Your last statement lets FE off a little light. They knew they had voltage problems that day (they knew they had them every day, Davis-Bessie was down). Eastlake 5 tripped on over production of voltage before the initial event that led to the blackout. Not seeing alarms under those conditions should have set off an alarm in somebody's mind...
What exactly can the government control in this case? Are you proposing that the government establish and maintain SCADA and EMS systems for the purpose of continuous monitoring and backstop of the power grid? And if so, what are they going to do when a problem on the grid becomes unstable and explosive more than a control area?
The root of the problem in this blackout was massive human error, software bug or no.
Not to go too libertarian on you, but the soulution is strong contractual provisions among the interconnecting parties. Blythely saying "Government Fix This" isn't going to accomplish much to prevent anything, unless it can act in real time which nobody is proposing. The government basically already does what it needs to in requiring reserve margins of energy and transmission of regulated monopoly control areas.
Had MISO the authority to tell FirstEnergy to get their voltage under control, or to tell them they were out of N-1 compliance, and for either violation they would be penalized x thousand of dollars for every minute beyond z that they are out (where z is 30 for N-1, beyond some reasonable y for voltage, and where x is something on the order of 50000 say) FE would have gotten into shape. Alternatively, PJM, AEP, DLCO, MECS, and DPL could have provisions for not violating inadvertant scheduling of energy and reactive and they could seperate from FE for being out of compliance. FE would have blacked out, but better them alone than the entire northeast...
Well, whoever wrote the original post did not understand what happened when Enron fell. Energy companies were champing at the bit to hire ex Enron employees. They assembled a hell of a talented staff and some of the best trading and analytical minds in energy. Their trading wasn't what took them down, and their people found jobs fast. Now, the energy industry subsequently imploding has cost many of those their subsequent jobs, but there are still opportunities out there and having Enron on your resume is nothing more than a notch.
Well, my perspective on this issue is a little different from most people's. First off, I am an avid follower of the politics of Florida. Second, I used to work with the man who was at the time one of the chief economists working on the high speed rail project in Florida. Both experiences tell me one thing, nobody in this state has a damn clue how to build or fund a high speed rail system. The voters of this state have established a track record of voting for some very poor amendments (including basically all of the 1998 amendments for the constitution revision in addition to this damn stupid idea).
High speed rail works where there is demand for commuter traffic between areas, or large commerce between areas. Miami and Tampa (and Fort Lauderdale, for that matter) are large ports that receive goods for other parts of the nation or send them south. Not a lot of commerce between the cities. Furthermore, who the hell wants to commute between the cities? Maybe, just maybe, there might be demand for such a thing between Tampa and Orlando.
Killing the high speed rail proposals when he took office stood for several years as the single action Jeb Bush had taken as governor of which I approved (now there is one other being his veto this year of a bill that would have allowed the Public Utilities Commission to raise telephone rates with basically no oversight).
Well, I am glad to find someone has long since made this remark. Interesting that even in this parody of an article the Weekly Standard finds it necessary to brandish its right wing credentials like a badge of honor.
The right wing has a tendency to like "our kind of dictator" from Nixon supporting Pinochet through the CIA on down to the present resident of the White House trying to replace the freely and democratically elected president of Venezuela with his puppet dictator. Furthermore, trying to replace a Venezuelan President with a hell of a lot more claim to legitimacy of leadership of his country than the Shrub has ever possessed in light of what happened here in Florida.
Scale is the problem with this, and other so called clean technologies. Consider a roughly average sized natural gas fired combined cycle power plant of 500 MW. This roughly means that there are two gas fired turbines (think huge aircraft engine) hooked up to a device to recover the exhaust as steam to power a steam turbine (called a HRSG). That is essentially three devices to get 500 MW. To get 500 MW out of this ocean idea, you need probably 670+ of these devices (more than exactly 500/.75 given transmission loss and some redundancy). That is a lot of area, and a lot of components that can fail or get eaten up by the corrosive effects of sea water.
These ocean turbine ideas are not alone. The only reason any wind farms ever get built is that congress approved a production tax credit for producing wind energy. Without that, building new wind is simply not viable for any company. The cost to set the things up amortized over some reasonable period consistent with GAAP simply overwhelms the fact that once the things are up and running they cost basically nothing to run. Furthermore, I can not imagine that turbines in the sea would involve as little maintenance as wind turbines.
