Open Letter to FCC Chairman Powell 298
Adina Levin writes "An open letter to FCC chairman Michael Powell signed by internet and tech industry pioneers explains why the government shouldn't prop up the ailing telecom behemoths. Telecom companies bought expensive network technology with long bonds. That technology has been made obsolete by gear getting faster and cheaper all the time by Moore's law and Metcalfe's law. The telecom companies are asking for the equivalent of a bailout for their investments in sailing ships after the advent of steam. The way to speed the deployment of broadband to homes isn't to prop up businesses based on old technology, but to let uncompetitive businesses 'fail fast', and let new competitors play."
Legitimate reason for bailout? (Score:5, Insightful)
Would letters from other people help? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, yes and no... (Score:5, Insightful)
Would future network investment be made less attractive id this was the case. Apparently, "Moores Law" makes any investment depreciate so rapidly that all progress is futile.
This so obviously is not the case.
No bailouts (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies with failed business models should be allowed to fail: that is The American Way. This economy depends on the fact that failing companies die, and in their place better/faster companies are born. Just like any other healthy ecosystem, we need a certain amount of "churning" to keep things moving. Stagnation is bad, and will only lead to long-term problems.
Re:Privatize them! (Score:4, Insightful)
You are trolling, aren't you. In case you don't know about it, go look up Railtrack - the UK privatised rail company that recently declared bankrupcy, leaving the UK govt with the options of a bailout of closing down the rail network. They chose the bailout. The sucessor company (Network rail) is a not-for-profit co.
By all means, prop them up. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Legitimate reason for bailout? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but I'd sure miss the powers granted to me by the fact that I live in a democracy right now, and the rights granted to me by my country's constitution.
Go back to the jungle, or participate in a free fight, if you think that's best for humanity. But please allow the rest of us to strive for some civilization. Thanks.
Typical corporate behaviour... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Privatize them! (Score:5, Insightful)
Riiiight. The streets around your house will look awful funny when only 70% of your neighbours pay their road construction bills. 30% of your street will be dirt road, the rest paved?
I suppose education should be completely privatized too. That way, the only chance a child from a lower economic class has to make something of themselves will be torn away because their parents can only afford to choose two of these three alternatives: 1) feed them 2) clothe them 3) educate them.
I suppose, by your logic, that I should have to pay for my own dedicated wiring from my house to the electricity provider of my choice, right? Would we really have, like, 99% of all houses connected to the electical grid (therefore, accelerating the growth of other technologies like electrical appliances) if distribution was privatized? Would there be any incentive to have a step down station in bumsville, nowhere?
Markets work, u know?
Markets work with quite a bit of help. Do you think they'd work if we didn't have laws regulating fraud, disclosure, etc.?
Re:'Little' people would suffer the most (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that the companies will go under. No-one will go around digging up the fibre and copper which are already under ground. Companies that fail will have their assets bought by someone who is not failing. Control of the last-mile will move. The companies are trying to avoid corporate failure. The reason there is an argument, at a philosophical level, is not that some companies will die, but that control of the last-mile will move to companies which have a different paradigm entirely. That is what the corporates are trying to make the government fear, not the actual economics of bankruptcy for certain specific players.
~cHrisWhere are the Internet pioneers (Score:3, Insightful)
Who are they? Is it reasonable to call someone an "Internet pioneer" even if he or she hasn't (co-)authored an RFC carrying a three-digit number?
Re:Well, yes and no... (Score:5, Insightful)
You realise we're talking about corporations? Businesses. Legal entities. Not humans. They're not war veterans. They deserve no special loyalty simply because they were first or paid 'too much' for their equipment. Do we celebrate and subsidize the construction companies who laid the first interstate highways? Well, maybe, but not for that reason.
The owners and employees who started the telcos and grew them and maintained them have already been amply rewarded - they were paid while they were doing it and they got to see the value of their stocks grow. If they want more money, they have plenty of other options besides being subsidized by the Federal Govt.
