GM Sees a Market For $5/Day Dedicated In-Car Internet 216
An anonymous reader writes "$5 doesn't sound like much for a day of internet service in some contexts: it's less than you might pay for it in-flight, and less than a few espresso drinks if you're lured in by a coffee shop's Wi-Fi service. But not all internet service is created equal; would you pay $5 for a month of in-car internet service if it meant a 200-meg cap, which is (only) 'enough to stream more than 6.5 hours of music?' That's where a new dedicated Internet service from GM starts (also at the WSJ, paywalled), and it's $10 for drivers who aren't also OnStar subscribers. Probably a more likely option for the occasional road trip, though, is $5 per day service (no OnStar requirement) for 250MB of data. Why wouldn't someone just use a smartphone with a data plan, or a dedicated hotspot device? GM thinks they'll be drawn to 'a powerful antenna that's stronger than that of a smartphone, along with a Wi-Fi hotspot that operates without draining a mobile device's battery. That hotspot is on any time the car is on.'"
Re:Still stuck in an analogue thinking pattern (Score:5, Interesting)
Given all that we know about GM, can someone explain (aside from the obvious political reasons / TBTF), why this company was bailed out? Romney was correct, it should have been allowed to go bankrupt. In addition, the taxpayer still had to eat a $10 billion loss. [forbes.com] GM management was incompetent to the core. This idea is yet another example of it for all of the reasons you list and more.
The question is would letting GM go bankrupt have resulted in more than 10 billion in losses in terms of lost payroll taxes and increased social assistance benefits for all of the GM workers and all of the assorted companies that also would have gone under?
Further down in the linked article is "On all TARP investments to date, including the sale of Treasury’s shares in AIG, the government has recovered a total of $432.7 billion on $421.8 billion disbursed. " so overall, it doesn't look like all the TARP funds were such a bad investment even from a straight purchase-sale calculation.
Of course, it is much harder to figure out if, long term, this was a good policy - would the economy have been better off to "kill off" the sick or better off in "healing" the sick? Have any of the "sick" been healed or are they still "sick"? Have we ensured similar things don't happen in the future?
I don't have high hopes for answers to these sorts of questions.