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Sorting Through the Analog to Digital TV Mess
H_Fisher writes "CNN offers an article from Fortune magazine, giving a look at the problems surrounding the mandatory switch from analog to digital TV in the U.S., now slated for 2009. 'Managing this transition -- which will render about 70 million TV sets obsolete -- will be not be easy,' Marc Gunther writes. Among the problems: millions of American households without cable or satellite access will lose free access to news and weather along with the rest of their broadcast fare. Uncle Sam's solution? 'Yes, the very same federal government that is cutting back on college loans and food stamps will soon be issuing TV vouchers' - $1.5 billion to help U.S. households buy new digital TV equipment."
Uncle Sam's solution? 'Yes, the very same federal government that is cutting back on college loans and food stamps will soon be issuing TV vouchers' - $1.5 billion to help U.S. households buy new digital TV equipment."
That's not fair. Surely protecting the priceless "inter-lickual propretty" is more important than little things like eating and education. Where are your priorities? Your sense of ethics? Your campaign contributions?
Uh, I'd rather go to college than watch TV. Why is it that I can get help buying a digital TV, but can't get help with tuition?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
This is completely retarded. Why not put that money into creating cheap HD Antennas that output shitty analog to Pronged/Coax/Component so people can continue on as usual with a new antenna?
!"increasing as much as planned" != "cutting back"
Of course, it is a
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I realize this is in an 'analysis' piece, but I would be very surprised if it were actually true. Unless by cutting back, he means cutting back in the rate of growth. I'm not even going to attempt to Google this to find meaningful figures, for (I hope) obvious reasons. Anyone know where we can see the real increases/decreases for funding of such items?
Dark Reflection
If you are poor, elderly or uneducated TV should be the last thing you are worrying about.
This really gives some credit to the theory that the primary purpose of television is to pacify people and have them forget the real problems they face.
From tfa: the sale of the spectrum would generate approximately $10b in revenue. The net gain ($10b - $1.5b) would still be a revenue influx of $8.5b. This sounds like a (surprisingly) fair and mutually beneficial deal.
Regardless of your feeleings on television, it is important that everyone have free (or near free) access to news, state of the union addresses, etc.
Of course, it is a /. article, so I suppose we've come to expect at least one troll line in the article summary.
:-/ Take it up with the author, I guess...
Yeah, I thought about pointing that out, too, but that quote was actually from the Fortune article itself.
The UK seems to have got the right idea. We can get digital terrestrial set-top boxes that plug into the TV, via a SCART lead (which carries, amongst other things RGB and Composite picture signals, and stereo audio), or on a few boxes via an analogue RF signal. That way virtually all existing TV sets can remain in use long after the switch-over takes place.
Only the really old sets don't have SCART sockets now, and although suitable boxes with RF Out exist they are more expensive.
-- Soruk
Instead of the analog signals being cut at a certain date, I think a better approach would be to decrease the output power of the analog signal by, say, 20% a year over the course of 5 years. That way, people with existing sets won't be forced to suddenly buy new equipment. Those that don't upgrade will just get a gradually weaker signal. A weak signal will cause people to want to upgrade (or get a cheap digital -> analog converter box), where as a suddenly cut off signal will make for angry viewers.
Yeah, don't pick on television. As you can see from Tassleman's post, television helps us develop our intellect and debating skills. We all are more informed and useful citizens and members of society thanks to TV.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
I'm really impressed that the appeal to Sept. 11th came in on the FIRST article. Slashdot should be proud to have the right wing spin machine view it with the importance that it receives.
Forget college, forget healthcare, we need radio bandwidth and tax cuts for the richest to help fight the terrorists.
Sickening.
80 years ago people were expected to read Shakespear in the 4th grade, now we (MAYBE) get into it by high school. We've been dumbed down folks, and if you don't think TV played a large part in that, well, you watch too much TV...
Spectrum space commands such a high price because it is limited right now. Open up the supply, with the same demand, and price goes down. This is economics 101.