Security of Internet-based phone system (Score:5, Insightful)
This is because every node on the internet can have packets directed at it by any other node. That's the whole point of end-to-end. But that means any joker with a PC can log in to his ISP and start up h4x0r scr1pt5 to start cracking phone switches.
With the current phone system, control signaling is out of band - end users can only control the phones at each end of the connection, and cannot control the functioning of the switches in between. You can command the switches by dialing a number, but you can only route your call this way, not control the basic functioning of the switch.
To a large extent security can be maintained by keeping the telco equipment in securely locked buildings.
But the protocols used for the phone system apparently aren't designed with security in mind, so that when they are adapted to the Internet, they become gaping security holes.
Potentially someone could do some clever work and bring down a whole nation's phone system, if it were on the Internet.
The convergence of the telephone system and the Internet has already been going on for a while. It is quite common for long-distance calls to be routed over the Internet, so you get phone-to-phone VOIP without the user being aware of it.
It is also common for telcos to be ISPs, and they just use the same fiber for voice and data. It's more economical to use the same data formats and protocols for voice as well as data, so they transmit all the voice calls with the Internet Protocol.
Re:Legitimate reason for bailout? (Score:5, Insightful)
Like health care? "Sorry, sir. I know there's a gaping wound in your skull and that it hurts, but your credit is no good here. Please go away and die outside in the gutter with all the other poor people."
Like law enforcement? "I'm sorry, sir, but there's nothing we can do. You have not paid for our police services. We cannot dispatch officers even if there's a murderous psychopath banging on your door with a bloody knife in his hand."
Like rescue services? "I'm sorry to hear that your house is on fire, sir, but we are a business not a charity. You should remember to pay your bills next time."
And so on...
People like Friedman and Hayek have proved
You can't really prove anything in even hard sciences like physics. Saying that something has been proven in economics or sociology is just ridiculous. Like psychology, economics and sociology are not hard, predictive sciences (some would say that they're not science at all) in the same sense as physics or chemistry.
If capitalism were a scientific theory, it would have been dropped a long time ago because it has no real predictive power and often contradicts with the real world observations.
neo-economic-liberal bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
I sincerely hope that you are joking, or playing devil's advocate. The "market economy" is a fiction, created by government contrivance. Do you really believe that it is some sort of objective truth? or that it is the ultimate expression of human desire for advancement?
The market economy has done such an excellent job in protecting the environment and promoting individual liberty. Ironically enough, the "free market" has given us the most blatent interferences in market freedom that we have seen.
This is not to say that the market is undesirable or is not an excellent allocator of (some) resources - just that is it insufficient as a complete societal model.
von Hayek (Score:2, Insightful)
I want to mention that Hayek, at least in "The Road to Serfdom", does not call for an abolishment of government. He seems to acknowledge, as many of us do, a need for it. Our founding fathers did.
The problem is, combined federal, state and local government here now represents about 50% of the market place, as opposed to around 5% prior to 1910. Truly this is *the* metric that shows clearly the US is now a collectivist / socialist enterprise.
History shows (Russia, National Socialist Germany, etc..) us that such a model does not work. It is a non competitive model. At best it can limp along, but will not provide liberty, self determination, self actualization. It cannot provide *opportunity* for a middle class. "We're in a tight spot!" - Oh Brother.
The states now feel the pinch (punch) of this last fed induced mania. For some excellent data and commentary on the current state, see Michael Hodges "Grandfather Economic Report". Best, Dave
Re:Legitimate reason for bailout? (Score:0, Insightful)
You are not speaking of the United States, are you? I don't know of any rights granted to me by the constitution. If anything, the people have ceded certain rights to the government.
Re:Can we add to the letter? (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact the situation is even worse. (Score:3, Insightful)
Compare an OC3 from a Bell -vs- an OC3 from a native ethernet provider like Cogent. These are two different worlds of cost.
But hey, let the FCC do what they will, we'll just add it to the list of criminal frauds already commited when it's time to impeach and imprison Bush and his administration.
The market economy depends on a strong government. (Score:5, Insightful)
Without such a strong government, producents will join force in guilds, who keep the market closed to outsiders, by force if necessary. This was the situation until the development of nation states with a strong King as the leader.
