Bard of the 1%
I had missed this Friedman column from last week where he argues that we should throw rural people under the bus on high-speed internet access, instead focusing our resources on ultra-high-speed internet for the top 5%. There is proper outrage over this column, from Daily Yonder and Ann Treacy.
A couple of thoughts:
1. I know the fact that people live in rural areas and small towns is inconvenient for people obsessed with national planning and technological fetishism, but that’s the reality of the United States. You can’t just marginalize these people and their futures by dooming them to second-rate access to resources. I mean, you can, but then you have to deal with endemic poverty, high rates of drug use, domestic violence, and any number of other social problems. Remember too that a very large percentage of the Latino population are rural dwellers because of agricultural work. There are lots of kids moving around from rural place to rural place and if we want them to have a better future, we have to allocate resources to them.
2. Friedman’s 5% fascinates me and is a sign of just how elitist he is. I suppose all Times readers think they are part of that 5% so they aren’t outraged by this. But Friedman quite obviously supports a Gilded Age society where the rich and powerful become more rich and powerful. He’s pushed policies promoting this for years. So it’s not just rural dwellers that don’t get the resources, it’s the urban poor and middle class. I suppose all the wealth generated by the increasingly powerful 5% will trickle down to the plebeians and troglodytes. I mean, isn’t that what’s happened ever since Reagan?
…..Shorter Tom Friedman circa 1937: “Let’s not waste our time providing electricity to rural dwellers. We should focus our technology on cities because that’s where we’ll create the future.” Luckily we had people like Franklin Roosevelt and David Lillenthal and Lyndon Johnson at that time fighting for equitable distribution of resources to people regardless of where they lived.
I lived in one of those poor rural areas with a large Latino population for a couple of years. I had good internet access at the library, a six mile walk over mostly unpaved roads, but that was it. A number of people had good access through wireless. If I had stayed unemployed and living in Arivaca I probably would have eventually figured out how to get the money to buy into the local wireless system.
I have a relative who lives near Lansing, Michigan, in an area that seems pretty suburban from a “what you see when you drive by” standpoint, and they’ve only had broadband available for about a year. They’re not that far into rural America – they live in what looks like a suburban neighborhood but with larger lots and an occasional dirt road.
I think Friedman makes a number of errors in his piece. The first is his apparent belief that we’re dealing with a dichotomy: We can only have rural people on broadband that’s slow by “state of the art” standards, or bring ultra-high speed Internet to “the top 5 percent”, but not both. Why not both?
Second, he seems to believe that ultra-high speed Internet will solve the nation’s problems, by allowing such things as “eight doctors from around the world [looking] at the same M.R.I. in real time” or “rapid prototyping” based on “Big bandwidth, combined with 3-D printers”, but fails to explain why the present Internet is so insufficient that it’s holding back that progress. If it were crucial that eight doctors around the globe reviewed the same MRI the moment it was generated, and a delay of even a few minutes could mean death to the patient, that’s one thing. But nobody works like that, and the faster transmission of a MRI to a physician in Tokyo won’t turn their nighttime into our daytime. 3-D printers will get faster and better, but there’s little reason to believe that it’s taking three minutes versus thirty minutes to transmit a gargantuan data file to the printer will represent the difference between a prototype’s viability and failure. It’s also difficult to believe that physicians’ surgical training (Friedman likes his medical examples, it seems) would depend upon network enabled simulators, with no local files, data storage or caching to overcome less than cutting edge network speeds.
Also, I suspect that the number of people and industries that need the type of speed Friedman is talking about to revolutionize science and industry is quite small, and also that a lot of them already work for employers and universities who can offer them ultra-high speed connectivity. Bringing that type of speed into Friedman’s home isn’t going to change much of anything.
I would have a lot more sympathy for the rural folks if rural *voters* didn’t so consistently vote (a) to send a fuck-you to urban folks, and (b) so consistently vote for batshit crazy leaders who want to make sure that only the wealthy can have anything nice — for example, do we seriously lack a national broadband strategy for rural residents because representatives from urban areas are opposed to government involvement in infrastructure? Really?
