self-consistent, there can be no right that conflicts another. Indeed, when properly defined, none of the fundamental rights do conflict. Because they belong to all men, it is implied that my right to act as I please cannot include forcing you to act in a certain way. The function of government is to maximize the protection of these fundamental rights.
Now that rights have been defined, it is easy to see why there can be no fundamental "right" to education or clean water. Schools and water networks cost money and resources, and those resources must come from somewhere. If everybody has a right to an education weather they have earned the resources that the education will cost, than such a "right" would necessarily imply the violation of a fundamental right-property. In fact, the very idea that a person has a right to something that they have not earned is a perversion of the ideal of justice.
Now that I have said all this you may think that I am opposed to public education. I am not. I justify public education as a form of national defense. One of the biggest threats to freedom are large groups of people being irrational. Because of the democratic nature of our government, if large segments of the population choose not to think, than individual liberties are threatened. Racism is such a phenomenon. Public education is our defense against this threat, and its goal is to empower and nurture people's ability to think.
-Andrew
Acknowledge that non-Internet communications equipment, while not yet extinct, is economically obsolete and forbear from actions that would artificially prolong its use.
This phrase shows the lack of knowledge of the writers of this paper of the difference between telephony and the internet.
Internet is an infrastructure that will route a package to a certain destination but without any guarantee. The package can even be lost. On this a protocol is made to allow connections and resending of packages when some are lost (=TCP). Therefor no guarantees can be made of the delay and bandwidth of such a connection, especially when different system of competitors need to be crossed.
Telephony on the other guarantees a maximum delay and a fixed bandwidth between two points once a connection is made. Even for connections between competing companies.
Therefore forcing all new equipment to be internet equipment is just going to reduce the customers experience.
The concept of intrinsic rights is unfortunately just an academic idea. Life has no respect for rights. Your only right is what you have the power cause. If you get eaten by a tiger, or bitten by a coral snake, or sucked under by an eddy while taking a bath, so sorry, right to life, uh huh. Thus the only old pithy maxim, might makes right. It's 100% true. The government does lots of things which are violations of your "rights" but because they have the might, the act becomes "right" to use the tired play on words.
Now, it's not FAIR for me to just walk up to you and shoot you in the face, and so the government tries to prevent it (though really our system of justice operates ex post facto) so what happens is you end up dead.
Is it fair to be punished for something you're not responsible for? Is it fair to reward someone for something they're not responsible for? Thats exactly what happens when you deny education to a child born to a poor family.
This whole philosophical idea of intrinsic sacrosanct rights is such bullshit. It's been latched on to by objectivists to prove an argument, but what really has happened is they've created a big petitio principi.
Goes something like this:
"we have the right to a capitalist democracy"
why?
"because freedom is a right"
why?
"because we live in a capitalist democracy"
As societal entities we can of course come together and dictate what we believe is fair and unfair and pass regulations based on that. This in fact is exactly what the US government does. If you dont agree with your elected representative, you can either vote for someone else and live with the decisions that person makes or kill them, your choice.
I get frustrated that the voices of ignorant media puppets count to the same amount as me, and I get doubly frustrated that you can't even count on your elected representative to do what he or she espoused during a campaign. Nothing I can do about it really, but choke on my morals or swallow them and take advantage of people to increase my personal wealth and prestige.
Oops, forgot to mention that the countries with a higher GNP are as measured PER CAPITA, so please don't come out of the gate with a stupid flame on my prior post.
Yeah! That's right! If I wanted to talk to someone I'd drive to see them!
Er wait, if god wanted you to get there fast he'd have given us wings!
In my day sonny, we had to walk fifteen miles in the snow, uphill, both ways, just to order a delivery pizza!
A lot of the problems with the recent Enron and WorldCom, etc. scandals were caused BY government regulation. That is, government regulation that was being written by the very companies it was supposed to control.
Corrupt and biased regulation is far, far worse than no regulation at all. The Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lays of the world may claim to lay their alllegiance at the feet of the free market, but a system where the ground rules are written and rewritten by the biggest players to ensure their own profits is far from a free market.
