This current presidential election will be perhaps the single most important event the United States has faced in a hundred or more years. Never before has there been such a wide range and disparity between the different candidates. Never before has there been so much at stake. This is where we decide if we’re a representative democracy or an oligarchy. What has our country come to? The answer is that there have been some very fundamental, mostly gradual changes in recent years that brought us to where we are now. The biggest single, most disastrous event was the advent…
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Originally printed in the Journal of Commerce – February 13, 2015 Opinion, by Michael Pellegrini So the ILWU is solely responsible for the humongous mess our West Coast ports are in? It must be so because I read it in the Journal of Commerce. My first concern is that perhaps this blame is misplaced. To get at the truth, let’s look at the background. First off, a normal workweek for longshoremen consists of 147 hours spread over three shifts in seven days. An eight-hour day shift, an eight-hour night shift, and a five-hour graveyard or “hoot owl” shift. If you…
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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…