Wisconsin Public Internet Struggles Against Telecom, Legislature 259
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Ars Technica:
"The University of Wisconsin's Internet technology division and a crucial provider of 'Net access for Wisconsin's educational system are under attack from that state's legislature and from a local telecommunications association. At issue is the WiscNet educational cooperative. The non-profit provides affordable network access to the state's schools and libraries, although its useful days may be numbered unless the picture changes soon. Under a proposed new law, the University of Wisconsin system could be forced to return millions of dollars in federal broadband grants that it has already won, spend far more money on network services, and perhaps even withdraw from the Internet2 project."
WTF is it with these Telcos? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WTF is it with these Telcos? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope they can't handle it. Its a free market and once they are free to get big enough they are free to rape you while financially supporting your elected officials to elsablish laws that support corporate rape of you.
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Nope they can't handle it. Its a free market and once they are free to get big enough they are free to rape you while financially supporting your elected officials to elsablish laws that support corporate rape of you.
No they aren't, they're a monopoly mandated by the government because the govt doesn't want more than one telecom of each type laying lines in their area.
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No they aren't, they're a monopoly mandated by the government
I don't think you fully grasped the GP's quote:
Its a free market and once they are free to get big enough they are free to rape you while financially supporting your elected officials to elsablish laws that support corporate rape of you.
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Its a free market and once they are free to get big enough they are free to rape you while financially supporting your elected officials to elsablish laws that support corporate rape of you.
That's like lying the truth, it makes no sense.
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Look at the situation here in France, it's funny how our very socialist country came up with something that's quite good for the consumers, and OK for the providers. Actually, I think these are Europe-wide rules, or guidelines.
Back in the Minitel era (hay ! that's supposed to be killed next year, and there's a bit of an outrage about that :-p), we had the typical state monopoly, with good service, bad prices, and rather bad features (except that wonderful Minitel!). In order to foster competition, the state
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The aesthetics of too many wires running everywhere is at best a minor concern if it ever was a concern at all. Utility companies (including telcos, of course) are a Natural Monopoly [wikipedia.org] because the physical plant infrastructure is so expensive that it's a prohibitive barrier to entry for any competition. The common solution for decades has been to accept that fact and balance the negative effects of a monopoly via strong regulation that prevents things like price gouging and service apathy.
We're at an intere
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<paraphrase>They're not a government mandated monopoly, they just have exclusive rights to be the only ISP in town granted by the government!</paraphrase>
What the fuck is the difference between these two?
Re:WTF is it with these Telcos? (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>Hey moron, the Telcos are not a government mandated monopoly.
The "moron" responds:
Yeah they are. My county government MANDATED that, "Our citizens want cable television. Let's hire somebody to lay the cables and give them an exclusive deal for ten years," and then handed it over to the highest bidder (suburban cable - later renamed comcast). QED: we have a government-mandated monopoly.
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You're still conveniently forgetting the existence of natural monopolies that necessitate this situation. Even if your County didn't grant the telco a monopoly, you'd still have, at best, a single provider.
You argue that the only reason we have a monopoly is because it is government-mandated. This is fal
Re:WTF is it with these Telcos? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, there is no evidence that a free market will help. In every non-urban area I've seen that has allowed additional telcos or cable companies to provide service, the result has been the same: the incumbent carrier, whose lines are long since paid for, undercuts the new carrier to the point that they cannot make any money. The new carrier goes under and sells their lines in a bankruptcy sale to the incumbent carrier, the backers of the new company get screwed, and the incumbent carrier gets a free infrastructure upgrade. Then, they raise rates above where they were before.
Last-mile infrastructure is expensive. Except for large cities, it isn't feasible for anyone other than the government to roll it out. This is why the government provides grants and tax breaks to subsidize the construction of last-mile infrastructure. The only feasible alternative to this that has actually been shown to work is government construction and maintenance of the relevant wire infrastructure. In places where the government owns and maintains the wires, free market competition tends to work very well among the various ISPs that lease access. Those ISPs need only provide blocks of IPs, routing infrastructure, and upstream connectivity from a central office. This makes competition much more feasible than having hundreds of companies trenching your yard and laying cables.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who realize that there is too much government intervention for the free market to operate are also the same people who oppose any government-run wire infrastructure projects (because that would be increasing government interference in their minds) and thus actively thwart the one solution that would actually allow the free market to operate in any useful way. As a result, with the exception of a few very rare, forward-thinking communities, telecom in the United States is a train wreck in slow motion, with emphasis on "slow".
