View 589 September 21 - 27, 2009 (original) (raw)
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
The "Net Neutrality" debate may actually eclipse the health care debate this week. Many think there is nothing to debate: surely we are all for net neutrality? I have always questioned this. Many of those who want "net neutrality" are really interested in unlimited ability to download enormous files without having to pay for the increased bandwidth use.
This is probably the best argument against the proposed Net Neutrality rules I've ever read:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/
2009/09/fcc-neutrality-mistake/He makes the argument, much like the recent conversations, that the demand for a 'free' or unlimited good is infinite. Networks don't have infinite capacity. Take away ISP's ability to throttle and/or restrict traffic for certain applications and certain high-bandwidth users, and the only alternative is to implement hard total bandwidth caps for everyone or charge by the megabyte.
Perhaps I just don't see what problem these rules are trying to solve, but it's certain that they will cause new ones. I like my 30mbps service with a soft cap (i.e. don't abuse it, and we won't throttle you). I do download 30GB files for work about once a month, and have never been throttled. That's a pretty generous approach, and the last thing we need is the Government to screw it up.
Cheers,
Doug
I for one would not want my email to run slowly because my teenage neighbor is downloading the latest pornography while my more senior neighbors are using Hulu to escape paying the cable company for premium services.
Now I have nothing against safeguarding freedom of access including freedom of posting. The current system more or less does this: most ISP's have an informal limit on the amount of data you can move on the Internet. Exceed it and they slow you down. Making that limit formal, and having a schedule of fees, may make sense, although I haven't heard any credible claims of arbitrary discrimination on a basis of content. I fear, though, that whatever rules come out of FCC/Congress will end up protecting pornography and piracy at the cost of the rest of us.
The demand for a free good is infinite. If we get legalized net neutrality with enforcement, we may well find this out. The people of America get the government they want and they get it good and hard.
The High Price of College-Educated Unemployment
I originally intended this for Mail, but I wrote such a long reply that I have put it here.
Dear Jerry,
http://www.programmersguild.org/
docs/stephanie_job_11sept2009.html
"In May 2009, Kim's daughter Stephanie graduated from the University of Southern California (USC) with dual STEM degrees. (U.S. News ranks USC Engineering school 7th in the nation <http://grad-schools.usnews.
rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/
top-engineering-schools/rankings> .)... She has incurred student loans approaching six figures."
"M.S. Civil Engineering, Structural Engineering" "B.S. Civil Engineering, Building Science (Architectural Engineering)" "National Honor Societies: Chi Epsilon, Tau Beta Pi, Mortar Board (Webmaster), Phi Kappa Phi" "GPA: 3.840"
"In spite of a diligent search for work through the summer, she - along with many of her USC classmates - is unable to find a job...."
And almost $100k in student loans for this, proceeds paid to an "Institution" that has done nothing to oppose H1B and doubtless supports most or all aspects of "immigration". Further comment unnecessary.
Best Wishes,
Mark
ps In case any Chaos Manor readers are situated to act, the young lady's job resume is here:
http://www.programmersguild.org/docs/
stephanie_resume_civil_engineer.pdf
The student loan programs encourage people to go to expensive colleges. The colleges and universities will absorb as much money as is available; they don't compete on price, and the public institutions now use loans to finance their increasing prices. Despite new technologies, college costs never go down. Never. Most public institutions now charge what private colleges used to charge, and demand ever higher rates. There is never a demand to restrict enrollment thus cutting costs.
The Public Interest in state supported universities was that low cost education -- ideally free to state residents, which it was for a very long time in our history -- was a good investment for the state. Now there is no justification for spending that kind of tax money, and the middle class is being destroyed: citizens graduate with a lifetime of debts. Next year the government will take over the entire student loan program.
Of course the universities will not lower their costs and fees; so long as money is available they will absorb it. California had at one time a Master Plan: the Universities would do research and admit some undergraduates, but would mostly be institutions for advanced degrees. The State Colleges would not give advanced degrees but instead concentrate on undergraduate education. That of course did not survive faculty associations, and all the States Colleges are now State Universities, and in most cases detest undergraduate education even more than the University of California which isn't supposed to like undergraduates. Of course both need undergraduates to justify their state support from tax money.
This attitude is similar to the city of LA which is now whining that it will have to lay off police and fire people; the assumption is that the cubicle workers (also subject to some layoffs) are as valuable and necessary and justified in tax support as the fire and police and sanitation and water technical people. There is not even a pretense of looking at what city "programs" might be eliminated. When I was Deputy Mayor in LA we had 81 civil service exempt -- ie political -- city employees (I was one of them). There are now more than 600. There has never been a suggestion of cutting back on those, as there is no suggestion of cutting back on the civil service payroll.