Unfortunately, this violates the foundation for the Libertarian belief, namely that all evil is created by government and all good come from the market. And as always when belief and reality slashes, the believers are unable to see the reality.
Of course, this isn't an excuse for the government to take up other tasks than ensuring that players on the market follow the rules.
I have to wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Please, please, don't bail out Worldcom! We all want to grab a piece of that 50% Internet backbone share for ourselves! Don't bail them out!" ?
It's Called Retirement Through Attrition (Score:5, Insightful)
Government's do not scrap entire fleets when a new technology improves over what is in existance, they strat building new ships and as the older, obsolete ships either sink, are lost in battle, or are too old to maintain they are replaced.
There is some old technology out there, and anyone seeking a bailout on that should be denied. Airlines should be denied bailouts, unless the money is used to go toward improved tech. The $100,000 switch of yesteryear can be replaced with a more relaible $25,000 switch that can handle more traffic, then that is what the money should go for -- improvements.
If their business model is failing, many airlines are in this boat only because of the lessed travel, then they need to adjust..close hubs, discontinue routes, etc. Yes, it would suck for the people that are affected, but what is to stop them from forming a local company to fill the void? It may be too expensive to run a daily flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco for a major airline using a big jet, because there are only 30 people wanting to go each day on average, but a smaller company with a 10 passenger leer could make 3 trips a day, and probably be very profitable.
Government should seek to involve itself in National Defense and Policies, and Proteciton of the Populace -- everything else should be a local matter.
Re:Well, yes and no... (Score:3, Insightful)
I admit that I don't know the entire picture, but I know some of it, and the fact is that the government put the Baby Bells into this situation.
How? Well, up until 1996 the telecomm industry was heavily regulated by a mishmash of federal, state, and local laws, the local Public Service Commissions, and Judge Greene. It basically meant that any and all purchasing decisions had to be approved by the PSCs, who didn't understand technology and required the RBOC's to ammortize purchases over extremely long time periods - even when the RBOCs knew that it wasn't viable. The flip side to this is that the PSCs did, by and large, fulfill their obligation to the public by keeping costs down. Mostly.
I don't know that this is what caused the RBOCs to buy equipment with long term bonds, but if it was then damn right the government is on the hook. You can't tell someone they have to buy a long term contract, then ditch them when it doesn't work out. Or maybe you'd like to see that happen. Have a home mortgage at a low interest rate right now? Want the bank to ditch you when interest rates go back up? Didn't think so.
Do we celebrate and subsidize the construction companies who laid the first interstate highways?
Apples and oranges. The interstate highways are public throughfares. They are owned by the state governments. This is not true for the telecomm network - it's owned and operated by corporations. The government licensed them, gave them some right of ways, but did not pay in whole for the network as they did for the interstate highway system. If this had occurred then we'd pay our phone bills directly to the government - what fun that would be. We'd probably be employing the rest of the world to do operator based switching still.
I'm not arguing purely in favor of subsidizing them. What I am saying is that we don't have the full picture here. But, frankly, if you think letting the RBOCs go belly up would be a good thing then you really don't understand economics or how the telecomm system works.
Re:Can we add to the letter? (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Reverse Deregulation. Ever since deregulation occoured, our bills (phone, cable, et al) have doubled, and in some cases tripled.
Yes, but consumers have recieved increased value in a number of ways: 1)The price long distance has come down dramtically. 2)It's hard to argue that the cost of cellphone service is being entirely born by cell phone service users. 3)A lot of phone and cable companies have used increased revenues to establish Internet services.
2. Bring webcasting down to a tolerable level. The fees webcasters have to pay are just insane. How about listening to the people instead of just these big businesses who want to squash the small-time communications industry? It does fall under communications, after all...
You are right, but the solution is market_mechanisims_pricing_copyrighted_material. (See my coment below) Also, communities that grant local monopolies to cable companies should insist that monopoly holders provide public access channels and studio equipment to encourage production of independant/local content to compete with content controled by the RIAA & MPAA.