Re:WTF is it with these Telcos? (Score:5, Insightful)
Go further: there is ample evidence (100% of historical record) that a "totally free market", absent regulation, devolves into monopolist rape of the population.
You have to have regulation, or you can't have a competitive market (which is vastly different from a "free market"). Free Markets = Fuck the Consumers. Competitive Markets are what most "conservatives" think they get out of "eliminate regulation" cries... right until some asshole buys out their company and ships the factory to India, China, or somewhere similar.
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The legislature is just handing out a little payback to all those hippie college students taking over [youtube.com] their capital.
Re:WTF is it with these Telcos? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm somewhat surprised that the "R-word" is mentioned so little. The programs being dismantled were put in place by Democrats. Republicans think that alone is reason to get rid of them. And, of course, anything that benefits the public must be bad.
The Republicans are in charge now, and they don't have a lot of time before the voters kick them out. So they're working as quickly as they can to dismantle the University of Wisconsin system. They'd like to pseudo-privatize the big school in Madison. "Flexibility" is the buzzword there, and it means less public funds, higher tuitions, and fewer in-state students.
In the telecom area, I think the next step will be to force areas that have a telephone cooperatives for phone and internet to sell to a commercial for profit entity and well below the infrastructure value. "Cooperatives are communistic, don't cha know, but AT&T is competitive, and that brings down prices." Rural communities with cooperatives in WI have better internet access (fiber) than I do in the city in CA (cable).
Re:WTF is it with these Telcos? (Score:5, Insightful)
There IS such a thing as right and wrong.
Wisconsin built up a wonderful public infrastructure during the years the Democrats - and even to a lesser extent, moderate Republicans (we'll never see the likes of Tommy Thompson again sadly: the Tea Tardier fringe will make sure no sane moderate ever survives the primaries) - were running the state. Solid public utilities. Lots of PUBLIC infrastructure in the form of parks, public pools, public recreation tracks. Things that the ENTIRE public, rather than just an elite few, get to enjoy. The Milwaukee river and other river systems, troubled by decades of runoff from irresponsible asshole factories, actually were getting cleaned up.
What's been happening lately? The Republican Party's old "GOP" initials seem to stand for Greed Over People. "Tax cuts" and "tax incentives" that go to nobody but billionaire robber barons time and again. Dismantling the ability for unions to form, let alone maintain a balanced negotiating stance. They want to throw environmental regulations - you know, those things that go towards clean air, clean water, having your kids able to play in a local park that isn't a totally fucking contaminated waste dump - out the window.
The ridiculous notion spread around that people who are below, at, or barely above the poverty line should "pay their fair share" (what the fuck is "their fair share" anyways?) for things that go to the public good overall, like vaccinations. The constant push to "spread the pain" by converting public goods (like roads) into revenue streams that always, ALWAYS disproportionately affect the middle and lower class more than the higher, selling off public utilities into "private company" hands... and always, like we see with Shithead Walker in WI, coming back around as bribes and kickbacks to the involved politicians.
Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Just like Abraham said (Score:5, Insightful)
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no, it's "government of the people, by the corporations, for the corporations"... why after all would a corporation want to be governed, or have to follow any laws?
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That is an almost direct quote of what the mexican president Vicente Fox said 6 years ago:
"This is a government of the entrepreneurs, by the entrepreneurs, for the entrepreneurs", but entrepreneurs being equal to big corporations because these conservative assholes are doing everything possible to crush small business. You can see how much good this ended for us mexicans. The guy ended putting is signature in a book wrote by republican propagandist Rob Allyn after his term ended, called "Revolution of Hope:
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What in the fucking hell were they thinking when they put that puppet of the Koch brothers as governor?
Just like most Tea Tardier organizations, you presume too much. You ask what they were thinking, rather than asking if they have enough functioning brain cells to form a coherent thought.
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Sorry, I was under the assumption that voting rights there were restricted to people that weren't brain dead.
Re:Just like Abraham said (Score:4, Informative)
You need to check your history book. The Internet was paid for by the government and slowly allowed to be handed over to corporations over two decades once it was already long established. Many advances (including computers that you claim are corporate gifts) are actually creations paid for by governments (typically for military purposes) and then handed over to corporations over time for civilian use and implementation.
