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Municipal Wi-Fi Networks In Trouble
imamac writes "According to an AP story, municipal Wi-Fi is going nowhere fast. A think tank research director quipped, 'They are the monorails of this decade: the wrong technology, totally overpromised and completely undelivered.' Subscriptions to the services are much lower than expected and lawmakers are concerned that millions of dollars will have gone to waste that could have been better spent on roads or crime-fighting. Satisfaction with the quality of service has also been low, which give some insight into the low adoption rate. Is municipal Wi-Fi just a bad idea, has it been poorly implemented, or is the technology just not there to support such an endeavor?"
The WiFi will go to Shelbyville!
But they put North Haverbrook, Ogdenville and Rockaway on the map.
"I'll say anything if you give me money."
>> Is municipal Wi-Fi just a bad idea, has it been poorly implemented, or is the technology just not there to support such an endeavor?"
Or that its something new, and will evolve in due time?
As a tech, I'm dying for these things. I'm getting more and more wireless networks where it just doesn't work because there's too many people with wireless devices in the area. I had one house with 6 wireless networks in range, cell phones, wireless security systems, 2.4 Ghz wireless on the land line, and even a few wireless mice and keyboards floating around. It was too much.
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Let me say this, Metropolitan networks, whether Wi-Fi or otherwise need one thing to make them both competitive and financially viable; the metropolitan network needs to be owned by that cooperative body within the municipality's control. That means every last 'last mile' connection.
When the city/county (whatever) owns all the last mile physical plant/infrastructure and ISP's simply rent connectivity to end users the municipality will be functional and profitable. Yes, that is how we would see big bandwidth to every home, and each home would have the choice of ISP services. It is possible to do this and would instantly flatten the cost of entry as well as the rules of engagement.
Then, if you ad Wi-Fi support to parts of the city that is subscribed to by users who already pay... well, it's not such a stretch to support financially.
Does anyone see any downsides to this?
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Google's wifi here in Mountain View is not very good. I can't get any reception on it, and I live less than a mile from their headquarters. If even Google can't get it right, city governments probably . . .
The rest of the above sentence is left as an exercise for the reader.
The major issue has been that they have given the contracts to implementors that are paid for the number of radios that they install and by gosh they will install more radios than anyone every imagined. But, see, the 2.4Ghz bands were already polluted BEFORE they started and installing 2.4G radios on every block for several square miles when each mesh radio has a practical range (line of sight) of around 20 miles is really not helping things. And just as bad, the backhaul of the mesh radios is almost always 5.2Ghz or 5.8Ghz, which have only a few channels each to choose from (5.8Ghz has more, but still...)
Don't believe this could happen? Ask anyone that has tried to use the Toronto mesh network downtown. It's flat ugly.
...Steve
Internet as a utility needs time to develop if it is ever going to be adopted. Take a look at my situation. I pay for a cable modem and not for a municipal wi-fi connection. Why? Well, because I occasionally like to watch television and television service is bundled with internet service. If I buy them separately I'm paying a whole lot of extra cash. What would make me change my mind? Well, if I could rent legal TV episodes over IP for a very, very low price akin to that portion of what it costs to see them on cable TV. Until that time, however, why should I pay extra?
There is an entire article on this in yesterdays "Information Week" that I recieved today. Page 41.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
Here in Oakland County, Michigan, they took a different approach. Our nascent, county-wide wifi network was almost entirely privately funded. The county agreed to provide the space to mount the antennas (on land already owned by the county) and to promote it. The actual design and implementation was bid out to the private sector. The winner agreed to pick up the infrastructure tab and to provide free wireless to everyone in the service area. In exchange, they are permitted to offer plans with more bandwidth and traffic prioritization to those willing to pay for it. It's a win-win: It didn't cost the taxpayers anything and we all get free access, and the private company gets to keep any profits that they make from the premium service.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Most other people might have a slight interest in being able to get on the internet anywhere, but not enough to pay for it.
the project get sent to a private company who uses it as a tool to gather demographic information, annd is overly paranoid about the right kind of information.
Let people connect. If you MUST have something, put a 1 page explaination. Period. Then let people use it. If somene crosses the line, deal with them.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It was a good idea in some ways, and I'm sure it can be improved more than one thinks. But, more money going to "law enforcement" and other uses is probably not going to happen... even they did, it's not like the streets will be safer. They'll figure out some way to blow it.
"Trillions"? C'mon. They're using networks and getting breaks on prices at the same time. It's not like it's acutally going to be 45Mb connections for each person connecting in the city, as much as a free shitty connection for whoever is desperate.
I understand they're spending loads of cash on this, but it's also a bit of a selling point for bringing new people to the area, and it looks good on paper. They don't care if it's a lot of money, as long as they're known as a tech-savvy town.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
Municipal WiFi is hard. Municipal WiMax would be a lot easier.
...if a broadband or near broadband wireless connection is not available everywhere, then it is pointless. People cannot run their lives hoping to find a connection. Far better to put up with a slower but acceptable 3G or equiv connection through the cell/mobile providers where coverage is often assured. I reside in the UK and have a Vodafone 3G connect doo dah connected to my Macbook via USB and it works like a dream, anywhere I go. Even when it slows to GPRS, it is fast enough to surf most websites. I only use WiFi when back home or at the office where I am more likely to waste time watching YouTube videos and downloading stuff. :-) Seriously, my point is valid and when 4G is introduced (Google Samsung 4G trials), that will be it for public WiFi.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
When the internet was taking off, we had great catch-phrases like "Information Superhighway"." Now that's a name I can get behind.
"Municipal Wi-Fi", in contrast, sounds so lackluster, like "Deparment of Leisure Services". Proponents use lame slogans like "Wi-Fi? Wi-Not?" and "Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it's not useful."
We need something that will make folks excited, like "Naked Bimbos Everywhere".
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It may be a matter of scale and what you are trying to accomplish. Spokane, for example, has a muni system downtown that is free for X hours. They use it as a convention/tourist draw. Bremerton is installing one as we speak for the same reasons. They are trying to revitalize the downtown area with a new convention center/hotel, etc. If the goal is to get people to sign up and pay money so we can make a profit, maybe it won't work. But if the issue is to draw people to the area with a wi-fi infrastructure to suck up tourist convention dollars, then that's a different take on the issue.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
WiMax has its limitations too, and plenty of them. Chief amongst those is that it doesn't work as advertised (3 miles non line of site? In absolutely perfectly ideal conditions, perhaps). It's good... but it's basically good old OFDM re-packaged into multipoint.
...Steve
I thought they'd all be too busy advocating Ron Paul for President.
My favorite quote? We are not libertarians, we are constitutionalists. Suuuure you are.
There have been various articles about it, but I only found one that talked about pricing - $17.70 per month (via thenewsroom.com).
The Army reading list
1. Unlike the free market, they only answer to the people every couple of years. The sellers must respond to the buyer every single day.
2. When government screws up they spend your money to figure out what happened and to come up with a solution. In the free market, you can just change providers.
It is not that City-wide Wi-Fi doesn't work or there is no tech powerful enough to run it; it's just poor implementation and, more importantly, poor advertisement.
For one, rural and suburban municipal Wi-Fi would be a much better implementation because some of these cities are still on the lower-end of personal internet connections (think low-speed DSL...). Running a Wi-Fi network with its network connection coming from an area with a much faster internet connection or a satellite-capable connection could possibly happen...
Also, I live in a fairly popular city in the United States. I believe we have city-wide Wireless internet, but I have not heard a WORD from our city's government (either that or it was taken down). Plus, another poster mentioned a good point that there is just too much cross-talk; I could be in a cafe with Wi-fi enabled, but it will not be that advantageous with the SEVENTEEN other wireless networks that are in the air...
I think this is a case where 802.11a might hold a candle. But that's just me, and maybe it's not right either ;-)
Right - interstate highways suck. I could have built the whole system solo in a week. National Parks - who needs-em. World War II. Give me 100 men with rifles and we could have beaten the Jerrys and the Nips. Nuclear weapons - HA - my own cousin has THREE in his garage next to his GTO.
Hey swallow some assholes book - he needs the money.
"Most people if they are going to do serious work aren't looking to be sitting in a park," said Eric Rabe, a spokesman for DSL provider Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) "They want to be at a desk where they have their papers or business records."
Gotta love that quote. If that's true then why is VZW pushing their much more expensive alternative so hard. If nobody wants it then why is Verizon so worried about competition? (grin)
"Is municipal Wi-Fi just a bad idea, has it been poorly implemented, or is the technology just not there to support such an endeavor?"
Well, based on my experiences with municipal bureaucracies, I'd say yes, yes, and maybe.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Why am I not surprised that the socialist nutters popped out so quickly...
If there weren't so many damn idiots in this world, I'd just be average.
A lot of these municipal wi-fi efforts have arisen just because the private sector has failed so terribly to bring decent Internet access.
Hell, scroll down the front page here at Slashdot and you'll see a story posted today about the failure of many ISPs to provide adequate service. Of course, we've seen many, many stories like that posted here. I'm sure we've all got our own stories to tell about the trouble we've experienced dealing with various ISPs.
So every time that somebody comes along and says that the private sector or corporations are the solution to the problem of shitty Internet service in so many areas, I want to laugh right in their fucking faces. Their solution has had a decade-and-a-half to prove itself, and it has failed! It has fucking failed outright!
Now, a government-backed solution may not be the best. But it's far better than what Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, or most other ISPs are offering. We only need to look to Europe to see how our American communication services should be. Over there, their governments tend to be heavily involved with making sure that a quality service is provided. And it's more than just stringent regulation, too. In the end, we see European consumers getting access to far better mobile phone services, not to mention much, much better Internet access than we usually have here in the States.
Sometimes the free market fails. That's usually the case with essential services, of which the Internet is quickly becoming one. So the government tends to be the only party who can step in and make a positive difference.
Municipal wifi does indeed work. Public wifi is an amazing idea. Of course it will be slow at first. Who is this idiot? Comparing monorails to wifi? That's like comparing soda pop to bawls.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6676205.stm "The BBC programme Panorama is to highlight concerns about a lack of safety research into wi-fi networks. "But the Health Protection Agency says emissions are within safety guidelines." etc.
That is my thought as well. Though WiMax sure is taking a long time to ramp up.
Cellular internet may have already taken over by the time WiMax is ready. Though WiMax may get a boost if the cellular providers are the ones providing it, which is likely what will happen around here (WiMax base stations on cell towers, telco offers yet another package to their users).
I'm your LiberNuttertarian Guy!
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Are you unpoopular?
The answer to all your problems is in this little philosophy!
LiberNuttertarianism!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I read this article on the way in today and saw some of the stumbling blocks they hit. One of them was that in many instances the materials the houses were made of prevented a clear (if any) signal from getting through. This requires additional equipment to get it to function. The speeds offered by these services are also usually that all that super. Then it mentions this kind of service has been a possible motivator for the local cable/telephone companies to suddenly offer services in the area. The end result is that there are more choices, but you can't be surprised when you offer crap and no one takes it.
802.11 wasn't designed to be used city-wide. Of course it's expensive and unpopular to try to blanket the town with WiFi, the stations barely enough range to cover a whole house well, much less a whole block. Furthermore, 2.4ghz is way too overcrowded for this sort of thing. Better solutions would be WiMax or a simular tech using the analog TV frequencies when they finally get auctioned off. The idea of Municipal Internet is very good, but this isn't the way to do it.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
better spent on roads or crime-fighting.
Did anyone else instantly think "SimCity" when they read that?
Yeah? No?
