John McDonald

Blogging about politics, life, and the web

Monthly Archives: April 2009

Its 2009 and I still can’t get reliable internet here

April 15th, 2009

In 1995 I expected my internet connection to be slow and unreliable. 14.4k modems were rare, powerful, and expensive.  There weren’t even many ISPs that could handle such a speed on all of their dial-in lines.

High speed broadband is supposed to fix this, right?

The problem is those cable broadband lines that seemed cutting edge in 1999 are showing their age and years of neglect.  While the ownership of that network has changed hands and brands more than once, every company to come along and offer access has been gifted with a virtual monopoly over cable internet in Jacksonville.

Of course, AT&T provides a “choice” with their DSL, but let’s not even discuss that disaster.  At least the cable is good enough to pay for even if it requires complaining to get it to work half the time.

While the actual cable infrastructure hasn’t changed much, I’d say my experience over the last 10 years has been one of a steady decline in service quality.  There were simply fewer people on the network – and congestion hadn’t been a problem.

Nowadays, I can’t even keep a connection active for more than an hour.  Frequent outages are commonplace, and while they’re usually as brief as five minutes, they often disrupt file transfers and browser-based publishing.  Forget gaming – I can’t even run a stable AFK script in a text-based online MUD (The MUD I’m playing was designed in 1993 and Comcast still can’t deliver the kind of stable connection it requires)

That’s enough of a rant.  I probably just need to go pick up my third cable modem replacement for the year.  Ugh.

Trying to Give Obama a Chance

April 4th, 2009

I voted for the guy but I’m having a hard time finding the patience that his other supporter’s have got.  A lot of people are saying to wait and take it easy before tossing around judgments or pronouncing cynical complaints, some are even cheering the odd continuity between Bush’s policies and Obama’s first choices.

There has been quite a bit of public furor about social program spending, tax revolts, tea parties, and executive bonuses, but I try to stay focused on:

  • Who is getting appointed?
  • Who gets the government spending?
  • Who benefits from regulations?

From my perspective, the answer to all three of those questions is:  The banks.

Sure, there was $770 billion for roads, schools, trains, and pork, but this is a small drop in the big bucket of financial bailouts, bad bank plans, asset guarantees, and other forms of debt thrown to the Wall Street Elite.

The fact of the matter is that all of these banks are effectively bankrupt, and they’re only being kept on life support because they provide a public good of producing credit.  This credit isn’t based on the bank’s assets (there are none), it is based on the faith of the market in the U.S. government.

So why not make credit a public good?  Well, there’s a long and twisted history of conspiracies, class warfare, and legislation designed to ensure a select group of people could benefit just a little bit from every economic act going on in the country.  Heck, we’re not even supposed to talk about it!

Nationalizing credit and the central banking system may sound radical, but it is hardly more radical than anything Jefferson, Jackson, Washington, or Lincoln did.  Banks with capital would still be allowed to operate and make loans in a free market – they just wouldn’t be propped up at taxpayer expense!

On the military front, the Pentagon will be glad to know it is getting a nice raise.  This will probably come in handy as we escalate activities in Pakistan and start looking around in Darfur.

So, some of Obama’s supporters take the sort of neo-con line that our primary goal at the moment is to save the bank owners and invade every country that can remotely be perceived as a potential threat.  Some others are optimistic that Obama will pull away sharply from the Bush legacy when he’s more established, or has earned more political capital, or he doesn’t have to worry about re-election…

Education Cuts and Union Seniority

April 4th, 2009

Well, there’s a financial crisis and to many politicians the obvious solution is to slash education funding.  Holding those responsible accountable must sound absurd – let’s punish the kids instead and take a mortgage out against their future by reducing their access to the knowledge they need.

Here in Florida, our elected representatives seem intent on achieving the notorious status of “worst in the nation.”  Last time I checked, it was a pretty close race between us, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee.  A few years ago, the voters passed a constitutional amendment that promised to reduce the number of students in a classroom under a single teacher’s supervision, but the legislature managed to create a few dozen loopholes before they decided to completely throw out the voter’s demands.

And now of course, they’re ready to gut the school system even more.  All of these property tax cuts weren’t free, ya know!

Here in Jacksonville, it means virtually no art, music, drama, or physical education unless it is taught by a homeroom teacher that never specialized in the subject.  Don’t worry though, they don’t plan on taking much time out of the schedule for this mediocore substitute.

Yet it may not be the cuts themselves that are the worst of the situation.  The highest level of absurdity at play here is how the teachers will be selected to lose their jobs:  By union seniority.

After spending billions of dollars and years of classtime on tests designed to measure performance, none of that data will be incorporated into the decision of who stays and who goes.  Everyone under the age of 30 can just forget about a teaching job – regardless of what they put into the school or how much the students get out of their educational style.

Now I’m not saying that young teachers are good and more experienced ones are bad, but it is also very clear that some of the senior teachers are literally from “another generation” when it comes to certain things like race relations and the role of religion in public schools.  This is most definitely a southern problem…

So if you’re wondering why the next generation isn’t curing cancer and saving us from environmental destruction, just remember that it was nothing personal.  We have to protect those who have been around a while – because hey – isn’t this collapsing society proof that they’ve done a good job so far?