"...Thus, by 1985, Internet was already well established as a technology supporting a broad community of researchers and developers, and was beginning to be used by other communities for daily computer communications. Electronic mail was being used broadly across several communities, often with different systems, but interconnection between different mail systems was demonstrating the utility of broad based electronic communications between people....This process of privately-financed augmentation for commercial uses was thrashed out starting in 1988 in a series of NSF-initiated conferences at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government on "The Commercialization and Privatization of the Internet" - and on the "com-priv" list on the net itself.. "
Source: http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml [isoc.org]
Also, claiming that some form of fair competition exists between companies is either a misunderstanding of how modern MSCs (multiple service carrier) operate or a blatant manipulation of the truth to suit a rant. No company can or will attempt to overbuild another MSC in a zone unless one of them is AT&T (in which case you can actually get government grants to over-build them, and money from AT&T at times as well so they look better). Between franchise agreements and city divisions where cable companies will cut a city in half (effectively choosing to "compete" only in certain regions where there really is no competition) customers don't have any semblance of real options.
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If those corporations were doing what they should be, I might agree with your sentiment. I see them as falling down on their jobs, and the mechanisms for marketplace corrections have been dismantled.
Corporations ought to be competing with each other to provide the best goods and services to me at the best price. In exchange for doing that, they're entitled to make a profit. The competition is gone, and the profit is coming before the goods and services.
In a scaled-down bad analogy...
Would you rather buy
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ROFLMAO. So unless we submit to anticompetitive acts by corporate collectives, we will all be "unusable, poorly trained garbage that can not compete in the real world", eh?
"Corporations, large and small, employee people in a competitive environment"
Competitive? Got some news fr you, my sophomoric friend. The only reason there is a competitive environment is due to regulation. That's right. Profit is all about maximizing price and minimizing delivery. Competition minimizes price and maximizes delivery.
Courtesy of Republicans and AT&T lobbyists (Score:5, Informative)
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I can't even be sarcastic, that's not surprising in the least. It also will not be surprising in the least when democrats fail to effectively stop this and fail to reverse it when they get back in power. Possibly with a little encouragement from AT&T.
Re:Courtesy of Republicans and AT&T lobbyists (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite frankly I'm sickened that \. has started leaning so far to the left these days. People here used to understand the free market. They used to believe in competition. They used to believe in freedom.
Then the reality of what right-wingers like you actually meant by "free market", e.g. rape of the middle class for the profit of the robber barons, came to pass.
You know. The raiding of pension funds. The fucking-over of everyone's 401k and other retirement accounts, which were your "replacement" for pensions - a few assholes from Wall Street laughed their way to the bank while the grandparents of the nation got fucked in the ass, thanks the the Retardican Party.
The constant tax cuts to billionaire robber barons while constantly increasing government "fees" on everyday necessities like auto registration, to fuck the middle and lower class every step of the way.
Do I think "total socialism" is the way to go? Of course not. But the laissez-faire, "no regulation", "every man for himself" crap that you assholes push sure as fuck isn't the way to go either.
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You mean make them a private school--with private school tuition rates. Pretty sure the parents of Wisconsin aren't going to be too happy about that.
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Used to believe in freedom?
Freedom?
OK , you know, I'm sick of hearing this shit. Freedom isn't an economic policy. Socialism is not inherently less free than capitalism - in fact, it's more free, because in a representative government you have at least some influence over the government monopolies. With corporate monopolies, you have no say whatsoever - not even with your pocketbook.
You can't apply free market ideas to natural monopolies. Your only options are to regulate them heavily, nationalize them,
Lobbying (Score:3, Insightful)
Used to be called corruption.
Unfortunately, the population of a country always wait until it's too late to act and then you get a revolution.
The GOP's bright idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Except brutality and suffering; those will be available to everyone camped outside of the enclaves.
Re:The GOP's bright idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Privatize everything.
Except brutality and suffering; those will be available to everyone camped outside of the enclaves.
There has been a concerted war on the public interest in Wisconsin (and a few other states) for the past several months. IIRC, Wisconsin is where three legislators are up for recall elections, three more have the signatures filed but not validated yet, and steaming mad voters are counting the days until they can start a recall effort on the governor too.
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Nine legislators are up for recall, Six Republicans and Three Democrats
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Oddly enough, the petitions in the three Democrats' cases turned out to be fraudulent - the Republicans sent in someone previously convicted of felony election fraud and had them passing around petitions claiming it was to recall a Republican state senator, to "support schools", "support Indians", or to "support Democrats", then appended the signatures to their "recall petition" to recall the Democrats instead.
Always nice to see the Greed Over People part doing what they do best: FRAUD.
Republicans like to accuse Democrats of stealing elections, but whenever you see mention of someone who has actually been to prison for election fraud it's almost always a Republican.
Re:The GOP's bright idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Not quite.
Privatize the gains, socialize the losses.
