Posted in NYTIMES today:

If bush hadn't taken over the white house like he did, we would be well on our way to having a far more robust national information infrastructure.

This story reminds me of a story in Wired's Danger Room Blog on July 11 about roads in Chad: http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/07/chads-budding-r.html

See, because the government of Chad has shirked its responsibility to take care of the roads, "entrepreneurial road blockers" have popped up all over the place, who will not let you drive through unless you pay them the proper bribe.

That only happens in a lawless environment where real roads are not built, and nobody polices such criminal activity.

In 1987, when Al Gore wrote the high performance computing act, instead of running fiber to each person's home, like he originally wanted, in a compromise with Ronald Reagan, the government took the much less ambitious step of merely connecting the government's Arpanet to existing commercial networks owned by sprint, mci, etc.

The problem now, though, is because bush has dropped the ball on upgrading to Internet 2, and because he has not put any money into deploying the public Internet, or bringing public fiber to homes, entrepreneurial road blockers have been popping up here, in the usa.

they are no different than the ones in chad. They don't own all the roads, but just enough of them to monopolize many lanes for their own phone and tv services and to set up not only road blocks, but airport style searches too. what's next? are they going to scrutinize every single byte that comes and goes from my computer?

Honestly there is only one solution.

We must deploy the public Internet. We must upgrade it, and bring it all the way to people's homes. It must go back to being a network from people to people, where nobody in particular is in charge, and nobody needs to ask permission to do anything.

We cannot count on monopolistic cable and phone companies for this vital service. There is so much more the Internet can be and they have held us back to 1970's-1980's speeds (10mbit-50mbit) for far too long already.

Only when we have bidirectional multi-gigabit speeds will we start to see the next horizon in what we can do as a society. the next amazon, google, and ebay are just waiting for this upgrade. they will never come into existence if we allow these road blocking isps take over completely.

so it's not just about "net neutrality," which is vital, of course. its about having a robust international information infrastructure. iii. let's do it. I know we can.

the most important story the nytimes had today was this prospect of holding back the entire economy at the hands of monopolistic money grubbers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/technology/15cable.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

in 1993 the telcos promised to deploy fiber to people's homes in return for the right to raise phone rates. they raised the rates to the tune of billions and billions, but have not brought fiber to our homes.

al gore said, in 2000, that the internet needs a serious upgrade. it does not cost much to dig trenches and put in fiber, if you're not also using half of that to sell phone and tv service. the internet is not just some 'service' it is becoming the backbone of society.

we cannot trust these phone and cable companies with the responsibility of protecting our freedom of speech.

we must deploy a real national information infrastructure, that is independent of these potential vampires, and is controlled and owned by nobody, and everybody, just like at the beginning.

I would like to see Obama declare that there will be 10GBIT up/down in every home by the end of his first term. and not something 'provided' by one of these monopolists, either.

as for the phone and cable companies, i think they should be broken up. the cable companies run the network, our network, as if they were a paving contractor that took over 3 of the 4 lanes of a highway they paved. leaving us with one lane for ourselves. its gross.

there should be a company, a common carrier, whose entire business is running and maintaining fiber infrastructure. the responsibility for that should go out to competitive bidding regularly. companies in the content business, like Time Warner and Verizon should be required to divest. if they want to be information providers, they should be able to get onto the Internet, just like everybody else, instead of being given this special advantage because they happen to also be the company running the fiber. there's a major conflict of interest for the American people right there.

before the internet became popular, we already had corporate networks. they were getting more and more expensive. these providers were looking for any and all ways to charge more money. $.75 per email. $/byte $/minute... no wonder there was no possible way to have a google or amazon or anything.

and now because of bush's dropping the ball on the internet since he has been in office, we are reverting to that model from the 80's. oh sure, a couple companies, like aol and compuserve made some money, but the entire world civilization suffered.

no.

this is much too big to allow this to happen again. we must take back our infrastructure and be able to freely invent, communicate, and exercise our freedom, without these companies holding us back.

here's a good article that has some good faqs about us building our own infrastructure and doing an end run, once again, around these huge monopolies.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9544

a "tax" is something that slows you down, like those little headlight generators on your bike from when you were a kid.

they don't have to come from the government. anything that costs us money must be included.