In theory, government regulation would be fair and impartial to all competitors. But then, in theory communism works too. The real world is quite a bit different.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
The concept of intrinsic rights is unfortunately just an academic idea. Life has no respect for rights. Your only right is what you have the power cause. If you get eaten by a tiger, or bitten by a coral snake, or sucked under by an eddy while taking a bath, so sorry, right to life, uh huh. Thus the only old pithy maxim, might makes right. It's 100% true.
In your examples you showed how just because morality says something ought to be does not actually make it so. The proper way to summerize this would be "right does not make might." The conclusion that "might makes right" is completely unwarranted by your evidence.
The idea that "might makes right" is, in fact a lie. Abraham Lincoln once asked someone, "How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?" The person replied "Five," and to this Lincoln said, "Wrong. Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg." Morality and Rights exist independently of the actual state of things at a given time and dictate the direction toward which men ought to strive. Without morality, man is reduced to following his whims like a beast. The consensus might determine what people will actually do, but the right thing to do will remain the same weather people choose to recognize it or not. What if the ad hoc morality of our society dictated that it was OK for me to kill you, and the only thing that kept me from doing so was my own recognition of a higher moral standard? Would you still be trying to convince me that morality was a pointless philosophical exercise then?
"we have the right to a capitalist democracy"
why?
"because freedom is a right"
why?
"because we live in a capitalist democracy
The answer to the question "why is freedom a right" is not "because we live in a capitalist democracy." Once again, you rely on the false premise that "might makes right." I would say in response something like "because man's rational mind requires certain things to function, and one of those things is freedom."
Is it fair to be punished for something you're not responsible for? Is it fair to reward someone for something they're not responsible for? Thats exactly what happens when you deny education to a child born to a poor family.
Actually, its not. The right at stake is the right of the creator to dispose of the wealth that he has earned/created as he sees fit. Not surprisingly, the rich person has decided to share his wealth with his children, and that is his right to do so. By not receiving that which you have not earned, you are not being "punished." Although the rich child is rewarded just for being born in the right family, morally you cannot stop this because to do so would violate the parent's property rights.
This whole philosophical idea of intrinsic sacrosanct rights is such bullshit.
you have yet to present any evidence that this is the case. Your "circular agreement" example isn't really created by the idea of intrinsic rights, but rather by the assumption that might makes right. Your false dichotomy of "fairness vs. morality" really is quite pathetic. What is fairness if it not derived from justice, which comes from morality?
-Andrew
I agree the govt. should not bail out the telcom industry. Just let the mismanaged companies go chapter 7, and allow new players to buy out the infrastructure. The reason for the telecom problem is not due to using obsolete equipment. The telcom market INCLUDES the internet and all high speed data communications. Look at companies like JDSU and AMCC, that design 10 Gb transponders and supporting chipsets. They are part of the telecom being hit just as hard as long distance carriers. The telecom industry is in a slump because the infrastructure is incredibly expensive, and not enough money was made through selling services such as long distance and internet access to repay the loans. The current telephone technology will be obsolete some day, but that isn't the reason for the current telecom crash.
Vote for Pedro
A few points here:
1> You omitted a third option the UK government could have chosen: auction the rail network.
2> Bankruptcy is the successful removal of failed management. You are confusing the failure of a particular private company (Railtrack) with the failure of privatization as system for instituting managment. In fact, that privatization allows for bankruptcy is an advantage; If the original mangangement team had been not private but public, they would likely still be there doing the same unsucessful job of running rail network.
You believe that privitization fails because it permits bankruptcy. Wrong. Privitization works becasue it permits bankrupty.
3> You say that the UK govt. bailed out Railtrack and you claim that Railtrack was then replaced by Network rail. You seem to have no understanding of what a bailout is. If there had been a bailout, Railtrack would not have been succeeded. It would have been bailed out; it would still be there, in place, running the rail network. Is your self contradiction not obvious?
4> A private for-profit company which does a poor job of managing the rail network is replaced by a private not-for-profit company which manages the rail network successfuly. So a>privatisation works to tranistion in a sucessful managerial arrangement. b>a private company now successfully manages the rail network.