Lay the smack down on the RIAA and MPAA. Please refer to #2. Originally, the two were created to oversee standards. Now they want to limit fair use and basically rule the industry? That's what happens when too much power is allowed to run rampant.
Pray that the Supremes see the light on Eldred vs
Ashcroft, and send the case back to the lower court with instructions to phase out copyright extensions that have been granted since 1790. Ditto for patent term lengths. In this day of rapid technological change, 50 years seems to long for patent protection.
Free the Internet, or at least bring it down to a cost-effective level. We're paying entirely too much for something that could help advance all people. Why should the less-fortunate not be able to afford access?
I assume you mean deregulate the internet. There is no way to force suppliers to provide goods and services below cost; at least not in the long run. Regulation (with or without subsidies)eventually means higher prices, poorer quality, & reduced supply.
This one's personal. Make MTV change it's name. It's not music television anymore, so why not change it to C(rap)TV. And for those who care, I'm not knocking rap. Just the crap (Real World, Road Rules, Jackass especially) that they put on that god forsaken channel...
does seem personal
Re:Let the Baby Bells compete (Score:3, Insightful)
Which sounds all fine and good, except that they're not allowed to charge for infrastructure costs. How much did it cost to upgrade the CO to DSL? To restructure wiring? To perform service upgrades? Doesn't matter, can't charge for it.
The flip side to this is that traditionally the RBOCs have used exactly these costs (and generally inflated them) to prevent competition. To put it bluntly - they fucked other companies for a decade and now they're being punished for it.
Of course, this doesn't help anyone who can't get DSL because it doesn't make economic sense for the RBOC to upgrade. Or the various telecomm supply companies who have seen their contracts evaporate because the RBOCs aren't willing to invest in infrastructure at this point.
Re:Legitimate reason for bailout? (Score:2, Insightful)
It might not be that way with a head injury... but it's that way with AIDS patients in lots of cities. Not to mention those needing an organ donation. And lots of other cases since the HMO's became popular.
Re:Legitimate reason for bailout? (Score:5, Insightful)
And I am happy to know that if I am burgled or mugged the criminal will rarely have a gun and that it's even rarer that the gun will be used. Regardless of whether the cops will catch the criminal, I can cope with losing some money or property.
Health care? You have only to go to a socialist country to see how that works. They won't throw you out in the gutter, but they will make you get in line, possibly for months to remedy serious ailments such as cancer.
Well, you could say I've been to a socialist country: I was born in a one with mostly state controlled economy. I am currently living abroad in a Northern European country which has had a large socialist party in the government for the last twenty decades. And you know what? The living standards are excellent in both countries. Working public transportation, no people living under the poverty line (check out the US and UK stats in the CIA worldbook for comparison), free public schooling, public libraries and goverment subsidized university level education to allow even the low wage blue collar workers' kids to have an advanced degree if they so choose. Crime is low because the social "safety net" will provide you with basic necessities even you go completely bankcrupt.
As far as your medical care argument goes, you couldn't be more wrong when it comes to Northern Europe and Scandinavia (UK public health care is in real shambles, though). As I've pointed out in one of my recent posts, I've undergone several surgeries. The latest problem with the eye was diagnosed at a private clinic (you know, private clinics are allowed even if the public health care is run by the government!), I got a referral to the local hospital (state run university hospital) and was under the knife in a week. I spent another week in the ward and paid $200 for that - the $8000 operation itself was paid by the society. I pay the progressive 28% income tax gladly for a system like that that is accessible to all citizens regardless of their income (unlike insurances).
You should know more about practical socialism before your spout nonsense like that. That's the kind of black and white reasoning that's not realistic. There is a middle ground between dog-eat-dog capitalism and total commitment to a government run economy, you know.
Re:Legitimate reason for bailout? (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with airline failures (Score:5, Insightful)
If you allow unprofitable airlines to fail, there are side effects. Right now, you can get anywhere pretty easily and pretty cheaply. For a while, the regulated airline market had heavily regulated costs that helped keep all costs "reasonable."
