This morning, California Governor @GavinNewsom unveiled an audacious budget whose crown jewel is a plan to pump $7b into medium-haul fiber links that will link every community in the state, no matter how remote or rural.
If passed - it needs a simple majority in the legislature - this will make California home to America's most extensive state broadband network, and reverse decades of ISP lobbying against the provision of modern telcoms infrastructure to replace 20th century copper lines.
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The plan uses state money to bring fiber to the town limits, then creates a pool of low-cost, long-term loans - repayable over 30-40 years - that local governments tap to build their local fiber grids, according to their local needs, under local management and ownership.
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And, as with the electrification effort of the New Deal, the plan creates an expert agency that can advise towns on designing those networks and train local people on maintaining them.
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This is the patient money the market won't provide. Fiber broadband investment is future-proofed and may supply all Californians' digital needs into the 22nd Century (!), and telcos - who balk at investments that take a mere 10 years to pay off - don't make those bets.
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Take Frontier, whose bankruptcy revealed how they chose NOT to make $800m in profit building out rural fiber because the analysts whose judgments controlled its share-price disapproved of long-term investment (Frontier's execs were paid in stock).
ISP monopolists have fought with increasing desperation to prevent Americans from accessing fiber. From fairy tales about 5G (which needs fiber!) to fanciful ideas about satellite service (slow, asymmetrical and unable to get any faster without repealing the laws of physics).
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The truth is, we know how to make fast, future-proof data networks: fiber.
Americans pay some of the highest charges for some of the lowest broadband speeds in the rich world, and California is among the worst US states. Newsom's plan will sweep California into the 21st century, and not just the big cities - the WHOLE state.
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Asia's rich countries - China, South Korea - have laid a billion fiber lines. The world is already designing applications for symmetrical gigabit connections and beyond. Without fiber, California doesn't just face a digital divide - it faces a SPEED CHASM.
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ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Inside: Newsom's California fiber dream; The S&L crisis perfected finance crime; Big Pharma's vicious battle against universal covid vaccination; and more!
Last week, the Biden administration broke with decades of US policy when it supported a patent waiver on covid vaccines. It was the first time in generations that the US Trade Rep acted on behalf of the people, rather than corporate greed.
Taking steps to make vaccines universally and immediately available isn't just the right thing to do - #VaccineApartheid is slow-motion genocide - it's also the smart thing to do. Billions of unvaccinated people present quadrillions of chances for the virus to mutate.
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Don't listen to the unscientific claims that viruses "tend to become less virulent" over time. Remember, the mechanism by which super-lethal strains go extinct is that they KILL ALL THEIR HOSTS (that's us, folks).
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When the Great Financial Crisis hit, suddenly there was a lot of talk about the Savings & Loan crises of the 1980s and 90s. I was barely a larvum then, and all I knew about S&Ls I learned from half-understood dialog in comics like Dykes to Watch Out For and Bloom County.
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As the GFC shattered the lives of millions, I turned to books like @michaelwhudson's THE MONSTER to understand what was going on, and learned that the very same criminals who masterminded the S&L crisis were behind the GFC gigafraud:
Hudson's work forever changed my views of Orange County, CA, a region I knew primarily through Kim Stanley Robinson's magesterial utopian novel PACIFIC EDGE, not as the white-hot center of the global financial crime pandemic.
Some things are hard to understand because they're complicated.
Some things are complicated so they'll be hard to understand.
The harder you look at the finance industry, the more evident it becomes that the complexity is deliberate, a means of baffling with bullshit.
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(If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:)
Private equity is one of those baffling and mysterious phenomena that only gets worse with scrutiny: how is it possible that a handful of companies are able to borrow vast sums to buy up and then destroy successful businesses? Can that really be their business-model?
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