Bottom line is that nuclear energy is the way to go. With nuclear you know exactly where is the pollution from every nuclear power plant ever produced, except Chernobyl and the US and France produce much safer plants than those Soviet designs. Furthermore, uranium is cheap. Fossil plants are cheaper to produce, but then you have the input price of coal, natural gas, or, in a small portion of the country (Florida, Maine, and Hawaii particularly), petroleum. Operating a nuclear plant might cost somewhere around $5/MW whereas coal might be somewhere around $15 and gas around 8.000 * (price of natural gas, say $2.70 lately) = $21.60.
I have two observations. First, electric and gas utilities were the ones that came up with the idea of trading bandwidth. They do not have any clue about the mechanics of high speed internet access, and I see no reason for them to get one any time soon. Furthermore, they are very protective about what happens on their power lines.
Second, as one in the wholesale side of the Power industry, the first thing that occurred to me on checking the internal website for jobs one day was "Why do we even still have meter readers in this day and age". It may have been a good blue-collar job in the past, but that one must go the way of the dinosaur as better technologies like this are developed.
Two points here. First point. Actually, venture capitalists do not expect a substantial return fast. They expect half of their money invested to totally disappear. Good, long established venture capitalists expect large returns on a small percentage of their investment after a bit of time to put the business fundamentals in place has elapsed. The ones who expected large returns fast either got them with the bubble and got out, or they lost everything when the bubble burst.
Second point. You have gotta love MBAs when they get started on technical points. A damn good example is bandwidth trading and scheduling. Basically they thought that point to point scheduled and dedicated access was this massive tidal wave that would sweep everything else aside. And you could not tell them any different, even though this scheduled bandwidth a) is unnecessary given current and foreseeable technology and infrastructure and b) violates the engineering realities of broadband access and traffic routing today. The MBAs, mostly at Enron, latched onto this bandwidth trading idea because it gave them wet dreams because it combined bandwidth and trading. Notice also the big proponent I have identified (and no, I am not calling attention to their collapse). Think of Enron's roots. They were a gas pipeline company. Point to point scheduling and dedicated access are how you trade Natural Gas, and that is an extremely successful market. I argued this in late 2000 with an MBA friend of mine until he was blue in the face. In the end, exactly one broadband market trade has ever been done, and that was in November on the now defunct EnronOnline.
First off, one reading of one webpage does not the story of decline and fall make. That said, it does appear to me that the venture capital took the usual, successful, model and misapplied it to this company.
However, consider the perspective of the Venture Capitalist. He usually has control of a good deal of funds with which he tries to hit home runs (well, usually he does not exist but is a pool of funds). Furthermore, in the best and the worst of times roughly fifty percent of companies that attract venture capital end up failures. Roughly ten percent ever make enough profit to be considered successful. It is on those ten percent that the fund, or funder, makes the money. The venture capitalist knows that the majority of ventures do not return anything because the original management of the company possesses too much control. They, usually, simply do not know how to run a large business. Furthermore, if the venture is successful then the original manager will be better off (in terms of wealth) with 15% of the success than with 70 - 100% of a company that never takes off. Running a large business takes talent in sales, management, supply chain, accounting, legal, the list goes on and on.
Now, another point about venture capital is that it takes a small and marginally profitable company with a good product or two (or several, or whatever) and figures out how to bring those to market and sustain the viability of the firm. It does not appear to me that these were particular problems in this case. This company already had high profile clients, a good revenue stream and profits, and it had decent pool of leadership to sustain itself. It appears to me that they needed to bring in a few MBAs to manage sales and that kind of thing, and not go after venture capital. It appears to me that this was a case of the owners and the venture capital getting caught up in the speculative excess of 1998 - 2000.
Actually, on thinking about it before submitting, one more thing appears to me. The venture capitalist saw that he had been approached by, or that he had found, a firm with good revenue and profitability, and probably figured he had a real good cash cow on his hands. That blinded him to the question of whether or not venture capital was a good idea in this case. A firm actually concerned about business viability would have perhaps been more deliberate in this case.
Ok people, come back to reality here. If humanity is incapable of evolution, it will die out whenever a pressure on the population kills it off. If some kind of science is the catalyst for improving the stock, that does not invalidate the idea that evolution overcame the pressure. Given that we are all still living and reproducing, evolution of some sort must occur when needed. If it is not needed for the survival of the species, then it will not occur except as random chance.
The argument that we are somehow evolving backwards is also facile. You can not undo what is done. A resurgence of disease will insure that from time to time.