When bush came into office, we were paying down reagan/bush debt for the first time in a long time, and so our interest burden was finally being reduced.

bush ended all that by cutting taxes on people who were making a million dollars a year and more... and on billionaires... but we were already in 6.5 trillion dollars of debt by then, so every penny of so called "tax cutting" was really increasing our interest burden.

Right now, we are all paying about 5% interest on 30 year t-bills compounded daily. it means that a bush dollar with interest really is costing us $4.85 in interest. so when you wonder why the country seems so bankrupt, its not just $4.00 per gallon gas prices, or $3 trillion thrown onto the bonfire that is the iraq debacle, but even more, its this humongous interest burden that is stopping us from investing in things like free college educations for all, national service programs, science and technology research, universal health care, real infrastructure, and many more items that actually have a return on investment that far exceeds what is put in.

Nasa, according to some researchers puts about $7 back into the economy for every dollar spent on it. bush has been cutting nasa to the bone.

so lets just do the math on one of these lost investments, like nasa or a GI bill. if a dollar spent on nasa would have given us $7 back, and one of bush's borrowed iraq dollars costs us $4.85 in interest, that means we lose about $41 for each dollar bush spends on iraq and not on nasa.

then of course you need to understand that china, saudi arabia, and some very wealthy individuals, as well as some other wealthy countries buy the lion's share of these treasury bonds. so my point here is we are squandering our money to enrich people and countries who don't need even more money. we are also taking their money away from potential investment opportunities for them and sinking that into treasury bonds. its just bad all around.

republicans are expensive.

if we simply reverse some of their policies, we can return to the virtuous cycle of investing in our nation, and benefiting from the fruits of our investments. lets do that, shall we?

CATEGORY: TECHNOLOGY

I STILL CANNOT BELIEVE TOM DOES NOT HAVE SCIENCE OR TECHNOLOGY AS THEIR OWN CATEGORIES! SHEESH.

You have to admit that the internet has been a game changer. and we don't even have a real internet, which would just be fiber going to and from everybody's computer, and radio signals going to/from everybody's devices. we have a pseudo internet with large monopoly isps trying to ruin it. so you can imagine how much of a game changer the internet has been, and how much more it would be, if it really allowed each computer and device involved to be a full participant.

Al Gore has been starting to speak, in the last few years, about an internet for electricity. a smart grid... an Electranet, if you will. there's a website http://www.electranet.com/ that has some helpful links including some to speeches gore has made. (check the column with links on the right side of the front page)

Imagine this. Right now it is practically free to talk to somebody in Europe from the USA via the internet. It used to cost so much it could bankrupt somebody. By democratizing electricity, if you connect the dots, it could lead to free electricity. Why? Because everybody would be driven by market forces to generate their own power with all sorts of new solar collecting technologies that will become popular when it becomes possible to share the power collected with neighbors. Think of it. The sun drops about 350 Watts per square foot on a nice sunny day, and plenty of UV even on a cloudy day. If we were harnessing a significant portion of the energy that currently just bounces off into space or bakes our houses, cars, roads, etc, we would have quite a bit of left over energy. As a matter of a fact then people could actually charge their vehicles on the Electranet and that's where the price of transportation seriously becomes cheaper.

i am reminded of the years before the internet became a household word. when people like Al Gore would give numerous speeches about the concept of the internet, and few understood the significance. The Electranet is the same sort of thing. It's a total game changer. it will knock the monopolies and their inefficient ways on their ears.

Has Mccain or any of the other republicans ever said anything else besides "how dangerous it would be to leave iraq?" its a cash bonanza over there! they’d hate to kill the gravy train that awards $300 million dollar contracts to 18 year old "weapon’s dealers" such as Efraim Diveroli, the poster boy if there ever were one for Bush/Mccain/GOP cronyism.

