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$2 Billion For Broadband Cut From Stimulus Bill
pdabbadabba points out a CNN report on changes to the planned economic stimulus bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 [PDF]) that will remove the $2 billion allocated to broadband development. The changes also eliminated smaller amounts allocated to NASA, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, and the National Science Foundation. $16 billion in school construction funding was removed, as well as another $3.5 billion for higher education construction. A variety of environmental projects were also cut or reduced (half of the $7 billion set aside for energy-efficient federal buildings, half of the $600 million for hybrid federal vehicles), and over $8 billion in health-related provisions are gone. The bill will likely go to vote in the Senate on Tuesday.
They are also foundering because:
- We are having to pay OUR tax money to educate the kids of people who illegally entered the country and mooch off all our social services, demanding handouts even as they thumb their noses at our laws.
- Our classes are forced to move at the pace of the slowest fucking idiot, rather than stratifying classes into advanced and non-advanced, moving the smarter kids up to give them greater challenges and keep them from getting bored.
- Thanks to years of parent lawsuits, the very idea of holding a kid back a year because they haven't learned what they needed to learn has gone away. These stupid fucking parents insist "waah but it'll hurt his self-esteem don't you dare cut my kid off from his friends" - I see them every day and want to grab them, shake them, and yell your kid is a fucking moron! He is harming the education of the other kids around him! But nooooo... instead, we socially promote them, so the entire 8th grade class is still trying to read at a 4th grade level. Meanwhile, the smart kids are bored out of their fucking skulls. I've watched a friend's kid actually get sent home with "warnings" from the teacher. What was the kid doing? She was performing like a 4th grader in the 1st grade class. She picked up cursive writing watching her parents. She finished the "math homework" while the teacher was blabbing on trying to teach the rest of the kids how to multiply 2x2, and then got out a copy of The Mysterious Island I'd given as a christmas present and started reading.
US public schools are not foundering because we don't spend enough money. They are foundering because teachers' unions make it impossible to get rid of bad teachers, because school districts do not stratify and have allowed social promotion of retards to become the norm, and because they punish the exemplary kids rather than nurturing their intelligence and love of learning.
And most of this has shit-all to do with monetary spending, too, save for the fact that when the kids of illegals are found in public schools, the administration should be required to report it under penalty of jail time, and INS/ICE should use that as a great opportunity to track down the parents and deport the whole lot.
If you can read this sig, congratulations, you have your glasses on!
Obama is not your saviour. He is a politician, and the USA is driven by lobbyists whom the best of are backed by the richest corporations.
Want too see how bad things really are for the USA.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ca2_1234032281 Wait till about 2:20 in.
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The problem is this: Just as we would still have Americans reading by candlelight and shitting in outhouses if it wasn't for the rural water and electrification acts of the 1930's so too will we have a whole damned lot of Americans unable to get ANY usable Internet without a broadband act. Why? Because the big telecos have already run to the places where they can make massive profit and simply aren't interested in running anywhere else. Let me give an example from my own life.
When my parents built their house the cable and ISDN stopped approximately 2 blocks from their house. You can actually see the cable and DSL junction boxes from their front porch. That was 29 years ago. Do you know how far away it is now? That's right! 2 blocks away. Even though there are now a good 3 dozen houses on that little 5 mile road, all of which would have been happy to buy the full bundle package for 5 years. How do I know that? Because about 7 years ago I got all the neighbors together and we sat down and talked. It turned out there was a couple of small business owners living there that would love to telecommute into the office, and I had just gotten a large check. So we got together and offered the cableco 15k simply to run the cable. We even offered to get together as a group and sign 5 year agreements for the full bundle package. By our estimate they would make over a quarter million over the life of the agreement and the only out of pocket costs would have been the labor, since at the time that 15k would have paid for the line.
So now they can telecommute and I can just access my families PCs by remote when they need fixes, right? WRONG! To wire up the lousy 4.5 miles they wanted 75k ABOVE whatever the costs of the line PLUS labor were. And from talking to folks around the state and throughout the south I have found a disturbing pattern (at least for me) in the way the telecos behave. Everyone I have talked to says the same thing, that the telecos and cablecos haven't run anything in over a decade, or in our case, in 3 decades. That the little ISPs got bought out by the big guys and that is when any upgrades and rollouts stopped dead. Meanwhile while our lines get slower and shittier by the year our rates are climbing and the FAP (what y'all call a cap) keeps getting worse because they have us by the short hairs. In my area the cable is now $156 for basic/phone/lowest Internet with a FAP of a lousy 36GB. From my neighbors I have learned that the DSL is the same but have worse speed and a even shittier 25GB FAP. Oh, and anyone who uses Linux or OSX gets screwed since all Windows updates don't count against the FAP but all of y'alls do. Nice huh?
THIS is why we need the broadband bill. There is a GOOD reason why we break up monopolies: It is because it doesn't take a monopoly long before its ONLY job is to kill any competition and keep its iron grip on the market. Well then WISPs and the free market will save us right? WRONG. We got a shitty WISP a few years back and I hear they will be out of business by this fall. Why? Because the teleco has been squeezing the living hell out of them for access to the backbone and they simply can't afford the 10 years worth of lawyers fees to fight back. Because monopolies have deep pockets and can SLAPP you into next week. If WE the people run the lines then WE own them. We can then lease them out to multiple vendors and finally have competition so that prices will go down and quality/speeds will go up. The free market only works if there is competition but the buying frenzy that the big telecos and cablecos were allowed to do has ended competition for a great lot of the country.
Believe me in a lot of ways I think the same as you. I am a Barry Goldwater small government type that was run out of the Republican party when the religious nuts took over in the 80's(yes I am old....get off my lawn!) but even I admit there are certain jobs that simply can't be left to the free market. Like bridges, freeways, and yes, broadband. I have seen with my own eyes how broadband has bec
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.