Come on now. It has honestly been too long since progressive intellectual southerners have had a decent character on TV to represent our finer virtues (I would say Carroll O'Connor as Sheriff what's his name would be the last I can think of). That commander guy needs some work, but he had some good insightful wileyness at various points throughout.
My other reaction would be that it was not nearly as lame as either "Encounter at Farpoint" or whatever the hell the launch of Voyager was called. Maybe there is some hope? eeh. I'll probably watch it in any case.
No. You are wrong. A trial and conviction, even in the presence of the death penalty are nothing. This is a declaration of war on the United States of America. No other interpretation of these events is warranted by an American. War calls for the full force and violence that the military of the United States can bring to bear against its enemies. True, we do not yet know who is the enemy (but I would rather like us to use this as an excuse to take out Bin Laden whatever the case...).
This is an action that is precedented only by Pearl Harbor in the entire history of the world in its intent, scope, scale, and speed. I can only hope that the sleeping giant will once again be awoken to his full greatness. We must bring utter destruction to the enemys that perpetrated these events and have enshrined September, 11 2001 as much a Day of Infamy as the previous day so enshrined by the great president. Furthermore, we must rebuild these great buildings bigger and stronger than before. Nothing less is acceptable. Absolutely nothing.
As a citizen of Palm Beach County, Fla. and a partisan Democrat, and someone who thought to himself while voting that it would be very easy to punch Buchanan by mistake, I can reach only one conclusion regarding this election. The vote in Palm Beach County is flawed and must be invalidated. The problems here can with little trouble meet the standard that the will of the people was not expressed in this election.
Palm Beach County is also huge. Any irregularity tips this election one way or the other with or without the military vote (which does, actually, split republican but not overwhelmingly so). Therefore, there is one logical consequence of this conclusion. The election of the entire State of Florida must be invalidated.
Therefore, given the current stand of the electoral college, the election should end up in the House of Representatives. And there Bush will win.
It is an unfortunate outcome for the nation that the court system might fall into the hands of whatever religious wackos Bush should choose to nominate, but there is a clear constitutional process that should be followed given the rejection of the vote in the State of Florida. It is also unfortunate that counties in this state still employ such pathetic means of voting when there is far superior technology available (reference the systems used in Leon County Florida as an example).
My main hope is that the electoral college goes away totally. It is a relic of a bygone era.
It is probably too much to ask that the Senate also be abolished (also a relic of a bygone era) and that federal judges and supreme court justices only be appointed for a certain term (say 20 years) rather than for life. Those reforms would certainly give more power to the people and take this country closer to democracy.
Hmmm... Lets see. I don't exactly think background reading is the appropriate question for such an inquiry as to the nature of this material. Adequate background information would be more at issue. To gain adequate background in such an inquiry one would have to be well aquatinted with papers in algebra (Ph.D. level, not high school or undergrad), algebraic topology, topology, and throw in analysis (just for good measure - ha ha). That would put you about third year into a respectable Ph.D. program in Mathematics.
To really understand this sort of thing you have to do it for years and really be interested in it. Personally, I think it all sort of looks interesting until you sit through a lecture in algebra...
Time for reality here people. What have been the effects so far of the deregulation of 1996? MY CABLE BILL HAS ALMOST DOUBLED!!!! Actually, the price went up so much that when I moved last, I decided it wasn't worth it. New services? BS. "Cable modems will be here in February 1997 at the latest" (here being Tallahassee). Now they are saying July of this year and I don't believe it yet.
In a limited number of markets in a few very large urban areas competition has helped, but for those of us who don't live in those (200 Million) we are in a transition phase. We do not yet live in a world where competition actually insures the best outcome for the consumer, and the republicans that believe this are living in a fantasy world. The republicans who say this and don't believe it (which is the majority of them), know that it benefits the industry which a) is giving them money or b) in which they and their friends own stock. Every action of the government results in some form of wealth transfer, and in the telecommunications market and deregulation this wealth transfer has come in the form of higher prices to the consumer. Transfer to the company and stockholders, and the rich get richer. The reason that rural America has electricity and phone service today (yes, today) isn't that competition was opened to this market, it is that Roosevelt required companies to develop there and set up the cooperatives. No rational businessman wants to compete in those markets; it is too expensive.
This is the Brave New World with all its vices and virtues. Now we are experiencing more of its vices than anything else.
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Your last statement lets FE off a little light. They knew they had voltage problems that day (they knew they had them every day, Davis-Bessie was down). Eastlake 5 tripped on over production of voltage before the initial event that led to the blackout. Not seeing alarms under those conditions should have set off an alarm in somebody's mind...
What exactly can the government control in this case? Are you proposing that the government establish and maintain SCADA and EMS systems for the purpose of continuous monitoring and backstop of the power grid? And if so, what are they going to do when a problem on the grid becomes unstable and explosive more than a control area?
The root of the problem in this blackout was massive human error, software bug or no.
Not to go too libertarian on you, but the soulution is strong contractual provisions among the interconnecting parties. Blythely saying "Government Fix This" isn't going to accomplish much to prevent anything, unless it can act in real time which nobody is proposing. The government basically already does what it needs to in requiring reserve margins of energy and transmission of regulated monopoly control areas.
Had MISO the authority to tell FirstEnergy to get their voltage under control, or to tell them they were out of N-1 compliance, and for either violation they would be penalized x thousand of dollars for every minute beyond z that they are out (where z is 30 for N-1, beyond some reasonable y for voltage, and where x is something on the order of 50000 say) FE would have gotten into shape. Alternatively, PJM, AEP, DLCO, MECS, and DPL could have provisions for not violating inadvertant scheduling of energy and reactive and they could seperate from FE for being out of compliance. FE would have blacked out, but better them alone than the entire northeast...
Well, whoever wrote the original post did not understand what happened when Enron fell. Energy companies were champing at the bit to hire ex Enron employees. They assembled a hell of a talented staff and some of the best trading and analytical minds in energy. Their trading wasn't what took them down, and their people found jobs fast. Now, the energy industry subsequently imploding has cost many of those their subsequent jobs, but there are still opportunities out there and having Enron on your resume is nothing more than a notch.
"I went to my job today, and you think of a librarian and you think of some nice little old lady. No, man, library people are WEIRD!!!"
Being the son of two people with their MLS, I knew that already...
Well, my perspective on this issue is a little different from most people's. First off, I am an avid follower of the politics of Florida. Second, I used to work with the man who was at the time one of the chief economists working on the high speed rail project in Florida. Both experiences tell me one thing, nobody in this state has a damn clue how to build or fund a high speed rail system. The voters of this state have established a track record of voting for some very poor amendments (including basically all of the 1998 amendments for the constitution revision in addition to this damn stupid idea).
High speed rail works where there is demand for commuter traffic between areas, or large commerce between areas. Miami and Tampa (and Fort Lauderdale, for that matter) are large ports that receive goods for other parts of the nation or send them south. Not a lot of commerce between the cities. Furthermore, who the hell wants to commute between the cities? Maybe, just maybe, there might be demand for such a thing between Tampa and Orlando.
Killing the high speed rail proposals when he took office stood for several years as the single action Jeb Bush had taken as governor of which I approved (now there is one other being his veto this year of a bill that would have allowed the Public Utilities Commission to raise telephone rates with basically no oversight).
Well, I am glad to find someone has long since made this remark. Interesting that even in this parody of an article the Weekly Standard finds it necessary to brandish its right wing credentials like a badge of honor.
The right wing has a tendency to like "our kind of dictator" from Nixon supporting Pinochet through the CIA on down to the present resident of the White House trying to replace the freely and democratically elected president of Venezuela with his puppet dictator. Furthermore, trying to replace a Venezuelan President with a hell of a lot more claim to legitimacy of leadership of his country than the Shrub has ever possessed in light of what happened here in Florida.
Scale is the problem with this, and other so called clean technologies. Consider a roughly average sized natural gas fired combined cycle power plant of 500 MW. This roughly means that there are two gas fired turbines (think huge aircraft engine) hooked up to a device to recover the exhaust as steam to power a steam turbine (called a HRSG). That is essentially three devices to get 500 MW. To get 500 MW out of this ocean idea, you need probably 670+ of these devices (more than exactly 500/.75 given transmission loss and some redundancy). That is a lot of area, and a lot of components that can fail or get eaten up by the corrosive effects of sea water.
These ocean turbine ideas are not alone. The only reason any wind farms ever get built is that congress approved a production tax credit for producing wind energy. Without that, building new wind is simply not viable for any company. The cost to set the things up amortized over some reasonable period consistent with GAAP simply overwhelms the fact that once the things are up and running they cost basically nothing to run. Furthermore, I can not imagine that turbines in the sea would involve as little maintenance as wind turbines.
