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Jobs Bill Funds Safety Network With Spectrum Sale
CWmike writes "President Barack Obama's American Jobs Act would allow the FCC to conduct so-called incentive auctions, in which the agency would share the proceeds of a spectrum auction with television stations that voluntarily give up their spectrum. The goal would be to raise $6.5 billion to fund a nationwide voice and data network for police, fire departments and other emergency responders. Lawmakers and other groups have called for a nationwide public safety network since emergency responders had trouble communicating with each other during the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorists attacks on the U.S."
You know, the last time Congress took a bunch of spectrum from TV and allocated some of it to public safety? The D block is still unused, right?
The only thing going on here is an attempt by the Verizons and Comcasts of the world to eliminate competition. (of course Comcast-owned NBC channels would be first to give up their OTA allocations). Public safety is a transparent excuse.
Isn't that one of the reasons for the digital TV conversion? I recall that as one of the reasons to change the spectrum layout last time. How much more do they need anyway? The reason for a lack of communication before was a lack of planning as much as anything else.
bob@Osprey:~>
Remember Citizen, your work, your money, your family, your life - all exist merely to further the aims of the Federal Government. If you disagree, we have a nice campground down in the Caribbean we can show you.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Spectrum auctions don't seem to get much more than £15 these days.
I'm an EMT, there are 5 radios in my ambulance. I don't need more ways to talk to people. I need policies, documentation, good equipment, and most of all consistent interoperability training between multiple departments and jurisdictions. I really don't think the fix is more spectrum.
The jobs bill is a joke. It's not going to be passed. It exists so that Obama can say "Look, I did a jobs bill, and this obstructionist do-nothing Congress wouldn't pass it!" You could say it's the kickoff to the Obama 2012 campaign.
(I make no comment here on the value of the actual policies contained in the jobs bill, merely on the motives of those proposing it and its chances in Congress.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Unfortunately, Congress is attempting to solve a technical problem that can't really be solved at this level. Although everybody wants more wireless spectrum, and can never have enough, adding spectrum here will not make intercommunication happen. What will make it happen is causing the various public service agencies to create municipal communication agencies that build and operate the radio systems for all of the agencies in a coordinated fashion.
Unfortunately, what a spectrum allocation does is make it possible for this to happen by a complete replacement of all existing public service communication systems in a municipality, because the old radios are not compatible with the new frequencies. So, we're going to put them all on the new frequencies, and replace all of their equipment. The communication equipment companies love this and that's who is behind it. If that's not enough, they've just gone through a wholesale replacement of systems because they were mandated to go to narrow-band channels and APCO P.25 digital communications capable equipment (mostly they use the digital equipment in FM rather than digital mode, because the codec in APCO doesn't handle background noise well). This was also driven in part by the equipment manufacturers. And we're going to throw out that brand new equipment now.
We also did this just recently with the 700 MHz band, and those frequencies are still mostly unused.
Thank you for being a friend
Traveled down the road and back again
Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
And if you threw a party
Invited everyone you ever knew
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
And the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.
I've taken the liberty to fixed the typo for you.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
It belongs to the public. A single entity should not get exclusive access to the spectrum in perpetuity. They should have to pay an annual lease on it to continue using it.
This also prevents companies from buying up spectrum to stifle competition. If they lease large amounts of spectrum which they then don't use, the bid price on the remainder will go up. The government can then use that bid price to raise the lease price for all spectrum in subsequent years, making it too expensive for companies to continue sitting on that spectrum. It's the same concept behind property taxes in real estate - by raising the price to own property in a highly desirable area, you force the owners to do something useful with the property rather than sitting on it as a speculative or anti-competitive move.
Obama is still trying to feather the government nest on the backs of taxpayers. We need to slash spending and taxes to revive the economy. The Bolsheviks have failed.
an ill wind that blows no good
Oh, I don't know. I think some Democrats actually believe they're taking away our liberty for our own good. That makes them every bit as dangerous and culpable*, just not as numerous. They're not to be easily dismissed.