See also, California, where rural counties consistently make the state completely ungovernable by sending lunatics like Tom McClintock to the state (and now national) legislature.
But yeah, Friedman is and always has been an asshole courtesan who makes his living by toadying to the wealthy.
If politicians did more things like expand access to the internet for them, they might be more likely to change their minds. While rural areas receive a lot of benefits from the government, much of that is from agriculatural subsidies which both parties support.
Which politicians? Because I’m pretty sure that the politicians they actually elect are a significant part of the problem. Again, I ask the question about whether it’s liberal-ish politicians from urban areas who are really the people preventing the funding of a national broadband program for rural residents.
This is pretty popular here in Montana, even among Republicans. I think this sort of falls under the “bringing home the bacon” infrastructure projects that are the staple for all successful politicians (and the teabaggers apparently excell at it).
Both the California state Senate and the California Congressional delegation contain more Republicans from urban/suburban districts than from rural districts.
Yes, Orange County and San Diego. Good fun. But the discussion here was about rural residents. How many of the rural counties around the edges of the state send Dems relative to Republicans? (My count is not very many.) If rural residents want stuff from government, they should stop electing people who think that government is the problem.
I’m not comfortable about the suggestion there’s only one bard for the 1%
Maybe we should hold a contest for the title holder.
There might be enough to fill a 64 person bracket
YOu can just drop almost everybody employed by Fred Hiatt into the competition to start with.
I don’t think it’s just one category.
Something like the Golden Globes, maybe the Golden Kneepads.
Best Bard presenting propaganda as reasons to dismantle the national safety net,
The nominees in this category are Robert Samuelson . . . .
Best Male War Mongering Bard,
Best Torture Supporting Bard,
Best Lead Female Bard of So Called Economic Issues,
Best Supporting Male Bard of Mass Labor Exploitation,
Best Television Bard on a National Cable Channel,
Best Dead Tree Bard for a National Newspaper
Best Ensemble Bards for a presenting False Equivalency, Stenography, etc.
If you structure it like the Emmy Awards (I believe they have about 20 regional chapters as well as the national televised event) virtually every
hackbard could have their own award in their own category.Of course some award winners would simply attain emeritus status after winning their particular award more than 5 times.
In which case the 21 chapters x roughly 100 awards + emeritus winners for each one. In fact, I’m thinking you could name each award for the most prominent emeritus winner. For instance,
Winning the David Broder Lead Male Bard for Fact free and Meaningless Anecdotal Analysis supporting Irrelevant Bi-Partisanship is . . . . (envelope please) . . .
All the plebians and troglodytes are just one marriage away from the top 5%.
See Kate Bolick for a referral.
Or John McCain.
No, McCain was always a member of the elite, although maybe not the same elite as, say a koch brother. But no son and grandson of 4-star admirals can be said to not be a member of the elite until he marries money…
Yeah, but he was not super wealthy before.
And the Heartland Real Murkan rural people will be just fine with all of this if their download speed is one kB faster than the black people’s on the other side of the tracks.
FTW
Strawman alert! Strawman alert!
I have no idea who (or what) Erik means by “techonological fetishists”, but I highly doubt that the technologically inclined (or these so-called “national planners”, whoever they are) are really standing in the way of rural internet accessibility.
Strannix’s New Year resolution was to be LGM’s new favorite troll. It’s very touching.
You attribute vague beliefs to unknown persons, someone calls you out on it, and they’re the troll?
It is obviously not the Tom Friedmans of the world who are keeping broadband infrastructure from being built out in an equitable way.
Is Friedman not a technological futurist? Has he ever shown any interest in rural Americans? What am I missing here? He obviously isn’t personally responsible, but he says in the article that he supports marginalizing rural people to concentrate the highest-speed broadband in the top 5%. So he’s providing cover for those who don’t want to provide that service.
I can see Tom Friedman circa 1937 arguing that we shouldn’t worry about rural electrification because the future will be built by urban dwellers.