That's the 2008 Financial Crisis in a nutshell. Then hold the mess up as an example of how bankrupt, stupid, and evil government and socialist organizations such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are. Blame it all on the policies of the Clinton and Carter administrations. Mock GM for now being "Government Motors". Crow about how great private enterprise is. Brazenly ignore the boatload of implicit contradictions, omissions, and lies in such statements.
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I wish you were being sarcastic. But at least one GOP candidate has made that his official election platform: Pawlenty, through his "Google test", wants to eliminate all government services that are offered by private company. And since everything under the sun is being offered by a private company, even national defense would be outsourced under that platform. I'm sure he'll backpedal on that so quickly he'll appear to walk on air, but still - Republicans are the only ones who offer up such insanity.
Re:The GOP's bright idea (Score:4, Informative)
I think you left out a couple of steps:
1. Privatize everything
2. ???
3. PROFIT!
The beauty of this scheme is that step 2 is irrelevant when it comes to privatizing government services. Just about any path you take leads to #3.
Make public schools ineffective by cutting the funding.
Privatize the schools.
Make a profit on government vouchers for private schools that are just as ineffective, if not worse.
Make the prisons overcrowded by throwing uneducated kids in jail on a three strikes count.
Privatize the prisons.
Make a profit by cutting health and nutrition services to the prisoners.
Make the courts ineffective by cutting funding and flooding the docket with charges against uneducated kids and internet downloaders.
No time for lawsuits against privatized service providers???
Profit on cost savings for liability insurance, lawyers and other items.
Republicans in Wisconsin are obviously soft on crime. Education (and therefore education funding) mitigates future needs for prison funding. Despite what the tea party would have you think, there is a role for government services in US society. Public education is one of the essential government services, and internet service is a requirement for public education.
Republicans always like to say that the public sector is too inefficient, and services should be privatized to improve efficiency. What they don't mention is that privatization never leads to improvement in services over the long term. Basically, the extra efficiency (if it exists) in the private sector, is consumed by profit taking. Once the initial inefficiencies are ironed out, the extra money goes as profit to the service provider, not for service improvement. Then thanks to the accounting principle of compounded growth rates, the only way for the privatized service to succeed as a company is to raise prices. Government services are not growth industries unless the population is growing dramatically.
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Uhm.. the Retardican plan is simpler than that.
1. Privatize everything
2. Take kickbacks from the Robber Barons you just sold everything to
3. PROFIT!
No question marks needed.
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Yes, it is ok to privatize everything. However there needs to be one conditions unlimited competition. Too often, the competition is either gobbled up or the barrier to entry is raised (thanks to lobbying)
I've always like the idea of for utilities services, that the service area is divided up and whomever services the population the best gets awarded a larger art of the pie, with a set 15-30% in contention each year. Example: DMV services. The state maintains the master database, but private enterprise can
Well you see... (Score:5, Interesting)
AT&T won't provide the services or will do so at triple the prices paid now. This is also a very convenient way of shorting the school system what they need, and thus have more ammo to go after them for not providing what our kids need. Thus making schools the root of all evil again. Most voters will go along with it, and the GOP in Wisconsin gets more of what it wants.
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Ladies and gentlemen, I give you cro-magnon man... aka your average everyday Tea Tardier.
Presidential Posturing from Wisconsin Gov ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Presidential Posturing from Wisconsin Gov ... (Score:5, Interesting)
His union-busting went well enough for his purposes
If WI laws allowed it, he'd be facing a recall vote along with the 6 Republican senators that are already being recalled. And I'd be shocked if he doesn't face a recall when he becomes eligible for one in January. He pissed a lot of people off and if his goal was to weaken support for the unions he failed miserably. A lot of people who started out against the unions watched the unions agree to a pay cut, a benefits cut, and even a temporary moratorium on collective bargaining. There are people angry with the Democratic senators for their walk out, but even that anger isn't directed at the Unions. In the end, it was the unions who looked reasonable; while the Democrats looked petty and weak and the Republicans looked like card carrying villains.
I think he'd be hard pressed to explain his behavior on a national stage to anyone other than anti-union Republicans. Not to mention that there are about 100k people in WI that have shown themselves ready and willing to take time off from work to stand in the literally freezing rain just to show their displeasure for him. Sometimes the "Would never vote for" column is just as important as the "Would vote for" column in polling, because it shows how active and engaged people would be to someone who is opposing him.
Re:Presidential Posturing from Wisconsin Gov ... (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of people who started out against the unions watched the unions agree to a pay cut, a benefits cut, and even a temporary moratorium on collective bargaining
Sadly that doesn't matter to many people. The unions have become the new multipurpose boogeyman for any number of groups and causes. Go take a look at the recent story hear about an Apple Store employee who wanted to form a union, and look at how many slashdot people jumped up to bash unions in response.