Just because someone isn't crazy enough to buy into libertarianism doesn't mean they're a socialist. It just means they aren't completely stupid. Admitting to being a libertarian is akin to admitting to being a Scientologist, it's a fairly clear sign of mental derangement.
Libertarianism: Because simple minds like simple answers to complex problems.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Wow, talk about false dichotomies... so anyone who thinks libertarians are nuts must be socialist? With that kind of simplistic thinking, I'm not surprised libertarianism hasn't caught on.
I don't see the point of commercial municipal Wi-Fi. A private company is perfectly capable of installing a few hundred 802.11n base stations in the city, unlike the burden of, say, laying down cables or water pipes. Such a solution also does nothing for city visitors, who are more likely to need Internet access in some arbitrary location than residents. Would you want to open dozens of separate accounts for each city in Bay Area? Starbucks hotspots will probably do better for you.
On the other hand, a free service is a great convenience for city residents and, for it's cost in taxes per person, is probably a good saving over cable/DSL. Free Internet can also encourage visitors to spend more time in city's businesses or locate the business in the first place when they have impromptu shopping ideas. In Foster City, there is an advertisement-supported service by MetroFi that I think is a good example on how things should be done.
They must be a Democrat or Neocon then.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Maybe - just maybe - we noticed that everything the gov't does could have been done better, chaper and faster by private companies or individuals? Besides, anybody who is not an anarchap supports, by definition, at least SOME amount of gov't interference in people's and companies' business and as such is a socialist. Yeah, I know you don't like being called as such but realize that's what you are, if you support public schools, police, transport, army, public anything.
Global warming is a cube.
Simple question is why have wi-fi everywhere in a city? What problem does it solve?
Do people constantly use their computers in parks? On the sidewalk?
Most people use the Internet in their home. A few will use it at a coffee shop or restaurant.
If you want to provide Internet access then a community DSL or fiber network is the place to start. Then selective hot-spots. like at schools, libraries, community centers, and maybe some parks.
Why would I pay for access to a metropolitan wifi network when I have a WAP at home, internet at my office, free wifi and a couple of restaurants I go to, and a browser on my phone?
metropolitan wifi networks are a solution seeking a problem.
Now Monorails are cool. Actually they do tend to be cheaper than subways and a lot more attractive than elevated trains. I think they are a good solution to mass transit. Too bad buses and light rail are cheaper still.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"lawmakers are concerned that millions of dollars will have gone to waste that could have been better spent on roads or crime-fighting."
No, not that millions of dollars will have gone to waste. That "lawmakers are concerned" bit. It gets me every time.
I mean, they took the money from someone, to give to someone else. They're not feeling the pain, and they're not really feeling the benefit. Build the matrix:
Take from me Take from someone else
Give to me Meh! Yay!
Give to someone else Hey! Meh!
Concerned. My ass.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Municipal Wi-Fi Can't Beat Laws of Physics
Companies Grow Wary of Building Out Municipal Wi-Fi Networks
Expert: Wi-Fi Laptops 'Pose Health Risk to Children'
Hackers Target Wi-Fi Hotspots in New Phishing Attacks
Have you read my blog lately?
I like being called a socialist. Anarchosocialist, anyways. There is nothing wrong with caring about the important rights: the right to food, clothing, shelter, and medicine. Without those rights, all others are meaningless.
Libertarians want the right to economically enslave others. When all resources are privately owned, all non-owners are defacto slaves, and it is this goal that libertarians work towards: the enslavement of the poor, worldwide.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It didn't cost the taxpayers anything and we all get free access, and the private company gets to keep any profits that they make from the premium service.
/sarcasm on/ /sarcasm off/
And what's going to happen to it once the private company ends up making next to zero profits from it and that it will cost boatloads of money to implement and maintain it?
Especially in Michigan where the economy is flourishing so vibrantly these days...
Judging from the the previous post of the potential dangers of WiFi networks, I think it's good that they're getting nowhere fast.
The wireless industry has worked very hard to inundate us with these technologies so that it would seem ludicrous to question them once they became mainstream. Because after all, once everyone has WIFI, the general population snuggles into the idea that they must be safe if they are everywhere----because otherwise, the government would have stopped their proliferation. Right.
I'm actually looking for Coffee shops with a LAN connection, not a wireless one. And they DO seem to be popping where I live. So yeah, wireless is losing its steam.
Our suburb is scheduled to have municipal online, as it were, in quadrants over the course of this summer. But one thing I've never seen was straight talk about what it will cost:
Lompoc recently slashed prices by $9, to $16 a month, for the main household plan.
OK. Here's the thing guys. If I didn't already have cable or DSL broadband, at $25 I would tack it on with my current provider instead of dealing with yet _another_ provider. At $16 I suppose you will get a great percentage of dial-up people to upgrade. Maybe even a few current broadband customers who want to save a few bucks/month or those who don't have cable OR a land line. But I'm not surprised the response is lukewarm. Makes me think this really does have to be a government-run commodity to work economically.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
In fact almost all networks are non-existent in my area. Five houses down the street they can't even get cable modem connections, no T1's, and DSL won't come here either. Sometimes I think I can shout farther than the network goes around here. The only Wi-Fi in my area comes from my own rig with a legal booster amp on it. Some of my neighbors might appreciate my hooking up a yaggi directional to it though since it won't reach all the way down the end of the next block. I'm currently looking for good/cheap community mesh solution and a way to get it connected online, since its just too much trouble for any of the utilities to bother.
Well thank you for the informative response, comrade. As a prototypical socialist, I assume that using various slanders like "crazy" and "stupid" is considered an adequate substitute for meaningful logic. I find it utterly remarkable how, someone who holds to a philosophy that people should be responsible for their own actions and not rely upon a nanny state to force conformity, is considered deranged. As for your definition of libertarianism, well, I don't remember any libs stating anything about the solutions to your mental problems, except that they are invariably easier to come by when the government is not pointing a gun at your head dictating theirs to you.
If there weren't so many damn idiots in this world, I'd just be average.
As much as wireless has a "cool factor", it still sucks. I can't get my Linksys wireless AP to throw a reliable signal 50ft through the house even after buying high-gain antennae, upgrading to a 3rd-party firmware that lets me double the output power and switching to 5.8GHz cordless phones. A municipal deployment might use better equipment, but dropping several thousand dollars on an access point that might cover a radius of several hundred feet strikes me as... inefficient at best. Considering the signal issues with wireless and the limited about of throughput per AP, you're investing in a dead-end technology that won't ever be able to deliver the hallowed triple-play that reduces customer churn.
Fiber deployments, on the other hand, offer a steady amount of bandwidth and lots of it, enough to offer uncompressed HD programming, 15Mbps+ Internet and voice. Those triple-play customers are less likely to switch providers even without a service contract so the revenue streams are not only larger, they're also more stable. Muni fiber deployments like iProvo and UTOPIA cost more up-front, but they also experience significantly higher take rates.
Muni wireless is failing because cities tried to take the cheap road to better Internet access. Let that be a lesson to those who are too cost-conscious to do things right.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
Ridiculous article yestersay in the Wash. Post about a large outer-suburban MacMansion-style development that is stuck in a 75-year contract for internet/phone/cable. Some years ago it seemed like a good deal since the company ran fiver optic to each house. Now it's a ripoff monopoly. Hard to feel sorry for the MacMansionites, who are busy violating their own association rules by sprouting satellite dishes, and should have known what a contract meant.c le/2007/05/20/AR2007052001724.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
If you don't know about these U.S. developments, almost all the "affluent" growth goes into outer suburbs, while the inner ones, not really built to last, start to peel and crack. Many or most new developments are private entities, with "association" rules and regulations layered on or replacing normal local law.
So if you're looking for virgin territory for high-speed internet service, that's where it is. Or was.
Right. I don't own any car manufacturing plant but I am not a slave to VW. I also don't have any CPU production facility, yet prices are falling every day and it's difficult for me to think I am being enslaved by AMD. I could go on forever showing how much your gov't regulated, police-enforced idiotic solutions do not work, never have and never will, but you would shield yourself behind your "I'm a socialist and proud of it". Maybe you'd like to take responsibility for the mass murderings perpetrated under Stalin yesterday and North Korea's gov't today instead?
Global warming is a cube.
A lot of cities got sold a sucker deal by companies like Tropos which have some badly performing and hard to deploy equipment (among other things they think one radio is sufficient for mesh and access points). But they also have a huge sales, marketing and schmoozing staff to wine and dine officials into signing contracts. So Earthlink is up to its neck in its deployments just trying to get the equipment to function at all.
Whereas other deployments that chose decent equipment like Tranzeo's two radio wifi mesh stuff are doing okay.
'nuf said.
-=[ place
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Um, what gives you the "right" to food, clothing, shelter, and medicine? Are those people who are engaged in the manufacture of those products and services your slaves? Why not a right to free music, free sex, and free insert_whatever_you_want_here? You should really think about differentiating between "rights" like (life, speech, etc), and consumer products.
If there weren't so many damn idiots in this world, I'd just be average.
Its just bad timing, not a bad idea. The public isnt ready yet for wifi to become another 'utility'.
Give it 5 more years.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If the municipal wireless is anything like home wireless, then somebody has to go around and reboot all the wireless routers every day. Wifi is one of those technologies that just doesn't seem to be maturing at all. It's like an open source game, they got it 60% working and were too busy playing it to finish it and fix the bugs.
When I can pay $100 for wi-fi in the city, which is quite spotty, or simply pick up Ma Kettle's unsecured router from her apartment on the third floor for free, I'll pick the latter. This also shields me from government snooping, MAFIAA lawsuits, and the like.
If I post a comment that's likely to make me the blunt end of harassment, be it about Scientology or Dow Chemicals, or if I download a song that was just broadcast over the radio for everyone to tape, Ma Kettle will have to fight the lunatics while I'm off posting from somewhere else. This has an even better side effect, since lawsuits against completely innocent people get more media attention and help bring about laws to protect citizens rather than corporations.
Wait, were we talking about wifi?
Dekker Dreyer
You should really think about differentiating between "rights" like (life, speech, etc), and consumer products.
Good call.
Given that life at least requires food, and according to many, also clothing and shelter. having a right to life implies having a right to those things as well.
That sets them apart from whatever_you_want
Hence. maybe you should follow your own advice before starting to sound like a fanatical non-thinker.
I've sold municipal wi-fi to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook, and by gum, it put them on the map!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Hmm. Lompoc introduces a municipal wireless network. Just as the city starts, the local DSL and cable providers suddenly do massive upgrades to their systems. Upgrades that the city has been asking for for years, and that the DSL and cable providers have found it infeasible to do. One wonders whether this sudden change of heart on the part of the private providers might have something to do with the failure of the wireless network, and whether those providers would have had that change of heart if it weren't for the threat of a competitor they couldn't exclude hanging over their heads.
...in Lawrence, Kansas. Thanks to Lawrence Freenet, a 501c3 nonprofit, community organization, we have a wireless network covering almost the entirety of Douglas County. Downtown is one giant hotspot, local businesses have access points, and there are repeaters located on street lights, water towers, you name it. Not to mention their prices beat the local cable company, performance beats the DSL providers, and they are the ONLY provider of broadband for rural residents.
If your family can't afford the fees, they will provide the service for free and even provide you with a computer if your family can't afford that either. No ads, no secret agendas. Just a nonprofit partnership with the city to help people get connected.
No, I don't work for them, so this isn't a shameless plug. But, I was there at the beginning when we were hacking WRT54Gs to stick on street lights, making three mile long shots to test connection quality for rural customers, and getting the word out that this would be a good thing. A year and a half later, there are over 1,000 subscribers. Tell me again that municipal wi-fi is in trouble.