Actually, the estimates on spectrum auction proceeds take this into account.
It is being legislated because the spectrum is legislated. It would open up a lot of money's worth of spectrum, more than 1.5 billion worth.
You don't have to junk the TV, just get a digital receiver and then plug it into your current TV.
Except that a few 1.5B here and a few 1.5B here lead to us raising the debt limit:
p e=politicsNews&storyID=2005-12-29T225501Z_01_KNE98 2458_RTRUKOC_0_US-ECONOMY-DEBTLIMIT.xml
http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?ty
I don't know about you, but I'm not a big fan of that.
Join the Army and get the GI Bill. There's only one minor downside...
Best Slashdot Co
"We bitch about and make light of all the delays going digital,"
"We" do? Personally, I'm still complaining about needing to switch to begin with. Between the government-mandated switch, the push for the broadcast flag, and now these new pork vouchers, I find nothing to be happy about with the entire process.
LOL, I love slashdot. :-)
;-)
If we converted to digital and left the poorest of our nation out in the cold, we'd devolve into some discussion about how the evil government was depriving the weakest among us from access to a free press, possibly even with a few stats peppered in about how TV is even more important for them because of illiteracy rates, and so on, and maybe some good socialism arguments to boot.
But when we DO help them, it's, of course, a conspiracy to spread propaganda and keep everyone under their thumbs! (After all, network television is nothing more than a propaganda mouthpiece for the government!)
You guys are the best.
The analog-to-digital crisis--nothing that requires emergency expenditures of billions is not a crisis--points up TV's supremacy in American life. Those screens dare not go blank, even for a moment. It is from TV that Americans take proper instruction in the backstabbing rituals of the I Got Mine society ("reality TV"), learn to fear the system's guardians (cops and courtroom dramas), routinely covet what they can't afford (advertising) and get hallucinatory reassurance from square-jawed automatons ("news"). For the dwindling few who still watch such things, it's also where the marionette-in-chief periodically appears on glistening guide wires to rattle off his sermons.
If Congress didn't help lift the declining middle and growing Wal-Mart classes into the digital age, there'd be trouble. You can't run a nation into debt servitude, steal its liberties, mire it in futile (and feudal) distant wars, corrode its health and environment, leave it to drown in natural disasters, and force it to work longer hours all while presiding over historical levels of official corruption if you also hide the electronic teat. Baby, as every momma knows, wants milk.
I didn't see this rather obvious fact in a post yet, but people keep debating the government spending the 1.5 billion, so I guess I'll go ahead and state the obvious...
If you RTFA you will see that the government will be selling off the spectrum used by analog tv for an estimated 10 billion dollars... Hence, spending a small portion of that to facilitate the switch still leaves them with a 8.5 BILLION DOLLAR profit.
So can we please not have any more stupid posts about increased spending, when this deal is entirely designed to make money, not spend it. 8.5 billion will be made almost immediately, with a likely increase in other technologies boosting the economy in the long run as a direct effect.
On a side note, I'd love to see any conversation about this move to digital being driven, in part, by the ease of applying DRM to a digital signal.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Well, except that the "plan" is to increase it to keep pace with cost of living/inflation.. to not do so is to, in effect, cut the program. Those of you born with silver spoons in their mouths will never have to worry about it.
!"increasing as much as planned" != "cutting back"
Pretend the following:
Your job is to provide 1 apple to every student each day. It is 2005 and apples cost 50 cents. You have 200 students. The 2005 government budget has given you $100 dollars a day to do the job. You can do your job and have no problems. You serve 100% of the students.
The government forecasts that in 2006, apples will cost 60 cents and increases in enrollment will give you 220 students. Because it knows that these are just projections, the government projects a 2006 budget for you of $140 a day, 40% increase in budget, but you should be able to do your job with a little money to spare. You still serve 100% of the students.