That’s a good question, actually – what is Tom Friedman? He talks like a futurist, but most of the evidence reads like he’s too lazy to bother understanding what he’s talking about. He calls up some guy in the field, transcribes his remarks, and presents them in his column with a coating of gee-whiz Tomorrowland glaze.
But he’s not really a futurist to me any more than David Brooks is a sociologist.
He’s just making the point to pick the low-hanging fruit. More people live in cities, and more importantly, more poor people live in cities. Marginal increases in internet speed in urban areas are clearly cheaper and more beneficial than increasing speed in the hinterlands (partially because of population density, partially because of the architecture of broadband networks).
Also, the two aren’t mutually exclusive; as I understand it, because of the way the internet is built, any increase in speed is a net positive for the entire network.
Basically, we could really do with an actual expert talking about this, instead of a) whiz-bang Friedmanism or b) perpetually outraged Loomisism.
The analogy, then, that you’re looking for is 1937 Friedman saying “let’s hold off on rural electrification until we fix the brownouts in the cities”. Not an unreasonable position, particularly considering that we’re a much more urban nation now than we were in 1937.
I can see Tom Friedman circa 1937 arguing that we shouldn’t worry about rural electrification because the future will be built by urban dwellers.
1937 Tommie Friedman would point out that Lenin himself said that ‘Electricity plus Soviets equals Socialism’ and warn that we need to avoid extremist positions like electrification.
Malaclypse Win! GOELRO!
Didn’t you guys used to have more-better trolls around here than the sad lot of limp lurkers popping-up around here now?
Or do I sound like the old guy that I am, misremembering memories I never had?
Try and remember Donalde’s one-sentence profanity-filled troll drive-bys. Worse still, try and forget Meade discussing how he and Annie were not prudes in the bedroom like we all clearly were.
Damn! I had successfully purged Meade from my mind until you mentioned that. This crew, however, is particularly weak tea pathetic.
BWAHAHAHA!
WINNING!!!!
Yea, but when Donalde typed that, you could tell that his blood pressure was so high that you could see the veins in his forehead and neck if you had the misfortune to see him. Your otherwise-clever impersonation misses that. Also, needs more profanity, and references to demons. I’ll give it a 3.5 out of 5.
Actually, I suspect it’s quite the contrary. Technological fetishists tend to be evangelists for technology (often quite beyond its actual utility). And as to national planners… do we even have any of those any more who aren’t under the control of private corporations?
I think the phrase that one is looking for is “free market fundamentalists”.
Here’s the blunt reality of delivering wireline services to rural areas: it’s REALLY EXPENSIVE to lay cable, and you won’t make the money back in low population density areas. Delivering wireless services is also really expensive and (relatively) slow and unreliable. Hell, last I checked a couple years ago, we still heavily subsidize plain old telephone service to rural areas, or the telcos would never have run copper out there.
So no private enterprise is going to offer a full-scale broadband solution* outside of relatively densely populated areas — they can’t make the money back because they math simply doesn’t work. So we need government to subsidize it if we want it. But the rural voters who send wingnuts to congress have no need of gummint interfering in their lives, and that’s all just tax and spend, so to hell with it.
* Satellite just barely works, but it’s slow, pricey, subject to weather-based interference and profoundly capacity constrained.
None of this should be read to support Friedman’s approach to the problem. My view is of course that we should be treating this as we treated crucial wireline infrastructure from the New Deal forward, but of course, the voters who would benefit don’t agree any more than they thing that government should be involved in their Medicare.
This dynamic sounds mostly right to me. Hell, we have state and local governments now that are turning down federal money for more immediately obvious infrastructure needs than internet access these days. Erik’s logic here sounds a little like blaming “train fetishists” for the collapse of high-speed rail.
I’m tired of all the love for “vibrant” urban areas. There is a great deal of writing off of rural areas and small towns. You can add the truly awful Richard Florida to these proselytizers too. They have a very narrow definition of “diversity” in my opinion.