But I don't have any other options if I want something other than dial-up. We live about 6 miles out of town. When SBC hooked up our phone line here at home I asked when they'd be getting DSL out to us. The technician said not in our life time. (I hope to have at least another 40 years in me) lol I don't think they are failing. It's just taking rural families some time to feel that they need something faster than dial-up. In town the municipality has to compete with SBC/Yahoo and Charter cable. Prices there start at $19.95 a month. We pay twice that for our wifi service.
You bring up a good point, which is that the space municipal WiFi is supposed to fill is already being filled by cell providers. Right now, I can choose between any of four providers for 3G access anytime, anywhere (or at least as good as our own teensy municipal WiFi network provides). As far as I'm concerned, areas with decent EVDO/HSDPA coverage have no business going down the municipal WiFi path - government has no business competing with private business.
Is it as cheap or fast as some people want? No. But then again, you're paying the _real cost_ of such service, not just subsidizing it by force. And, personally, $15 a month for Sprint data access over EVDO seems OK to me.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Adding 2 meaningless options doesn't make your answer less simplistic.
If you are so interested in voluntarely interaction between people, it might be a good idea to not think that everyone who has his own ideas (that might be different from yours) is by definition stupid, else you are just arguing everyone should be like you, and this whole voluntary interaction thing becomes pretty meaningless.
Something else, untill the invention of centralized government, humanity was stuck living in rather primitive and generally not to nice conditions. Government is the answer to a number of problems. That said, there is quite some discussion possible about what those problems are, and it should be clear that where it isn't the right answer, it shouldn't be used. You can also discuss how to optimize government so it works best. Believing that government is by definition evil and not needed however is showing gross ignorance of human (pre)history.
Just because you allow a criminal and corrupt government to continue, doesn't mean that every government in the world is the same shit as you have. My homecountry has always had decent governments, no matter political flavor, who has done the best for the people and currently they have several hundred billions of dollars stashed away in pension funds that will benefit the people rather than a few already very rich people.
A libertarian society is the most vile and inhumane society you can imagine which is also why none such exists.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
I'm not a statist either, I'm an anarcho-socialist of the anarcho-syndicalist variety. I don't want the state telling me what to do, but I don't want an oligarchy of owning class assholes telling me what to do, either, and that is a certainty under libertarianism.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
[My parent comment to you] WOOOOOSH
It was intended as a jest to compliment the offensive politically decisive parents posts.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Exactly how does not having clothes interfere with your right to life? Nudists seem to manage quite well without it, as do the few remaining tribal folks. Same for shelter, unless, you think that nomads and homeless people are dead. As for food, how can you stipulate, that someone who spends their life in the production of food, owes any of it to you? Doesn't your own socialist philosophy require that you "mix your labor" with it? In fact, to get to the core of the discussion, the socialist requires that others provide for them, and be forced to do so, if necessary. The libertarian does not. The libertarian ideal is that people should cooperate when it is to their MUTUAL benefit. Socialism, on the other hand, forces people to cooperate via the business end of the government. Hence, maybe you should be a little less dependent on using the power of government to force other to follow your advice, and provide you with all the luxuries that you seek, before starting to sound like a lazy fanatical thug.
If there weren't so many damn idiots in this world, I'd just be average.
Give any bar/restaurant/coffee shop that install free wifi equipment in his establishment a 500$ refund on taxes. Oh, and make them buy larger tables also...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Wi-Fi would make sense for parks, librarys, and schools. Give people access where they congretate, as that's where most time would be spent.
Parks would be great because mom or dad could keep tabs on business while the kids are free to run about the playground. Likewise, other folks could login some time outdoors instead of from a stagnant and cramped office. Why not allow people to enjoy the outdoors if they can still get work done?
Librarys would be good, since it's a quiet study/research area anyways. You could save data on your own laptop instead of losing it on a public terminal. Likewise you wouldn't have to wait, or deal with whatever boogers the last person left on the public terminal keyboard. Also if you're using your own terminal, you also shouldn't be hindered by what someone thinks would be politically correct for you to view. (But this might necessitate privacy screens or something. Who knows?)
Schools would be great as well, provided enough kids could make productive use of it. It works to some extent for colleges, and similar policys could work for public schools just as well. The only downside is that such service is likely to be limited to the more affluent schools, since laptop adoption amongst lower income areas would take longer to catch up without some other assistance. To reduce slacking or less productive use, network accounts might also be limited in access based on scheduling. That way MySpace could only be accessed after class hours, but pages related to any coursework could be accessed during class time. (Some IT should be clever enough to make scheduled privalages a possibility.)
Business or residential areas would make less sense, since both those areas are likely to have their own wireless or wired networks. Why waste infrastructure on places that should be covered already?
" Is municipal Wi-Fi just a bad idea, has it been poorly implemented, or is the technology just not there to support such an endeavor?"
WOAH. False Choice fallacy winner here.
"A think tank" study, eh? I don't have to look at the name, as I can guess. Lissen up; the "think tanks" are really, REALLY well funded right wing propoganda outlets dressed up as friendly wonks. Who's picking up the tab for this "think tank" study? Would that group have a deep interest in reaming us bloody with corporatized, right-sized monopoly services? Uh-yap. Damned near all of the "think tanks" are deeply married to the very wealthy. Their agenda is the ascendancy of their spouse.
The muni services have been litigated to death, and those few who managed to survive are throttled for funds by friendly neighborhood lobbyists working the local governments. What few, very few experiments that exist managed to survive by partnering with some corporation like Google, which kinda isn't exactly a municipal wifi network, but yet another granted monopoly.
Years back I totalled up what Americans have spent on their "free market" net connections. The figure is enormous. I then calculated, on the high side, what it would have cost for the Feds to fiber up every town in the country, Interstate Highway style. I never hear people complain about the highway system, even tho it's cost trillions in adjusted dollars over the last half century and literally rode over local governments. It's not even close. We could have had fiber to the house for a fraction of what we've been screwed for, and for a hell of a lot less than what they are about to screw us for in perpetuity.
Now, we don't even need the fiber to the home; we could build municipal fiber backbones with wifi nodes and even cat5 connections to the citizens. We could do it for, what, a few tens of billions of dollars? And then it would be done but for the maintenance costs. And we'd not have to spend 25-100 bucks - each - a month for crap service. We'd have gigabit to the home or megabit to the air. If we didn't want to make it a "market" system, we could make it free, anonymous, and as capacious as we liked. We don't do it that way for ideological reasons.
The "free market" thinktanks want to hold us upside down and shake the change out of our pockets. They aren't anyone's friends but their investor buddies'.
Slander is not a substitute, but logical discourse is impossible with libertarians. It's like arguing with flat-earthers, it's so absolutely wrong that I don't even know where to start.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
If you owned nothing, and all the world's resources were owned, as they would eventually be under libertarianism, then you would be a slave. How would you survive without doing what an owner told you to do? You wouldn't. And you would have no rights, either. No right to assembly, all land is private. No right to free speech, ditto. Any owner could tell you to shut up or leave their property.
Face it, you want to own slaves, you just don't have the balls to admit it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The article complained that people are not buying in New Orleans. I suppose that's because they have a free wireless network that works OK.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Hmm. I take it for granted that the government is generally both slow and dumb, but any implementation beats my current options:
DSL doesn't reach. SpeedNet is a privately owned WiFi network downstate-only for rural areas, at the rural price: $50.00 a month. And Sprint's WiMax is *years* away.
ANY muni wi-fi service would beat the Comcast monopoly. So just get your act together and make it happen.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
Hey, this is better than video cameras all over the city. I mean, justifying the cost of "free" internet is way better than paying for a camera for every 15 people.
I, for one, welcome our Municipal Wifi Overlords.
You support slavery, do you? When all resources are owned, all non owners are slaves. If rights to basic necessities are not guaranteed, I can get you to do anything by denying them to you. You want a world where a small owning class controls all resources and the rest of us all have to do what you say, don't you? That is what libertarianism necessarily leads to.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The government is inefficient, and if you don't believe that, you're in denial. Just look at all the "wars on" anything. The government throws trillions of dollars (which are stolen, for all intents and purposes) at things that people perceive as problems. Some really are, some aren't. The war on drugs creates more drug use, the war on terror creates more terrorists, the war on poverty, causes more poverty. We should declare war on some endangered species, maybe we'd have more of those as well...
The point is, there is nothing the government does that private companies or individuals couldn't do cheaper and better. Libertarians don't believe in no government (that's the anarchist's, which aren't as crazy as you may think), but they do believe in less government, an extremely limited government.
The basic libertarian principals are that you do whatever you want, and I'll do whatever I want, and as long as I don't harm you and you don't harm me, everything is good. The only legitimate functions of government are the protection of the three fundamental rights of life, liberty and property.
Perhaps in large cities, like LA and NY, city and municipal management might have real skills and the dollars to invest in Wi-Fi networks. For little Po-dunk towns like Kansas City, St. Louis, etc... I have found too few dollars and too big of dreams have created patchy, intermittent WI-Fi service. Also, there is no advertisement of WI-FI even being available. Several hotels offer their own service, but there is no notification of city-based WI-FI. And honestly, do you believe cities that cannot/will not fix the potholes in the streets are actually going to invest the needed resources to build a reliable WI-FI? They will build an IT disaster that no citizen will know about, tourists will condemn, and it will be a talking-point on their resumes come election time.
If I have nothing, owning no property, and you own all the world's resources, then if you were to demand that I bend over and let you anally rape me in exchange for a bite to eat, it would be mutually beneficial for both of us if I complied.
"Mutually beneficial" is not the guarantee of moral correctness you seem to think it is.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Secondly, if government is such a wonderful mechanism to achieve everything that we want, then why is it always mandatory? There is nothing in the ideology of libertarianism that states that people can't form voluntary alliances. You can't say the same for those people who don't want the government's "help".
If there weren't so many damn idiots in this world, I'd just be average.
Don't get me wrong: I like the fact that they exist. They can, in fact, be done right. They should exist and we need them and other services like them to break the horrific stranglehold legal monopolies like cable and the Bells have over our connections.
However, they can be done very, very horribly. Case in point: Tempe, AZ (think Phoenix) has municipal wireless. They got it right with allowing some free services to everyone (you can visit asu.edu and such without paying), but the service is run by complete morons.
That's right, utter morons. Their "transparent" proxy isn't. If you're having trouble connecting, you'll run into it constantly and it breaks all downloads because it wants to direct you to their crappy page of news and ads and open your originally requested site in a (blocked) pop-up. Did I mention that you get this page sent even when the program you're using isn't a web browser? Believe me, it doesn't play nice with telnet, non-HTTP downloads, etc.
Oh, and if you're having service problems, well, umm, tough. All of their websites only have useful information if accessed over the wireless link. If you go to the same URLs from the web, you get pages of ads. I don't know if they belong to the same company, or if they're from domain squatters, or what, but it really, really sucks when you have no one to contact about problems.
Also, all the links here are unencrypted. Set your laptop up to sniff traffic and you have a goldmine of passwords to steal, you can launch MITM attacks, or whatever you want. Yeah, they use SSL while you log in, but that's not much comfort.
So please, if your city plans on setting this up, make sure it's run by competent people! Otherwise, you too may feel like strangling whoever made that damned semi-transparent proxy and decided to make sure that support was almost impossible to locate, let alone contact.
And if you're ever in Tempe, don't bother connecting to the WAZTEMPE SSID for any reason. I had nothing but headaches trying to use their services and I never want to use them again. Find a cafe or something with its own wireless link. They can hardly do any worse.
