Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
I Was Working At A Wisconsin County Client:
Never Forget 9/11
I had to be at the facility at 7:30 AM (on top of an 80-mile commute from northern Illinois), basically to ensure that the test upgrade databases and application processes were up at 8 AM (the county DBA's were responsible for overnight backups). The fellow contractor Indian developer on the upgrade team lived locally and usually watched Today before driving to the courthouse. He arrived at work shouting incoherently about some plane flying into a building. My initial inference was that it was maybe some Cessna which ran into mechanical problems and went back to my work--I was tech lead on a critical upgrade project to go live in just a month. I noted, with exasperation, how all the county employees seem to be huddled around portable TV sets somebody brought in; I was getting briefed in bits and pieces by colleagues and county workers; it was clear something was very wrong: these were airliners purposefully flown into skyscrapers, then the followup Pentagon and Flight 93 incidents. The entire airline system was shut down; I recently connected to a former fellow high school freshman who was married to an airline pilot on another unrelated flight, and he was diverted to an interim destination. I probably didn't see any footage until I got home at 9 PM or so and got on the Internet. The next several days were surreal; there were fears of a follow-up wave of attacks. I arrived at the courthouse to find a group in prayer out front and joined in. I saw more bipartisanship in Washington in the aftermath than I had seen in years.
There were severe economic consequences that went well beyond the devastated travel industry. I had never applied for the Wisconsin gig. I was interested in an Austin project the company was recruiting for. The president of the consulting company was worried about the Wisconsin project, whose references led to the Oregon and Austin wins. He explained the Austin project was still in the future, but he had a DBA problem on his reference project, which was behind schedule and on a fixed bid. He didn't want to work with independents and he didn't want to cover travel from California. He wanted me to go perm and claimed his company had never had a layoff in its history. He mentioned hiring a road warrior consultant from the East Coast who never billed a single hour (all travel expenses covered) and left on his own after 6 months. I did single-handedly bring us back on schedule (I think the client demanded a one or 2-week extension to do additional testing, which the company gave them, despite having to eat the extra costs, mostly in the hope of landing a follow-up project). After a successful cutover going live, I was told to report the next Monday to do some Oracle patching on internal installed training Apps; instead, I found myself scheduled into an exit interview. I think most of their government clients had frozen projects in the pipeline.
Chart of the Day: Male Privilege
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| Courtesy of Carpe Diem |
The Fascist Amendment To Restrict Political Speech Fails Cloture Vote: Thumbs UP!
This bogeyman nonsense about campaign money buying elections has been thoroughly debunked over the years. For example, GOP candidates for Senate from Missouri and Indiana, both veteran politicians, not novices, who seemed to be all but certain to win the 2012 general election made unforced errors discussing women's issues of little relevance to national policies and they were never able to regain momentum. I have pointed out that wealthy candidates don't necessarily win office (Romney and Perot come to mind) despite the ability to spend millions of their own money. Eric Cantor was decisively defeated by an underfunded unknown economics professor for renomination this year. Charlie Crist, then governor and establishment-favored Senate candidate in 2010, got crushed by an unexpected challenger, Marco Rubio.
Is life unfair? No doubt. I couldn't get elected dogcatcher--I don't have a voter-friendly surname (imagine if I had been the write-in candidate in the 2010 Alaska Senate election...) I've rarely had decision-making power to impose my will, even when as a problem solving expert, I knew the right decision to make. I've had to convince bosses or other business meetings to my point of view. I've had to negotiate and compromise. I have a phenomenal work ethic and would be relentless trying to cut spending, burdensome, anticompetitive regulations; I would build or join coalitions. Unlike most people, I'm very good at both the "big picture" and details. And I truly have no incentive other than the future of my fellow citizens; I'm already doing that in this blog. I've done all of this without a penny from anyone. I'm a true believer in the free market. That being said, the chance I could ever win a political race is laughable (even with all else, I've been far too direct, even in this blog, where I'm sure I've said something that offends almost everyone else). I didn't mean to make this a conversation about me, but let's just say I don't mind other people getting credit, I wouldn't be in it to get my name on infrastructure, and I'm not interested in being there for the rest of my life or in some prestigious or lucrative post-political career. I wish there were people like me running for office. The idea that I would be a shill for some crony capitalist is laughable; I want to do away with corrupt tax or regulatory gimmicks.
The Net Neutrality Kerfuffle
If you haven't noticed, there's a new gadget I've configured to run in the upper right corner of the blog: don't break the Internet (see here for the relevant website and its sponsoring parent, Tech Freedom, here). I don't want to get into an arcane discussion here, but there is a lot of propaganda going on with proponents in favor of meddling with the Internet through dysfunctional, pushing-on-a-string regulation. In some cases, companies like NetFlix (disclosure: I used to subscribe when I lived in California and subsequently in Illinois; I discontinued for service and budget issues and had a negative experience where they initially claimed to have not reclaimed one of the discs back) have tried to co-opt the net neutrality issue in what I would regard as a classic crony capitalism setup; NetFlix can account for up to a third of peaktime Internet used capacity some evenings and obviously has a vested interest in any regulatory rulemaking; crony capitalists preditably try to engage in regulatory capture--basically writing terms to businesses it can't impose in a competitive marketplace, typically at the expense of smaller competitive rivals (just to throw a sample concept, suppose the existence of an upstart videosharing service).