When it comes time to actually pass the budget, the government gives you a budget of $125 a day budget, a 25% increase over this year's budget. However, government projections of prices and enrollments were on target. Apples now cost 60 cents and you have to provide apples for 220 students each day.
You can only purchase 208 applies, which means that 12 students are no longer covered.
Did your budget increase? Yes.
Did you cut back on the percentage of students you can serve and the services you offer? Yes.
Thus not increasing by as much as planned does equal cutting back.
But put $1.5 billion more into scholarships and such and I can guarantee that more students will get a college education.
I'm afraid you missed the point then.
These people are leaches on the system. It has nothing to do with who's being taxed. As the GP said, the top %5 pay the majority of the tax dollars already, both in total $$ and % of income. That the type of people you mentioned exist is a sad fact of human nature and the kama system hopefully will get them, but for each one of them there is a John Chambers (CEO, cisco) who lowered his pay (to $1.00 IIRC) to help the company save money and to up morale for his employees, there is a Craig Barret, who durring the downturn took a 75% pay hit because that is what was fair, and there are others just like them. These guys (and those like them) pay 40% of the federal government bankroll and are GoodPeople(tm).
[/rant]
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Actually, if the free apples program costs $100/day then you would probibly be budgeted $500/day and would have to do the usual orgy of aquisition at the end of the year so that you can say you don't have enought money to do the job. You will probibly have at least twice as many employees working for you then you need too since in government, your status is judged by how many people you have.
Lets not even get into how you will frequently run out of apples while waiting for multiple competitive bids from apple suppliers. Then you must make sure that the apple supply contracts are handed to vendors in the proper legislative districts so you will have the votes you need.
special consideration to 'disadvantaged' apple suppliers
Invironmental impact studies
Gotta make sure you pay the fairtrade apple rate
and so on...
No matter where you go, there you are.
First off, you're probably just counting income tax. All poor people, even unemployed, pay sales tax. Almost all employed poor people pay social security taxes and a few other non-refundable taxes. Fees tend to be paid disproportionately by poor people because they're an equal dollar tax on everyone who uses the facility or lives in the state.
Second, the upper 1% control far more than 1% of the wealth or income. The only way to get the upper 1% to control only 1% of income is to have perfect equality. In practice, the number is more like the top 1% controlling around 50% of the wealth. Even under a flat tax, their fair tax burden would be around 50% of total taxes paid. Anything less is a regressive tax regime.
What happens is that the poor pay fairly high rates (probably around 20%-30% of income) because they are still responsible for the social security tax (11% or so once you include the employer portion), sales tax, tolls, and sin taxes (gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol). The middle class pay a similar amount, with a higher nominal rate being offset by fat mortgage deductions, better tax preparers, and far less sin taxes and tolls. Even without breaking any laws, rich people will pay less taxes because they essentially pay no sales, tolls, or sin taxes and they often shop around for lower tax countries to park their money. Capital is also favorably treated, and most of their income comes from capital.
you just want a reason to tell the people whose lives you're marginalizing that it's their fault you have their money.
Let's see. Say you have a married couple - perhaps two people who both work as professionals in IT or some other area that they had to go to school to tackle. Between them, they make $250k a year before taxes, working probably 70-80 hours a week each at least. Unlike the low-income people you're talking about (who pay NO taxes), these two people have a very large chunk of their income harvested from them. Do you really think that those people (who, if they live in the sort of large urban area that can pay them that sort of living, probably also have a $2800 monthly mortgage on a 40-year-old two bedroom townhouse) are taking poor people's money? Do you really think that they "have" the money that an 18 year old flipping burgers should have instead? How much should a burger cost, in order to pay... what, $20,000 more?... to each burger-flipper? And do you really think that someone who designs hospital buildings, researches gene therapies, leads an engineering consulting team, or creates art desired by a large following should pay $10 for a $3 burger for that purpose? And would you, what, use the federal government to make sure that no other burger joint gets to offer a slightly cheaper burger lest we disrupt the artificial cash flow to the burger flipping strata of society? Or how about we tax the professionals a lot, and don't tax the burger flippers at all? Oh, right, we already do that. And how did we manage, despite painful blows to the country's economy (oil delivery shocks from Katrina, etc) have more economic growth and lower unemployment than, say, more socialist-minded places like France or Germany? By reducing the tax burden on the people that take their money and invest it the businesses that hire people and grow the economy.
