The gaming of the broadband stimulus is going on in full force.
Consider Rachelle Chong’s testimony from last Thursday’s hearing on the ARRA deployment.
Chong: In 2006, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had the foresight to form a blue
ribbon Broadband Task Force, on which I served. The Task Force performed a
broadband mapping exercise and brought recommendations to […]
From Hendrik Rood in The Netherlands
This brief explanation in a comment to an article by the Economist on economic populism, takes a priceless summary of the workings of recent private equity take-overs in terms of Adam Smith’s well known example of a manufacturer of widgets …
Typical scenario for the last 18 years:
January -
Private Equity Investor […]
They speak of taking bad mortgages off the books. Problem is they can’t do that…everything is securitized, Sliced and diced good with the bad and then credit default swapped ten times…. ten layers of so called insurance. The total in mortgages is about 5 to 10 trillion. 700 billion will be […]
The cowardly democrats have capitulated.
As a friend wrote: And here’s Glenn Greenwald with the latest - including a direct response to the “yeah but right after 9/11…” argument…
And yes its is the immunity for the telco’s that is especially inexcusable. And quite depressing to see that Obama threw in the towel - as my […]
Posted in Political Soapbox on December 22nd, 2007 No Comments »
I asked Susan to comment on the issues of Milton Freidman and the death of public interest and the Kevin Martin FCC.
She replied: The problem with hymns to the free market is that the workings of that market depend on the existence of government boundaries. Without a level playing field of some kind (including antitrust […]
I grew up believing in an America that i can no longer recognize. War Department films that informed the public during World War II of the struggle to save Europe from the darkness of facism and nazism were given to my father at the end of the war by the War Department. Beginning […]
Scott Marcus worked at the FCC a few years back. Before that he helped build the Internet with BBN. And about a year ago he gave a deposition for the EFF on behalf of Mark Klein as the whistle blower in lawsuit against ATT for its illegal surveillance of Americans communications.
Scott knows what he […]
Moral of story that follows: if you sign up for online automatic credit card billing be very very careful to keep written notes of what you are doing and especially your user id and password which will NOT be variants of your Normal usual ID and passwords. If you don’t do this you […]
Cook’s Edge: I have been wondering how the merger negotiations could have been restarted only eight months ago - after being halted a year ago. Apparently NLR members were reminded that in 2008 they would be asked to make a second five million dollar buy in for another five years and another NLR network […]
Life in the American research and education networking community begins to look ever more strange. Over the past 16 years I have written a great deal about research networks. My writing has covered foreign research networks because until National Lambda Rail became operative in 2004, the United States had a research network only name. […]