*(... as dangerous and culpable as money-grubbing Democrats and Republicans. Yes, both.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
... without it for the last 10 years, why piss the money down the rat hole now when we can least afford it? Government make-work jobs don't recover an economy. Real, organic economic growth recovers an economy - that is - production that is based on the laws of the free market and demand. You can build something of little utility that nobody really wants or needs (especially since any police department, fire station, or rescue squad in the nation is a phone call away and any smart phone user can locate one anywhere in seconds).
Then there's the question of why. Why does NYPD need instant, over-the-air access to LAPD? What could possibly be so exigent to warrant the expenditure on such a system?
But we should be doing many of the things the comission said. But this is a good one especially. If we're going to have emergency services, why would we keep them on a line thats subject to being overwhelmed in the event of an emergency of catastrophic proportions? to superid: You wont be listening to any more radios, unless something along the lines of a massive terrorist attack happens. Then, with those radios being overwhelmed, you wont be left to stramble and make choices with anything but a local view of the immediate situation. Says right in the slashdot summary. Thats the major purpose of the network. Not so people who can already communicate well do, but to bring mor epeople on, without fear of the slew of services that manifest in the wake of a disaster being overwhelmed. Its really, really important if your night suddenly goes from "dehydrated kid with syncope" (by the way, who breaks into a small town EMT center in winter? Cold IV fluids certainly wake you up. jerk vandals.) to "level 5 hurricane" or "large fireball downtown" to be able to communicate in the now heavily used communications networks. Just sayin'
I never owned a Spectrum, it had a terrible keyboard. Back in those days I had a Commodore 64
Just dial 9.1.1.1!
Or in the IPv6 world, 0009:0001:0001:0001:0001:0001:0001:0001.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would 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 our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
and seing the keywords Jobs, Bill, and networks, for a minute there I thought of a different content of the article.
The jokes practically write themselves!
Spoilers: It's not.
An easier way to raise money would be to deregulate broadcasters and allow them to offer broadband services, similar to what is being done in Europe using a DVB-T2 format. There is already a provision that would provide a 5% ancillary revenue fee back to the government from broadcasters, teh gift that would keep on giving. The problem seems to be that our government wants concentration of certain industries with a few...sounds a bit Fascist, doesn't it?
"Lawmakers"... for people far too stupid to understand "legislators". Yeah let's dumb down all conversations concerning important things like public policy, that way stupid and ignorant and functionally illiterate people can participate too. Man, we'd never make it without *their* input. And heaven forbid if they encountered a reading level higher than their own ... why, they might start getting uppity ideas about learning more so they could keep up ... next thing you know, they'll think more deeply and will demand more representation in the political system. By God, let's not let that happen. Um, someone might lower their self-esteem, yeah, sure they'd never just better themselves. For stupidity!
Obama and everyone else in the government have it wrong.
Giving money to existing businesses will not create jobs. Existing businesses already have the employees they need to create their product, and if you give them money in a bad economy they will hoard it waiting for the economy to get better. (This is not 100% true in all cases, but as a general rule it works very well.)
You get jobs from new businesses. New businesses grow to accommodate production - once a business can meet demand for it's product or service, growth essentially stops.
New businesses come from innovation on top of infrastructure.
Most innovation is an incremental improvement in an existing product. Your company makes perfusion pumps. If you can make the same pump but 5% smaller, or 5% lighter, or 5% cheaper, or lasts 50% longer - that's generally good enough to start a business.
Innovation:
Patents are largely impossible for the small business right now. They are expensive and don't afford any sort of protection. Patent descriptions are so broadly written and subject to so much interpretation that it is likely that any innovation you make is covered by numerous patents. There are trolls out there ready to take everything away once you've done all the hard work.
Any similarities between your product and an existing product will net you a copyright violation.
Infrastructure:
The criminal laws are so broadly written and subject to so much interpretation that enforcement has become largely discretionary. Local prosecutors are not held responsible for bringing merit-less cases to court, so be sure not to piss anyone off in the government.