“The bourgeoisie…has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”
(Though to be fair to M and E, if they were around today, I suspect they would understand that internet access in rural areas would make that life less idiotic.)
“I’m tired of all the love for “vibrant” urban areas.”
Why, because it’s too accurate?
No, I’m tired of it because “vibrant” urban areas are vibrant for a certain class of people. For others they are fundamentally undemocratic. There is no getting around income inequality is greatest in metropolitan areas such as New York and DC.
People such as Friedman and Florida repeat the lie that deindustrialization is inevitable and probably a good thing.
I’ll call out those in rural areas who claim that they don’t receive their share of government money too.
FWIW, it’s not just Friedman who thinks that. In this book, http://www.amazon.com/Whole-Earth-Discipline-Ecopragmatist-Manifesto/dp/0670021210, Stewart Brand argues for cities in that they are “greener” than rural areas.
Like all things in life, I don’t think it is a simple either/or. I also think that while there are additional costs in providing services to non-urban areas, IT based services are the ones that should least likely matter. Services based on fuel/energy costs are another story.
Cities are indeed greener than rural places by any environmental metric.
The broader point though is that this is a nation where different types of people live in different types of places. The government needs to ensure equitable access to resources to all people, including those who choose (and I’m defining that term very broadly here because what child chooses where they live) to live in rural areas.
We have to do the what for the who now? When did anybody sign on for THAT?
I’m looking out my office window and I don’t see a single bit of green open space bigger than 1 acre for 2.5 miles. I don’t see a huge government program to equalize access to walkable open space for urban dwellers. Yeah, we get funding for a few parks every now and then, but when I lived in Montana I literally walked in the mountains for miles from my backyard.
I think everybody’s on board with a certain baseline of services, but after that different areas are going to be different. If it costs $1 billion to get awesome internet access for the ~60% of Americans who live in cities, or $2 billion to get only-slightly-better-then-we-have-right-now access for all Americans (and that appears to be the breakdown), I’m not seeing one choice as obviously living up to egalitarian ideals and the other as the new gilded age.
I think you are trying to define “green” a bit too literally here.
Something doesn’t actually have to be colored green to be the environmentally superior option.
Moreover, unless we abandon agriculture as an industry entirely, there needs to be rural areas, small towns, etc.
Not necessarily!
(might as well introduce some real futurism here instead of Friedman’s “Zettabytes!!!!” schtick)
If we can run planes and such as drones, I’m sure we can manage a combine.
You could ask Ceaucescu about his experiences with this, if he hadn’t got what he deserved back in ’89.
Barring that, ask any Romanian who lived through those resettlement programs.
Laying cable and supporting the resulting infrastructure DOES have fuel and energy costs, FWIW.
There was a great deal more population in the rural areas in FDR/LBJ’s time. Our population has become much more urban/suburban as agricultural work diminished & we really have less reason to subsidize rural areas.
So Latino children of farmworkers don’t have the right to the same level of internet as suburban kids?
Is high-speed internet access really a right? What makes internet interesting is that unlike schools, which can be operated at a cheaper cost in rural areas, internet becomes more expensive in rural areas. I’d rather give those children of farmworkers better teachers and school facilities before I worried about internet access. (Charter Schools! j/k)
Is electricity really a right?
Who are you asking?
Because I think you’re arguing that big gummint should be spendin’ taxpayer’s hard earned money on a boondoggle where those gummint union workers will just be leanin’ on their shovels all day.
If the god-market thinks that rural folk should get
electricitytelephone servicebroadband, surely the god-market will provide it at an affordable price.Maybe not, but I grew up in a semi-rural area that didn’t get electricity until government came in and created cheap and cost-effective hydropower. Without that energy source, it might have been another 20 or 30 years. Energy costs, again, aren’t necessarily tilted against rural communities to the same degree, due to greater proximity to coal/oil/wind/hydropower.
Or telephone service? Or mail service? It is no more of a burden to provide high speed internet to rural areas than it was to provide those services and it would have a similar positive impact.
