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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.
It is a fallacy that you need computers in schools. Teach the kids reading, writing and math skills, the rest can come later. Computers are a drain on schools with already tight budgets. We went to moon with engineers and scientists who did not have computers.
Conservative, mod down for violating
It would be great if the local cable or phone company could run their lines just 1 block further from my nearest neighbor so I could get broadband.
Maybe Obama can make it happen!
Or Obama can help find where that 200 billion dollars went.
http://www.newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
How many people here are truly opposed to some sort of filtering in computers in school? While the idea of some sort of imposed filter on my internet connection at home is very bothersome to me, I don't have a problem with attempts to keep inappropriate material off of computers in schools.
My biggest concern about it would be that generally the filtering systems aren't that hard to work around, so hopefully the school systems won't waste money buying into a really expensive product that ends up not working any better than a cheaper alternative.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
You can't pay money to Intel, AMD, ATI, Dell or Microsoft without buying some hardware to Asian manufacturers because this is their business model to have manufactures in Asia. In today's world, it is hard to stimulate one country's economy without stimulating another one. There are some fields where it is possible (construction, restaurants...) but most are tied to foreign manufacturers.
Note that if giving job to China is an issue, one could prefer Taiwanese makers. I believe the difference is more important than it seems : one is a democracy, the other is not.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I work with lots of good Chinese and Indian software engineers. Most never saw a computer before University. They did have a rigorous and old-fashioned education, with lots of math and logic.
I also know talented hackers who got into programming as kids/teenagers, and benefited from the fast dev cycle of Apples, TRS-80s, etc.
But giving kids the latest and greatest computers is not going to help anything. The important stuff can be learned on a 486.
Chinese and Indian schools value the academic achievers, while American schools value the funny, the athletic and the socially gifted. That is why those countries are beating us.
As much as people like to bash "tax and spend liberals" the economy and stock market historically does better when one is in office.
I'd work for Pokemon cards. Apparently you haven't seen the exchange rate lately.
When Obama announced that he was going to start the largest public works program since the Interstate system, I thought he might be talking about an interstate high speed rail network.
Though, after looking through his proposal, I don't see anything about high speed trains. I think a train network would kill many birds with one stone:
- it would provide a fast alternative to flying, which I hate.
- it would cut down on carbon emissions since trains are much more efficient than cars or planes.
- it could do for the country what the interstate system did in the last half of the last century.
- it would create lots of jobs spread out across the country
Did you miss the (rather conspicuous) use of the word "broadband"? Our network infrastructure sucks quite badly, and if he's talking about upgrading it, that's a lot of domestic blue-collar jobs.
If POBE is really serious, he'll look at giving us real broadband, like the premises fibre that Korean consumers enjoy. If he does that, Corning will have to de-mothball a factory or two, and a lot of people will be needed to dig ditches and pull cable. Sounds pretty stimulating to me.
Oh my Gosh. Here I am the most right wing guy on slashdot and I'm about to go and defend Obama's proposals for infrastructure spending in general, and national broadband and school computing in particular.
a. ubiquity creates new industries. If broadband is something nearly everyone has in the USA, then, you have a much easier time making a business case for a new kind of service. The USA has built railroads with federal help before, knowing that putting railroads would pump the economy, and it did. Then, roads did the same thing. Broadband won't be any different.
b. computers in schools works. Yes, a lot of kids play games on school computers but there will be those kids who are not as well off but interested in learning to program that will use them. I know I'm grateful to all the computer stores and schools back in the 1980s that let me learn programming in the lab and I think that there's other kids like me out there.
Note that I wouldn't restrict this to just computers. I would like to see schools have shop classes with real presses, CNC machines, and other tools of the art so that kids can get some hands on real things prior to joining the real world.
c. My stock retort to other conservatives that would oppose this government spending would be, you had no problem spending 2.5T on building schools and broadband in Iraq, but why can't you support that in the USA?
d. Hands on experience in computing and manufacturing is a national security issue. The USA needs to know how to manufacture its own goods. I would offer as exhibit A, World War II. It's handy for national security when you have a ton of manufacturing centers that can be quickly converted to produce for wartime needs. Indeed, has the USA had a better manufacturing base, maybe we wouldn't have had to wait for five years and four thousand dead to get decent armoured vehicles into combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By extension, those who pine for the old cold war days with Russian and for a stronger NATO should also be reminded that a part of our military obligation to our alliance partners is to have an economy capable of sustaining manufacturing in the event our allied economies are destroyed. It benefits Europe if the USA is capable of manufacturing its own products as that know-how can be shared with the continent.
So yeah, I think Obama's on the right track with a big infrastructure stimulus. I think Republicans would be better suited to argue what to build, rather than not to build at all, given that they already blew several times Obama's figure on rebuilding Iraq.
This is my sig.
There are two ways out of a recession as large as what we are facing:
That's a myth. War is not good for an economy.
What the Second World War did for the U.S. economy was to turn the nation into a place of shortages and rationing-- food rationing, gas rationing, even tire rationing... a lot of things didn't have to be rationed, because nobody had money to buy things like new cars.
The one "good" thing that the war did for the U.S. was to give people a rationalization for the shortages and ration-coupons: they were sacrificing to win the war. The economy was terrible, but people felt good about scarcity, because it was for a cause.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I have a better plan. If a company comes along and wants to lay parallel lines. Let them. Don't stop them in any way. Don't fine them. Remove all possible hindrances, anything that could turn them away. It'll start out small and slowly expand at the same time that the demand for cheaper service drives prices down. More and more people will have better and better service.
Sorry bud. The first time they tear up my street, I'll live with it. The second time, I'll bitch. The third time, I'll have my city passing a law banning parallel lines when there's existing fiber, and pushing for city maintenance of a common resource.
Some things just don't work when left to the free market. Now maybe my city doesn't need to do it; I'd be fine if my neighborhood association paid for the common fiber instead.
So the public would be taxed to pay for the city to lay the fiber, and then the increased tax on ISPs would be passed on to the same public to pay for service? This is your plan?
You think this would be more expensive than it is now? I pay for the cost for AT&T to lay the lines. Then I pay every month in increased costs because they have a monopoly. (Cable company here sucks; no HD yet and internet was lossy.) I'd love my city to lay fiber, then let ISPs compete to provide service over the common wire.
That's litte different than my electricity service, where the lines are owned by a regulated monopoly, but the suppliers compete on the free market.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
"One country two systems" has been proposed by China for Taiwan. The Taiwanese - having had de-facto independence for over 50 years - would prefer to stay independent, rather than being someone's colony again. (It's described in the link you gave, btw.)
You do realize that a 700 billion bailout divided by 300 million people is still only $2,333 per person in the US? Even assuming that were only to be spread over a quarter or so of the total population, the absolute maximum you're talking about is $10,000.
And quite frankly, I think US taxpayers are, by and large, morons. Giving every adult US citizen $10,000 might alleviate some temporary debt problems, but it's likely to cause at least as many problems as it solves, and will have little long-term benefit.
I think that bailouts of failing industries are equally stupid. What needs to happen is investment in business models and industries that are sustainable in the long term and will make the US more competitive globally. Given the way in which our world is moving, universal computer literacy and national fast broadband are two things which very definitely need to happen to keep the United States competitive in the world.