To think they gave this kid $300M to sell 60 year old useless rusty bullets into Afghanistan. of course we only have found out about this because of democrats in the congress who are just starting the huge job of trying to investigate just what is going on.. the pentagon said it cannot account for hundreds of billions of dollars used in iraq... WHAT? wow. is that what happens when bush fires all the inspectors general who are supposed to be policing the contractors over there, i suppose.

the other day i saw the report about promising medical research that has shown we can grow back fingers. find it on youtube. the funding for that research was far less than how much Efraim and his vice president (also his masseuse) got.

Could you just imagine what we could have done with the THREE TRILLION DOLLARS (omg i still cannot fathom such a number, but there it is) that is being thrown into the bonfire that is bush’s escapade over there in the middle east?

each month, now, due to the excellent training and practice we are offering to would-be terrorists in iraq and Afghanistan 600 IEDs go off. unfortunately 300 of those are now outside iraq and Afghanistan all together. great.

Last year, mccain staged a little "shopping trip" to the market across the way from the green zone in Baghdad. To do so, he had to wear armor, and he had 2 gunships at the ready, as well as half a dozen copters overhead and over 100 marines to guard him. I guess they thought the market was pretty safe last year. THIS year, mccain was not able to go to the market at all, because it was deemed to be too dangerous.

It has been so dangerous in the green zone this month that people are not even allowed to spend one extra moment outside than absolutely necessary, and they have been instructed to wear their bullet proof vests if they do plan to venture outside. they are not allowed to sleep in anything but ’hardened structures,’ at this time.

We have well over 4,000 dead troops, tens of thousands injured, over a million innocent iraqis dead from our nonsense over there, as well as millions whose lives have been completely destroyed, who are trying to survive as refugees illegally in countries like jordan and Syria.

So what is Reckless, Mr. Mccain... Senator Bomb Bomb... is you. and your party. and any of you who wish to perpetuate this genocidal rape and pillaging of a nation in the name of making some money and keeping oil prices artificially high so cheney’s pals over at Exxon can make record profits.

today’s democracynow.org had a sad report about iraqi refugees, of which there are hundreds of thousands. men, women and children whose lives have been destroyed by bush. 4 years of no school. no mixed religion families allowed back in iraq... no work in any other country, so no medical care, abject poverty... its really sad...watch the video if you can.

http://current.com/pods/war/PD05977 this reporter was interviewed for about 15-20 mins on today’s democracynow.org...

just to put news coverage in perspective, i was watching cnn for a few minutes because it was on in a deli where i had dinner...

and for 3 commercial breaks, lou dobbs trumpeted, "after the break, we will have on Nobel prize economist Stieglitz who has written the book, ’the three trillion dollar war.’" so they were using Stieglitz as a teaser and when they finally had him on, he barely got a word in edgewise. dobbs kept talking, and he may have been on for a total of 90 seconds... 30 of which was him actually talking.

contrast that to his guest appearance on democracynow.org where he got to speak, uninterrupted, for at least 45-50 minutes, so he could fully explain the whole point of his book

it felt like leaving the expensive French restaurant for a quick bite at an amusement park hot dog stand...

i’m so completely spoiled at having news makers on when they should be... weeks before cnn even bothered to notice him... and they give these news makers enough time to explain in depth what it is they are talking about.

compared to a network that treats its viewers as the 2 year olds they are.  wow how can anybody really think they’re getting any news at all when they get 30 seconds like that on top of all that silly eye candy, music, commercials for super absorbent towels.. sheesh.

Re-Growing Organs, The Future Is Here
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/22/sunday/m...

category: SCIENCE (would you believe myspace doesn't even have a category for science? wtf?? This is amazing though. scientists are getting closer to making it possible to re-grow entire limbs, organs, etc. they already have this one guy in the video re-growing his fingertip, blood vessels, nail, fingerprint and all.

..I came across this study the other day. more evidence that you gotta get your kids into art class, dance and music and away from that TV!

dana.org

Does art make you smart? New research from a consortium at seven universities reveals close correlations between training in the arts and improved math and reading skills. The findings add new scientific support to the observation that children who participate in the arts also do well academically and suggest that changes in attention networks in the brain may be one reason.