I think he'd be hard pressed to explain his behavior on a national stage to anyone other than anti-union Republicans.
There are a lot of people in this country with strong anti-union feelings. And there are plenty of people who could be convinced to feel the same way as well. Explaining this to enough people to win the GOP nomination is trivial.
Besides, with our current conservative POTUS in office, the republicans have to go even further to the right in order to make any distinction between what they want and what Obama has already done. Anyone who isn't rabidly anti-union will be labelled as "soft left' as the kindest.
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I think he'd be hard pressed to explain his behavior ... Sometimes the "Would never vote for" column is just as important as the "Would vote for" column in polling
His idea of "winning" probably does not match ours.
From a purely drama-queenie, attention grabbing point of view, Palin, Hlllary, and their male equivalent Walker, ARE and have been incredibly successful. They live for the Oprah interview and the press fawning all over them, and if they don't have to bother with the responsibilities of governing, well that's great, more time to stir up controversy...
You have to realize that both the Ds and Rs are incredibly weak here, with the exception of Feingold who was
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where have all the real leaders gone?
Into business, where they actually get to make decisions, i.e. where they get to buy politicians instead of just being bought.
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There is something wrong with getting rid of buses? Large gridlocked car less city's sure but the rest. Who do I have to vote for to have this happen?
Re:Presidential Posturing from Wisconsin Gov ... (Score:4, Insightful)
What sort of public transit do you propose for people who are legally unable to drive, due to age (old or young), disease, or blindness?
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Rickshaws?
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Of course, public safety always takes a back seat to profit.
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You opt not to drive, you are opting to figure out what to do to get around.
What if you opt not to drive, because you currently have a reliable transportation system available to you that allows you to get to where you need to go without driving? If you took that system away, wouldn't you be taking freedom away from those people who made that choice?
It's not up to other citizens to solve your problem.
If there is a solution in place that someone can use, and they opt to use it, how are they counting on other citizens to solve their problem? They didn't ask the system to be built for them, they worked an existing system into their
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So what do you do about people who are physically incapable of driving?
Used cars for them, too, of course! They can carpool with the blind people, the chronic drinkers, the children, and the elderly! We don't need buses when we have so many used car dealers!
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And thus you have opposed every single road improvement project, right? Since it's sure as hell not anyone else's problem to solve your traffic woes either.
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What sort of public transit do you propose for people who are legally unable to drive, due to age (old or young), disease, or blindness?
The taxi companies that donated to the election campaign of the politician suggesting the government spend money on taxis?
Its funny watching people try to rationalize simple shakedowns.
Bringing it back to the story, why did the same governor go after certain public servant unions and not others? No deep philosophical reasons, just look at the donation records. The folks who didn't cough up enough dough have had it made perfectly clear what'll happen if they don't.
A permanently declining economy inevitably
Re:Presidential Posturing from Wisconsin Gov ... (Score:4, Interesting)
You can't run a public transit system that caters to 1-2% of the population and only serves that number. It doesn't work without massive funding from the government, which people have consistently voted against.
When I was in Chicago in the 1960s the buses and electric trains there had plenty of riders and ran 24x7. Unfortunately, the result of a lot of government programs created the "inner city" mess that everyone should be familar with. It was no longer safe to ride public transit, so if you didn't absolutely have to, you did not. Ridership dropped. Fares increased because of this, so ridership dropped some more. They ended the 24x7 service because there were too few people to make it practical. The removed station attendents and got rid of every single person in the system they could do without. The trains became less and less safe to ride.
The end result of all of this is the train routes have been reconfigured, stations closed and buses cut way back. It is now something that is usable during rush hour and absolutely nobody goes anywhere near unless they have to. There have been attempts at bond issues for funding the CTA and every single one has failed. It is viewed that if it can't survive as an independent company, it shouldn't survive at all.
In other places rails that were used for trains have been torn up and the land used for something else. The rail lines aren't coming back - the land is tied up now. That decision was made in the 1950s and has just finally gotten around to being noticed.
End result is public transit is pretty much dead in the US. What was needed was massive government investment in the 1940s and 1950s to offset the investment in roads. It wasn't done, so public transit became less and less relevant to the people in the US. Sure there might be some people that it would be nice if public transit worked for, but they are far too few to support the system. It would now take the government spending billions of dollars each year in every major city to have a functional public transit system and for the most part it would be empty - except for the 1-2% that absolutely require it. It would still be a haven for crime and unsafe, but that is how we seemingly want to have inner cities.