The US system of tax supported higher education is never subject to any cost/effectiveness review. The story above is about a private university, and thus not properly subject to this tirade; the young lady thought it was worth acquiring lifetime debts in order to have a prestigious degree, and perhaps so: USC produces good engineers and other technical professionals (my late dentist, and his successor, were USC graduates and the present one is a former professor there). I don't mean to dump on USC, nor on the undergraduate programs of the University of California at Los Angeles for that matter. I do think it is time to reassess the cost/effectiveness of the higher education system, both nationwide and in California. What do we need from them? Are we getting it? Is there any way to cut the costs? I suspect that if the public higher education system had less money it would survive and have to cut costs. If it then charged less, the competition would be beneficial for the private universities.
In a rational world, we would not expect more than 10% of the population to benefit from a four year college education. In a rational political world we might expand that to 15% to include not only necessary technical and science education -- pre-med, engineering, physics, computer science, chemistry, the growing biological sciences. Of course in a rational society we would not give public support to growing numbers of voodoo science undergraduates. I won't comment on the public need to support ethnic and women's studies departments with taxpayer money.
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The Health Care Debate Continues: Medicare for All
First the costs. There is an interesting article on costs
http://www.chicagotribune.com/
news/nationworld/sns-dc-health-
costs,0,7927970.story
in today's paper. Of considerable interest to me is
Like the Senate, they have pledged to slash payments to Medicare Advantage, a popular, private insurance plan. The bill moving toward action in the House assumes $156 billion in savings from reduced Advantage payments.
But Advantage is used by one quarter of all Medicare recipients and many seniors say they like it because of its high level of service and convenience. Congress has shied away from cutting the program in the past. And Senate Finance will consider a proposal to protect it.
Medicare Advantage is the plan that pays Kaiser dues for myself and my wife, and undoubtedly kept me both alive and out of poverty when they discovered I had a brain tumor a couple of years ago. Under it we have a reasonable payment per physician visit and an even larger payment for laboratory work: nothing prohibits us from making medical appointments (such as with the oncologist, the dermatologist, our excellent primary practitioner, the cardiologist, etc.) and nothing prevents our getting lab tests, x-rays, and such, but the costs are sufficient that we aren't tempted to waste those resources. We pay into this through automatic deductions to our Social Security payments.
On that score, Theodore Roszak has an article in today's LA Times: Medicare for All which says the simple solution to the health care problem is to allow all those who don't today have free Medicare the opportunity to buy Medicare insurance. Medicare works. Let everyone in on it. It needs no new bureaucracy, and we have experience with it.
"If you're under 65 and want the Medicare option, you would have to pay a designated premium, which would have to be high enough to cover the costs of the expanded coverage. But it is bound to be lower than any private plan. (Seniors would still be covered, without paying a premium, as they are now.)"
Of course we don't know what that premium would be. Roszak's argument is that Medicare is here, it works, and while it has some cost problems those would be overcome if we eliminated fraud and waste. Since everyone says that we can finance whatever they're advocating from savings in fraud and waste, we don't need to take that statement too seriously, but it does cause me to wonder why we don't eliminate all that fraud without waiting for health care reform.
I have no idea what premium will be demanded. Roszak's article assumes the extended Medicare program would be voluntary. He assumes that there would have to be subsidies for the poor. He says that the program would be available to all and could not be denied for pre-existing causes; which would inevitably lead to gaming the system -- young people would be tempted not to buy a policy until they needed it, then rush out and get all they could. Whether these obvious objections can be overcome is not clear, so I at least can't speculate on the premium; I would presume it would be fairly large.
What we do know is that he proposes something specific that can be analyzed and is thus subject to a cost analysis. One suspects that such an analysis would be enlightening. I see no reason whatever to suppose that if fairly assessed it would cost less than any private plan, but I am prepared to be pleasantly surprised.
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I get an average of two dozen requests for blurbs (puffs, praise, for not yet published books) a year. Some come from my editors, and I always try to respond to those. Then there are the requests from authors I don't know. The same happens to us all, of course. Vonda McIntyre recently wrote about this. For anyone with an interest in the subject, this is worth looking at: http://blog.bookviewcafe.com/2009/
09/20/hunting-the-wily-cover-blurb/
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An interesting puzzle story. I have no idea what it might mean:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125356566517528879.html
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This just in:
Jerry,
For what it's worth, in a speech to a college crowd carried today by Fox News, the President admitted to the students that he hadn't taken calculus.
Of course many have not. To their disadvantage, but it's not an obvious disadvantage. To those who never took calculus (but did have Algebra) I recommend Calculus Made Easy and six months work, going through the problems and working them. What one fool can learn, another can -- and it's worth the learning because it induces one to think quantitatively about many things that didn't seem quantifiable before.
Calculus was invented in order to solve problems that would be too tough to solve without it. Like algebra it's really a form of low cunning.