Ah, a republican AC troll. So pleased you guys still take the time to respond "personally." You're an audacious liar, so much so that it's obvious to me you wont benefit from attention to your little fantasies, so I will keep my responses brief...
Reaganites were notorious cost cutters
Like saying Nazis were notorious for their hygiene. Actually they were notorious deficit spenders; oh yeah, and the Iran/Contra affair was rather notorious too... The only costs they ever cut were in civil rights enforcement. MILSPEC was one way they tried to cover the procurement corruption, laughable, really. The kickbacks, and who profited, even made the news (the "Ill Wind"). Oh yeah, you drink that water, don't you.
The president has no recollection...
Electric utilites were not privatized, they were degregulated
Actually, you're wrong again, moron; even your own propoaganda machine doesn't split that hair... You're really funny - I love that you guys are still trying to find cover on this one - you shut off the lights in California with a fake shortage - and the fact got covered on CNN! Well, the show must go on, I guess. Please, read a summary of a rational position on Calif/Enron. You know, the utility privatization scam is widely documented enough now that almost everyone knows about it... you might want to find another dodge, or just pretend you missed it altogether rather than respond with this drivel.
NorthPoint goes out of business and this is proof that Michael Powell is "notoriosly corrupt".
Yep; since you're obviously ignorant, or hoping we are, I'll give you the executive summary: to the RBOCs, Northpoint was a "competitor" and a "client" at the same time. Like most CLEC's, it was brutally abused via service sabotage, but the deathblow was some clever Verizon fraud. Then the bells made a huge show of pulling the plug on 12 hours notice, creating the most widespread, massive and prolonged (months?) downtime in the history of the commercial internet; millions nationwide were affected, including MSN's customers. The message was loud and clear: Don't deal with CLEC's. You might get shut off. Federal regulators? Off somewhere sending faxes from the beach, approving massive RBOC mergers while counting their bribe money.
You know, Verizon settled Northpoint's fraud claim for 175 million dollars...
So if beef prices rise
Slow down there cowboy. Telecom is regulated; the RBOC's prices and service quality aren't based on how well they wrastle their cows, they're based on how good their oversight is. But of course, you knew that, since your whole point here is just to make disingenuous comments that sound like arguments. I don't have to convince anyone Verizon is outrageously overpriced or offers abysmal service - any professional whose dealt with them knows that... Now that he's overseen the final days of behind the scenes sabotage of TA96, Powell has actually gone on record opposing the CLEC concept... backpedaling on the entire idea of competition in the industry. As I say, notoriously corrupt.
So you seem to believe that the proper role of government officials to pick winners and losers in the marketplace.
Thank you - I could have just accused you of having no idea either what I was saying or how the post-TA96 telecom industry works, but you've made my point better than I ever could.
You don't have any specific allegations of wrongdoing.
Thank you - I could have just accused you of either being senile or blatantly ignoring parts of your screen, but you've made my point better than I ever could.
just gratifying his own political bias
This is conservative dogma 101: Any attack is a partisan attack. Any criticism is a political bias. Unfortunately the facts dramatically point to Satanism. But I'll settle for cronyism and nepotism. And to your ignoring all the evidence in a goofy attempt to paint these clear and egregious failures as something other than grounds for criticism... poitical bias? You're gunning to have your headshot next to the definition, aren't you?
I'm sure you were out there dumping offal on dems and their appointees, too. At least there we have some common ground. It's not that dems wouldn't deserve your hypocritical contempt, just that you usually want to have some better reason for your arguments than drooling-fanboy-sports-team-loyalty.
I am not trying to shut down criticism of Bush
Yeah, right, AC Troll, you're just a freelance righter of wrongs, who gets 100% of their facts wrong and has no idea what they're talking about on any of the issues, but sure is fired up "bigtime" that someone may have disrespected your president and his friends.
Hail to the chief. Hit another one for the gipper, ACTroll! I'm waiting! And you can add why you don't log in - modded down too often?