You might be OK with that level of government spending, but apparently very few voters are. I suppose an alternative might be to tear up the highways that have been built over the last 60 years or so and force people to use the unsafe, crime-infested public transit system. It might get enough ridership to reduce the crime level then. But it would take that kind of thing to make it work. And that would cost hundreds of billions.
By the way, the US is broke and unless China wants to sponsor public transit in the US (maybe some nice Chinese buses?) we're not spending anything on public transit.
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After the government buys them their used car, who pays for the gas and insurance?
While we are on the subject. Why is the political party that's supposedly against handouts the same party that promotes "vouchers" other than it's obviously harder for companies to make money off of poaching the poor if they already have what they need from the government.
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There is something wrong with getting rid of buses? Large gridlocked car less city's sure but the rest. Who do I have to vote for to have this happen?
There's plenty wrong. But nonetheless, if you want to get rid of buses, subways, trains, and anything else that resembles public transportation, you have your chance this year. Go vote for Teflon Tim Pawlenty, the man who was - on paper, anyways - the governor of MN for 8 years. He's been running for president since at least 2006, but this year he finally got around to declaring his candidacy.
He'd love to have your vote. If you find the right guy, in the right back room, before the right primary, you
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Thank you for making it clear to me who the candidate with a working thought process is
Let me get this "thought process" straight, then:
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Helping people buy a house who were previously rejected for mortgages = bad, bad, bad, bad, bad
Giving people money to buy a used car who cannot currently afford to drive = infinite win of excellence?
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I'm not sure I am familiar with this new definition of "thought process", really.
Ha, that didn't go the way you expected it, did it?
Actually, it did. I expected that only people with no grip on reality would think it to be a good idea to give used cars to people who cannot afford
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Actually, he wanted to offer subsidies to nonprofits that would give rides to people while the transit union was on strike. Blind people already were in a pickle what with the buses not running. The plan apparently didn't go through, however, and the strike lasted a month and a half.
Not the best source, but at least it's a source: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/269165/pawlenty-s-transit-strike-katrina-trinko [nationalreview.com]
If you're thinking of something else, you should probably provide a source.
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If Walker handled the country like he's handled Milwaukee County and is handling Wisconsin, we could look forward to becoming the United States of America Sponsored by BP(tm)
As opposed to our current status as The United States of America Owned Outright by BlueCross/BlueSheild?
This guy's given straight-up hand outs to corporations that donated to his campaign
I'm not sure how that differs form our current POTUS, or the one before him, or the one before him, or the one before him, or any other POTUS I can think of ever.
and then claimed we needed to end unions to make up the sudden shortfall
Unions are the universal boogeyman. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the GOP presidential contenders tries to blame them for 9/11 before the primary season is over.
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I have no problem with unions as long as workers aren't forced to join them. My last job was a union shop, but I wouldn't join because we were supposed to pay into a strike fund (80% of "dues") which we could never draw from by definition since we were prohibited by law from striking. Sorry, but I'm not going to pay for someone else's insurance when it won't potentially benefit me in the least. Ended up getting laid off from that job along with all the other union employees too, so a whole lot of good th
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I'm not sure how that differs form our current POTUS, or the one before him, or the one before him, or the one before him, or any other POTUS I can think of ever.[Citation needed]
I'd like to see a specific example of this that wasn't a throwback to the neo-con abortion we just emerged from.
It is not clear if you are agreeing or disagreeing with me there...
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yes... put money in the hands of poor people. What a radical concept.
OK, so you want to give poor people money to buy used cars. If you give Joe-Minimum-Wage, who currently rides the bus to work, $2k to buy a car, how long will he be able to afford insurance on the car? How about gas and parking (which he also didn't need to pay while riding the bus)? What if the car breaks down and he can't get to work?
What if Joe was a chronic drinker who liked to get plastered after work every night? He was getting home safely on the bus, and now you want him to drive home instea
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At least with a government program, we can make sure that not *all* the money is traded away for crack and booze.
Campaign donations (Score:5, Interesting)
THis makes perfect sense when you figure that ATT is set to profit big time from this legislation and they were/are a huge campaign contributor to Scott (I'm a Douche Bag) Walker. For those of you following along, this is the second time he has done this, the first was a 23m Fed giveback that would have replaced the sub par Badgernet service.
An unfortunate glimpse of what's to come (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a very nicely written and researched article, which, unfortunately, only shows in detail one horrific case study of what could soon be a widespread occurrence if the big telecom corps get what they want: to go after the government/educational market (now that the consumer market is completely saturated) and offer them half the service at twice the price.
