Consumer Reports, Net Neutrality et al.
I have companion blogs, including my
SoftDoc/practical computing blog. This blog chronicles some basic usability issues, some practical tips, etc. There are some things where I'm an early adopter (e.g., I bought one of the first VCR's on the market) and where I I lagged on some things (e.g., smartphones, even CD's vs. vinyl). It's difficult to explain the difference; I had had work cellphones on jobs, but it wasn't until my car had a major issue in the middle of nowhere between San Jose and Los Angeles in year 2000 when I finally decided to buy my own. I can still remember my first MIS professor ridiculing people paying thousands for a computer to use as an alternative to a 99-cent recipe box. I thought (and to a certain extent still think) people eagerly spending hundreds of dollars to pay for the latest iPhone are insane. I am not addicted to cellphones (in fact, most calls I get are unsolicited), not to mention absurd data charges which rivaled my utility payments. I eventually got my first smartphone 3-4 years back, largely because the monthly charges for "unlimited" talk, data, text were only about $10-15/month more than I was paying for a quota of maybe 300 minutes a month on a plain vanilla phone. True: smartphones aren't cheap, but I can usually find a fully functional one for under $100. I had some vague notions of the smartphone providing an alternative to limited personal access to Internet at work (e.g., many have filters disallowing access to external email providers, like gmail), checking statuses on package delivery, getting directions to some after-work social event, making transactions in my retirement accounts, etc. I sometimes found myself breaking in "new functionality" on the road: I found myself needing to get a haircut while visiting my mom in Texas; my mom, although she had lived in the area for years, didn't know local barbers (my Dad, retired USAF, usually got his hair trimmed on the local military base), and so I played with voice recognition features in Google Chrome.
I finally bought an Amazon Fire tablet as once again prices dropped to the point it was a no-brainer (like $50). It was still fuzzy how practical they are and the need: after all, I have 4 functional PC's at home already (I've usually maintained at least one backup PC, but this is a case where I thought all 3 were dead and I resurrected some time later). But the usefulness had shown up in unexpected ways. First, I had subscribed to Amazon Prime after being on the bubble for years. This is a grab bag type service bundled around expedited, more eligible free shipping. Like many Amazon customers, I expected that the service would pay for itself in explicit shipping costs. But Amazon has tied Prime to "free versions" of other expanded services, like Kindle (Reading) Unlimited, Music, Video, etc. You get to choose one free Kindle book (from a handful of alternatives) each month. I've watched a number of movies and old TV series on Amazon Video. And its devices are highly integrated. I bought an Echo Dot (a small speaker integrated with your WiFi and voice recognition software), so I can spontaneously say, "Alexa, play 'Suspicious Minds' by Elvis Presley." (Of course, Alexa will remind me some songs I request are included on its unlimited music subscription and only play me a sample.) Still, when WWE programming is on TV and heel champion Alexa Bliss cuts a promo, Amazon Alexa often gets confused in a humorous way. I sometimes forget Alexa is eavesdropping, and I responded to Bliss' appearance with a sarcastic, "Alexa, I just love you." Amazon Alexa responded, "Aw, that's a nice thing to say."
Yes, I'm getting to the point. Amazon, as part of its magazine subscription service, offers sample issues, one of which included Consumer Reports. So recently I added it to my reading list. I also have an extensive Kindle collection (nearly 1000 titles), which is also updated to my Fire tablet. The tablet is small enough to fit in one of my jean's front packages. Today was laundry day, so before I left, I put my tablet in my pocket.