The free market is neither really free nor is it what you're making it out to be. In the free market we also see monopolies where there is no alternative to switch to and business behavior which indicates businesses which do not have to "respond to the buyer every single day". It's sad that American memory is so short in regard to the recent corporate scandals (Worldcom, Enron, Exxon, etc.) which dominated the headlines and the lack of structural change that resulted from those scandals. In software, all software proprietors are monopolists; when you choose proprietary software you're giving control of your computer and your data to a monopolist, trusting that that master won't hurt you. This has proven to be an unwise choice.
Public involvement makes American government better and municipal wi-fi need not be privatized to be real or good. I'd much rather have some degree of democratic control over it than to hand it over to a private tyranny where I am at the mercy of an organization where profit means more than my welfare.
Digital Citizen
Uhhhh, I am an anarchist. An anarcho-syndicalist. We think your concept of individual ownership of natural resources will automatically lead to an oligarchy of a few owning class people. We believe in democratic control of natural resources by the workers actually using those resources.
Government is a control structure, and like any it can be abused. That includes the control structures of private ownership, which aren't as efficient as you may think. In studies of privatization, privatization of competitive industries works well, while privatization of natural monopolies has always failed.
With government, there is a system of checks and balances. In the free market, there are no checks and balances to curb the runaway positive feedback loop of wealth accumulation. There are no checks to stop the exploitation of the natural failure modes of the free market: information imbalance, natural monopoly, and externalities. I have yet to hear a Libertarian give a cogent explanation of how their system would deal with those three factors.
You accuse me of not understanding Libertarianism, I accuse you of not thinking through the consequences.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
This is far from flamebait. When it comes to something that needs to help the public in general, the government can be trusted to do it much better than any corporate entity. Roads, parks and military are three good examples. Just because the government can screw up doesn't mean it always has or always will. Municipal Wi-Fi is a good idea, but it was farmed out, in most cases, to groups that have a lot to lose from it doing well, or to groups that didn't have and weren't given the resources they needed. This is an instance of "Crap in, crap out." not government deficiencies.
Clones are people two.
If nothing else, the muni wi-fi forced the commerical players to upgrade. That by itself make the project a success.
As an aside, how did you come by having nothing, unless the government took it away from you, in the first place?
If there weren't so many damn idiots in this world, I'd just be average.
"Um, what gives you the "right" to food, clothing, shelter, and medicine?"
f _needs
set aside medicine, and you've just stated Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_o
everyone has the fundemental right to life; one needs food, clothing, and shelter- IN THAT ORDER, to survive. There's your "rights" right there...
the significance of a signature is insignificant
Haha, nice try at a slam, but I consider survival beneficial, and if the options are putting out or starving to death, any rational individual would have to choose the former. In your system, what is to keep owners from colluding to keep prices for necessities artificially high? Because of the fact that the more you own, the more power you have, people with a slight ownership advantage can parley it into a larger advantage. This feedback loop eventually leads to a small oligarchy of owners who then get to legally decide who lives and who dies, under your system. Please attempt to show why or how this would not be the case.
For bonus points, show how innate weaknesses in the free market, namely natural monopolies, externalities, and imbalance of information will not be exploited under your system to hasten the above-mentioned inevitable outcome.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Municipalities have limited resources. They need to be marshaled wisely. Investing in widespread WiFi is a bad idea. They will always be behind the technological curve. Maintenance and support will chew up more resources. As soon as a widespread vulnerability is discovered, they will have to spend again to put in emergency fixes. When someone who hates porn takes over, that will be censored. When someone else who hates gays takes over, any material that is ruled "objectionable" will be censored. Think they don't have the right to do that? Someone else will, too. They will sue. And the municipality will blow more resources on lawsuits that they may or may not win.
Let the private sector in. Let them compete on price and quality. Do you think your city would be offering you a free 2 year cell phone for a contract? Or a low-cost one for pay as you go service? Nope. If your municipality was handling cell service, you would be stuck with a 3 pound brick from the 80's. Do you think a municipality could have kept up with all the network upgrades that have happened in the past 20 years? They would be bankrupt. Most are close to it anyway.
So let's avoid the whole scenario where some technologically illiterate councilperson hands the contract to their brother-in-law so the bum can have a job. Let's avoid the inevitable censorship and hassles and property tax increases. Let the private sector in to do it better, faster, and cheaper.
OK, I'm done with my free-market rant.
Association contracts that prohibit satellite dish installations are not enforceable. See this document from the FCC on this. This overrides any contracts or HOAs or CC&Rs in the United States.
Your view is too US-centric and if you think that the system in this country is the world norm, you are in denial. Most other advanced countries have substantially better operating governments. It is amazing how fucked-up US can be when one considers the vast resources at its disposal; who knows, maybe this is because this country is already poisoned by its uniquely unfettered "laissez-faire" philosophy.
Municipal wireless, using current WiFi technologies, is a half-baked idea. Realistically, wireless access points only have a range of about 20-30 feet. It works in homes, office buildings, hotels, and areas with dense pedestrian traffic... But, for the goal of having internet connectivity anywhere, a technology like WiMax or EVDO is more appropriate, because it'll actually work.
No, I will not work for your startup
That looks like a Control-C, Control-V that has gone bad. You have to be careful what you highlight, or it'll get inserted into your current document.
Go on then.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Muni WiFi creates competition that the incumbent telcos/cablecos have written out of the economy. It supports better roads and crime fighting more economically than just filling potholes and jailing (for a month) criminals and suspects.
And it helps create alternatives to the AP, by increasing neighborhood communication directly among neighbors, without AP's filter.
The AP is clearly siding with its corporate media buddies who don't want the people to have anything like the power the corporations have. But Municipal WiFi, though a whole industry with its ups and downs (amplified by politics and the stakes that motivate AP and its ilk), has a lot of growth and progress. Especially considering its many enemies, most of whom have corporate lobbyists pressed right to the ear of the Bush administration and plenty of Democrats, too.
Muni WiFi has a long way to go, and has to outgrow some plans too ambitious and inappropriate for a public utility. But it's evidently grown threatening enough to AP that we'll be seeing plenty of these hatchet jobs for some time - until AP and its corporate cronies are forced to change with the times they try to change with their reporting.
--
make install -not war
_Any_ system of government automatically leads to some kind of "oligarchy". Ability is unevenly distributed among inviduals, and no matter how you base your government, somebody is eventual control it. In your government, it's an oligarchy of those most able to sell their particular interest as the public interest. The political purpose of private property is to leave so much power and activity outside the government that those that do dominate can't infringe so much on any one else.
Seeing as how it was the governments that chose who to "farm out" these projects to, and that took it upon themselves to allocate (other people's) resources toward the projects, isn't the projects' failure still an example of "government deficiencies"? The governments were the ones making all the major decisions; they ought to take the blame when things fail as well.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
The government is inefficient
d f) looked at the annual administrative costs and asset reduction at retirement, they concluded that mutal funds have operating costs ten times greater than the SSA and provide extreme risk to retirement assests.
Businesses are inefficient too.
The government throws trillions of dollars (which are stolen, for all intents and purposes) at things that people perceive as problems.
Stolen?
The war on drugs creates more drug use, the war on terror creates more terrorists, the war on poverty, causes more poverty.
Stop with the conjecture, provide references.
The point is, there is nothing the government does that private companies or individuals couldn't do cheaper and better.
Look around at all the corrupt businesses. There will be no transparency with private organizations. The problem with private enterprise is they are profit driven entities. Just because a private ogranization can be better dees not mean it will be better. This reminds me of all the people that said mutual funds could provide far greater return than FICA, with less costs. When the CBO (http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/52xx/doc5277/Report.p
The world is not black and white. There are complex social problems out there and one ideology is not going to provide a cure.
Slashdot - The great and glorious cluster fuck of Internet wisdom.
Exactly. We don't have a right to food, clothing, shelter, or medicine. We do not have the 'right' to any physical or material good, because having a 'right' to a physical good means that we have the 'right' to obtain that physical good from someone who works very hard to create that good.
What we DO have a right to is the right to produce our own food, clothing, shelter, and medicine. If you want to make your own Aspirin, there shouldn't be anything stopping you. But I don't think that you should be able to go to someone who DOES make their own Aspirin and say, "I have a right to this Aspirin. Give it to me for free."
Perhaps because Wifi is entirely the wrong kind of technology for widespread Internet access. 802.11a/b/g were designed for short-range stationary networking such as a house or small office building. Being in the unlicensed "ghetto" band of 2.4GHz, wifi radios have serious problems going through too much solid material, are pretty much stopped dead by mundane things like trees, have to compete with everything else in the 2.4GHz range (including omnipresent microwave ovens), and have crippling federal restrictions on transmitter power. A lot of people wanted to make municipal wifi work and I applaud them, but their solution to overcome Wifi's inherent problems was simply to dump hundreds of radios all over the place and pray that it would work. And they lost that bet.
If anything was going to make community wireless Internet access work, it's WiMAX, which fixes many of these problems. In particular, a community could be served by a *single* radio. And I hate to be a doom-sayer, but I predict that WiMAX is going to be dead in the water soon now that the cell phone companies are starting to offer reasonably-priced EVDO plans.
If one dominates in private property, it infringes on everything. How can I eat without property to grow food? I must work for somone who does have such resources, and I must do whetever that person says. When only kings and nobles owned property, the fight for the right of the common person to own it was important. Now, property owners are the new kings and nobles, and the common person needs protection from property owners.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I actually use GoogleWifi as my connection at home even though it was never designed for that. They say it's an outdoors network but they give you suggestions on how to connect. I use a PepLink 200 and a flat panel antenna to connect. Initially the performance was incredible. Nearly 1 Mbps up and down. Over time it kind of degraded. I'm situated midway between two APs with lots of trees in between so it's not optimal. The connection strength varies with time of day. It's pretty bad late at night. Sometimes I can't connect at all. Rain can degrade it as well. I don't know why it varies with time of day yet. My guess is that it's when most traffic from other networks occur around those hours. 2 AM is a good time to connect.
Pros:
- Free
- Fast
- No monthly fee
Cons:
- Unreliable
- High equipment cost, depending on how far from an AP you are. It costed me $250 to get started, which is 5 months of connection. Overtime, it's definitely more cost effective.
If you happen to be close to an AP, you might not even need anything extra but performance degrades quite a bit with distance and poor line of sight. I don't have LOS to the AP but the signal bounces enough that I can connect. One possible way to fix this is to involve the users. It would be nice if people who can connect reliably would open up their APs for others and relay it. Google can give out the routers on condition that you share the signal. Just an idea. I do plan on doing that as soon as I can get it all working well.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
More roads and cops hasn't really panned out in the long run for us either. Unless our suburban sprawl and failing public transit systems are considered successes. Lets build more prisons to stuff all the people stealing private wifi signals :)
You have no right to be fed, you have no right to be clothed, you have no right to a roof over your head, and you have no right to good health. None of those are considered inalienable rights, and an alienable right is not a right, but a privilege, and in the case of socialism, privileges to be granted and denied by the all-powerful Godlike State. To put it simply, socialism is State-worship. Yours is a secularized theocracy, instead of priests divining the will of God, you have bureaucrats divining the will of the State. And for what, "the greater good?" How is your greater good also my greater good? I would be asking you the same question if we replaced the phrase "the greater good" with the word "salvation." It's ultimately the same damn thing. Socialists only seek to become the infallible masters of a secular theocracy, and to hell with the rest of us.
