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Cuba's Pending Tech Revolution
dcblogs writes The White House order last week lifting economic sanctions against Cuba specifically singles out technology, from telecommunication networks to consumer tech. There's much potential and many obstacles. Cuba has an educated population craving technology, but it has little income for new tech. The Cuban government wants to trade with the U.S., but is paranoid about the outside world and has limited Internet access to 5% to 10% of the population, at best. "The government has been very reluctant to have open Internet access," said Harley Shaiken, chairman of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. But "there is real hunger for technology," and with the easing of the embargo, the government "will be facing new pressures," he said. The country needs a complete technology upgrade, including to its electric grid, and the money to finance these improvements. "Markets like Cuba, which will require a wholesale construction of new infrastructure, don't come along often, if ever," said Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO of CompTIA, a tech industry trade group. "The flood of companies lining up to get in should be quite substantial," he said. Cuba has a population of about 11 million, about the same size as the Dominican Republic, which spends about $1 billion annually on technology and related services, according to IDC. But capital spending today on IT in Cuba may be no more than $200 million annually.
As much as I like what's happening recently, I'm really troubled by the *way* it's happening.
Eric holder just gutted civil forfeiture. That's a good move, should have been repealed 30 years ago, I'm all for it.
Has anyone noticed that a single man who was not elected gets to pick-and-choose which laws he will enforce? Here's a man in the executive branch who decided unilaterally to dump an entire law. The legislature can pass or repeal laws, that's their job. The supreme court can bless or condemn laws, that's their job.
But the executive branch?
Can they just unilaterally pick and choose which laws(*) they will prosecute?
Similarly, Obama told Holder awhile back not to pursue "Defense of marriage" cases. That's fine too, the law should never have been passed and should have been dumped long ago.
Has anyone noticed that this was done by the executive branch all on its own, with no oversight?
I'm troubled by this because everyone accepts the outcome because the results are so good. The ends justify the means in these cases, it's so good to get these laws off the books that we don't notice *how* they got repealed.
To be specific, in the future we will see the executive branch gutting laws more often, and if people complain they will point to these good results and say "it's OK for us to do this now because no one complained when we did it previously".
This is a troubling turn of events.
(*) I'm making a distinction between pick-and-choose laws, as opposed to pick-and-choose cases, the latter of which is within the discretion of the prosecutor. Yes, there's line, and yes it can be abused.