-Dave


Currently Playing..
Hourglass..

Here's a letter i wrote to Laura M. Holson of the new york times, in response to her article, Cellphone Straitjacket Is Inspiring a Rebellion

Laura, I so wish you'd open up your most recent article to comments. Being 42 years old, I remember very well the horrible land line phone service from before bell telephone was broken up by the justice department. Often, calls would be dropped, people would experience "bad phone lines" which would require them to redial. A call from coast to coast cost an arm and a leg, and there would be so much static that you might have thought you were using cups and string to communicate to your loved ones. for decades, that greedy monopoly stifled the entire economy, with its $3.50 per minute calls to california, $11 public phone calls to canada, etc.

when the phone company was broken up, we experienced a renaissance in phone service. within less than a year, companies like sprint came along with their pin drop slogan. finally you could call california and hear the person on the other end. hundreds of phone companies popped up out of nowhere. all the excuses that bell was using about how there is this fine line between what consumers want and their profits proved to be just so much hog wash. an entire industry grew up and brought us to the point we are at today where you can make unlimited high quality calls for only $20-30 a month.

I am reminded of those bad old days every time i get on my iphone. at&t does a horrible job. there are dropped calls. the voice quality is so abysmal that you can barely make out the words people are saying. its a disgrace. its a monopoly.

i say that the fcc shouldn't give one single more hz to those greedy vampires. they are severely hurting this economy. we need open source open standard national information infrastructure.

you allowed Roger Entner to make a ridiculous unqualified statement that 90% of internet sites are not profitable. that's poppycock. the internet was an end run around these monopolists, and they lament the fact that the economy has gotten away from their grasp.

its easy to see how much better a model like the internet is when you simply compare it to the closed corporate networks that comprise the way cel phone service is right now. The very thought that somebody would have to pay $20 a month to be allowed to download pictures they take to their own computers like on sprint's service is so ridiculous it would be laughable if it weren't true.

i hope that you spend the future months comparing and contrasting a neutral, free and open internet, where no single company owns our network, with closed cel phone provider networks and all of their gouging driven policies and features.

People wonder just why the economy could do so much better under the Clintons. Here's one word. Debt.

its expensive to operate under republican debt. We pay $1B a day in interest on the reagan/bush/bush debt. each dollar the usa borrows costs us $4.85 in compound interest (30 year T bill compounded at
5%) Most of that goes to wealthy bond holders and
countries like China.

Here's another word. Occupation.

its expensive to operate an occupation. especially when gravy train crony contractors can make over $10K a day for a guard job that ought to cost $83 a day. (5 companies' markups plus debt interest)

Our military is in shambles. why? republicans don't support the military. oh they have record military budgets, yes. but that's mostly to pay crony contractors for shiny toys and frivolous sub contracts. there's no money left for actual soldiers, their weapons, armor, medical care, or anything. But at least Blackwater makes a billion dollars a year running the largest and richest mercenary army in modern history.

Here's another word. Evasion. Under republicans when there's no more real accountability to corporations who evade their taxes, there's a record few corporations now who pay any taxes at all. They use our society that taxes pay for, but leave the bill for the rest of us to pay.

Then everybody runs out of money because they are paying for things they'd already paid for in taxes. So everybody has to borrow just to make ends meet. There's big trouble when they run out of equity for all that borrowing.

So when the us stops borrowing, and has to pay less interest... when it can pay for a stitch in time instead of nine... when it stops handing out the crown jewels and all our wealth to rich cronies... when it shuts down all the crony gravy trains... when it reigns in citizens and corporations who try to swindle us out of our fair share...

then we have heaps of money left over and we can easily afford to do all sorts of things. the whole government investment in the internet was merely $11B. What's that, a few weeks of Iraq contractor handouts?

So imagine all the things we could do if we were not burning all our money. Hillary Clinton knows all about this, and she's the one who will make our economy sing again.