Libertarians don't want to economically enslave others, rather, libertarians don't want to have to put up with being afforded privileges by a state. Libertarians don't want the state telling them what they can and cannot do with themselves. Libertarians want to be able to do anything they damn well please (and can afford) so long as the non-aggression principle isn't violated. In an ideal world, there would be no "libertarian state," because libertarians would have no need for one. In the real world, the "ideal libertarian state" is one that protects its constituents from external aggression (I specifically state "aggression," and not "threats," for the obvious implications of the latter) while remaining neutral on internal disputes (so long as those disputes don't infringe upon the non-aggression principle). You could, theoretically, form your own socialist enclave within a libertarian state and so long as you didn't attempt to force your system upon others, they'd let you assert your right of self-determination. If the roles were reversed, I seriously doubt a socialist state would allow the formation of any movement contrary to "the greater good."
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
I would rather pay a high upfront setup fee for free wifi, than a monthly charge to a corporation that needs to make money.
Let's look at this:
Find a government employee that you would hire to do a job.
Find a politician at any level that you would trust to be in charge of ANYTHING.
Now, let's make it a little more complex by adding millions of dollars, multiply it by several thousand government employees, and let's throw in hundreds of politicians. Let's make it really entertaining by throwing in the left wing news media that is fed by the hands of BIG GOVERNMENT.
Most of you people have this belief that because the government is throwing money at technology, that it's a GOOD thing. Frankly, I know I don't want the government to "invest" in anything. I want them to provide roads, police, and jails. If I want Wi-Fi, I want a private company to invest their money, and produce a service that is WORTH paying for. In fact, I'd like 2 or 3 companies to come in and COMPETE with services, that way I can buy one that is full-featured, or I can buy one that is cheap. Or I can buy services that fit somewhere in the middle.
Instead, I'm stuck with a poorly implemented, over-priced, under-performing tax burden that no one wants, yet everyone is forced to use because some politicians thought that they can't have any private competition. I think you'll see the brighter side of DIALUP after a few more years of Municipal Wi-Fi.
I said it years ago. Go look at Municipal Cable. Ask the locals in those areas how they like Muni CableTV, adn I bet you're lucky to leave the room without any serious scars. Municipal services suck. Government projects suck.
This is a fact of LIFE, and by extension has always been true for humanity, as a matter of monikers, degrees and methodologies.
Though a foolproof system is not theoretically possible, in interest of maximizing quality of life, liberty and opportunity for all citizens, it is necessary to have some regulatory systems to level the playing field, and minimize the abuse of concentrated power (which as stated, is a fact of life).
I think there's plenty of evidence to support that the only thing private companies do "better" than government is enrich themselves. You may not have noticed, but to a great extent, many of the economic problems we're facing in the US at the moment are the direct result of the fanatical belief that "free markets" are good in any way shape or form.
The reason we had a strong middle class in the US during the second half of the 20th century is because of the "socialist" programs of FDR and his followers. That, and Labor Unions were the two forces that created a middle class where families could live off the salary of one working parent and kids could expect a better life than their parents (mostly gone, now). All unfettered capitalism and free markets got us last century was a whopper of a Depression and a tech bubble.
By the way, after a decade of Republican, pro-capital, "free market" rule in Congress and 5 years of Bush, we've just about done away completely with the American middle class. Things like thederegulation of the banking industry have leeched an incredible portion of the wealth that had been gathered by the middle class. If we keep this nonsense up much longer we're going to have a very small group of rich people and a whole lot of serfs. That may suit some of you, but I don't really have the temperament for serfdom, and I certainly don't have the necessary greed and lack of morals required to become one of the elite.
I get such a kick out of midlevel techie "managers" who swear they're doing so much better under Bush, until you find out the amount that they owe has been increasing every year, and their real income has been declining at about 7 percent annually (despite their 2 percent "raises").
You are welcome on my lawn.
As opposed to an oligarchy of working-class assholes telling us what to do. Yeah. Great improvement. You replace one oligarchy of assholes with another, and the only difference is you are likely among that group.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
I've seen plenty of people truly expect to get 5-6 miles of people connected to one AP, and in many cities, the number of AP's is horrendous, but yet everyone expects an indoor network. One city block for indoor coverage is not going to happen, but an AP on every light pole just might.
Where I live, an AP on every 3 light poles would get the job done, connect everything with laptops, probably 90% indoors, but yet everyone groans it can't be done. It's just crazy that it's expected to wait 5 years on a tower thats 800 feet above sea level, then finally start deploying on the ground on city provided poles.
Go re-read "The Wealth Of Nations"
It turns out that paying a free man to do a slaves job is cheaper for the owner and the would-be slave than just owning a slave.
The slave owner doesn't optimally provision the resources needed required for the maintenance of the slaves; the slave, acting in his own best interest, can distribute the stock required for his sustenance considerably more wisely than the slave-owner could
Slavery is only possible when the government permits it. In a libertarian model, "renters" work for "owners" to the mutual benefit of both, and where collusion and monopoly do not exist (and they rarely do apart from government intervention), abuse is essentially impossible (above what some majority of renters are willing to bear).
For every 1 "owner" that says "i'd rather see poor people starve to death", there are 100 that say "i'd rather put poor people to work and get rich". You can count on this basic tenet of economic well being to ensure that a capitalist, libertarian society does not devolve into owners exerting control over non-owners via economic pressure.
This ignores altogether any altruistic or moral difficulty in pseudo-slavery arrangement. It is worth noting that in the history of the US, some of the most effective charitable giving and humanitarian work was established long ago, when there was an aggregately lower standard of living and considerbly less taxation on the populace, and the real-wealth of the giving and middle class population was aggregately lower.
There are a few basic tenets of market economies and human nature that we can agree or disagree on. I'll state a few that I agree with
- all consentual transactions between adults that do not involve force or fraud are inherently just
- wealth is not a zero-sum game
- laws and a legal system are effectively required to establish and enforce "the rules" of a functional market economy
- the division of labor, and the free market, is responsible for the overwhelming majority of progress in the western world, no matter how you choose to define it, since its real inception in the 1600-1700s.
If you disagree with these points, we're obviously not going to come to the same conclusion about what libertarianism is or if it is an effective method of governance.
You seem to enjoy trolling people or at least being as caustic as possible in your remarks. I encourage you to read "The Wealth of Nations" and "Free to Choose" if you haven't already done so to try and better grasp the rationale for libertarian thinking.
If you can point me to any worthwhile reading that makes the argument you're pushing in a more compelling and rational way, I'm curious enough that I'll give it a try.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I never said the government wasn't to blame; I was simply disagreeing with the GGP saying that the government should never have been involved. I never said they did things well, but each municipality had different reasons for doing it poorly. You are right that, in the long view, government deficiencies of one sort or another can be considered the cause of failure, but I believe that is looking at things too glibly. Saying the government doesn't know enough about this and should just stay out and let the corporations do it ignores the fact that the government is us. We, those with the knowledge, should help the legislatures, etc. craft these laws, not point and laugh when they fail because they only get bad information from those with something to gain.
Clones are people two.
Yeah, but who holds the government responsible when it screws up? The people? Pfeh. The people are trapped in the cycle of replacing assholes from one side with assholes from the other.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
WiFi tech is moving forward much faster than municipalities move.
by the time they got 802.11 a/b rolled out, 802.11 a/b/g/n is out.
they were just too slow.
why should I pay for 11Mbit/s when I can get more than 100Mbit/s
They're using their grammar skills there.
Interestingly enough, I got my issue of Governing Magazine and they have an article about Wi-Fi. For those of you want to read another FA, click here.
There's also a couple of Q&A's with a couple of government type people and their viewpoints on municipal Wi-Fi.
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
1. You work for someone else. You have labor, it has value, someone will pay you for it. 2. Yeah, "dominance" in property happens, but it can only go so far. It can't coerce, it can only buy, and anyway there are other properties. But when the government is dominated, where can you go for relief? Only to the same electorate that was persuaded to elect the dominant government in the first place.
More garbage from you bankrupt right-wing pseudo "libertarians". If the pharmaceutical companies shut their doors tomorrow then we the workers who work in them (like me) should take them over and run them for the benefit of the people. Thats my left libertarian/anarcho-socialist side. On the other hand my social democratic side says I am happy to pay taxes if they are used to provide health services and effective drugs to people who need them. I am not happy to pay taxes for the wars of agression and imperial domination carried out by Bush and his brown nosers Blair, Harper and Howard.
It boils down to this right "libertarians" believe in freedom for capital, left libertarians believe in freedom for people. The original poster was right about right wing "Libertarians":
As far as difference between the cruel private master and the benevolent municipal master, I recommend the words of C.S. Lewis: "...Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Thank you for your civility. It was not required, but it is appreciated.
will automatically lead to an oligarchy of a few owning class people.
.sig made me)
:)
There you go, bringing class into it again...
(I wouldn't have, but your
Interesting post, really - please send me your newsletter.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
HAH! Talk about newspeak.
... government or no. Where have you been? Europe has already achieved free universal health care. Not everything has to be adversarial.
We're all "forced" to work by nature, so I guess we're all "slaves".
"The only way people can have a right to any good or service"
That's not "the only way". There are MANY ways. E.g. people themselves can choose to provide it as a "right"
Government isn't the answer to many problems; it's the answer to one problem (protecting its individual members from the use of coercive force). Anything else, the government is using it's monopoly on coercive force to violate the rights of a group of individuals for the "greater good."
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
John Simson of SoundExchange, the "non-profit" set up to collect internet radio royalties. Didn't I just hear this guy's name somewhere? Oh yeah, he was just mentioning how "The time comes that we really have to [start collecting royalties from terrestrial radio]" on Slashdot yesterday. I guess he just figures we won't need to take money from all of the internet stations since they'll be able to grab more from the standard sources sooner or later.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Wi-fi VOIP
One solution to the concentration of wealth over time consistent with Libertarian philosophy is that individual liberty does not require that the government give corporations the same rights as individual people to accumulate wealth. Much of the imbalance in the market can be traced to too much accumulation and concentration of property and information into that imaginary legal entity that is called a corporation. These corporations are controlled by individuals that receive vast wealth through their operations, but yet they assume much less risk and liability than if they were individual owners. Given that the corporation is a legal contrivance created by government, as a Libertarian, I don't see any reason that corporations can't be limited by a set of rules different than for individuals. And with much more strict limitations on corporate wealth and increased liability, then I don't see the accumulation of individual wealth as cause for as much concern. That and limiting the inheritance of wealth and you have a system that allows individuals to accumulate the wealth that they can during their own lifetimes and to use it freely, but puts a real natural upper limit on what accumulation of wealth is possible because of the productive life spans of most people.
So you see, as a Libertarian, I view the problems of concentration of wealth as one of a government creation through flawed laws, not because of a lack of restraint on the individual. The accumulations of individual wealth has always relied on contrivances of government, as governments seem to prefer the control of wealth in the hands of fewer people over which it can exercise greater political control. In this way the system of corporations now is not much less contrived and unnatural a way to control wealth than a feudal one was.
It does not mean that we are required to feed, cloth or shelter you. Doing those things would be a moral, just and nice thing to do, but not doing them is not depriving anyone of the right to live.
agreed. but is that the fault of the tool or the users?
Clones are people two.
It does not mean that we are required to feed, cloth or shelter you. Doing those things would be a moral, just and nice thing to do, but not doing them is not depriving anyone of the right to live.
It does mean that you are required to strive for a society where everyone can at least have those things however. No, you are not personally required to provide me with them, but striving for a society that is extremely likely to deny those to part of its members IS denying people the right to life.
The difference is subtle, and maybe difficult to grasp for those who prefer to think in simple solutions, but then, the world isn't exactly simple.
So you mean to tell me that there aren't any people living in "rather primitive and generally not too nice conditions" with the full benefit of centralized government?!?
There definitely are. They also without exception live in places where said government isn't working very well if at all.