The problem with "market forces" is that it ignores externalities. There is an overall economic benefit to having small cities connected to the nation's air travel grid. The nation as a whole benefits, but the airlines are only compensated for some of it.
You can't worship at the altar of market capitalism (and you SHOULD) without understanding and appreciating the problems that externalities create. Figuring out how to internalize externalities, which IS a legit role of the government, is VERY tricky business. The more you internalize externalities, the BETTER the market functions.
Let me give a hypothetical. Airline A services small towns in 10 states connecting them to business centers. The airline agrees to continue service with a $1 billion bailout because the routes are unprofitable. If the routes result in business of $10 billion, and alternatives like video conferencing would only produce $6 billion dollars, than the airlines are worth $4 billion to society. In this case, it's a no brainer, because it will also generate over $1 billion in tax revenues. What if alternatives would develop $9 billion? Society is a wash on the decision, economically, but the bailout might still make sense because of the side effect of making people in those states live better by being able to vacation.
We definitely need churning, but you need to look beyond the sum requested by the company, political ideology, and desire for churning. You need to understand what the full economic consequences are before judging an economic action.
Alex
Re:Legitimate reason for bailout? (Score:5, Insightful)
The primary reason most people advocate capitalism is ETHICAL, not scientific. It was liberals and their endless dreams of micromanaging the perfect society that gave birth to that study.
Indeed - you only have to look at the fine examples of capitalistic ethics provided recently by companies such as Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossing etc to realise how unnecessary government regulation in the free market is.
As far as your other statements, many of us wish there WAS no police force. I am perfectly capable of defending myself, and have a license to carry a Ruger .38 to do so.
Ah yes, and of course the police do nothing that giving everyone a gun wouldn't. It's like I've always said: you can't beat a heavily-armed lynch mob for a meticulous and professional criminal investigation leading to a fair and open trial.
Health care? You have only to go to a socialist country to see how that works. They won't throw you out in the gutter, but they will make you get in line, possibly for months to remedy serious ailments such as cancer. Even dialysis machines are hardly easily accessible.
And of course, limiting access to healthcare according to personal wealth or employability is such a fair way of arranging things, isn't it? After all, it's obviously entirely your own fault if you're poor or unemployed. I'm sure many of the /. readers left jobless by recent events in the tech industry will back me up on this one.
Incidentally, which socialist countries are you thinking of? How about Cuba as a counter-example? The health service there is excellent, and completely free at the point of use.
Capitalism is ethical? (Score:5, Insightful)
In what theory is capitalism ethical? Nothing in my readings has any statements about an ethical dimension.
> Health care? You have only to go to a socialist country to see how that works. They won't throw you out in the gutter, but they will make you get in line, possibly for months to remedy serious ailments such as cancer.
So what happens if I have cancer, but no money for treatment? How is this different to the "socialist" case?
> You need to think about more than one possibility. Chanting to yourself over and over again "Government can solve my problems, government can solve my problems" is not going to work.
As opposed to chanting "Government can't solve my problems" or "Only the market can solve my problems"?
Re:No bailouts (Score:3, Insightful)
PS. Unlike criminal law, which is incredibly unforgiving.
Re:The problem with airline failures (Score:3, Insightful)
Why can't that $10 billion business afford to pay a little more for airline tickets?
It's really just a choice: who should pay that $1 billion: just those who benefit from it? Or everyone?
Re:Legitimate reason for bailout? (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't their existing infrastructure, and
social dependency on that infrastructure, give them a somewhat legitimate need for a bailout?
As far as I know, the citizens of the US are engaged in an ongoing "bailout" of the Baby Bells... that's what all of the tariffs, etc. on the standard phone bill are for.
We've *paid* for the infrastructure, allowing the telcos to profit from their regional monopolies for decades.
I think that it is time to reclaim our ownership of it, decouple the infrastructure from the services by making infrastructure maintenance the province of non-profit organizations, forcing the the Baby Bells to compete for services on a level playing field.