Organizations like WiscNet provide a fantastic public service, and the notion of dismantling them for private industry to make a buck is just reprehensible. I'm from Michigan, not Wisconsin, but I could very easily see this happening here, as we have the same issues in play: Merit Network, a non-profit co-op founded for the same reasons as WiscNet, provides Internet access to almost all the schools in the state. It would be a huge loss for our corrupt legislature to squeeze them out (never underestimate the evil of the Michigan Legislature, look up the Michigan "promise scholarship" if you don't believe me). I'm sure other states are in similar situations.
My dad's a public school teacher, and my Internet access growing up was through Merit's dialup, which they offered free to teachers at the time. Unlike most commercial offerings back in the mid-90s (or even now) there was no monthly time allotment or bandwidth cap. I shudder to think how my experiences building web sites and learning to code would have changed had AT&T run that system. I do biomed research now, and I'm posting this from a Merit network connection that we use to collaborate with other labs across the country. Try doing that on a 250GB monthly cap.
Hey Wisconsin State Telecommunications Association: Go to hell, and take your bandwidth caps with you.
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Yes (Score:2)
Why should we educate American kids, when Chinese kids study so much harder?
Our corporate/Chinese overlords are totally against spending another dime on American education, aside from private money spent in our elite universities to educate the American executive class ... and Chinese!
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As the friend and niece of teachers, I can tell you that first off - they are underpaid and overworked. My aunt makes 25k a year which for a family of 4 puts them at about 11k under the poverty line for the US. She's been in her position for 3 years now and just had to worry about possible lay-off because of budget cuts.
I don't buy this. This is one of those situations where you need to "vote with your feet".
According to , teachers get much better pay than you state. For instance, teachers in Georgia (not [teacherportal.com]
So when are the ISPs going to pay up? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, does that mean the telecoms are going to return the BILLIONS in subsidies and tax cuts they've received?
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If they don't want to live off the tax payer's pocketbook, they can refuse any business from government institutions, like say universities and let those universities fend for themselves.
Are they doing that?
a) yes
b) no
disgusting (Score:3)
Competitive? (Score:2, Interesting)
Taking tax dollars from 49 states and using it to undercut local providers isn't competition. It appears that this legislation is simply preventing WiscNet from receiving public funds from UW-Madison, which it is doing in order to do an end-run around the existing state-supported network, Badgernet.
If WiscNet, a non-profit organization, can't provide service at lower prices than a for-profit corporation like AT&T without forced revenue from tax subsidies, then I'd say that AT&T is competitive.
All th
Re:Competitive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice spin. You're implying that the telecommunications grant isn't available to the other 49 states and somehow the rest of the country is being shortchanged. You also overlooked the purpose of these grants. Without them private entities would not expand their broadband offering to rural areas. If there was truly a free market telecommunication market then people in rural areas would still be paying too much for POTS (plain old telephone system) and would only have dial up access to their ISP.
I can't help but notice that the republican party advocates cutting subsidies to non-profits because of "free market" concerns, yet is amazingly quiet about government subsidies going to profitable industries (eg. oil).
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And don't forget corn ethanol subsidies, which have the added bonus of raising food prices.
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I can't help but notice that the republican party advocates cutting subsidies to non-profits because of "free market" concerns, yet is amazingly quiet about government subsidies going to profitable industries (eg. oil).
You're quite mistaken. Republicans have been quite vocal in their support of oil. To be fair, subsidies for the petroleum industry is not exclusively a Republican cause. There are also a fair number idiot Democrats who seem to think oil being over $100 isn't enough incentive for companies to go out and drill for oil.
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You got me there. I really should of said "... amazingly quiet about cutting government subsidies going to profitable industries.
I agree about the oil subsidy issue being a little nonpartisan. Mainly because:
1. Oil companies are successful at equating subsidies to local jobs in the minds of the voter. The republicans use this argument to justifying their pro-corporate agenda, and democrats (particularly the ones in oil states) fear the possibility that a republican opponent in the next reelection may equa
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Market rates? First, you're going to have to define what the market is. Oh, there is only one private company, one state-born and one state-supported company around? Gee, not much of a market there. Then, you're going to have to define service. What uptime? What up/download speeds? What caps? What times? What support? Finally - and this is especially important given we are talking about university access to Internet - what is the cost to research and public education when switching to ATT's version of servi
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If WiscNet, a non-profit organization, can't provide service at lower prices than a for-profit corporation like AT&T without forced revenue from tax subsidies, then I'd say that AT&T is competitive.