On top of that, compared to the 'no government at all' situation, there is a much bigger part of the people not living in such circumstances now exactly due to the existance of centralized government.
Last but not least, please go learn to make a proper argument.
In fact, one can very easily make the argument that, historically, the societies that have the highest standards of living are precisely those that have the least amount of government involvment.
You could, but the only thing you prove with it is that you are stupidly ignorant of human history.
Secondly, if government is such a wonderful mechanism to achieve everything that we want, then why is it always mandatory? There is nothing in the ideology of libertarianism that states that people can't form voluntary alliances. You can't say the same for those people who don't want the government's "help".
If you don't like your government, go live somewhere else.
The few places on the planet without a government aren't very attractive to live in of course, but maybe, just maybe that has some kind of reason related to my earlier post, and it is yet another reason why people like you are considered stupidly ignorant. The proof of your extremist libertarian ideas not working is really out there and it is extremely obvious if only you stop refusing to see it.
[My parent comment to you] WOOOOOSH
It was intended as a jest to compliment the offensive politically decisive parents posts.
Sigh. well, at least I have the excuse that there are nutcases who would have made such a comment in all seriousness. Sorry for missing the joke.
So you mean to tell me that there aren't any people living in "rather primitive and generally not too nice conditions" with the full benefit of centralized government?!? In fact, one can very easily make the argument that, historically, the societies that have the highest standards of living are precisely those that have the least amount of government involvment.
Secondly, if government is such a wonderful mechanism to achieve everything that we want, then why is it always mandatory? There is nothing in the ideology of libertarianism that states that people can't form voluntary alliances. You can't say the same for those people who don't want the government's "help".
The mongol governments had only 3 involvements with ti's governed.
1- kill them
2- rape them
3- steal from them
Inefficient things like roads or schools they never bothered with. Was that what you were referring to?
Rome demanded a lot more, was rome a poorer place to reside? How about modern Canada or Europe?
I do believe a place is good or bad generally independently of the government involvement.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
It is the solution for all cases where something is highly desirable but not economically viable.
From my 27 years as a human being I can surely tell you most humans volunteer to be stupid selfish bastards followers. letting them run without restrictions will eventually cause them to spontaneously form a government. It's simply the nature of the herd to want to follow. So lets say a libertarian revolution were to happen. about 5s after the last pro-gov guy converts / is shot the libertarians will spontaneous form a government and will likely be just as repressive as the one they replaced if not more so. You'll go around saying "this action does not sufficiently contribute to my liberty. please go over there to receive some mandatory freedom."
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I am not happy to pay taxes for the wars of agression and imperial domination carried out by Bush and his brown nosers Blair, Harper and Howard.
Umm.. Harper may drink deeply from the chocolate starfish of dubya but we didn't send any troops to Iraq. Right now if Harper wishes to stay a government head he'd best avoid even giving a slight hint that sometimes in the distant future he may send even a ham sandwich to iraq. I am a conservative myself but there is no way we want to step into that quagmire and the smartest decision the liberals made was to say no.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
The balance of society and government is like a zero sum game, to strengthen government you must weaken society. Only where society needs no punisher can anarchy exist, for there all people would rule over themselves and not incite others to rule over them nor would they desire to rule over others. The human race is not ready for this and it may well never be and in the meantime those wishing to rule over others and those fearing they can not rule over themselves will continue to see that anarchy is improperly defined in the minds of the populace.
Why does any city need wifi coverage? :P) then noone would be without a connection. It is pointless to cover an entire city with a service that most buildings provide for you.
The one question is: what device needs wide area, constant, mobile internet? Your phone?
Laptops are NOT mobile enough to warrant this sort of thing...oh so you want to use your laptop? Well your in a cafe right? Where else is do you think your gonna get a seat and a table? If your in a park with it then maybe your city council needs to put wifi there, not everywhere. If every cafe provided internet for its customers and other government operated places (libraries, parks, bus stops maybe?) provided low range wifi (or just ethernet cables on extendable reels
Even more stupid perhaps is to provide a service only usable by a specific and immature product. The laptop is not a real portable computer, it is too big, too prone to heat problems, too delicate and most of all too desk like to be truly portable.
Give it a few years. When laptops are the size of iPods it will be a problem, for now just worry where to get your latte while you surf.
-deadlock
There's a middle ground.
Which is why you need to do a trick that New Zealand does. You get private people running it BUT you have a public shareholder. For example, New Zealand post is a fully private company and runs efficiently. Its sole shareholder is the New Zealand Goverment, which takes a very hands-off let-it-do-its-thing approach.
Result is private sector efficiencies with public ownership and without the full 'make money at all cost' drive. The main thing is making sure the goverment doesn't meddle with it very often (i.e., sticks to broad objectives at an annual meeting).
Now, of course, NZ Post has no legally protected monopoloy on mail delivery, so competition can come along. It tries.. but NZ post simply covers so much and and is so efficient that it's difficult to compete. (Unlike the USA where the USPS has a protected monopoly).
Hell, you might even win election with a platform like that, even if it is as ridiculous as the the "right to food" and the "right to shelter".
How about a novel idea -- equal opportunity not equal outcome?
Nah, it'd never fly.
I like the idea of municipal wireless. But I have one concern:
Municipal wi-fi has the potential to reduce the number of broadband subscribers. This may drive up the cost of getting broadband or put the providers out of business. At the same time, there will be pressure to censor the government-run system, since some people will be upset that "those pervs" are looking at pr0n with government resources.
So we end up with the government in a monopoly position, and required to censor, so getting uncensored network access may be impossible. And this is unacceptable.
Oh wait! There are no un-metered bandwidth mobile telecommunications companies in the UK.
My apartment isn't facing the street, so I don't get Google Wifi inside, though there's pod on the lamppost pretty nearby. I can't do everything I want to with the service, so I haven't bothered getting a repeater - it's still slower than my DSL, blocks port 25, doesn't give me a static IP address, and presumably won't let me run servers on it, plus I'd rather not give Google the opportunity to log all my traffic. (Plus I can see several 802.11 networks from various neighbors, so the couple of times I've had DSL problems I've been able to sponge off them; the tradeoff is that in my dining room I get a better signal from a neighbor's connection that kills my work VPN than I do from my own 802.11g, but at least I can browse the web and download email
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I live in London, where the City has recently acquired blanket coverage by one of the operators (actually The Cloud is more an association of WiFi operators with reasonable roaming agreements). My cellular provider is dropping its data rates next month, which will totally kill my use of "public" WiFi. Already it is a toss up - if I'm just checking email and looking at a few webpages, then the data based charging from my cellular provider is going to work out cheaper - even at the current outrageous rate. If I am going to download something more substantial, then the WiFi's time based charging is better, and I might notice the improvement in download speed over HSDPA in that case. The phone of course has the advantage of continuing to work after the train leaves the station, sitting on a train being the only time I ever use public internet anyway.
Suppose all pharmaceutical companies were expropriated before they can close their doors, and the products distributed for free to those who need them most. Over time, that would eradicate some of the worst infectious diseases, and give a perspective to places where many people have Aids and can't afford drugs. Oh but it would cripple your "economy"... we can't do that, can we? We'd better keep killing people.
...) and the general reproduction of workforce.
According to your definition, capitalism is slavery. Wage labor is "being forced to support others (capitalists) involuntarily". It is involuntary because the means of subsistence were/are taken away by primary accumulation, which is always a violent process.
Taxation of companies is just the State taking its share of the surplus of exploitation. It doesn't primarily serve the people, it serves to ensure the political basis for capitalism (armies,
Yes, I'm a communist, and not afraid to say so. I prefer not to call myself a "socialist", because that usually means socialdemocrat (= pro-capitalist).
...and given that life inherently requires sex for its inception, any "non-thinker" would be foolish to exclude a right to sex. And given that women typically look at guys without the means to support themselves as losers, that also means a "right to wealth" is needed in order to propagate the "right to sex". That or send people to Thailand and pay for it via a government subsidy.
Of course you can take about any argument and pursue it into absurdity, doesn't mean that it was what I was saying.
Hell, you might even win election with a platform like that, even if it is as ridiculous as the the "right to food" and the "right to shelter".
That you can't see the difference between your argument and the 'right to food' for example is telling for you and a good indication of why I can't be bothered to take you serious as a 'thinker'.
How about a novel idea -- equal opportunity not equal outcome?
How about the fact that history shows again and again that equal oppertunity requires a level of coercion because there are always individuals who think you should not have an equal oppertunity?
How about the idea that ensuring everyone in your society CAN obtain food actuallty being equal oppertunity and not equal outcome?
Equal outcome would be forcing everyone to eat the same amounts, which is not what anyone has been arguing in this discussion.
He is right on the money.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
- millions of dollars were spent
- some people are worried about longterm sustainability but things haven't been around long enough to draw any conclusions
- random Mary Joe Citizen (someone who sells software out of their house and a student) doesn't like it
You can't draw any conclusions from that. And considering this is coming out of what appears to be an industry think tank, we might as well have an opposing view of municipal broadband: From The Institute for Local Self Reliance's Localizing the Internet: Five Ways Public Ownership Solves the U.S. Broadband Problem": In short: And this paper has better case studies than pulling random people off the street.If the pharmaceutical companies shut their doors tomorrow then we the workers who work in them (like me) should take them over and run them for the benefit of the people.
Um...right. And the resources to run them would come from where exactly?
One of the best descriptions I've read. Well said.
You seem to like those axioms a lot.
(0) You seem to consider being a slave a very bad thing. (Not that I disagree.) The opposite of slavery is liberty. Libertarians just realized that you don't need to have a human owner to be a slave. You can just as well be the slave of a system, of a bureaucracy, of a collective or a society or a state. Consider China or the Soviet Union or Cuba: many resources are "not owned" (I assume by that you mean they're "owned by everyone"), the "equitable" distribution of wealth and basic necessities are "guaranteed" --- but those people were (and are) slaves in many aspects. (Yes, you could say those are just bad implementations of sound principles. What makes you think it _can_ be well-implemented?)
(1) When all resources are owned...
(a) It's not necessary that there are people who own nothing.
(b) As a special case, as long as every man owns his own work ability he is not a slave.
(c) Slavery is defined as one person owning someone else's work. The exact opposite of that is liberty: the guaranteed right to work what you want to.
(d) Supposing some resources are not owned, what then? They can be just as unaccessible for any number of reasons. In particular, they can simply be consumed.
(2) If right to basic necessities are not guaranteed...
(a) The definition of basic necessities is not the same for everyone. If you have N people and food for N/2, how do you guarantee the basic necessity of eating?
(b) No, you can't get me do anything by denying my basic necessities. Just because they're not guaranteed (by who?) doesn't mean
- I can't strive to obtain them myself.
- Someone else may want to help me.
- You don't ever need my work (why would you want me as a slave if my work isn't useful for you?)
- I might prefer death to doing something I don't want. Many slaves did.
(3) You want a world where a small owning class controls...
(a) If I would, so what? It's my will against that of six+ billions.
(b) If everyone wanted it, so what? You can't have everyone part of a small owning class, right? This means that the non-owning class is by definition larger, and "owns" the vast majority of work potential (including violence).
(4) That is what libertarianism necessarily leads to.
(a) No, it doesn't.
(b) That is what communism necessarily leads to.
(c) That is what monarchy necessarily leads to.
(d) That is what socialism necessarily leads to.
(e) That is what anarchism necessarily leads to.
(f) That is what feudalism necessarily leads to.
(g) Note: that was just an obnoxious way of showing that you replaced an unproved but vaguely intuitive theorem with an axiom. Without a rigorous justification ---and that's hard as hell to do--- that statement is practically useless. One can make any number of such statements, including their negations, all of which can be supported with rational arguments. One obviously needs a more subtle approach.