FWIW, my grandfather only got electricity shortly before I was born in 1952. It really did make a difference, though he never had running water except in the kitchen or anything other than inefficient wood heat. No kerosene lamps to pollute the interior atmosphere and pose a fire hazard.
Even assuming that the economic burdens are comparable (I don’t really know), we live in a much different political climate that is far less favorable to the creation of national infrastructure. If Congress decided to give high-speed internet to everyone tomorrow I’d be thrilled, but if we’re going to have to fight for infrastructure I want to prioritize areas where the political support is stronger and the economic returns are more pronounced.
So basically your position is fuck rural America, only urbanites count?
You really don’t have a clue about allocating political capital, do you? Yeah, I meant to say “fuck rural America” but it came out “I’d be happy if Congress went along and brought rural America into the 21st century.” If you can’t tell the difference between political realism and anti-rural sentiment, then you’ve got a problem.
Yes, access to information and infrastructure are rights
I assume you’re referring to Articles 21 and 22, but “equal access” undoubtedly refers to discrimination based on identity, not geography (what nation or empire in history has achieved equitable geographic access to services? Must all advances in service be universally implemented at the outset?)and it strains credulity to consider high-speed internet to be “indispensable for dignity and the free development of personality”.
Not to speak for Ahistoricality, but the link was to Article 19, “[to] receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
I’m not sure what the relevance to this conversation is – certainly Ahistoricality doesn’t think that everyone has a right to have a road built to their door – but it sure looks like that was the intent of the link.
Yes, that’s the intent. Given the function of the internet in contemporary global society, how is access to the internet not covered by Article 19?
Aside from the “perfect as the enemy of the good” strawmen, I don’t see any significant reason why reasonably equitable access to the public sphere, educational and informational resources of the internet isn’t effectively mandated by the UDHR and other similar compacts.
How to enforce and implement these infrastructure projects is a matter of balancing resources and priorities, but the fundamental principle seems sound.
This is craziness. You’re trying to take a negative right (the right of people to be free from government censorship) and turn it into a positive right that guarantees the provision of certain platforms for individuals. What’s worse, you’re actually arguing that the right even extends to encompass the most advanced iterations of the platform (since there are inferior means of accessing the internet that are available in rural areas). And “the perfect being the enemy of the good” is not a strawman here, it’s an acknowledgment that if you’re reading a right in such a way as to make its obligations impossible to meet, then you’re reading the right in the wrong way.
So we stop progress for everyone until every last migrant Latino child gets hooked up? Uh, I don’t think you need to be Tom Friedman to wonder how that will work out.
Look, Friedman’s right that our broadband infrastructure is a national disgrace, like our infrastructure in general. Do you have any actual thoughts on the issue or are you just going to play dumb?
Nice strawman you have there, be a shame if anyone set it on fire. Nobody is arguing to “stop progress,” but rather that rural areas not be deliberately excluded from participating in it.
Strawman? It’s the obvious implication of what Erik said. If everyone has a right to the same level of internet access, then it naturally follows that we can’t move on upgrading certain parts of the country until everyone else is already caught up.
It is only “obvious” in your imagination. What he says is we need to upgrade rural access and not just concentrate on urban areas, the way Friedman suggests.
A right to utility services? Nobody has that, not if it costs too much.
Part of providing utilities is providing a baseline service, and part is providing a return on the public’s investment. Part of that return is your “latino children of farmworkers” getting better education or whatever and so being more productive later, but the better part is helping the economy.
It’s a balance. Where do we get the most bang for our buck in providing services and in helping the economy?
The point is that the government subsidized providing those to rural residents, so why not high speed cable.
Ok, why should subsidize rural internet access when we don’t subsidize rural sewer and water access? Are you saying it’s more important for “latino children of farmworkers” to use the internet then use the bathroom?
That’s a suckers game. There’s not enough money for everything. We have to make the best choices with the tax money we have to get the best results for the country as a whole, or we’re going to keep arguing about whether the government does more bad than good forever. I think we’re going to disagree about what the best results are, but it’s not worth calling somebody the bitter enemy of true progressivism, is it?
