As more sectors of the economy become subject to government regulation, young people especially should know about the economic opportunities and hazards that are presented. “Mexico’s Richest Man Confronts a New Foe: The State That Helped Make Him Rich” (New York Times) is about Carlos Slim, one of the world’s richest people.
[Separately, I’m recently back from some of the world’s most competitive markets for telecommunications. In Denmark, if a neighborhood is served with fiber optics it is possible to get a symmetric 1 Gbit/second service for about $80/month (100 Mbit/second service at $50/month is available without fiber). See also this ranking for how countries around the Baltic Sea clutter the top-10 for average connection speed (see also this article on Baltic Internet connection throughput).]
Regarding internet speeds, it seems obvious that the U.S. lags way behind most other developed and/or developing countries. One youtube vlogger that I used to subscribe to mentioned in one of his videos that his 100 Mbps connection — don’t know if it is symmetric or not — cost the equivalent of about $20 USD/month…in Phuket, Thailand. My meager-by-comparison 12-15 Mbps Comcast connection costs $43/month (would be $10 more if I didn’t also have cable TV as part of the package). My only viable option would be DSL via Centurylink, which would probably get me around 1.5-3 Mbps — I’m a long way electrically from the nearest central office — for around $40/month. My father, who lives in another state, recently switched from Centurylink DSL, which was giving him less than 1 Mbps most of the time, to Comcast internet which, IIRC, gives him around 40 Mbps for about $80/month.
Lots of US industries are now oligopolies, telecom, airlines, cable, health insurance, etc. The products in all these industries are mediocre. There is no price competition. Customer service is dismal because if you are unhappy with Verizon will you really be better off at AT&T? Banking is probably next as the high costs of regulation drive out the more competitive institutions, which will not have the wherewithal to comply with all of the government regulation.
(Off topic) I wasn’t sure where to post this, but Spiegel this week ran an article on the mh 370 flight. Here’s the URL:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/mh370-disappearance-that-fuselage-is-in-one-piece-says-expert-a-1107149.html
Easy to say but hard to do, to become rich and stay rich! There are a lot of factors that influence the said previously. In Mexico may be easier, but in Europe it is more complicated!
Out of curiosity, Phil, assuming you could get that with fiber optics it is possible to get a symmetric 1 Gbit/second connection, ?WHAT? exactly would you use it for? Download new movies from Netflix every 10 seconds, run a parallelization VM on your souped-up Intel tower, real-time simulate the Internet? TELL ME.
Clearly, the world has gotten mad. I now have no option but pay ~$40/month for a nominal 50MB down/10MB up connection, in reality closer to 20/5 MB, which already that is an overkill. This is the slowest speed, I could get 100MB for maybe $10 more, or 500MB for additional $20. I presume tha it’d make sense in a multigenerational household with lots of Internet-age children. But that’s not me. And there is no recourse because my government is SO PROUD of that we’ve constantly in the lead of that, or among the top 3 or 5 or whatever (a case of governmental inferiority complex?). And that our cellphone coverage along the highways is far better than in neighbouring countries.
Actually, 1 Gbit/s will set you back 45$ a month in Denmark
https://www.hiper.dk/priser
ianf: 1 gbit/s is handy for torrenting Linux distros, amateur tv stations. It’s VR friendly. It’s a place to experiment. And at 45-80$ a month, it’s not a crippling expense.
@ Steven,
don’t get me wrong, I don’t dispute that there are uses for gigabit fiber services, but then the larger question starts looming on the mind-event horizon: what is/ whom is the Internet for? Are we to be the stuffers of these fast tubes, or are these fast tubes to fill us with content when it suits us?
And how much of that… the day only has 24 hours, of which perhaps a fourth can be assigned to personal use, and at most half to professional dependency, on. In the end we’ll have to grapple with the same (analogous) question that Simone de Beauvoir once defined as that facing all the “Second Sex” humans (here in ill-willingly bowdlerized version): is the Woman for cooking potatoes, or are cooked potatoes for the Woman (this was viewed as a profound kind of philosophical insight at the time; she claimed this dilemma to be a major source of female schizophrenia, but that’s another topic).
Back to gigabit fiber: essentially it is subsidized by those copper-cable subscribers who use their lines at maybe 5% of their listed/ paid for capacity, which the ISPs feed off, so that a petite minority in predominantly new houses can indulge in their hobby of serving Linux distros and running (let’s not beat about the bush) “amateur TV stations” with “group sex performance arts” channels and the like. A case in point is: the “3” mobile cell network sells wireless IP connection for up to 40Gb at ~$120/month, and claims throughput of 7.5MB/s on average. I asked their representative what that top-offer 40Gb figure was based on, and whether people really used that much data on their mobile devices. He said “10-15 streamed movies” to the first, and “wavered” on the second. My neighbour who’s constantly on the phone to her kids (has unlimited voice, but not lo-res video calls) tells me she doesn’t reach her monthly 5Gb data limit. As I said, “overkill.” But nice if you already live in a place fitted with fiber – I’m sure I’d spend a couple of weeks exploring Göögle Earth in HD, and then go back to reading books and looking up Wikipedia.
Off-topic followup to Phil’s earlier Goebbels biblio-fetish: his still-alive 105yo secretary does not see anything that’d have required reflection at that or later times about the “Jews’ problems:” https://gu.com/p/4qayv
Followup to off-topic-followup above: a 2m trailer from the “A German Life” documentary film, also interesting for purely cosmetic care reasons: was that now 105-year old secretary (i.e. born 1911; thirtysomething when she worked for Goebbels) using too much OR not enough facial moisturizer cream in the ensuing 70 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvLL6LP41YY