By the way, I'm not a libertarian. But your argument was just so obnoxiously wrong--twice--I just had to say something.
"I think I am a fallen star. I should wish on myself."
I don't know about you, but I'm not forced to buy any goods or services from any particular private company, yet I'm forced to give a large portion of my earnings to the gov. for many so called services. The gov. is infinitely better at enriching themselves than any private company for the simple fact that they can forceably take anything they want from you and often do.
It also doesn't hurt that they are relatively SMALL and culturally homogenous.
I think you've just stumbled upon the general scaling problems of governments and beaurocracies in general.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The only "right" you need in order to ensure that you are fed, clothed and have a roof over your head is the right to own (real) property. Once you have that. You can handle the rest YOURSELF.
Liberty means being free to take care of yourself, not entitled to someone else's property.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Go squat on a mountainside in Montana and leave the rest of us alone.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Aren't my time and my thoughts also resources to which I have exclusive ownership of? So while I may not own materialistic resources, I still have the potential to produce value with the (albeit little) resources of my time and thoughts? That would at least allow everyone to have some small level of ownership and there wouldn't be any "non-owners", just people with a materialistic disadvantage.
0) You haven't refuted anything. I was critiquing libertarianism, which purports to support liberty. I attempt to show that it leads to the opposite. You say other systems lead to "slavery" as well. That does not prove that libertarianism doesn't.
1) Certainly it is not necessary that there will be anyone who owns nothing. I am extrapolating based on current conditions, systems analysis, and feedback loops. Wealth is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands, and doing it faster the less regulated an economy is. The more wealth you have, the more power you have to get more wealth. The end condition where all important resources are owned by a relatively few people is not outrageous, and anyone proposing a system that seems to lead there should be prepared to show why it won't. All you do is speculate that it might not.
2) Point A is confusing. Everyone can agree that people need food, water, shelter and medicine. The amount of food is surprisingly small, you can usually get by with 1/2 what you think you need. But that hasn't been a problem since the green revolution (technology, not party). We throw away enough edible food every day to feed every human on the planet, just to prop up "fair" market prices.
3) Dumb. We are talking about systems we want people to buy into voluntarily. You can't use that "What I want vs. what everyone else wants" argument. People have no reason to support a system that only rewards individual strength. I mean, if I'm strong enough to just take it, why do I need a system? I won't support a system that is unfair to me, and others won't support a system that is unfair to them, so we have to reach a compromise. And violence? We are talking about systems of governance here. The point is to do away with violence. We've already seen in company oppression of labor unions how money can be used to turn one group of poor starving people against another.
4) I have shown the specific mechanism I accuse libertarianism of promoting. It's a feedback loop of accumulation of wealth leading to greater power and greater accumulation of wealth. The other systems have their faults. They are different faults, but we aren't critiquing them, we are critiquing libertarianism. As a debater, you need to show why the specific mechanism I mention will not lead to the outcome I presume it will. You have not done that
In short, your arguments are of a poor quality and do not address my points in a cogent way. But thanks for trying, by steering clear of outright flameage you've done better than most, even if your arguments would get you failed out of a high school debate class.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's purely a matter of the market. Suppliers got into municipal wi-fi because they had dollar signs in their eyes, which led them to under-serve and over-charge. Toronto's municipal wi-fi costs $30 CAD a month. And while it's quite fast, it only works outdoors (which in Canada means it's only going to be used a few months of the years anyway) and it only has a relatively small geographic footprint. So that $30 is ON TOP OF the price a Toronto user is already paying for Internet and e-mail by cable or DSL. Until free (or at least ad-sponsored) wi-fi becomes ubiquitous, it's better value for anyone in Toronto to walk a block to the nearest coffee shop and nurse a $2 coffee while using their access point.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
I use an ethernet cable. Its faster , cheaper , more reliable and impossible to hack from over the air.
Carrboro, North Carolina has public WiFi downtown. It's a fairly small area, less than 1 sq. mi. I'm guessing. The service is "adequate", not super fast for media surfing, but for basic email, non-critical web surfing it has worked fine for me the few times I have tried it.
;-)
They have a few things going for them. First, Carrboro is a smallish town, so the bandwidth load isn't too high. Second, a lot of local cafes offer their own (usually free) WiFi, so that reduces the load even more.
Any other locals out there with more concrete data than my lame ass non-analysis?
And no, don't even think of moving here. We're all full! Go away!
http://www.bitworksmusic.com/
BitWorksMusic.com -- odd tunes for odd times
Dominance in property can coerce, because crimes against property are initiation of force in libertarian doublethink. If I prevent you from eating, and you try to take my apples, I am justified in killing you, in libertarian lala land. So I can force you to do anything I want in order for you to survive. There may be no other properties, we are certainly witnessing the conglomeration of power and ownership, there is no reason to think it won't continue or even accelerate.
In an ideal world there would be many small systems of democratic control of resources that band together into federations of mutual protection and support, so people would have recourse to these other systems. If all property is owned, and the owners are colluding to maintain control, I have no recourse.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
No, I would have interlocking systems of constitutional democratic control of resources instead of a few rich bastards owning everything. Only a rich bastard could fail to comprehend why that is a good thing.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Your terms are full of inaccuracies and flawed assumptions, and you ignore the main point. Any flaw in a "property" society attributable to human nature will also occur in any other. In your society of politically distributed goods, the collusion occurs not among the propertied owners but the influential, and occurs in a system constructed without any check on state activity or limitation on its justifications. The justification for property here isn't that it's perfect or fair -- I'm sure its abused all the time, though your particular objections aren't likely -- but that it is far better safer than the alternatives.
You have not shown that individual ownership is preferable to democratic control. If it is, why then are democracies preferred over dictatorships? You also say my predictions aren't likely, but offer no reasons why. States may have systems of checks and balances, the free market does not. Collusion among individuals where one person has one vote is much harder than collusion in a system where one dollar is one vote.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Your time and thoughts won't grow food. When you are starving, you will trade any amount of time and thought for a very little food. Time and thought are in no way equal to natural resources.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
"You have not shown that individual ownership is preferable to democratic control."
I think it has been shown rather vividly in the last century.
You have simply chosen to ignore it.
In older times, the king owned everything, yet there weren't long lines outside the castle of people waiting to get anally raped for their supper, and we all know what wonderful people royalty were/are
Some were good, some were bad. A system of absolute monarchy does not offer protectin against those who are bad, and no encouragement to those who are good, the system is in fact completely neutral with regards to that.
The effect however is that many bad absolute monarchs have existed, and that gave the whole thing a bad name.
An anarcho-capitalist system such as many hardcore libertarians advocate is in itself also neutral to the behavior of people, it doesn't deal with the bad, neither does it encourage the good.
If you go back to the absolute monarchy system, it is easy to see why it brought as many bad things as it did, it is a consequence of human nature and a system refusing to take that nature into account for the benefit of the people living under it.
The anarcho-capitalist syste makes the exact same mistake, and is a bad idea because of that.
, so it wasn't because the king felt their pain.
In fact some did, but that had nothing whatsoever to do with the system and everything with their personality. Matter of fact is that those were (and are) the exceptions. There is absolutely no reason to assume that this has all of a sudden changed now.
In addition, you are assuming that being anally raped is beneficial to you. I don't want to question your sexuality (hey, that's your business), but personally, I don't think that getting ass-slammed for food is beneficial.
If the alternative is no food, then it is an easy choice really.
As an aside, how did you come by having nothing, unless the government took it away from you, in the first place?
You are born without anything, plain and simple.
Bullshit. Where has it been shown? In what state has democratic control of resources been tried? Nice straw man. Idiot.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
1. It's a Fox News report. They have zero credibility.
2. Just look at the list of related stories. Not a single positive one, and there's even stuff like Wifi laptops endangering children.
Socialism is a form of well-meaning slavery. As long as everyone consents, NBD.
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
That'd be Article 25. Time you read it:
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
True. But capitalism is a form of coercive slavery, where anyone without the money and property with which to protect themselves can be forced into servitude. Some would say that under libertarianism, the state exists only to provide a police force to keep the slaves in line.
I've been trying to formulate a variety of socialism that would work within a capitalist framework, where it is entirely opt-in. The key would be trade restriction contracts, that is, in order to be a member of a group, you would have to agree never to trade in any way with anyone who does not uphold certain basic rights, like the rights to food, water, shelter, and medicine.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
When the republican national convention came to New York, 1800 protesters were arrested for public assembly. Almost all of those arrested had the charges dropped. (a wikipedia link)
Critical mass cyclists are routinely arrested for using "public" roads. (another wikipedia link)
It is becoming increasingly popular to charge for use of public roads. See the latest news with Bloomberg planning to charge a congestion fee in NYC a la London or Paris.
The list of restricting uses to public land is very long. These are just a few samples. If this land were paid for purely through charges such as the congestion fees, things would be run much more efficiently than the way they are now with tax dollars. Since we are forced to pay the government for all sorts of public property without any guarantees about how our money is spent, there is not enough incentive to setup usage rules for this land according to what the people paying for it would want. If all payments became usage payments, then the usage would necessarily match the desires of the users.
Slavery is about one individual being owned by another. It is not about not owning things oneself. One should have the right not to be oppressed by others and the obligation not to oppress others. One does not have the right to own lots of land; that is a privilege earned.
You do not need to tell me about protester arrests, I've been there. Critical mass, heh, nothing like biking down alleys in a breakaway pack of 100, dodging police the whole way. Stay on the route, my ass. As for property rights being a privilege, I agree. Property is a positive right: the right to exclude others, not a negative right: the right to be free from property seizure.
In our democratic system, there are means to address imbalances in rights. In a system of absolute property rights, there is no way to protect yourself from the owning class.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I didn't exception myself from that statement. I am more then happy to follow or lead but following takes less energy. I've made a lot of selfish decision and a lot fo stupid decisions. I am under no delusion that I am better then everyone else. I just have the perception that everybody is just as bad as me. Without some form of structure we'd self destruct.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
But if your thoughts can help grow more food better, you can trade those thoughts for more food or more material resources. Hence your thoughts can, through trade, turn into food.
"States may have systems of checks and balances" Or they may not. They tend to "not", because the people in them always like power and always work to erode the checks. That's why you want a strong society with a lot of activity outside them -- so society itself has as many checks against the state as possible. Property and markets are among the most important of those checks. That's the third time I've said the same thing, which is enough -- I'm done. Be well, friend.
But if people have a monopoly on food, you either sell your thoughts for what they say they are worth, or you starve. We see plenty of owners acting in collusion with other owners to use monetary force to alter market relationships. My God, are you that dense or are you deliberately not understanding the issue here?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The same exact thing could be said of the market. People in market systems like power and those with power collude with others with power to keep the vast majority from having any. Property and markets are important checks, I am not saying do away with them altogether. I am arguing against the libertarian concept of absolute property rights because such rights do away with the checks that government places on markets and property. Checks and balances need to work in a negative feedback loop, one check balancing the next around in a circle. Libertarians argue that property and markets are their own checks, I say that is untrue, that property and markets are inherently unbalanced because acquisition of more resources gives one more control over how the market values one's resources.
You are saying the same thing over and over, without understanding or even appearing to try to understand what I am saying. This is a big issue I have with libertarians, it is as if they do not even properly understand what they are saying. It is as if they are repeating a magical mantra, they don't need to know why it works, they just need everyone to believe that it works. When libertarians are challenged on their beliefs, they can neither properly articulate a defense of them nor say why the other parties logic is flawed, they simply resort to parroting back what the princes of libertarianism have told them to say. I understand what you are saying perfectly well, I just don't think what you are saying is making the point you think it is making.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You must never have subscribed to cable television or had a telephone.