And is AT&T going to give up it's subsidies in order to level the playing field? I didn't think so. So we'll see AT&T with its billions in subsidies and tens of billions in profits battling WiscNet with is $0 in subsidies and $0 in profits. AT&T can provide services to the schools and libraries for free for a few years until the competition is dead. Then they can charge whatever the hell they want. (That seems to be AT&T's internet pricing formula).
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The money they took is also available to telco's. The telco's are just pissed they didn't get the money first. As it is private industry already operates with millions of dollars worth of our tax money.
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If WiscNet, a non-profit organization, can't provide service at lower prices than a for-profit corporation like AT&T without forced revenue from tax subsidies
They provide service to public schools, libraries, and local governments. ALL of its revenue comes from tax subsidies. As opposed to AT&T, which derives merely some of its revenue from tax subsidies, while other parts are derived from bribes for continued monopolies and subsequently jacked-up rates.
Obviosuly the UW sports teams are a problem too! (Score:2)
You know, the football team at UW Madison might compete with the NFL for ratings.
Also the basketball team may compete with the NBA for ratings.
Obviously there is MUCH more to privatize.
(Or maybe there is a role for publicly owned things?)
It gets even more crazy. On the UW, Madison campus the UW hospital is a public authority (basically a separate entity from the UW) Can the university provide LAN access to that building? Not the way things are written now.
Craziness.
Fighting Bob LaFollette is spinning in his grave (Score:2)
The contrast between Walker and another former Wisconsin governor [wikipedia.org] couldn't be greater.
Having lived there for my first 50 years I was brought up learning all about the states progressive past. Walker is the states biggest embarassment since Joe McCarthy.
Better change the state motto from Forward to Backward.
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You're kidding, right? Walker created a short term budget deficit and then wants praise for quashing his crisis while creating collateral damage. Wisconsin never had a long term budget issue.
Let the Free market decide! (Score:2)
Could today's xkcd have been ANY more timely?? (Score:2)
WiscNet was second target (Score:5, Informative)
WiscNet was, as I understand it a secondary concern, although the telecoms have wanted it to die for a decades. It is the same pattern of schools banding together and riding together on common infrastructure. ATT would like that to go away with WiscNet in favor of Badgernet which they run or even better, from their point of view, to sell everyone T-1 lines retail.
This is the second effort for this. The first successful effort (from ATT's perspective) was to give back $37 million of the same stimulus money (NTIA, BTOP) for a different state run project. The spin there was that the Feds did not want to give the money to a private company. But insiders tell me that it was not the feds but ATT. ( wisconsins-stimulus-rejection-too-many-strings-or-too-much-scrutiny [fibertothewhatever.com])
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This is why corporations should be absolutely forbidden from making any attempt to influence legislatures. Free speech is for individuals, for human beings. No corporation should be allowed to speak to a legislature through any mode whatsoever. They may speak to the public. They may speak to their employees. But they may not order their employees to say anything at all to elected representatives. What citizens say to representatives should be entirely a matter of personal conscience, not paychecks. We liter
Just surprised (Score:2)
About up-front and blatant this move is. Generally such moves are a bit more crafty or silent. This is just a big 'FU,' we want our buddies to get their perks for their money.
Re:Just surprised (Score:4, Interesting)
That trend has been forming for quite a while now. Until not long ago, politicians were far more sneaky when trying to dismantle public institutions to shift more power to their "friends" in various businesses. But when they noticed the general "meh" attitude that spreads in the population, I guess they felt a bit let down that we didn't even honor their attempts to veil the sellout to corporations. And now they're pretty much blunt and blatant about it. Simply because there is no public outcry. We've learned to expect that from them, we pretty much expect our politicians to screw us over. And, bluntly, why should they veil it? It's not like we have a choice. Republicans or Democrats, hanging or shooting, Kang or Kodos, it's not like there's really a difference.
And please don't start something like "then run yourself" or "vote for another candidate". Please. At least be sensible. First, people are too stupid for democracy to really work, they're too caught up in petty bickering about how much party A is the hell spawn and if they don't vote for B the apocalypse is going to happen the day after the election. And second, the amount of money required to do something like this is crippling, it's like telling someone to open a competing telco if they're not happy with the AT&T service.
So why should they be sneaky about selling us out? It's not like we can do anything about it anyway.
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Re:Just spawn a private sector ISP? (Score:4, Insightful)
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WTF, are you cave man? "Me tax dollars, you make fucky-fucky!"
Incoherence and greed in one package. Let me guess, you're a card carrying Tea Party member.
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I've had something like that in my sig for ages.