To understand some of the kerfuffle, one needs to understand the concept of Title II, a broad authority used to rationalize federal overregulation of landline communications. As Tech Freedom points out, No, Title II Doesn’t Ban Prioritization OR Mandate Free Interconnection, (The former discussion refers to the bogeyman of a two-tier, zero-sum arrangement of the last mile to the customer's point of access; the latter has to do with the criticism that NetFlix wants to socialize some of the costs of getting its content to its customers.)
To a great extent, the FCC under Clinton and Bush generally let the Internet businesses find their own way to meeting market demand:
“This debate is no longer about net neutrality,” said Berin Szoka, president of TechFreedom. “A radical fringe has hijacked the conversation in an attempt to undo two decades of bipartisan consensus against heavy-handed government control of the Internet. Al Gore may not have exactly ‘invented the Internet,’ but President Clinton’s FCC chairman Bill Kennard deserves much credit for choosing not to embroil the Internet in what he called the ‘morass’ of Title II. Kennard’s approach of ‘vigilant restraint’ unleashed over $1 trillion in private investment, which built the broadband networks everyone takes for granted today. Abandoning that approach would truly break the Internet.”...“Invoking Title II would trigger years of litigation,” continued Szoka. “It’s not clear the FCC could ultimately ‘reclassify’ broadband at all, and even less clear the FCC could, or actually would, follow through on talk of paring back Title II’s most burdensome rules, like retail price controls. Even if ‘reclassification’ stood up in court, the FCC still couldn’t do what net neutrality hardliners want: banning prioritization. The FCC would succeed only in creating a dark cloud of legal uncertainty. That would slow broadband upgrades and discourage new entrants, such as Google Fiber, from entering the market at all.”Now basically there are multiple ways to get data from a content provider like NetFlix to an ISP: directly or through a third-party CDN (content delivery network) (think an Internet backbone carrier with access points to ISP's; CDN's tend to have asymmetrical data exchanges--more data going into an ISP than going out of an ISP, and they pay for a certain service level agreement (say, to minimize buffering of a video to an end user) (See Rogowsky for a good summary of this). Rogowsky has another excellent post where he points out that NetFlix's self-serving "strong net neutrality" is little more than "net neutrality for the strong".
NetFlix in fact used its own CDN in an agreement with Comcast (Comcast's data-carrying revenue is a miniscule amount of overall revenues) that not only cut out middleman costs but improved delivery speeds by over 60%. Geoffrey Manne has a related post:
In short, the Netflix-Comcast agreement deals with something known as interconnection – how big content providers transmit their huge files over the internet’s backbone in order to get to Comcast (and other ISP) last mile facilities in the first place. Net neutrality deals with how traffic is handled once it arrives at the last-mile, and whether it makes sense for certain traffic to receive priority treatment once it gets there.
Big content providers have always had to pay someone to manage delivery of their shows, movies and services. Typically these companies use specialized services called “content delivery networks” (CDNs) to manage this traffic as it travels from the provider to the ISP, which then moves it over its “last miles” to individual customers and screens. CDNs often build significant infrastructure of their own to improve speeds, and content providers (including Netflix) have always paid for this.
Mr. Hastings figured he could confuse longstanding, widely accepted interconnection practices with the debate over net neutrality, hoping politicians and regulators who favor net neutrality might help him get a free pass on interconnection costs.Do you think government intervention would have cut costs 99%? The market did that without government inertia of bureaucracy or equally incompetent judges, all while running profitable businesses... BEWARE OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES.
But free to whom? Someone has to pay for the infrastructure needed to handle Netflix’s traffic. If Netflix (or Cogent) doesn’t pay, everyone using the network would have to, whether they were Netflix customers or not. In reality, Hastings was looking for a government handout... Competition has forced prices for these interconnection services down by a remarkable 99 percent in recent years. ISPs can do nothing to thwart interconnection, and, in fact, Comcast has every incentive to keep the online video spigot wide open.
The Economics of Back to School
Facebook Corner
(Reason). Does Sarah Palin think the American president is responsible for security around the world? Maybe. Lots of people do, especially people who want to be president. How can a president prevent chaos from exploding in the normally serene Middle East while charging in, striking hard, and getting out?
So many commenters are hung up on the author's paragraph which includes the phrase "normally serene Middle East"... It's obvious that the author is mocking Palin's oversimplistic view of a surgical operation to take out ISIS. In some cases, the enemy of your enemy (say, Assad) is not necessarily your friend. It must be be wonderful in Palin's view of the world where all bad guys wear black hats...
Eliminate the Death Penalty!
Proposals
Wrong hand, dude!
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Michael Ramirez via Townhall |
Barry Manilow,"Trying to Get the Feeling Again"