Ok, why should subsidize rural internet access when we don’t subsidize rural sewer and water access?
You don’t think that the regulated water rights we have throughout this country is an implicit subsidy? God help us is we ever revert to a free market in water and sewer. We tried that back in the Age of Cholera.
Ok, why should subsidize rural internet access when we don’t subsidize rural sewer and water access?
Because you don’t have to be connected to a water and sewer network to drink water and dispose of sewage? If wells and septic tanks didn’t exist, then we probably should subsidize rural water and sewer access. But at a certain point it’s more efficient to build a detached system than to connect. That doesn’t work for communications networks.
We actually do in some rural areas, or at least the water systems.
The water system is not subsidized? How much federal money has gone into dams and water systems in this past century? Billions.
Just as a thought, we could pay taxes at a level seen in civilized countries, and do both.
Come on now, that is too radical a notion to even consider. just because every civilized country does something is no reason we should.
Something about horses and beggars. . .
A couple things make me sympathetic to Friedman(for this column only!)
1)Holden Pattern’s point about the returns on investment in these outlying rural areas. When I try to parse Friedman’s column, I get the sense (or maybe it’s just hope) that he’s not arguing against expanding bandwidth in rural areas, but rather saying it should be less of a priority that expanding bandwidth in densely populated areas. I think both efforts are worthwhile, but I can’t really disagree with putting the urban areas first. There’s a reason most of the countries that kick our ass in this department have greater population density.
2)Also relating to Pattern’s point, expanding bandwidth in urban areas is likely to be easier due to less reactionary local politics, so there’s something to be said for the path of least resistance
3)Friedman’s emphasis on (wealthy) college towns implicitly excludes poor Americans, but a slightly broader emphasis on dense urban areas could have a lot of benefits for inner-city residents as well. And coming back to point #1, it’s far more economical to provide broadband services to a dense population than a dispersed population.
4) I think we’re confusing small towns and rural areas with the people who live in those small towns and rural areas. We have an obligation to the latter, not the former, and by no means are we obligated to strain our resources to prevent every small burg and hamlet from being left behind. If our desire to get more bang for our buck makes the cities appear more attractive than small towns, then so be it. While I believe the cultural benefits of urbanization are oversold, I think the economic and environmental benefits are pretty well settled. There are obviously aspects of rural culture and history that need to be protected and preserved, but rural poverty is not among them, and I think that greater human density provides far more in the way of economic opportunity and mobility than high-speed internet alone.
I’m loathe to defend Tom Friedman, but a few points that Erik rather conveniently left out of his summary of the article:
1) By “top 5 percent”, Friedman clarifies that he means specifically university towns, where the higher bandwidth would be used for research and educational purposes. He is not, as Erik says, proposing this for the benefit of wealthy Times readers.
2) Erik spins the column as “throwing rural people under the bus”, but what Friendman actually says is this:
Is this a good idea or not? I don’t know, but Erik obviously isn’t capable of even trying to evaluate the proposal on its merits. Instead he descends headlong into the pointless rural ressentiment that fuels American rightwing politics today.
3) Friedman then notes, with perhaps a tinge of jealousy, that all South Korean homes are scheduled to be wired for ultra high-speed internet by the end of the year. It seems that if Erik’s concern for the issue at hand was all that sincere, that would be an important point to note! I mean, how can South Korea manage that when the US can’t even manage marginal service in all our homes? But instead he plays the fool.
To be clear, I think Friedman is a pretty much a shallow buffoon. But his thinking in this column is much more serious and insightful than what Erik can manage.
Remind me to send you a holiday present next year for amusing me so much with your trolling.
A few rubes aside, I think your readers are smart enough to know that on-topic discussions are not “trolling”.
And I think that, a few rubes aside, your readers are slowly recognizing that you are a total intellectual fraud.
I can see why the University might need ultra-high speed but why exactly does the surrounding town need that immediately?