The regulatory laws are broadly written and subject to interpretation, and again enforcement has become largely discretionary (viz: Gibson and Martin)
The cell phone network only covers metropolitan areas, and is so unstable that Apple can come out with a popular product (IPhone 1.0) and overload the system, making it impossible to make calls. In Manhattan (!)
High speed internet is only available in metropolitan areas, and is so overloaded that the carriers are implementing rationing (aka data caps).
Our electric system is old and outdated - by some estimates 20% of the generated power is wasted because we can't route it efficiently.
Our postal system is expensive and somewhat unreliable, yet we can't let more efficient companies (UPS and FedEx) deliver mail.
Our air travel rules are so invasive and abhorrent that people refuse to use it. Good luck getting your sales people to other cities, or sending an engineer to work out problems with a vendor.
Our tax structure is so complicated that it requires expert advice and constant vigilance for compliance. With Amazon giving in to external states demands to collect sales tax, expect this to get a lot worse before it gets better. Every cash-strapped state, county, and local town will be all over the net looking for their cut.
About the only piece of infrastructure in the US that seems to be OK is the interstate highway system.
Any single one of these can be considered minor, or could be ignored or dealt with by accommodation. Allocate some funds to hire a CPA, or a lawyer, or patent searcher, or whatever.
Taken in concert, the whole package puts a severe chilling effect on business growth in the US. That's why we don't have jobs any more, that's why the economy is taking so long to turn around.
We just don't have it any more.
There's no surprise it's being announced when the Republican Tea Party primary warmup debates are going on. Obama couldn't get the Debt Ceiling deal done without giving away 3/4 of the store, when not doing so would have supposedly caused a Constitutional crisis (it wouldn't have actually caused the US to default, in spite of what Obama and the Tea Partiers said, but would have caused massive cuts in Social Security checks and Federal paychecks.) And he's pretending that he can announce a "Jobs Bill" and expect a Republican House to pass any of it just on his say-so?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I volunteer with a fire department in rural east Texas. None of the area volunteer fire departments want the new networks the cities keep pushing for. There is an 800MHz trunked network used by a few local law enforcement officers. There are only five carrier frequencies on that system and more than five departments using the network. If my department was on that same network and we were in a burning building and needed to communicate with the pump operator we are not guaranteed to be able to transmit. A fire fighter could burn up because the local PD was busy checking a license plate. Unacceptable.
I Don't Work Here
OK how frequently do catastrophic emergencies happen?.... ALMOST NEVER -- Why should we base our communications system around this scenario? Can you imagine the bureaucratic nightmares involved with the daily operation of a national emergency communications network?! Since when does anything on a national level work swimmingly? It would nearly neuter the productivity of every local district. What we have now works well. Each department and area is responsible for it's own administrative domain. It keeps policy relevant, streamlines change, and best of all COSTS US NOTHING. This idea is foolish and offers little benefit outside of extreme emergency.
the real estimates are between 10 and 30b. there is no way to get that from spectrum auctions. they should just use the commercial networks which will run more efficiently and have better maintenance. The bill pushes for a new government run company to build a nationwide network. Why not bid it out to the current networks?
The new network will lease towers from American Tower or Crown Castle (same as verizon/att), and buy the same LTE equipment as verizon/att and then work in what way that is better? The new network will have less coverage and be more expensive. Where are they going with this?
Free Trade is not free.
The empire is going down; this large train is headed for bigger crashes and despite some of us seeing it coming it can't stop in time even when the clueless people take notice.
It really does not matter what bill you come up with-- the broken system will output garbage; adapting to they system isn't going to help but that is what is being tried.
It is rather simple, the terrorist religious fanatics have won this decade; on both sides over here and in the middle east. They continue to win. Our nuts are rising to new extremes (ironically also holding Fascist ideologies) if the debt limit phoney crisis and the GOP debates don't illustrate that then you probably are not cut out for politics. Obama is negotiating with terrorists; the reason you don't negotiate with them is because they have leverage; once you implement a non-negotiation policy you remove that leverage and put the blame onto them. This "Jobs bill" is easily 60% GOP concepts that have poor or miserable track records; they won't pass it if it is 99% if the politics help Obama. period. The hostages can die, they don't care (or are bluffing) and so they have leverage... Not that the Dems are that far off in their viewpoints these days; they've shifted towards the GOP slowly for decades... working for those corporate dollars.
