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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.
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.
Time and again, history has shown a healthy middle class is the best road to alleviate poverty on a grand scale.
Let me fix that for you:
Time and again history has shown the way to have a healthy middle class is to alleviate poverty on a grand scale.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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.
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