I think the logic is that the towns themselves tend to have more social and intellectual capital (people like living in college towns even when they’re no longer students) and a lot of major universities have built partnerships to establish business incubators with varying degrees of success. Think Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. Of course, this leads to the risk that you’re only wiring up towns like Chapel Hill, which is basically a yuppie enclave (tbf, Durham is significantly more diverse).
I teach at the University of Montana and need high speed internet at home to effectively do my job. Next question.
Regular HSI (which can be pretty damn fast with current technology), or 1Gb/s type institutional connectivity? That’s a serious question, not a jab.
Not institutional, but there are many areas of the state where all you can get is sloooooow dial up. I think, however, that I was misinterpreting some of the comments here.
I don’t think it does — I am having a hard time coming up with a use case where something (massive data-driven research or analysis?) that needs broadband beyond what’s necessary to deliver HD video content can’t be run on the relevant university server by VNC or SSH (or similar) using ordinary broadband. Someone who has the need for that kind of bandwidth will also have the skill to run the relevant applications remotely. Could be wrong, though.
Incidentally, every single urban / suburban / small town cable plant in the country has MASSIVE amounts of bandwidth that could be used for digital delivery but the constraints there (as with rural rollout) are business, not so much technical. The problem is that too much of that bandwidth is taken up with contractually-required analog SD television.
Obviously all we need to do is get rid of the Post Office and use that money so people with 6 MBs down can get 50 MBs down at the same price. Ygelsias would agree!
The fact that the only real use of bandwith for most people is Netflix shouldn’t mean anything.
The fact that the only real use of bandwith for most people is Netflix shouldn’t mean anything.
I’ve sent several people here over the years. I know one of them got the mandatory triple wages she was entitled to, rather than the nothing she thought she would need to accept. I can think of other ways that bandwidth can help people as well. Do you want a rural doctor to not have online, searchable access to medical journals?
Thinking that Netflix is the most important use of bandwidth really shows a lack of what the internet if good for.
Again, the choice is not the Post Office or broadband. The choice is investment in productive infrastructure, or tax cuts for the wealthy. Our grandparents understood this.
Also, if you do not think farmers and ranchers need access to the internet, you really do not know anything about modern agriculture. Our folks here in Montana, at least on larger spreads, are definitely wired to track the markets, etc.
Well, sure, but they’re just growing food. It’s not like they’re doing something important and innovative.
Thinking that Netflix is the most important use of bandwidth really shows a lack of what the internet if good for.
Loona Luxx film festivals, of course!
After the American Revolution, we decided to provide subsidized mail service for everybody in the country. The rationale for this universal service was not economic but political: the mail tied a barely unified nation together. Universal access to the Internet is important for exactly the same reason. e pluribus unum. And as for Friedman’s bit about efficiency: we can damned well afford to provide excellent service to everybody. We’re worried about nickel-nursing in this and many other cases involving the public good because we have developed a seriously twisted sense of values.
Thank you for stating the obvious, which too many here seem to be missing.
You know, Dick, I bet no one here would have ever in a million billion years figured out that the OP was stating the obvious unless you had pointed that out to us.
I do not believe that this was addressed to you, now was it? What I have seen here is a lot of arguments against providing fairly basic services to rural areas, which seems to me extremely shortsighted.
I was going to write a long post on why the Friedman article is a big steaming pile of shit, starting with it being a classic case of strawman scarcity thinking, but then I remembered I’ve got clothes in the dryer.
I’ll just say two things:
(1) The principal challenge to rural broadband access is the cost of laying the pipe. The principal challenge to suburban/urban ultranet development is getting the hardware and software to run fast enough – the pipe is already there, or is relatively cheap to add.
I.e., two entirely different problems with absolutely nothing in common except the word “internet” appears in both write-ups.
(2) Similarly, one faces real financial hurdles while the other does not. The 5% can easily finance their ultranet. The real problems facing the latter are not money, but technical limits and the general inertia that makes it difficult to get people and organizations, especially private companies, to replace legacy systems.
[...] Loomis disagrees, arguing: I know the fact that people live in rural areas and small towns is inconvenient for [...]