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Power and Free Broadband To the People
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes Slashdot member and open source developer Ben Kallos @KallosEsq — who is now a NYC Councilman — is pushing to make it a precondition to Comcast's merging with Time Warner that it agree to provide free broadband to all public housing residents in the City (and by free I mean free as in beer). Kallos, along with NY's Public Advocate, Letitia James, is leading a group of state and local politicians calling on Comcast to help bridge the digital divide in NY.
Merger is anti-market, anti-competitive and will result in shittier and more expensive internet for everyone. Also, there is no such thing as free, costs will be passed to existing paying customers, again making it more expensive.
Here is a solution: don't allow Comcast to merge with Time Warner! Who cares about "free" broadband? That would cost them maybe a $1 million and the rest of us about $20 billion in increased fees to support the TWC/Comcast monopoly. Ben has a small mind.
You don't help the poor by giving them more free handouts. All that will occur is the middle class will pay for it through price hikes and something similiar.
Time and again, history has shown a healthy middle class is the best road to alleviate poverty on a grand scale. Well guess what? It's the middleclass that has to pay for entitlements by and large (especially through fica taxes), taxing them more after decades of no real wage increases (since the 70s iirc) will have the opposite effect.
The best road would be to block the merger, encourage legislatively more competition, prices will drop, and it will help everyone (except Comcast and Warner of course).
Wouldn't it be nice if they can all have free housing, a free car, free gas, and how about free food and clothing?
And here comes science to take your stupid politicized assumptions about what good public housing does and flush them down the shitter. Public housing shows serious reductions in intergenerational poverty against control populations facing similar problems.
Now the best results come from people who temporarily reside in public housing and move into low/middle income housing after a few years, and the worst results come from people who face dual problems of mental illness or addiction in addition to homelessness, but that's not the boogeyman you're trying to take down.
shutup. just shut the fuck up.
you neither know you are talking about, nor have any valid point to make.
its not about solving the digital divide any more than the housing thing is about solving poverty.
its been widely and clearly shown that there is an increase in opportunity and outcomes between homes with and home without internet access.
you're essentially complaining about improving someones potential opportunities to enrich themselves and make their life better and maybe even get out of that housing you mock. but again, you have no valid point, so therefore theres little sense in talking sense, like pointing out to you that without subsidized housing many of these people would be on street, homeless, increasing both crime rates and homeless and deaths among the impoverished.
Theoretically we are a civilized nation.
But a civilized nation doesnt advocate intentionally making it harder if not impossible for those most disadvantaged to improve themselves, nor advocate for them to die quickly and get out of the way.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
It is my opinion that poverty is partially systemic. Our economic system depends on there being a pool of available workers (unemployed and underemployed). So as long as there is capitalism and a functioning free market, there will always be poor people. That being the case, we have a responsibility to make sure the basic needs of everyone are met. Increasingly in order to succeed in school and in life, Internet access isn't really a luxury.
Well said
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
You haven't been to much public housing in New York City. We've had public housing for over 100 years. It's good housing. During the 1920s, the unions built housing for their members.
The Wall Street Journal did a story on public housing a few years ago. The reporter thought it would be a mess. He was surprised to find out that it was pretty good housing. The residents liked public housing.
The residents were almost all working, mostly middle-class working people. Teachers, bus drivers.
They were black, however. I realize conservatives don't like it when black people get anything.
The NYC government actually produced housing projects more cheaply than the private developers, with lower rent, and the projects paid for themselves. It's a lot cheaper to build housing when you don't have to pay for the profits of a billion-dollar real estate consortium.
During WWII, NYC built housing for workers, in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, etc. When you really need housing, you can't depend on the free market. It worked so well that they continued to build public housing after the war. That was Frederich Hayek's nightmare -- during wartime, people would see how efficiently the government worked, and they'd want the government to continue after wartime.
The main problem for public housing is that it worked so well that the Republicans are trying to destroy it.
For example, they passed the Fairclough amendment, which prohibits the construction of new public housing. They can tear down old public housing, but not build new units. They've been tearing down public housing throughout the country. NYC is one of the few places where the tenants have fought to preserve it.
All of us owe our existence to the big, free handout from the sun. Without that huge source of free, yes, free energy, known as sunlight, we would die. Further, animals, including us, are completely dependent upon life to convert that free energy into more usable forms. Everything we eat was once alive. Plants keep the oxygen in the very air we breathe at levels we can tolerate. We wouldn't last 10 minutes without air. We are totally, completely dependent upon the environment.
The next time you strut around acting all holier than thou than the "lazy people" because you're employed, think on that. We all mooch off the sun and the environment. If you want to beat up on some people, pick on the ones who are pushing us all closer to unsustainability, by having too many children and/or damaging the environment in their greed to have more, more, more.
