There’s been a discussion lately about the viability of Click. It seems the Cable TV business is losing money – in part through the rising costs of programming content, and partially because of the way the city cooks their books, writing off capital construction costs of the network. The wholesale internet business – where Click sells wholesale bandwidth to the three local ISP’s (Rainier Connect, Advanced Stream and Net-Venture) is making a whopping 60% profit! Click’s idea is that the internet sales should subsidize the cable TV operation. To me, that’s stupid.
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C-Net’s Maggie Reardon wrote another PR-release, fluff piece for Comcast on the issue of the Comcast-Netflix peering/extortion issue. In this supposed, “learned” explanatory piece, Ms. Reardon details all the thousand reasons Comcast embodies all that is goodness and right and how NetFlix is a horrible bandwidth hog, free-lunch expectant monster! Yeah, right. Here’s the piece: C-Net article: Comcast vs. NetFlix It’s obvious who’s paying Maggie’s salary. So I called her on it. Yes Maggie, it’s obvious you are indeed a shill for the Telco’s. A few years back, Ed Whitacre, who at the time was the CEO of AT&T, came up…
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C-Net’s Marguerite Reardon’s at it again, with a new piece on the goodness of the FCC’s proposed rules on “Open Internet.” http://www.cnet.com/news/fccs-position-on-net-neutrality-hasnt-changed/ She spends the whole article mouthing soothing platitudes from the talking points Comcast prepared for her. I can’t believe anyone is so stupid as to believe these rules won’t terribly harm consumers. So I can only guess that Maggie’s on Comcast’s payroll. I felt strongly enough about it to leave the comment below on the C-Net website: ++++++++ This article, coming on the tails of Ms. Reardon’s magnificent piece rationalizing the unbearable goodness of the TWC – Comcast merger…
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Marguerite Reardon of C-Net wrote an opinion piece suggesting the Comcast-TWC merger would be a good thing. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57620361-93/why-a-comcast-merger-could-be-good-for-twc-customers/ I wrote the following response: Maggie Reardon has obviously sold her soul to Comcast. Her opinion piece is an embarrassment. It looks like most of it was copied verbatim from a Comcast press release. I’ve never had TWC, but I have had Comcast and they have what can only be termed as horrible customer service. If TWC is worse, so be it, but to consider going to Comcast as an upgrade is simply asinine. As far as Comcast being an innovator:…
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All your money are belong to us... You think Bank America really cares about its customers? In mid-August, B of A notified me that there’d been a breech of data with some retailer I do business with, and because of that, they were issuing me a new debit card. A couple days later, I got a similar notice for my Visa account with them. The one thing the notices didn’t contain was the name of the retailer who’d been hacked. Because the breeches involved both my Visa and debit cards, I was able to narrow it down to only three…
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It’s 1984 in 2013 – Welcome to Oceania! “…Americans have learned that the National Security Agency has been spying on Americans without judicial approval. We learned about this not from the Administration, but from the New York Times and USA Today. Every time a revelation came out, President Bush refused to answer questions from Congress… Americans fought a Revolution in part over the right to be free from unreasonable searches – to ensure that our government couldn’t come knocking in the middle of the night for no reason. We need to find a way forward to make sure that we…
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After years of operating in blissful ignorance of the markets they allegedly compete in, Click! has come to the conclusion that they’re in trouble and have to do something, and do it quick! The fact that they haven’t upgraded their system to DOCSIS 3.0 – like Comcast did three years ago isn’t to blame. The fact that people are ditching traditional cable TV in droves – “cutting the cord” – in favor of streaming media over the internet (like Netflix and Hulu) isn’t to blame. Nope. According to a presentation at the Tacoma Utilities Board meeting last week, and based…
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I was surprised when I saw that the AFL-CIO was backing SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act sponsored by the RIAA and MPAA. I was able to find out the name of the AFL-CIO official, Paul Almeida, testifying for the bill, and I sent him and email. Below follows that exchange. To: Paul Almeida From: Michael Pellegrini Subject: Sorry to see an AFL-CIO officer shilling for likes of the RIAA… Sir: I am an ILWU member. I’ve been involved in the union movement for over 30 years, working as an International Organizer, as a Business Rep, and have held elective…
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There are some things you just never expect to see. Shrimp ice cream. World peace. An openly gay republican president. Or, workers in the United States facing the loss of their collective bargaining rights. “The right to bargain collectively is at the bottom of social justice for the worker, as well as the sensible conduct of business affairs. The denial or observance of this right means the difference between despotism and democracy.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in an address to the Senate, May 8, 1937. These rights have been a mainstay of US labor law for nearly 80 years, first coming…
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The period in American history leading up from the Civil War to World War II was particularly violent and bloody for labor. It was through that struggle that many of the very most basic rights we enjoy today came about. These include: Abolition of child labor The eight hour day Unemployment insuance Social security The right to form and join unions, and bargain collectively To give a glimpse of the background that led up to these changes, here’s a list of the major strikes that took place in the United States from after the Civil War on (courtesy of Wikipedia):…