Just admit it. You think that anyone with enough drive and capacity to produce enough income to live in an OK townhouse and own two cars that they have to drive an hour and half each day to the job where they work 70 hours should be forced to support other people who don't. But people like that aren't "born into money," they produce something of value and thus make the money. You act like there's some pie of fixed size out there, and that the minute one person earns a dollar more than he did the day before, some other person is thus going to have to go without that same dollar. What a load of decades-old socialist mumbo-jumbo crap. The economies that are framed around that perception fail miserably (and usually violently).
Among the many people I know who are arguably upper-middle-class (I'm not one of them), none of them were "born wealthy." But they, and people like them, pay the lion's share of the taxes in this country, including property taxes. The lower middle class pays very little, and the poor people pay no income taxes... in fact, they get tax credits along with a zillion other entitlements funded mostly by hardworking professionals and their families. That you have to resort to embarassingly ridiculous citations of essentially fictional $10M birthday parties (those just happen all the time, I know) in your attempt to make upper middle class people feel like they're not paying enough taxes is just an indication of how wrong you know you are.
The solution to poverty isn't penalizing productive people even more, it's in making a future of poverty unattractive enough to kids (and their parents) to make them want to actually bother to complete a solid high school and at least a real vocational education. Taking newly created income from someone who just earned it and handing it over to someone who didn't does not change the cultural ruts that keep some families explaining to their kids that sticking with entry level jobs is not a career strategy.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/TaxFacts/Tfdb/TFTem plate.cfm?DocID=221&Topic2id=20&Topic3id=22
0 50
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=2
While the Top 20% may pay 60% of the tax, they hold 80% of the wealth.
The bottom 50% hold less than 5%.
So maybe the tax burden on the top 20% should be a little higher, as they are currently being taxed at a low rate in proportion to their benefit.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Let's be clear about who is doing what to whom, shall we?
Television is not provided gratis to the viewing public out of the generosity of some media mogul's heart (or space formerly therefore).
Television is a MEANS of delivering viewer eyeballs to advertiser content. They 'bait' you with 24 minutes of programming per half hour, and then hope you don't notice that they 'switch' to advertising for at least 6 minutes. (Admittedly, lately they've gotten more subtle about the switch part by using product placement, and cheapened the bait with 'Reality' TV, but the principle's the same.)
Hi-def will be a way for these companies to put out more attractive bait. (OK, actually what happened was that the digital compression algorithms have allowed them to squeeze more analog signals into the allowed bandwidth, more like dropping LOTS of shitty-baited hooks in the water instead of something particularly attractive. Gov't is mandating that they use only the 'pretty bait'.)
So could someone explain to me why the US gov't is subsidising a privately owned and MASSIVELY profit-generating product delivery system?
-Styopa
"Wealth" is very different from "Income" while "Consumption" is very different from both. Taxes can be levied on any of the three items (or others of course).
The current U.S. personal tax system primarily taxes "Income" (income tax) and, to a lesser extent, "Consumption" (as in sales tax and "luxury" taxes).
The only significant personal "Wealth" tax in the U.S. that comes to mind is property tax. Generally property tax is very progressive - the poorest pay little direct property tax (they tend to rent or live in low cost housing) while consuming the bulk of the benefits (subsidized public health programs, transportation, and education) and the highest income individuals tend to pay high direct property taxes (since they tend to live in expensive homes and own businesses) and reap few if any of the direct benefits (they pay for their own health care [and more], rarely use public transportation [except for politicians who want to make a point], and send their children to private school).