I would like to see everyone gain greater independence. A hard life though it was, many had that in the early 19th century, before the Industrial Revolution forced many independent farmers to become factory laborers. Are you crowing about employment, about slaving for The Man, as if that's some kind of virtue? Employers have had entirely too much success pushing back some of the hard won standards. What happened to 9 to 5, to the 40 hour work week? Employer greed, helped along by compliant and fearful employees who've been convinced that it is even more virtuous to work overtime for no extra pay because they're in a "superior" salaried position, and who are afraid of losing their jobs if they say "no", that's what.
And I think we could be in a good position to regain a great deal of independence. It's possible to go off-grid, and not have to buy electricity from a central seller. Add an electric car, and you wouldn't need the oil companies either. You can grow your own food too. Would take a lot of work, but with employers trying to hold minimum wage fixed, and constantly scheming to cut pay even more, it could conceivably pay better to quit a low paying job and put your hours towards managing a vegetable garden. Live off the land. And tell The Man to shove his miserable job and pathetic pay. People did that once. For education and news, download from the Internet. Internet access ought to be treated more like the mail. Our government runs the post office because it was thought that communication was too important and valuable to be totally dependent upon private parties who could and would abuse such power. it has to be supervised by The People. These private telecoms companies have not served us well, preferring instead to monopolize the market and gouge us all for inferior service.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I'm sure that the upstanding U.S. citizens who live in public housing will take it upon themselves to learn how to code and contribute Open Source software to the world in complete gratitude for this benevolent entitlement.
Some of them already do, you fucking idiot.
I've been to their homes.
Kids live in city projects and go to Stuyvesant. Lots of programmers live in the projects.
Why should the rest of us bend over backward to compensate for the shortcomings of unmotivated people with no drive to better themselves?
Who says they lack 'drive'?
How many people have REALLY had to raise themselves up from their bootstraps?
Not me, that's for sure. I'm smart enough, I'm successful enough, I'm self employed... but my parents gave me access to computers and the internet from the beginning, I was encouraged in school, they helped me pay for university, they drove me to my first job interview, helped me get to and from work by driving me and picking me up as much as they could (10 minutes by car vs 1.5 hours or more by bus) until I had my own car, got me driving lessons and let me use their cars to practice, and my first 'real job' in my field ... my father knew people and got me connected.
Sure I'm motivated... sure I took the initiative to transition from employee to contractor, I worked and went to school full time, I paid most of my tuition myself, bought my own car... but I had plenty of help.
If I'd been born to poor parents with little drive of their own, in public housing, with no internet or computers, no one helping me get and hold my first jobs... would I be where I am today? Most probably not. Even if I had the same amount of "drive"; it might not have been "enough" drive to get from there to where I am now.
So yeah, I think its worth giving people in those circumstances a little help to break out of that cycle. Maybe they aren't all as unmotivated as you think. Maybe they have just as much drive as you or I do but have have much bigger obstacles to climb.
Especially as it is a cycle. The lack of success makes it difficult to self motivate, that difficulty self motivating further limits prospects of success. So, yeah, give them access to the internet -- some of them will use it to find jobs, some of their kids will use it to educate themselves and find and develop opportunities they never would have otherwise had.
Why not?
What is your alternative? Ignore them? What is that going to accomplish? It not like they will all just go away. Its not like the problem will solve itself by magic.
And if things get bad enough for enough of them eventually they rise up in a mob and burn down the homes of those who have anything. History has shown us that countless times. So if you still need a self-interested reason to make life livable for your fellow citizens, how about, "If you don't sooner or later they'll get desperate enough and angry enough to burn your house down, with you in it."
The soundest reasons for effective social services to support those that fail in the psychopathically competitive society of capitalism are it is cheaper than prison and it makes up for the theft of subsistence existence. The right of every living thing to gain access to and survive off the environment that is stolen by the artificial construct of ownership and exclusion.
Only fools think they are "bending over backward" because they completely fail to look out the outcomes of the various social services models around the world. Straight up and without any room for argument is the fact the greater and more supportive the social services the more stable and crime free the society that provides them. Reduce social services and you increase crime, the forced need to survive when the ability to survive off the environment has been denied and no alternatives provided. The get a job rant when there are no jobs is stupid. Just as daft is if there are no jobs become self employed, when self employed people are just as unemployed as everyone else when there is no work to contract.
Social services keep the economy ticking over while recovery occurs, else economic collapse is the result of the downward spiral of less services are required, driving greater unemployment, resulting in less services required.
The real solution to many of societies most pressing problems is not the crazy elimination of social support services but the elimination of the psychopaths and narcissist that do not see themselves as a part of their overall human society along with everyone else but see themselves as competitors or more accurately predators preying upon the rest. Remember it is not in reality dog eat dog, dogs are smart enough to cooperate and work as a pack, it is rabid dog eat rabid dog, only sick dogs seek to prey upon other dogs.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen