Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Maybe he means we should be 20th? 20 would be a higher spot. 1 a lower spot. If 10 is 10 spots too low...Oh nevermind. This happens too often to still be amusing.

No, what he means, and I truly, deeply believe this, is that we will simultaneously be raptured by 2007 but still all have broadband service under his leadership.

We'll have no need for numbers which, after all, are facts.

There's the illiterate side and the innumerate side to Dubya. Even if he got it right, to what depth does he understand broadband?
That's an easy one --to the depth that it is explained in his speech.

Never mind this, what's the big deal about broadband anyway? 56K is pretty good for everything except watching video on line.

blog-watching? check
nyt-reading? check
web-browsing? check
telecommuting? check (with caveats)

It sounds like another red-state chicken-in-every-pot bribe. In the cities and the suburbs, if you're willing to pay the extra $20-40 per month for broadband you can have it. So it comes down to more rural subsidies. We city dwellers pay the rural states for food. The rural states should be paying us for the technology we develop.

OK, I'm willing to cut anybody, including GWB, some slack for off-by-one errors, at least in general speech, where usually people speak more in metaphors than scientifically precise concepts.

What I would take issue with here on the other hand is the obsession with isolated one-dimensional quantitative measures that have little direct bearing on the quality of life which is so prevalent in Western society.

p mac's "chicken in every pot" reference describes it very well. Chicken in pot -- prosperity -- check!

You (not brad, one of the commenters above) could have said:
'nyt reading- check'
50 years ago. That is a short-sighted point.

If you can telecommute on 56k, then you are not productive enough. I cannot. A scientific paper is 500k. If you add all the overhead, it takes a minute to download.

And try: videostreaming, videoconferencing, download music from i-tunes, photoediting.

And again, think about a business model were the intelligence/application is not on your machine, but on the network. So you can do your word processing on a remote server, or whatever. Outsource your cpu. You need bandwidth.

I was on dwight yesterday too (cf. Brad's next post), on my way to the bechtel center for a conference. One of the speaker spoke about grid networking, where all the computer harness their idle cpu cycles to solve SETI data. The more bandwidth, the more power to such grid computing.

Also, Moore's law applies to bandwidth. Someone (some IBM ceo I think) said there was a world market for two computers. Well, if you provide the cpu cycles, and the bandwidth to boot, people will find a use for it. Napster created a huge demand for bandwidth.

The bottom line to broadband of course is increased productivity.

Politic-wise: Red state would benefit more from it: turning blue. As broadband = access to information. It would allow educated people to go to some backwater instead of being drained to the big urban centers. Any person with half a brain leaves Alabama. If they had broadband there, people could at least hesitate: they could be productive there as well.

Oh come on, like any good computer geek, he counts from zero. :)

cedichou: While you are right on many counts and I won't argue against you, observe that 'p mac' said "with caveats" on telecommuting -- depending on his/her job it may indeed be with caveats, in my job I need DSL bandwidth. (And I enjoy and benefit from the working from home thing.)

Regarding half-brains from specific US states, please be less judgemental. People are born and grow up in certain environments as it happens outside the domain of their choice, and making condescending statements is not benefitting anybody.

Having said that, there are certain migration patterns in any country.

Good Bushism. Not as funny as my favorite: "Africa is a country that needs our help."

Then again, there are so many Bushism's to choose from. And I agree with calmo. Having Bush comment for any length on broadband technology is like having him debate Kerry about military service--it's just asking for trouble. He should've left this one with his minions of doom. No wonder he's bringing Cheney with him on Thursday.

Personally, I think that inhabitants of states that voted for George Bush should be sterilized, for the improvement of the American gene pool.

Annnyway, this is the second time I've pimped this Washington Monthly article, so I hate to become a Mike-like obsessive, but read this:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0404.glastris.html

Four years ago, we had the world's 3rd highest rate of broadband penetration. We've dropped seven places since then! Bush is at least partly responsible, since Michael Powell's FCC let the baby bells monopolize lines, driving up costs.

This is what comes of teaching the president to program in a c-derived language.

Cedichou,

The British ruled their planetary empire at 56 baud. That's baud, not kilobaud.

And doesn't most of the important science get done through notes to journals?

Julian, thank you for such a cogent statement about our "inhabitants" and their potential to improve our genetic pool. I think your decision procedure is perfect.

Seems to me Bush's broadband policy goal is entirely unrelate to what he claims it to be. He wants everyone to have broadband, right, sure. So, what does he propose as a key to that plan? A permanent ban on taxes on broadband service. Right.

Consider phone service, or electricity. Two other things the government thinks everyone should have. How is universal access achieved? By having special subsidized programs for low-income families paid for by taxes on every other subscriber.

Bush doesn't want universal affordable broadband access. What does he want?

Well, look, he wants to "change the standards" to "encourage" broadband delivered via power lines.

In other words, he wants to take broadband largely out of the hands of current providers, give it to the energy companies over their infrastructure.

cedichou- you are missing the political relevance. Having broadband in urban but not rural areas makes it easier for the Dems to deliver targeted messages to their core. Red states would not turn blue. It would just create more freepers and readers of NRO and Drudge. Politicians like Bush could use the red state broadband to more efficiently deliver attack ads.

>The British ruled their planetary empire at 56 baud. That's baud, not kilobaud.

Works ok so long as you don't mind the occasional famine.

Please don't mock the fuzzy logic of our Fearless Leader; he is hard at work catching the crooks from the Al-Queda, Al-jazeera, and al-gebra networks - this just in from the al-noos-al-de-time wire-service:

"At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual
later discovered to be a public school teacher was
arrested trying to board a flight while in
possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a
slide rule, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, Attorney general John
Ashcroft said he believes the man is a member of the
notorious al-gebra movement. He is being charged by
the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.

"Al-gebra is a fearsome cult," Ashcroft said. "They
desire average solutions by means and extremes, and
sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute
value. They use secret code names like "x" and "y"
and refer to themselves as "unknowns" but we have
determined they belong to a common denominator of the
axis of medieval with coordinates in every country.

"As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say,
there are 3 sides to every triangle," Ashcroft
declared. When asked to comment on the arrest,
President Bush said, "If God had wanted us to have
better weapons of math instruction, He would have
given us more fingers and toes.

"I am gratified that our government has given us a
sine that it is intent on protracting us from these
math-dogs who are willing to disintegrate us with
calculus disregard. Murky statisticians love to
inflict plane on every sphere of influence," the
President said, adding: "Under the circumferences, we
must differentiate their root, make our
point, and draw the line."

President Bush warned, "These weapons of math
instruction have the potential to decimal everything
in their math on a scalene never before seen unless we
become exponents of a Higher Power and begin to
factor-in random facts of vertex."

Attorney General Ashcroft said, "As our Great Leader
would say, read my ellipse. Here is one principle he
is uncertainty of: though they continue to multiply,
their days are numbered as the hypotenuse tightens
around their necks."

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