Bottom line is that nuclear energy is the way to go. With nuclear you know exactly where is the pollution from every nuclear power plant ever produced, except Chernobyl and the US and France produce much safer plants than those Soviet designs. Furthermore, uranium is cheap. Fossil plants are cheaper to produce, but then you have the input price of coal, natural gas, or, in a small portion of the country (Florida, Maine, and Hawaii particularly), petroleum. Operating a nuclear plant might cost somewhere around $5/MW whereas coal might be somewhere around $15 and gas around 8.000 * (price of natural gas, say $2.70 lately) = $21.60.
I have two observations. First, electric and gas utilities were the ones that came up with the idea of trading bandwidth. They do not have any clue about the mechanics of high speed internet access, and I see no reason for them to get one any time soon. Furthermore, they are very protective about what happens on their power lines.
Second, as one in the wholesale side of the Power industry, the first thing that occurred to me on checking the internal website for jobs one day was "Why do we even still have meter readers in this day and age". It may have been a good blue-collar job in the past, but that one must go the way of the dinosaur as better technologies like this are developed.
Two points here. First point. Actually, venture capitalists do not expect a substantial return fast. They expect half of their money invested to totally disappear. Good, long established venture capitalists expect large returns on a small percentage of their investment after a bit of time to put the business fundamentals in place has elapsed. The ones who expected large returns fast either got them with the bubble and got out, or they lost everything when the bubble burst.
Second point. You have gotta love MBAs when they get started on technical points. A damn good example is bandwidth trading and scheduling. Basically they thought that point to point scheduled and dedicated access was this massive tidal wave that would sweep everything else aside. And you could not tell them any different, even though this scheduled bandwidth a) is unnecessary given current and foreseeable technology and infrastructure and b) violates the engineering realities of broadband access and traffic routing today. The MBAs, mostly at Enron, latched onto this bandwidth trading idea because it gave them wet dreams because it combined bandwidth and trading. Notice also the big proponent I have identified (and no, I am not calling attention to their collapse). Think of Enron's roots. They were a gas pipeline company. Point to point scheduling and dedicated access are how you trade Natural Gas, and that is an extremely successful market. I argued this in late 2000 with an MBA friend of mine until he was blue in the face. In the end, exactly one broadband market trade has ever been done, and that was in November on the now defunct EnronOnline.
First off, one reading of one webpage does not the story of decline and fall make. That said, it does appear to me that the venture capital took the usual, successful, model and misapplied it to this company.
However, consider the perspective of the Venture Capitalist. He usually has control of a good deal of funds with which he tries to hit home runs (well, usually he does not exist but is a pool of funds). Furthermore, in the best and the worst of times roughly fifty percent of companies that attract venture capital end up failures. Roughly ten percent ever make enough profit to be considered successful. It is on those ten percent that the fund, or funder, makes the money. The venture capitalist knows that the majority of ventures do not return anything because the original management of the company possesses too much control. They, usually, simply do not know how to run a large business. Furthermore, if the venture is successful then the original manager will be better off (in terms of wealth) with 15% of the success than with 70 - 100% of a company that never takes off. Running a large business takes talent in sales, management, supply chain, accounting, legal, the list goes on and on.
Now, another point about venture capital is that it takes a small and marginally profitable company with a good product or two (or several, or whatever) and figures out how to bring those to market and sustain the viability of the firm. It does not appear to me that these were particular problems in this case. This company already had high profile clients, a good revenue stream and profits, and it had decent pool of leadership to sustain itself. It appears to me that they needed to bring in a few MBAs to manage sales and that kind of thing, and not go after venture capital. It appears to me that this was a case of the owners and the venture capital getting caught up in the speculative excess of 1998 - 2000.
Actually, on thinking about it before submitting, one more thing appears to me. The venture capitalist saw that he had been approached by, or that he had found, a firm with good revenue and profitability, and probably figured he had a real good cash cow on his hands. That blinded him to the question of whether or not venture capital was a good idea in this case. A firm actually concerned about business viability would have perhaps been more deliberate in this case.
Ok people, come back to reality here. If humanity is incapable of evolution, it will die out whenever a pressure on the population kills it off. If some kind of science is the catalyst for improving the stock, that does not invalidate the idea that evolution overcame the pressure. Given that we are all still living and reproducing, evolution of some sort must occur when needed. If it is not needed for the survival of the species, then it will not occur except as random chance.