Your statements about the USPS are way off; you don't know what you are talking about-- when you overreach you risk undermining your credibility. FedEx? ha!
An interstate highway bridge collapsed just a few years ago; remember?? That was a shared mistake between MN and the feds. Roads last a long time and that system has been equally mismanaged.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Exactly. We have fundamental systemic issues that a bit of "stimulus" spending here & there is not going to fix. Plus, most of the things you mentioned are there due to entrenched assets, with no representation of the opposing side. For instance, who lobbies on behalf of the public domain?
And then there's all the big stuff like health care, social security, and the real estate market black-holing a ton of value.
Yeah!
AT&T says it needs to by T-Mobile to get more spectrum - and now we have a better answer - they can get the spectrum and we don't get a monopoly.
Though this was about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates doing something together.
Comprehenxion failE, ma gramma sux too!
As I recall from my childhood, one could transmit a "text message" over analog radio using morse code.
Analog-only radios are awfully limited though. Can they even send text-messages to each other?
... ..- .-. . _ .... .- ...- . _ ..-. --- .-. _ -.-- . .- .-. ...
PDF
Government Oversight Committee
Obama's Jobs Destruction Act
In his speech Obama didn't say "stimulus" once. He wants to stay away from that word, last stimulus was a failure and unpopular.
Of-course deficits that finance the stimulus destroy more jobs than the tax cuts create.
None of it is paid for, cuts from future increases is not paying for anything, but there is net increase in deficit (and it's underestimated) 450 Billion USD year 2011.
Debt ceiling now will have to be raised again obviously next year, because this is 450Billion that are not accounted for in the last debt ceiling increase.
Tax credit for hiring people who are unemployed for more than 6 months. So now employers will have incentive NOT to hire anybody who hasn't been unemployed for 6 months :)
More unemployment!
7.25 - is minimum wage. 4000USD is given as tax credit, and you have to keep the person for 6 months minimum.
So hiring somebody at 7.25USD/hour and given 4000USD credit reduces minimum wage to 3.40USD/hour.
Minimum wage will be reduced, and so there WILL be more employment, but some people will be FIRED to give more space for new minimum wage hires because of the tax credit.
Bill will make it illegal to discriminate against long term unemployed. So what will happen is that people who are long term unemployed will NOT be interviewed. Who wants to have a lawsuit on their hands?
If anybody is unemployed for 4-5 months, now there is a reason not to hire them right away, to interview them and to keep them on UI for another 1-2 months and then to get the tax credit once they are at 6 months unemployment time.
Of-course fire anybody after 6 months, get new hires. It's all going to be minimum wage jobs, nobody who is hiring people at good salaries will care about 4000USD tax credit.
The 1 year cut in SS payroll tax will make SS that much more broke (it's broke now, but it can be made worse.)
To pretend that there is SS "trust fund", gov't will borrow money, put it into "trust fund", borrow from "trust fund" and spend it on stimulus. Many lies all around.
If you hire a returning veteran, the tax credit is 5600USD. Applied to minimum wage, it makes minimum wage 1.87USD/hour. This creates huge government incentive to have very high turnover.
Payroll taxes will be lost on existing jobs, ha ha. They'll have to print more money.
For returning veterans with injuries (wounded warrior), you get 9600USD tax credit. For a minimum wage job this makes the pay a NEGATIVE ONE :) -1.98USD/hour.
Hire as many wounded warriors as possible immediately and just pay them, but the employer gets 1.98/hour for every new hire. Hire all of them and have the Fed monetize the debt that will be created paying these tax credits.
How do you like them apples?
You can't handle the truth.
The FCC Chairman is a presidential appointee, this is important to remember I will get back to it in a second.
The FCC ought manage power and frequency across the spectrum only by engineers who work in the public interest.
Not auctioning off spectrum from a fascist point of view, or failed policy, or insert latest retarded unscheduled fuckup here.
