Reflections From a Murky Pond

In keeping with the neo-Socialist principles of the Liberals, President-elect Obama is pushing hard for a stimulus package that is essentially a modern version of FDR’s “New Deal”, which created a federal welfare state, devalued Us currency by ending the gold standard and ended prohibition. Obama has pledged that his incoming administration would make the largest “investment” in national infrastructure projects since the late 1950s. Among these projects is a plan for expanding access to Internet broadband, the so-called information superhighway.

Leaving aside for the moment all the “brick & mortar” projects Obama wants to use taxpayers’ money to fund, let’s look to the future in the form of “expanding access to Internet broadband.”

During the Great Depression and FDR’s resultant reactionary New Deal, the US Federal government tried to revive the American economy with the public work projects, this ended up paying people to dig unneeded ditches, ditches to nowhere. It is likely that Obama’s plan for expanding access to broadband internet services will end up in a similar fashion, having built “information superhighways to nowhere.” President-elect Barack Obama and many Liberal want to spend billions of tax dollars on a nationwide broadband build-out as part of his planned economic stimulus package. But how do we ensure that those billions aren’t spent creating the 21st century equivalent of ditches to nowhere?

Essentially the question of how to spend the money is not one that can be answered. The underlying coverage and usage data is just not available. Only a tiny few know anything substantive about the internet’s actual infrastructure and those that do know aren’t sharing that information with policymakers, regulators, or their competitors.

The FCC has essentially created a fictional story about broadband’s growth and deployment. Had the FCC done the actual work to examine the history of broadband and then questioned why America was not getting properly upgraded, we wouldn’t be 15th in the world in broadband.

—  Bruce Kushnick
TeleTruth,
An Alliance for Customers’ Telecommunications Rights

Earlier FCC found that its data collection on internet broadband was incomplete and thus ruled that AT&T, Qwest and Verizon could stop filing some reports – because the reporting requirements did not extend to cable companies, as well as more traditional telecommunications companies.

Without public data how can the US federal government find anything close to best way of making the internet more resilient, accessible and secure? With little or no data to work from and the very real probability of this being a useless waste of tax dollars, this does sound a lot like a 21st century version of FDR’s New Deal.

There’s been a fair amount of media coverage of- and hoopla over the Congressionally mandated switch over to all-digital television broadcasts within the US with its “drop dead” date for analog receivers being February 18, 2009. The oft-repeated message coming from both the US government and the television broadcast companies has been, “don’t panic.” There are many ways to keep millions of televisions in American households from going black.

I think its good that the US government and the television broadcast companies have both made sure that digital television antennas and analog-to-digital converter boxes are readily available to the households who don’t subscribe to cable or satellite TV sources. I also think it’s good that the US government and television broadcast companies doing what they can to keep this switch-over from becoming a cause for mass panic. We certainly don’t want the US public to fear that their television may be taken way 😉

But question remained floating around in my mind. Why is our government forcing this change to happen, and what is the US government’s “interest” in passing legislation to mandate the switch-over from analog to digital television?

The Given Answer(s)

Analog TV signals use the 700MHz (698 – 806MHz) frequency band, this means that by nature, they have a longer range than those frequency bands used by the wireless and electronics industries. Freeing the whole of that spectrum from television’s use could mean easier and cheaper deployment of broadband networks, which could translate to more affordable, widespread high-speed Internet access for consumers.

A portion (24 MHz at or near the upper end) of the 700MHz spectrum would also be set aside for police, fire, ambulance and other public safety responders who must rely on the analog spectrum to communicate due to its greater range and coverage.

By the time of the 2009 switch-over, the US government will have auctioned the remaining parts of the 700MHz spectrum to companies interested in deploying wireless technologies. The proceeds from these auctions are estimated at about $10 billion by the Congressional Budget Office.

Coffee – the dark and invigorating brew that fuels Americans every morning – could soon be providing energy to far more than just our bodies and minds. Engineers at the University of Nevada have proven that used coffee grounds can be effectively used as a source for both biodiesel and solid fuel pellets.

Details of their findings can be found here [PDF].

Every 1,000,000 pounds of coffee grounds can produce just slightly over 13,900 gallons of biodiesel and 847,600 lbs of solid fuel pellets. Since Starbucks generates an estimated 210,000,000 – yes, 210 million – pounds of spent coffee grounds per year in the US, the researchers at the University of Nevada believe that Starbucks could amount to 2,920,000 gallons of biodiesel and 89,000 tons of fuel pellets. This would represent just slightly less than 2.00% (1.986%) of the estimated 147,000,000,000 gallons of diesel fuel required by the US and Europe annually. Now that’s some go juice!

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