Laundromats are not my thing. I'm trying to think back; I think the last time I went to a laundromat was when I was a visiting professor at Illinois State. Most apartment complexes have an on-site location, many with money changers, etc. Some have variations of a rechargeable card system. My prior Baltimore area apartment had washers and dryers in each unit, and my SC apartment had washer/dryer connections, I think it cost me about $30/month to rent a pair. I don't think I've ever spent that much in a month on laundry (maybe a load a week), but it was convenient. My last complex had a rechargeable card system which I could replenish with my credit card, maybe around $4 to wash and dry a load. Fairly close: maybe a hundred yards from my front door. The typical annoyances with living in an apartment community--residents forget to time when their machines finish, and you sometimes have to wait for a dryer to open up. In my current residence, there is a very limited facility--maybe 2-3 washers and a couple of dryers. That, however, wasn't the big issue. It was s fusion of greenback funding with smartcards. I won't go into a litany of complaints about coin-operated machines (many apartments, including my WV one, still have them, and getting rolls of quarters was always a hassle; that WV complex did change greenbacks up to $20 for quarters, but the machine was constantly breaking down). In this case, you had to pay for your first card with a $10 bill, but the machine didn't even mention which bills it accepted. I was not about to see it eat a $20 bill for a $10 card. This raises another point: I almost never use an ATM. I can use plastic for almost everything. (There are even vending machines which accept plastic.) I might visit an ATM every several months. My bank isn't local but it usually covers minor processing fees other ATMs charge for a limited quota of transactions per month. And, of course, Sam's Club or WalMart usually offer an option to withdraw cash, say $20-40 after one's main transaction. For the most part, I would use cash for things like ad hoc tolls. (Some tolls are integrated with EZPass, which I used around the Chicago area from 1993-2004. But I haven't been on toll roads regularly since then. Occasionally I had to use them in the VA west suburbs of DC. It's more oddball transactions, like the occasional barber shop that runs primarily on cash. But rarely do I carry more than $40 in my pockets, usually in Jackson's.
The apartment manager said that the machine would take $20 and lower denominations, but the initial smartcard transaction required a $10 bill. I had gone to WalMart, but they held no $10 bills, no suggestions other than open a local bank account. The apartment manager couldn't/wouldn't break a $20, suggested I might buy s pack of gum to get change from a $20 at a gas station. At this point, I said, "Enough!" I was spending too much time to accommodate an idiosyncratic apartment policy. It turns out there is a 24-hour laundromat st a nearby central intersection. It, too, uses a smartcard, but this one is integrated to credit cards. I got a bit of sticker shock seeing a wash starting at over $4 a load, and the dryer has a 6-minute 25-cent cycle; it turns out you have to stack multiple card inserts at the beginning of the drying cycle to get, say, a decent 42-minute dryer cycle. So a 2-week cycle of clothes probably costs about $7. More expensive than my last 2 complexes with laundry facility but cheaper than my SC rental.
All of that intro just to explain how I'm spending just over an hour at the laundromat, and there's really very little you can do when you're maybe a 10-minute drive from home. That's how I ended up slipping my tablet into my pocket and ended up reading Consumer Reports on emerging entertainment services (e.g., cable, Internet services like Hulu, direct channel subscriptions, etc.) Along the way Consumer Reports does its expected bashing of the opposition to net neutrality and mounts a vigorous defense of the "public option" to Internet services (as if somehow taxpayer funding of money-losing enterprises and being able to regulate one's own competitor constitute "fair" competition).
Now I'm not going to launch into a long rant on net neutrality, which is a pushing-on-a-string attempt to justify for more government involvement in a sector, far beyond the scope and nature of its core competencies. In fact, CR does pay passing lip service to the fact that some public takeovers have led to at best sub-optimal results. For a good overview of how local governments impose high-cost barriers of entry on potential competitors, see
here. There is, of course, no competition to local government when they corruptly impose high costs on competitors that only the deep-pocketed can afford.
CR paints this absurd conspiracy that cable companies will choke competitive content providers out of business by discriminating.against content in favor of their own content. CR, of course, neglects to point out that the local cable only has a monopoly because of local government policy. Moreover, just as the fact that you can obtain Internet services via cellphone wireless, content providers have alternate ways to deliver their services.
Fortune, for instance, points out nearly 1 in 5 customers are cable-cutters. Comcast owns NBC and certain affiliated cable networks, but it hasn't tried to claim exclusivity rights against its competition. WWE has established a highly successful direct subscription network bypassing cable providers. Google Fiber has a list of cities waiting to be hooked up to its growing empire.
So the cable industry, which is largely fragmented, is hardly in a position to exploit the kind of monopoly abuses, which haven't existed since the industry's explosive growth since the 1990's. The last thing this mature market needs is to give cord-cutters additional reasons to exacerbate the trend. Today Google Fiber has cable companies fighting for their lives, merely by hinting an announcement in huge population centers, but local government doesn't have to wait for Google Fiber to open its markets to competition.