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
You touch on the idea of the social contract, but you miss the point I'm making: in the natural world, no such contract exists. When you say that someone has "rights" you are making a value judgement, and applying it universally (fairness is a local value judgement and says nothing universal). Are the laws and rights synonymous? If not where does your justification for rights come from? There is no foolproof moral system, and your statement about "the right thing to do existing whether people choose to recognize it or not" seems to me to indicate that you are probably somewhat bigoted in your morality. It's fine if you agree with the pope or kant as far as the morality you use to determine your own personal actions, but you shouldn't extend that to everyone. I am not a moral relativist but I don't believe that any one moral system can answer the question "what is the right thing to do" all of the time.
:) I certainly don't claim to be, but that doesn't mean you have a license to be rude, particularly in a condescending manner when you havn't proven yourself superior in any way, and it's completely unwarranted.
If you look at the ACTUAL values this country espouses (which have been terribly subverted by the idea of currency as personal worth) you can see that the might makes right paradigm is really unavoidable. There's a lot of talk about "rights" but what it comes down to is exercises of "might" in the economic sense. The few things which we provide to people who don't have the economic "might" to take them are all obviously provided because they would bring about externalities to the empowered portion of the population. Health care is an example, in order to stop the spread of nasty communicable diseases we have to cure those disgusting impoverished people. Homeless shelters are another, we have them because we don't like to look at the homeless, and we want to keep them away from tourist attractions, and keep them from spreading those nasty diseases. Drug rehab programs exist to prevent addicted users from stealing from or mugging the empowered (since police can't take away that nasty feeling of violation). All across the world the might makes right paradigm shows true despite the claims of "rights". the important difference is that fairness is an empathetic concept, and rights are based upon rational logic. The problem here is that logic doesn't go from is to ought, and those influenced by the aristocratic ideology assume that humans have "rights" as the basis for their postulations. There's no justification for the claim that humans have rights though, you can't get to that in any logical way from the nature of life and the world. Any argument based on the proposition that humans have certain basic rights is going to be unsound. You can get to "that action is unfair" from a couple of simple propositions, and it will be valid and sound.
My complaint about the circular argument of many objectivists was just that, not a refutation of all objectivist ideas. You can make an economic argument for some of the objectivist ideas, but those havn't been shown to produce an outcome any better, and in fact as it has been stated, the idea of a totally free market is sort of silly, especially considering that a free market is empowered to take advantage of consumers when there is disparity of law. Totally free markets are always going to be perform sub optimally, what is required is not a free market but freedom to compete. Sounds the same, but very different. Adam Smith was not referring to the typical market when he talked about the invisible hand, but rather a market of theoretical perfect competition.
As far as the people who make the money being able to keep it and choose how they spend it, I have a slight disagreement with that. Life's bounty should be distributed based upon the merit and work of the individual, but few people can claim that their merit was the source of their wealth. Hard work and intelligence by themselves are only somewhat likely to get you ahead in life, and I don't believe in the dispersement of funds based on luck (and nepotism as an extention thereof). The day that luck is no longer a factor in determining wealth I will be first in line to vote for a reduction of taxes for the very wealthy. My main problem with extreme wealth besides the elements of luck and nepotism, is that it tends to subjugate the political system by allowing the advancement of agendas which lack popular support (a very un-democratic notion). I can't yet demonstrate logically that a society based on different precepts would be any better, however, so I respect the fact that the system we have is at least somewhat operational.
As a side note, please leave the pithy but fundamentally wrong and irrelevant quotes by famous people aside, and argue on the merit of your own logic and knowledge. I also don't appreciate having my assertions insulted when you don't properly justify your refutations and argue with fallacies. I understand nobody's perfect
No hard feelings, everything with the exception of the logical impossibility of "rights" is just my personal opinion and you're free to disagree and there's no real way to determine who's correct (probably neither). If you can come up with a valid and sound argument for the existence of universal rights, I'd be happy to listen but be prepared to have it refuted. Rights are a value judgement.
I'd suggest you read john rawls' "a theory of justice". It's an excellent book and could broaden your horizens somewhat.