Or owned a car (the gasoline) or a computer (Microsoft). Perhaps you don't have electricity in your house or have never required the services of a hospital or doctor.
Maybe you never had to fill a prescription.
Yes, taxes are not optional, but they are the dues we pay for civilization. You anti-government types would be the first ones to cry if your garbage wasn't picked up or the road on which you drive to work wasn't repaired, or if your social security check was a week late.
You really ought to find some books on the way the average urban family lived in America from 1900 to 1930. Hell, we're lucky we didn't go completely Communist, considering the way large corporations have been hostile to the middle class.
Talk to me again when you're looking to file bankruptcy because you lost your job and you've got 60k in credit card balances and you've defaulted on your school loans, or when you've gotten sick and needed hospitalization for a significant amount of time and you get dumped from your insurance. Then we'll revisit just how wonderful the "free market" is. Many Americans forget just how important the "socialist" programs of FDR were to creating the terrific country in which we live, and they are just now realizing just how much damage a dim bully like George Bush has done. It's a shame, but Americans seem to be learning fast. We've had 18 solid months now of less than 1/3 of the country thinking the President was doing even a fair job, and more than half the country thinking he was doing a terrible job. Wait til you see just how bad it's going to be before that last 30 percent gets the message.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Didn't you say you're an anarchist? It seems to me that everything you have said so far is the exact opposite of annarchism, in fact it is a lot closer to socialism or even closer to communism.
Markets are a form of voluntary cooperation, competitors cannot use force to increase their power, but must cooperate with others for mutual gain. Their cooperation leads to mutually productive activities. Corporations have no real power, only the government has power. The Libertarian philosophy on free markets (which, btw, you have somehow lumped together as a single entity. The Libertarian philosophy and the free-market philosophy are not one in the same, although Libertarian principals are heavily based on the free market) is that any group of people should be free to trade with any other group of people without interference, either from the government or anyone else. A "free market" by definition is a market without force or fraud. The governments role in a free market is to operate a court system only to enforce contracts voluntarily entered into between parties, and the settlement of disputes.
What I can't figure out is why you have such a low impression of Libertarians in general. In my experiance, it is next to impossible to stereotype them, Libertarians come from all backgrounds, they are all different in every possible way. They are anywhere from dirt poor to insanly wealthy, high-school drop-outs to PHDs. Christians to muslims, to atheists. The only common thing that I have ever seen in a group of Libertarians is that they are generally very intelligent and open-minded, which goes directy against your assumptions. Maybe my experiances aren't the norm, but I have no reason to beleive they aren't.
I have not met many open minded libertarians. The real problem I have with libertarianism is the core concept of strong property rights, which are based on the idea that property is a negative right. It is in fact a positive right: the right to exclude others without having a contract with those others. Libertarians are very closed minded when it comes to property.
I know that anarcho-socialists can look a lot like communists or socialists, but we are not. Early anarchists critiqued Marx's ideas, saying they would lead to the same end as the capitalism he criticized, namely, oligarchy. Read Property is Theft! by Proudhon, he outlines my issues nicely. More importantly, he brings up a point of ambivalence I have: property is also inherently anarchist, as it opposes all forms of state power.
The difference between anarcho-socialists and socialists or communists is that we want our society organized by voluntary cooperation, from the bottom up, and they want it imposed by force from the top down.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
There are a lot of phone options now. VOIP, landline, cell...no one is forcing you to pay for or use any of them though. Cable TV is not some right. A lot of friends have dropped cable in favor of watching OTA or just not watching TV at all. No one has come to their door demanding they turn cable back on.
I'm not anti-government, but I want the government as small as possible. Roads and city services are a great place for government involvement at the smallest local level as possible. I want balance sheets and ROI calculations just like a corporation.
You should read 'FDR's Folly' sometime. It might change your mind on how helpful all his programs really were. We now have whole generations of Americans (and now even illegals lol) living off the public dole. In some states a woman can pop out a couple of kids and make the equivalent of 50k/year in subsistence. I know that's not a lot with 2 kids, but that still a decent amount of cash for just sitting around and having babies.
And how exactly does someone get 60k in debt? Even if I lost my job today I have 6 months salary saved up and could pinch pennies to go even longer. This doesn't count a part time job I could easily pick up to help cover costs. I also worked the entire time through college so my school loan is small and manageable. Oh wait, personal responsibility isn't required anymore so let me go out and spend all my savings and start letting it rain with Cristal...
You'll notice I have avoided anything having to do with healthcare. That's one area where I haven't figured out where the real problem is yet. It couldn't cost so much if people weren't getting the money from somewhere to pay, so I look at it as a chicken and the egg type of problem. There are so many factors that go into what a drug or procedure cost that I just haven't thought through them all yet.
This is a much better post than the one I answered with. Here you're actually debating. While my debating skills are certainly far from perfect, your first post was only a pre-digested bundle of oratory--repeated at least once almost verbatim in the discussion above.
A bit of ad-hominem in the first sentence, a couple of half-truisms mixed with unsupported statements, a bit of demonization (and what I think is a straw men argument---sorry, I'm not formally trained in debating, I get some of the terms mixed up), all finished with a generalization not supported by anything... No alternative given, no solutions.
That's a critique only in the most barren sense of the word: ie, "It's bad, and I think it's really, really bad. You can't support that, can you?"
Sorry to criticize. I'll stick to the arguments from now:
0) I wasn't refuting anything. I was trying to point out on one hand--though maybe it wasn't necessary--that "slavery" is not an absolutely defined term, and in a careful analysis it can pop up in unexpected places. As to your answer, allow me to generalize it a little: Most governance systems purport to support certain ideals---including liberty---and _can_ result in the opposite. That's perfectly true, but to criticize libertarianism you have to show that (a) it always goes that way or (b) it goes that way much more often and quicker than other governing systems. You didn't show any of that, you just stated that it is "necessarily" so.
(Allow me to explain a bit on that: criticizing a feature of something without context and an alternative is not very useful. It's like saying that planes are dangerous _and_ you shouldn't use them for transportation because they can fall from the sky and go boom, ignoring the fact that it's in fact the safest way of traveling. (I don't know if that's really so, it's just an example.) It _is_ a useful critique for trying to improve flight safety, but not to ban flights.)
1) Almost right, but two fatal flaws: (a) you simplify a complex process (a system of social governance) to a couple of feedback loops, then claim that the limit of those loops is a certain degenerate state---which is true, but only for the very simplified model. (b) You half-acknowledge that the loops can be broken when you ask for proof why the system won't fail. This is valid, in math, but unfortunately _no_ system of social governance can be proved. For scientific proofs you need observation, theories, and experiments. We have lots of the former two, but not much of that last one.
I realize up to here I'm criticizing your comments rather than supporting libertarianism. That was sort of my point: I'm not supporting libertarianism, I was just pointing out that your critique is lacking.
But allow me to try a bit of a supporting argument:
No real system of governance is rigidly defined by a couple of simple rules. Different ideologies (eg, libertarianism) are defined by a few simple ideals; people have many ideals, they try to reach them, and after a while their government becomes laking enough in another ideal direction that people notice that, in fact, the old ideals are not enough. So new ideologies snap up supporting those ideals.
The point is that you can't fulfill all ideals. You pick some, to define a direction. The trick is to recognize that the ideology is different from reality: the other ideologies are not swept out, they exist too. Every ideology has extreme limit cases, but society tries to balance them to remain in the 'acceptable' zone, and strive for the 'better' zone---however hard that may be to define. You just have to consider the complexities of life not explicit in the model. For instance:
2) No, not everybody absolutely needs food, water, shelter and medicine. You need the first two to live---but some people choose not to live. This means that some things are sometimes for some people more important than living. Second, medicine didn't exist for a long time, and some people refuse to use it even now. Again, shelter means
"I think I am a fallen star. I should wish on myself."
I agree with what you are saying, and would never advocate such a society. Unfortunately, there are others who don't care. And it's important for all individuals to understand that this is a possibility if they they do not provide for themselves. In cases where it is impossible for a large enough group to provide, they will eventually revolt, but it's better to be active politically before it comes to that.
Unfortunately, there are others who don't care. And it's important for all individuals to understand that this is a possibility if they they do not provide for themselves.
Well, it is also a possibility when people provide for themselves with disregard for the needs of others.
In cases where it is impossible for a large enough group to provide, they will eventually revolt, but it's better to be active politically before it comes to that.
The thing is that most of the advantage humans have over other animals comes from what humans can do as a group, not so much from what they can do as individuals. Economics of scale also make it a lot easier to have a group provide for itself then having individuals provide for itself.
Hence, while you are ultimately responsible for yourself, and noone else is, striving for a society where everyone can have their basic needs forfilled requires striving for the group to provide for the group. You can strive for equal oppertunity for everyone, you can strive for enough food for everyone, but you can't force me to eat, or to work for and obtain my share, that is my own responsibility.
Very nice, I take back my insults regarding your debating skills. Mostly, I like to post humorous quips or metaphysical/spiritual/philosophical musings, but every so often my dark and trollish side gets a hold of me. My inner troll has a taste for libertarians. You could probably figure out who all the major libertarians on Slashdot are just by looking at my foes list.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Well, I guess I should have know it by your signature ;)
"I think I am a fallen star. I should wish on myself."
Disclaimer: I don't work for Gartner, but like their research papers.
The wireless mesh tech is now falling into the through of disallusionment of the hype cycle, after inflated expectations.
Maybe it'll end up being practical when it helps the city to read electricity and water meters?
That's good.
I've read it. It was free-market/Republican bullshit from page one. In fact, I'm not sure I believe the copyright page, much less any of the footnotes.
You realize that you (and I) are extremely rare in this regard. The US has had a negative savings rate during the Bush administration. Foreclosures are at an all-time high. Banks had to push a sick anti-bankruptcy law when the Republicans owned the congress because their business practices had created a bankruptcy rate not seen since the Depression. This is what your beloved (and imaginary) "free-market" has gotten you.
Healthcare? Let's not let that little detail spoil your free-market Utopia. Soon, healthcare will be consuming the largest portion of our economy, if the current trends continue. Healthcare is ultimately the thing that can wake up the citizens of the US and get them to roll the country back from this wrong-headed direction we've been going in since Reagan. Otherwise, you can forget about the middle class completely.
By the way, you may not have 60k in credit cards, but I'm guessing you've got a fat ARM or balloon on your house, or have recently refinanced, to collect some of that "wealth" the credit industry wants you to believe you should be taking out of your property.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Since when is personal responsibility the responsibility of the government? Why is it my problem that other people don't save money? Why do I have to pay taxes which may be used to bail out people who made stupid decisions getting ARMs or negam loans? This is the exact situation that responsible people are tired of dealing with. If someone wants to risk taking an exotic loan with the hopes of making a big profit on a house I'm fine with that. Just don't come to me to bail you out when your gamble doesn't work.
I don't have a house yet because when I thought prices were reasonable I hadn't saved enough for a decent down payment. And now that prices are out of control I'm waiting for the credit bubble to collapse before picking something up on the relative cheap. The collapse is happening even with some states trying to put programs in to stop it. The problem is that housing is sticky on the way down since it's not a liquid asset.
As far as healthcare goes, how did it get so expensive? Do individuals have that sort of money to purchase the drugs and services at that high of cost? I would argue no, and that gov. programs are where the money came from to drive up the costs of healthcare to begin with. Some other drivers would be things like schooling costs, lawsuits (malpractice and class action), insurance, and good old supply and demand (good doctors can have waiting list for months for an appointment).