Differential pricing, however, is part of what vendors do to justify investments in capacity--which often have beneficial effects on standard customers; it seems that I get faster and faster Internet all the time even if my subscription price is stable. In Arizona, I paid extra to get improved Internet speed for my cable package. It wasn't that the cable operator was blocking or discriminating against my content, but I was willing to pay more so I wouldn't have to deal with interruptions in a content feed (plus I use cloud computing backup services). Netflix customers use a lot of bandwidth. Cable companies have to manage their network series efficiently and effectively. Netflix knows that degraded services given limited capacity will not help its business model with unhappy customers; at the same time, it sees net neutrality as leverage against bogeyman cable companies which serves to control its costs, i.e., we non-Netflix customers end up subsidizing Netflix.
Differential pricing is a quality/cost trade-off we routinely see in the real world, e.g., when premium (first or business-class) travelers pay far higher than coach/economy travelers. I'll never forget going to a department store within walking distance of the OLL campus to buy a pair of inexpensive sneakers. Soon thereafter I was playing tennis against one of my friends and as I pivoted on my left foot after returning a cross-court volley, my foot literally split my sneaker across the seams. You get what you pay for.
In the extended Baltimore area, we have 2 competitors (Comcast and Verizon) vigorously competing for our business. My current supplier offered a competitive rate with no long-term contract; I came home from work to find a bottled water in a promotion packet from their competitor wanting my business. That's what happens when government gets out of the way of market competition.
HBO's CONFEDERATES Kerfuffle
So, if you don't know by now, HBO is actively considering a series based on what if the Confederacy had survived the Civil War and the South had retained the institution of slavery into modern times. And so you have storylines about fugitive slaves, bounty hunters, etc. Naturally this does not sit well with the politically correct, who have launched ongoing purges of the statues of former Confederate leaders and the like. It seems as if the "white majority" have been patiently waiting for the mere possibility to once again enslave 13% of the American population.
I have been a sharp critic of the Civil War, not because I am a "closet Confederate" or a sympathizer of the evil institution of slavery. I simply point out, with DiLorenzo and others, that slavery had been peacefully abolished by most countries in which it had been practiced. This was a costly battle that had decimated a generation of Americans, and many Southerners saw it not as protecting the institution of slavery but of an invasion of its territory by Northerners. Did the South have the right to secede? Most libertarians fundamentally believe in the right of association and the non-aggression principle. Even Lysander Spooner, a proto-libertarian and Abolitionist of the period, was a vehement critics of the Civil War. I do not doubt that the slaveowner plutocracy dominated state politics in the South.
But the fact is that there WERE anti-slavery movements in the South, and for many "free whites" without significant property, competition against black slaves was at a disadvantage. Moreover, there was a high government cost to enforcing slavery. The independent Union, no longer burdened with having to appease the slaveholding South, would have quickly outlawed slavery and scrapped the Fugitive Slave Act. This would have exacerbated the enforcement costs of the South, one of which was politically hostile to the notion of Big Government. Moreover, the South had seen global competition displace its lost markets during the war, and some of its major customers opposed the use of slaves. (Note that AFTER slavery was abolished, the South once again dominated the international cotton trade, thereby providing the institution was not responsible for the industry's success.) Also at one point, no doubt dealing from a weak hand, Jefferson Davis even unsuccessfully put a
limited version of emancipation on the diplomatic table.
A number of Southerners, in fact, emigrated to Brazil, which probably accounted for 40% of the African slave trade, and Brazil abolished slavery by 1888. So most of us think that the South would have eventually ended slavery as well for intrinsic political reasons as described above (e.g., enforcement costs). The risk of losing slaves lowered their market value, and poorer whites would resent having to subsidize their competition.
I think the very premise of the show--that somehow the institution of slavery would have survived an independent South--is rather preposterous. Would I watch the series? I'm not sure. It might be interesting to see how the authors rewrite history and analyze dubious storylines. But will it bring back nostalgia for State-based violations against individual rights? I don't think so.