Not creating authority over the internet out of thin air because of tyrannical rule of the spying establishment want it.
The only tyrannical rule the FCC ought show is authority to manage the spectrum in the public interest, and to maintain military freqs. for our military.
Not tapping the dirty CAFR money flowing into corporate owned TV Stations, not playing political games, not handing over most of the public spectrum to commercial ownership.
The FCC must use it's engineers and just say, "Boom this part of the spectrum belongs to this nationwide public safety network." because they have already worked out it's the best use of the spectum in the public interest. Fuck 'commercial TV Stations' interests, You take the "correct spectrum" (Some spectrum is better purpose than others, some go line of sight, some shoot skip long distance) needed to keep the military and public safety.
This is common sense if you follow the original (now completely failed) mission statement you don't pipe a bunch of RF noise (broadband computers and shit) down the electrical distribution system generating so much noise hams cant even receive a fucking signal, that's not common sense, that's corporate FASCISM which puts that fucking noise louder than your squelch can block or DX station can punch through.
All this noise and chaos ties back to when the FCC not only dumped their original mission statement, but scrubbed it from even being historically found on their own websites. and replaced it with the two fascist version of their current mission statements
The FCC needs to have their leadership heads rolled, and rolled back in history before the fascist fuck-ups arrived.
Some people argue teh FCC ought to be publicly appointed, like by voters. Maybe, I am not hear to argue this. I am arguing that the FCC has become a bloated piece of shit no longer serves public interest, they simply re-define the words "public interest" to now mean something like how cheap your cell phone bill is. That's not public interest, that's financial pocketbook interest.
The FCC being a presidential appointed position translates to,
"Things are currently the way they are because things are exactly the way the President wants it to be."
Our officials are responsible for the way things are currently, since 911, and the puppets moved in, it's the way they want it to be.
The problem is they are not being held responsible for their actions, in any way shape or form. The largest crime on planet Earth is by these people who get away free. Lets see some banksters in jail, No? How about the SENATORS who swore an oath to regulate the monetary system in jail? No. Then fuck you.
Nobody no voter, no commercial CEO, nobody should be in wonderment as to why things are so fucked up, it's not even a democrat vs republican problem it's fascism through and through both parties equally are pieces of shit with corporate media (by definition not in the public interests) keeping the game going.
It's this fucking 911 war machine Continuity of Government, DHS/TSA and the unconstitutional puppets who moved in, until this shit is dealt with man to man, face to face, the people will never snap out of the hypnotic dream the public is kept under by the corporations our official establishment loves so much
Instead of having a scripted town hall meeting, all candidate ought be forced to provide all their corporate and foreign affiliates. Once you know who's behind them, we can skip completely whether it's a Democrat, Republican, Independant, Green, Tea, or Unstated (all that party s
When do We the People get spectrum. We should not be paying corporations taxes for our spectrum.
So yes I am for annual lease, but the FCC needs save some spectrum for the people that they work for. Or has the Fed forgotten who We the People are.
Did anyone else read "Jobs Bill" and just assume that Steve Jobs and Bill Gate's had a love-child?
As a ham and a person who has to buy new toys for our local govt. Take the radios that are being taken out of service. Dedicate five VHF and five UHF channels within the common bands as emergency channels. Use FM only. for bonus points have one pair of channels used for a repeater with a backup power supply. Other than reprogramming existing equipment there would be little cost. The FCC would have to come up with the ten channels, but surely this is faster than moving entire blocks around. Of course, while it would work, there are no big moneybags to move around (mostly out of our tax dollars to m). you didn't really think this was about public safety or first responders, did you ?
Uh, let me reiterate: "I think some Democrats actually believe they're taking away our liberty for our own good."
Think about it for a moment. How often do they say: "what about _____?" (paraphrased; insert: children, elderly, sick, jobless, homeless, racial equality, women, etc.) They really like taking the moral high road. How are they not "moral busybod[ies]"?
You don't need religion to be moral. It certainly helps, but it's not a prerequisite.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.