So, what is the "fairest" thing to tax? The usual claim of "unfairness" in the U.S. system of taxation seems to, at the root, be that individuals who enjoy a lot of creature comforts don't pay their "fair" share compared to individuals who have a minimum of creature comforts. It turns out, these creature comforts are a direct result of consumption, not income or wealth.
The only way to substantially enjoy ones wealth is to spend (i.e., consume) it - if you have $1B USD in corporate bonds and stocks and spend only $20K a year, your lifestyle is not much different from a fairly low paid worker BUT your $1B is helping create and sustain jobs. Sure, you're getting a revenue stream from your investment, but obviously less than what someone else thought the assets were worth (else there would have been no willing sellers of the stock you own or willing borrowers of your money) and your lifestyle is not improved by this revenue stream. This investment revenue stream must just be being plowed back into creating and sustaining more jobs (unless you're a horrible investor!) since at most $20K/year is being consumed for creature comforts. Sure, you have a greater feeling of "well being" because you have money for a rainy day which the fairly low paid worker doesn't - but taxing "feelings of well being" seems odd (presumably that would result in taxing those who follow a religion since a feeling of "well being" is something that most religions tout either explicitly or implicitly and would also result in very rich, but emotionally depressed, people paying no taxes).
Consider two single developers working side by side at similar jobs and both earning a salary of $75K/year (for the moment, ignore taxes since "appropriate taxation" is the issue we are addressing):
The first (call them "Mr. Frugal") spends $25K/year ($10K for a studio apartment, $15K for other stuff) and owns an old car, a 20 year old 19 inch color TV, eschews cable TV, and has a wardrobe consisting mostly of t-shirts with product and company names on them. The remaining $50K a year is invested in stocks and corporate bonds.The second (call them "Mr. HighRoller") spends $75K/year ($25K for a nice apartment, $50K for other stuff) and always has a nice current model year car, a high end HD TV not more than three years old, the best of cable TV packages, and a wardrobe full of the latest designer labels. Since there is no "remaining" money, HighRoller saves or invests nothing.
After working for 45 years, Frugal has well in excess of $2.25M (inflation adjusted of course and assuming the investments were not too stupid) and retires comfortably - never requiring a penny of public assistance. On the other hand, HighRoller retires with NOTHING (except rapidly depreciating designer clothes, HDTV set, and high end car) and ends up living on Social Security
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
ATSC is not inherently harder to demodulate than DVB-T, in fact it is a bit easier, but only if you don't have multipath interference. Until this year, ATSC demodulators have had a rough time with multipath intereference, but now there are new chips that can handle it OK.
DVB-T uses COFDM which uses hundreds or thousands of carriers at different frequencies that change amplitude slowly. On the other hand, ATSC uses a single carrier amplitude modulated very quickly (VSB modulated, technically). Thus small time differences due to multipath are not a problem for COFDM, but are a problem for 8-VSB modulation of ATSC. The new chips have extensive time-domain equalizers to handle multipath.
On the other hand, there was evidence that 8-VSB provides a greater coverage area with less power. Power costs are a major issue for television transmitters.
The other issue is that ATSC includes high-definition, while European DVB-T systems don't (as far as I know). Hi-def decoders are a bit more complex than standard-def decoders.
We need a common name for the fallacy that everyone on Slashdot thinks alike. Just because the other side has an opportunity to express their differences with other Slashdotters doesn't mean "we" should be //faulted// for being inconsistent.
News flash: groups composed of many people from all over the world don't all think alike! What a concept!
If we converted to digital and left the poorest of our nation out in the cold, we'd devolve into some discussion [something contradictory to below]
But when we DO help them [something contradictory to above]
This particular posting doesn't out-and-out accuse We Slashdotters of hypocrisy, but that's the strong implication. How can anyone be so stupid to accuse a group of people of hypocrisy, especially a group claiming no political or ideological uniformity of its members?
Yes, there's probably a plausible explanation, but I don't really care. The 'you guys said one thing before and another thing later and the moderators agreed, you all are hypocrites' argument is retarded.