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Obama Wants Broadband, Computers Part of Stimulus
damn_registrars writes "President-elect Barack Obama announced in his radio address that his administration's economic stimulus package will include investing in computers and broadband for education. 'To help our children compete in a 21st century economy, we need to send them to 21st century schools.'
He also said it is 'unacceptable' that the US ranks 15th in broadband adoption." No doubt with free spyware and internet filtering. You know... for the kids.
The reason Korea has such rapid broadband is because it's like one giant city. You too could have Korean-like broadband if you moved to a major city (or tech center) like Seattle, L.A., New York, Philadelphia, or Boston. Even here in suburban PA I have access to 100 megabit/s broadband via comcast.
Also the United States is not some podunk little nation like Korea, but a continent-spanning nation that takes 3 days to drive across (~2500 miles), and therefore it makes sense to compare like-to-like:
(1) Russian Federation - 6.9 megabit/s ...
(2) European Union - 6.2
(3) United States - 6.1
(4) Canada - 4.4
(5) Australia - 4.4
(6) China - 2.1
.
The U.S. is only slightly behind its Russian/European neighbors, and significantly ahead of its Canadian, Australian, and Chinese neighbors. That is not a bad position to be.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
There are lots of important techs that were developed without government funds. The steam engine, the internal combustion engine, iron, steel, powered flight, guns, electric power transmission, the light bulb, most modern materials, most modern advances in computer hardware and software. . . That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure there's a lot more.
And furthermore, just because technologies were developed with government money doesn't mean they couldn't have been developed with different funding. Also, I can't think of a single major commercial airframe in use today that was originally designed for military use (not so say there isn't one, but certainly none of the Boeing 7X7 lines or the airbus A3X0 lines were).
Meeting people and getting your foot in the door does not require an education. You can meet people in the field. Degrees serve primarily as a barrier to entry, since employers use them to weed out potential candidates. You will not be prepared for your job by your degree, and you will likely use less than 10% of what you learn (much less what you crammed before the test and promptly forgot afterward). There are much better ways to spend four years of your life.
1. Take a bunch of money out of the economy.
It is not clear much money will be coming out of the economy.
The plan is to borrow (deficit) and print (low interest rates) money rather than tax it.
This seems to be working well, with inflation staying low, and 30 year bond yields at 3%.
When confidence is low people choose to spend less and save, so even if we chose to tax this would not take that as much money out of the economy as was spent.
2. Shuffle it though an inefficient bureaucracy .
3. Put what remains back into the economy.
4. ???
4. Jobs, income, confidence.
5. Economic recovery.
The whole thing hinges on what people decide to do, so it is not a simple or predictable thing to manage. Even if you can just convince people it will work then it might.