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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.
Just look at the loving way in which the residents of "free" public housing maintain their residences out of gratitude to the all-caring government.
Truly, public housing solved poverty to exactly the same degree that free broadband will "solve" the digital divide. 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.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
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?
...it will be a single 1 Mb/s connection shared by all of them. As a result, more of them will spend the ten to fifteen bucks for a dialup subscription.
...why do I have the sneaky sensation that Google will be the future provider of "free" internet to everyone in the world? Connecting our lives...
Knowledge is indeed power. But who controls Google?
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
If these people are living in poverty, how are they going to have a computer to access the internet with?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The problem is in the US working poor didnt qualify for free housing so basically what happened is you concentrated utter poverty in a small area.
Combine that with inadequate security, poor maintenance and shoddy construction you have a recipe for disaster. So right now
working poor pay well over 30% of their salary for rent. What would they do if they didnt have the heavy rent loads? They would spend it on consumer goods like washers and dryers and cars and perhaps even save for the down payment for a house. So an argument could be made that public housing might
in the long run stabilize home prices and improve the economy.
In Europe mainstream families live in public housing so public housing doesnt have the stigma that it has in the US so economic activity is maintained
near public housing in europe because you have working families who spend money not just welfare recipients. Also because working families
vote political interests have a vested interest in maintaining the quality of public housing.
There's no way Comcast (or any cable company) will ever agree to that. The fact is that cable companies make most of their money off of large apartment buildings. That's where they get access to oodles of customers without having to lay hardly any cable at all. Rich neighborhoods, oddly enough, with their spread out property, tend to cost cable companies more money to service than they pay in.
His district is the third-highest-income in the city (he represents the less classy half of the upper east side, from Lex to the river), although that may have come down a bit, with the redistricting. Also, it's worth noting that, with the proposed redistricting, he's had three sizable public housing projects added to his district (Lexington, Isaacs, and Holmes).
...
1. This makes it harder for anyone to compete with the likes of the cable monopolies because to provide and compete they'll have to first give away their products and services to people for free simply for the privilege of being able to sell them to anyone else. This effectively makes it impossible for anyone to compete with the cable monopolies. And in exchange for protecting and expanding their monopolies the price for them is cheap. The cost of course is paid by everyone.
2. This sort of thing is ultimately vote buying. We've been seeing this sort of thing go on for years. You want to win the election? Use public money or take money/resources/rights from one group of people that doesn't like you and give it to another group that is for sale. Instant win in the election every time. It is a perversion of democracy. Only those that pay should be able to vote on matters that are being funded.
No taxation without representation... remember? Well... why do you get representation without taxation? It is the same thing. Pay like everyone else or you have no right to influence what gets spent on whom.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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
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?
I would like to think that if I had the drive I have now but been born to poor parents in the slums, I would work my way up to drug kingpin. But upon further reflection, I think I would likely have been killed in my late teens or early twenties.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I've heard it said, for a poor kid growing up in a ghetto, drug dealer is the best option. You'd have to be stupid not to try it.
Cheap storage VM.
$22T spent in the war on poverty over the the last 50 years in the US. Poverty level essentially unaffected for the last 45 of those 50 years.
People are smart enough the cooperate too. It's called charity. The problem the progressive socialist movement seems to have with charity is a) it is not forced on people by the state, therefore it "can never work" and b) it by its nature discriminates in favor of the deserving poor and against those who choose not to try. It is true that charity will never meet the endless demands of the "gimme free stuff" people, but I simply don't care very much about them. I do care about the sudden widow with two kids, the wounded veteran, the mentally disabled, i.e. people who simply cannot provide for themselves and people who *temporarily and unexpectedly* find themselves in need of assistance. It's an oldie-but-a-goodie: the safety-net system should not be a hammock.
Spending $22T hasn't done fuck-all to alleviate poverty. But keep shoveling the money into that pit, keep putting large and larger burdens on fewer and fewer people to carry more and more dead weight. Or maybe, just maybe, we admit that the way the war on poverty (much like the war on drugs) cannot be won by throwing money at the problem--hasn't worked so far. After we admit that, maybe we can at least *try* something different.
Our Government is a classic enabler and we are all codependent. An enabler is a person who by their actions make it easier for an addict to continue their self-destructive behavior by rescuing the addict. The codependent party exhibits behavior that controls, makes excuses for, pities, and takes other actions to perpetuate the obviously needy party's condition, because of their desire to be needed and fear of doing anything that would change the relationship.