Of course, it will never happen - the Baby Bells spend enormous amounts of lobbying money at both the state and federal level to retain their "ownership" and control of "their" infrastructure, and the fact that our money was spent to build out their regional infrastructures is something they'd prefer everyone ignore.
Oddly, one of the justifications that the Baby Bells continue to use for tariffs is to guarantee services in low population density areas... yet these regions are still lagging far behind more populous locations in DSL availability (and even quality POTS lines) because it isn't "cost effective" for the Bells to roll out such services there, despite the fact that the tariffs are supposed to eliminate cost considerations in such places in the first place!
Further, the ILECs continue to prevent competition from CLECs whenever possible.
True story: Here in Upstate NY I had a customer that wanted high speed Internet access... they are located in a small rural town, and a T1 line wasn't an option due to the cost. The POTS lines are lousy (and have been for the nearly 2 decades that I've done service there), and the local cable company didn't offer cablemodem services because their infrastructure couldn't support it and the owner wasn't prepared to make the financial commitment to rebuild the cable plant in town.
The ILEC in this case (Verizon) wouldn't even offer them ISDN, which was in theory available, would have been at least acceptable for their Internet needs (which were basic email and light Web-browsing for some 20 LAN users).
Well, after some searching, I found a CLEC that could offer DSL albeit "only" at 256Kbps due to distance) and local business dialtone service as well. There was much rejoicing, and plans were made to roll it out. A few other companies in town discovered what this company doing, and they too expressed an interest in DSL for their Internet access. It looked like a "win-win" for everyone: My customers would get cost-effective Internet access, lower cost business telephone service, the CLEC would get business that Verizon couldn't (or wouldn't) provide and my company would make money installing the firewalls, routers, mail servers, etc.
When Verizon found out what was going on, they closed the POP from which the CLEC was operating, splitting the services between 2 small cities in the area, citing "lack of demand for services" from that location as the reason for their actions, thereby eliminating the CLEC's ability to deliver local dial tone and DSL services to that town.
This is the same Verizon that is now allowed to offer long distance services because they have sufficiently opened up the last mile to competition...
The more things change, the more they stay the same, at least here in Verizonland.
It's obvious to me that so long as the RBOCs have control of the last mile, continue to have it supported by tax dollars, credits and tariffs, and abuse their monopoly control over it, that they will *not* compete, but will simply continue to ask for more money from us and the government when their mistakes cost them money.
Time to wean them from the public teat. No more bailouts!
But what if they did? (Score:3, Insightful)
sidewalks: probably wouldn't exist - except along the lines of "gated communities", with boards far more oppressive than the regular governments could ever dream of. In the cities where sidewalks are absolute necessities, the quality of the sidewalk would be directly proportional to the affluence of the neighborhood - and might even help propel runaway gentrification and disinvestment (or not, since any functional society needs people from a variety of economic levels - that's why they've got rent control in New York).
telcos: until the advent of wireless/satellite communication, the rural areas would almost certainly remain poorly or completely unconnected, putting them at a significant economic and social disadvantage. Industrialized farming would have had an even easier time taking over the farming market. Populations would be much more concentrated in the cities. On the positive side suburban sprawl would probably be significantly curtailed.
If free market principles applied to roads (and to a lesser degree power) the exact same things as above would probably happen, only much more so. As for water and waste... those are two things where the community, up to and including the international community, gets involved because it affects them directly.
Of course there are countless examples on the books along these lines, and where real money is involved it gets much uglier. Unless the government regulates it into something acceptable at the behest of the (generally angry) people, the rich and powerful will increasingly manipulate and monopolize the markets (and the law, and the money) legally and illegally for their personal gain regardless of how badly it affects others. "Free Market" is an oxymoron. Those who want it the most are always either rich or think they could be - and if they actually got it almost all would be disabused of their hopes and money rapidly.
A meddling beauracracy versus a greedy oligarchy -fiscal democrats versus moneyed republicans.
Re:Legitimate reason for bailout? (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is why every day, I consider leaving the US.
Re:Legitimate reason for bailout? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd take your civic-mindedness at a higher value if you understood that the Constitution doesn't grant rights.