The argument that we are somehow evolving backwards is also facile. You can not undo what is done. A resurgence of disease will insure that from time to time.
Come on now. It has honestly been too long since progressive intellectual southerners have had a decent character on TV to represent our finer virtues (I would say Carroll O'Connor as Sheriff what's his name would be the last I can think of). That commander guy needs some work, but he had some good insightful wileyness at various points throughout.
My other reaction would be that it was not nearly as lame as either "Encounter at Farpoint" or whatever the hell the launch of Voyager was called. Maybe there is some hope? eeh. I'll probably watch it in any case.
No. You are wrong. A trial and conviction, even in the presence of the death penalty are nothing. This is a declaration of war on the United States of America. No other interpretation of these events is warranted by an American. War calls for the full force and violence that the military of the United States can bring to bear against its enemies. True, we do not yet know who is the enemy (but I would rather like us to use this as an excuse to take out Bin Laden whatever the case...).
This is an action that is precedented only by Pearl Harbor in the entire history of the world in its intent, scope, scale, and speed. I can only hope that the sleeping giant will once again be awoken to his full greatness. We must bring utter destruction to the enemys that perpetrated these events and have enshrined September, 11 2001 as much a Day of Infamy as the previous day so enshrined by the great president. Furthermore, we must rebuild these great buildings bigger and stronger than before. Nothing less is acceptable. Absolutely nothing.
As a citizen of Palm Beach County, Fla. and a partisan Democrat, and someone who thought to himself while voting that it would be very easy to punch Buchanan by mistake, I can reach only one conclusion regarding this election. The vote in Palm Beach County is flawed and must be invalidated. The problems here can with little trouble meet the standard that the will of the people was not expressed in this election.
Palm Beach County is also huge. Any irregularity tips this election one way or the other with or without the military vote (which does, actually, split republican but not overwhelmingly so). Therefore, there is one logical consequence of this conclusion. The election of the entire State of Florida must be invalidated.
Therefore, given the current stand of the electoral college, the election should end up in the House of Representatives. And there Bush will win.
It is an unfortunate outcome for the nation that the court system might fall into the hands of whatever religious wackos Bush should choose to nominate, but there is a clear constitutional process that should be followed given the rejection of the vote in the State of Florida. It is also unfortunate that counties in this state still employ such pathetic means of voting when there is far superior technology available (reference the systems used in Leon County Florida as an example).
My main hope is that the electoral college goes away totally. It is a relic of a bygone era.
It is probably too much to ask that the Senate also be abolished (also a relic of a bygone era) and that federal judges and supreme court justices only be appointed for a certain term (say 20 years) rather than for life. Those reforms would certainly give more power to the people and take this country closer to democracy.
Hmmm... Lets see. I don't exactly think background reading is the appropriate question for such an inquiry as to the nature of this material. Adequate background information would be more at issue. To gain adequate background in such an inquiry one would have to be well aquatinted with papers in algebra (Ph.D. level, not high school or undergrad), algebraic topology, topology, and throw in analysis (just for good measure - ha ha). That would put you about third year into a respectable Ph.D. program in Mathematics.
To really understand this sort of thing you have to do it for years and really be interested in it. Personally, I think it all sort of looks interesting until you sit through a lecture in algebra...
Time for reality here people. What have been the effects so far of the deregulation of 1996? MY CABLE BILL HAS ALMOST DOUBLED!!!! Actually, the price went up so much that when I moved last, I decided it wasn't worth it. New services? BS. "Cable modems will be here in February 1997 at the latest" (here being Tallahassee). Now they are saying July of this year and I don't believe it yet.
In a limited number of markets in a few very large urban areas competition has helped, but for those of us who don't live in those (200 Million) we are in a transition phase. We do not yet live in a world where competition actually insures the best outcome for the consumer, and the republicans that believe this are living in a fantasy world. The republicans who say this and don't believe it (which is the majority of them), know that it benefits the industry which a) is giving them money or b) in which they and their friends own stock. Every action of the government results in some form of wealth transfer, and in the telecommunications market and deregulation this wealth transfer has come in the form of higher prices to the consumer. Transfer to the company and stockholders, and the rich get richer. The reason that rural America has electricity and phone service today (yes, today) isn't that competition was opened to this market, it is that Roosevelt required companies to develop there and set up the cooperatives. No rational businessman wants to compete in those markets; it is too expensive.
This is the Brave New World with all its vices and virtues. Now we are experiencing more of its vices than anything else.