As for "The get a job rant when there are no jobs is stupid." You've obviously never posted a job opening and had to deal with the endless stream of people who simply want you to sign their "I applied for this job" paperwork so they can keep their checks coming. They have no interest in even discussing the job. They don't want the job. They just want their check.
"Mar 12, 2012 - Although the employment picture is improving, the job market can hardly ... lack of work, however, there are jobs that employers can't seem to fill." [CNBC]
"Jul 19, 2013 - Despite millions of workers still looking for jobs, there are a wide variety of positions employers just can't seem to fill, new research shows." [Business World Daily]
"Jul 10, 2014 - A lower unemployment rate doesn't mean all jobs are getting filled. A new survey reports many businesses are having difficulty finding workers." [CNBC]
"The staffing company ManpowerGroup, for instance, reports that 52% of U.S. employers surveyed say they have difficulty filling positions because of talent ..." [WSJ]
A Department of Energy Survey [www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2009/#undefined], includes a part of which breaks down appliance use in US homes by household Income.
For example it states that 16.9M households are below the poverty line, and of those 15.6M have microwaves, 8.6M have coffee makers, 10.6M have top-door (top freezer) refrigerators, 1.8M have a 2nd refrigerator, 3,9M have a separate freezer, 4.8M have a dishwasher, 10.9M have a clothes washer in their home.
For TVs, of the 16.9M households below the poverty line, only 0.3M had no TV, while 4.8M had one TV, 5.9M had two TVs, 3.5M had three TVs, 1.6M had four TVs, and 0.7M had five or more TVs. Some 8.9M had TVs between 21 and 36 inches in screen size, and 4.4M had “big screen TVs” of 37 inches or more, with 5.7M being LCD or plasma TVs. Some 6.1M had cable TV boxes connected to their primary TV, and 3.9M had a video game console, and 7.1M had a DVD player.
In addition 5.8M of the 16.9M households below the poverty line had computers, while 1.8M more had two computers (and nearly1M had three or more). Some 7.2M had internet access, of those 2.7M had cable broadband, 3.1 had DSL or fiber. And 5.2M had at least one printer.
8.0M (of 16.9M poverty-level) households have cordless phones, 5.2M have answering machines, 0.8M have fax machines, and 0.8M have photocopiers. 5.8M have stereo equipment.
"Living in poverty": in the US is hardly the same as being destitute. Considering how prevalent the trappings of modern-day middle-class lifestyles are in the households living below the poverty line, one may find themselves wondering "Wait, they have a big-screen TV with cable, but I've gotta fork over taxes to give them foodstamps that they can spend at McDonalds?"
In my mind the notion that I am being forced to pay welfare benefits even one household that chooses to squander their real income on Playstations and big screen TVs is too many. If they can afford to buy a TV, they can afford to buy their own food. If they’ve got a big TV from before they were poor (they lost a job perhaps), then sell the TV first to buy food, then when you’ve truly got nothing left, we can talk about your “needs”.
So we should be paying benefits so that more people can have a dishwasher, cordless phone, and computer? Progressives seem to support the notion that everyone should be able to live a lower middle-class lifestyle, one that includes all those things, and that our welfare state should provide it without question of other lifestyle choices that may have been made, without requiring work on their part.
No one needs a dishwasher. It is a luxury, work-saving device. No one needs a TV. It is an entertainment device. No one needs a Playstation, it is a game. No one needs a tattoo. It is a personal choice. No one needs Big Macs, Coke, beer, booze, or cigarettes. If you're on welfare and spend money on those things, you can afford to meet your basic needs, but are choosing not to and expecting others to subsidize your decisions.
My definition of “need” vs "want" comes in much lower than progressive find tolerable, and includes minimal support–I don’t want anyone to starve in this country, and want to provide a helping hand. But if you want more than the most basic subsistence level of support, get it yourself. And I mean *basic*, like here's you sack of rice and beans. Of course, though, people who simply lack the basic mental or physical ability to support themselves cannot be excluded from a reasonable level of support.
I guess the question for progressives boils down to "How rich do you want the poor people in this country to be?" The onus should be on them,since they want to forcibly take money from me and others to redistribute it to those they feel do not have enough. They never have defined “enough” but the level of expectation on the word “need” seems much higher than mine.