Pay particular attention to the 9th and 10th amendments.
Re:Legitimate reason for bailout? (Score:5, Insightful)
I just moved back to the states from the Uk, having lived there for 3 years and 1 year in Switzerland.
I found the health care in switzerland to be excelent, even though it was private. You had to have healthcare, to be registered in a city.. which you had to be to legally rent an apartment. The taxes where I was living was about 14% total, not including taxes on things like Garbage (yes,a stamp had to be put on every bag you take out.. at 1 dollar per bag, it encourages you to recycle everything you can).
My wife went to the doctor a few times, for this and that, and was quite happy with the modern clinic. The doctors seemed progressive and would offer medicine that was both herbal and western in nature. (No robotusin for a cold, but a herbal concoction you get at the pharmacy).
Anyway, I loved the swiss method of handling things, and at 1% un-employement, and guarding their borders in a way that would make the queen of england prooud, they don't seem to have a lot of the problems that other EU countries have with the poor and destitute.
Now, england is a complete flip-side. I have spent more hours sitting in a clinic waiting for the bloody doctor to just show up for work. (No appointment at my local surgery). When the doctor does show up, they seem to not give a damn about what the problem is. My wife sat waiting to be seen for almost 6 hours. No joke. A co-worker waited 7 months for status on a testicular lump that he was worried might be cancer. Yada yada.
When we found out we where having a baby, our first, we decided to pack our stuff up and move back to the states. Pretty scarry stuff. I can't speak for the rest of the EU, I am sure that they are in better shape than Uk. I was watching a debate on Brittish TV, and there is a statistic that if you get stomach cancer, your chance of survival is 6%. In the US your chance of survival is 61%. Fricken nuts.
And as for shoving people out the door. When we came back the US, we didn't have a job or much money. We immediately qualified for medicade and even after I got my new job, the state took care of the child birth and all the expenses including 6 months of birth control after the child birth for my wife and 3 follow up visits. Now we are back on private health care with my job, but to say that the hospital kicked me out is plain false.
I don't think that my case is special. I don't think that a lot of people realize is that in the US, there is help if you really need it. I am not a bum out on the street, but when we moved back to the US.. we did need some help, and I am glad we had it.
Private sector will always be better off than public, even in healthcare. What they need to do is put legislation in to keep the mall-practive law-suits under control and help keep the costs down so insurance isn't expensive for everyone. Look at the mortality rates across the board, you will be surprised what america's health care is churning out. It was a big enough difference for me to move across the world to have our baby.
Cheers
Re:Free markets (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't speak to psychologists, because those people are nuts, but most economists I've spoken to are generally concerned with 'cases that don't work' only in that they are trying to improve the models. I would also disagree with placing either discipline in the 'liberal arts' category. They can (and usually are) studied as scientific disciplines. Yes, they are probably best termed 'soft sciences' relative to chemistry, but they certainly have more in common with biology than they do with English Literature.
(I canceled my Comcast modem and television service last week. Originally, I just wanted to get rid of the television service, but they told me that if I did, they were going to jack up my cable modem price by $15. I told them to cancel everything.)
I'll try not to be snide here, but without context, this sounds like biting off your nose to spite your face. Are you dropping the service because they make too much money? How do you determine that? Profit (to be distinguished from 'economic profit') is perfectly acceptable. How are prices set? A common misconception is that it is "(price of goods or services) + x%" where 'x' is an arbitrary amount that someone decides the company 'needs'. This is not true. Price is determined based on (here goes the ugly word) markets. In a transaction, both sides get a deal that is acceptable to themselves. If Comcast says that $100 per month is a good price for them (and how they arrive at that is often based on the above formula) that's fine. As a customer, do you feel you are receiving enough service for that $100 per month? That's all that matters. Why should a consumer care how much Comcast gets? All that really matters is what YOU get.
Sorry, I lost it somewhere and started rambling.
Re:impeach and imprison your attitude (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:How Corruption Works (Score:1, Insightful)
sarcasm
Re:Free markets (Score:2, Insightful)