T-Mobile@home with Competition

Our landline connection to the local telephone company has finally been severed! We are "free at last, free at last!" Well, not quite free - we'll be paying around $12 per month (saving about $25/month) and getting better features.

As I pulled the plug a couple days ago I reflected on the recent comment that mentioned the "ethics-free competition of capitalism". In my lifetime, telephone service has evolved from a "natural monopoly" with a single supplier and limited choice to a vibrant competitive marketplace with a wide variety of service options and prices suitable for nearly everybody. Lots of telephone operators and others lost their jobs, but many more new jobs were created, and, best of all, consumers now have tremendous communications opportunities at reasonable prices.

THE OLDEN DAYS OF MONOPOLY

When I was young, we did not even have a telephone in our Brooklyn apartment. My parents made calls from pay phones. Incoming calls came to the candy store on our block and a kid would be dispatched to fetch us. When we finally got our own phone it was used almost exclusively for local calls because long distance was so expensive. Early in our married life we had a farm in a rural area of New York and experienced the joys of a four-party line.

I remember when the monopoly phone company would not even allow you to connect a "Brand X" phone to their lines because it might "disrupt" service to others - a "phone-y" excuse as we now know. Like all monopolies, the local phone companies provided minimum service, with little efficiency, and used inane "public service" excuses to keep competition out.

THE MODERN ERA OF COMPETITION

Well, along came cell phones, with multiple companies competing against each other and against landline phones. Some of our friends cut their landlines at that point. Then, with the advent of the Internet, and broadband connectivity to most households, along came Internet phone service. More and more of us are cutting our landlines, getting better service at lower prices.

We selected T-Mobile@home because we have T-Mobile cell phones and it is available for only $10/month plus tax and fees (a few bucks, we are not sure yet). Advantages: 1) You get to keep your old landline phone number, 2) all the existing phones in your home ring and can be used to make calls, 3) Your computer does not have to be on to receive or make calls, 4) The speed and voice quality are as good or better than a landline phone, 5) You can use your old answering machine and/or let the T-Mobile system record your voice mail, 6) Unlimited national long-distance is included, 7) Caller ID is included, 8) Call Waiting is included, 9) Call Forwarding is included., and 10) 911 works to alert emergency services to our home address.

We normally leave our old answering machine on and it intercepts and records voicemail normally. When we are away we can turn our old answering machine off and calls will be answered by T-Mobile voice mail -or- we can forward them so any calls to our home phone will ring on one of our cell phones. The only disadvantage of T-Mobile@home is that it fails if the electricity goes down (but that was the case already since all our phones are wireless and the base units need electricity to work) or if the Internet goes down (in which case we can use our cell phones.)

Our local phone bill, with Caller ID but no long-distance or Call Waiting or Call Forwarding, was over $37/month. We expect to save about $25/month once we recover the one-time $35 access fee and $50 wireless router fee.

There are many other Internet phone options if you have broadband service. They range from free to about $25 plus taxes and fees. If you are willing to leave your computer on to receive or make calls, you can sign up for services like Skype for free and make voice and video calls to others, WorldWide, who also have Skype and have mutually registered. Something called Magic Jack costs about $20/year and allows calls to be made and received nationally like a regular home phone. Services like Vonage cost about $25 plus tax and fees and appear to be similar to T-Mobile@home except you do not have to be a T-Mobile customer to qualify.

I expect other cell phone companies will be forced by the competition to offer $10/month home phone via Internet service. However, many cell phone companies are also in the landline business and will be reluctant to do so.

LESSONS LEARNED

The main purpose of this posting is not to "sell" T-Mobile@home, although I certainly recommend it. My purpose is to counteract the media-sponsored idea that competition is somehow evil.

Fair competition - even the "cut-throat" variety - with government serving only to police standards and fair advertising and contracts, is far more responsive to consumers, and more efficient, than monopolies can ever be. Something that is now said to be a "natural monopoly" may, due to technology advances, no longer be so "natural". Beware of claims by monopolies that they are "protecting the public" or "assuring service to poor people or to rural people" or "protecting American jobs", etc. They are usually self-serving, anti-competitive, and, over the long run, bad for everybody, especially the poor and disadvantaged.

Ira Glickstein

Socialist Utopia Found and Lost

A relative by marriage spent a number of years in a Kibbutz (communal living) in Israel. She recently described how this seemingly idealistic lifestyle, which she enjoyed when she lived there about forty years ago, has since succumbed to the worldly pressures of capitalism.

NOTE (added 10 Sep): At my invitation, the relative mentioned above has posted a Comment below, using the "Anonymous" option. As she mentions, there was lots of information coming at me rapidly and I was not taking written notes, so I got some information factually wrong. I thank my relative for Commenting and I have corrected my Topic text to indicate the corrections. [Changes are indicated by brackets. Material in quotes is from her Comment below.] My erroneous text has been grayed out. I appologize for the incorrect information I included in my original posting.

As she recounted her time in a small (100 person) non-religious (no rabbis allowed) kibbutz south of Beer Sheva in the Negev desert, I found myself drawn by the idealism of the concept and the reality that it could (and did) exist here on Earth during my lifetime. I was sorry to hear how and why she and her husband left the kibbutz for a new life in the US and how, on two subsequent visits, she found the original concept diluted to the point she hardly recognized it.

Could it be that this dedicated C-mind (me) has some L-mind memes kicking around?

Her utopian story awakened my idealistic, utopian imagination!

HER UTOPIAN STORY

She was born and raised in the US in a non-practicing Jewish family and met her husband-to-be while he was visiting from Israel. He had spent his teenage years living on a kibbutz. They married and ended up living in a small kibbutz, one of a group of three that were some distance from each other and quite far from any other settlements.

Living arrangements were simple. Each couple had use of their tiny apartment with a bedroom and a shower and toilet. Everything else was communal.

Children lived in a separarate building and were, in essence, raised by the whole community. With only 100 people, everyone knew everyone else and took responsibility for every child. I was reminded of the saying "it takes a village to raise a child" - in this case it was literally true. (That "African proverb" was made famous by first lady Hillary Clinton's 1996 book It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us.)

The main work at the kibbutz was farming. They raised much of their own food and sold the excess to fund purchases of supplies. There was sufficient social pressure to assure that everyone worked relatively hard. Work was distributed to everyone according to their abilities. For example, she told me, one man, who was blind, was kept busy sorting lumber by size by feeling it. Another, who was mentally handicapped, was given tasks he could accomplish despite his limitations. Everyone did their share of "grunt" work on the farm and took turns preparing, serving, and cleaning up after communal meals.

No one was paid for their work, except for a small "stipend" that could be used to buy personal items. Social pressure and the public nature of communal living assured that everyone consumed only what they needed.

No one was "in charge". She told me there was one designated person who dealt with the external authorities, but he had no special authority within the kibbutz. There were regular meetings attended by all adults and decisions were reached by general consensus.

Thus, the kibbutz was a living example of the Karl Marx slogan "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" (1875). (I have refrained from calling this kibbutz "communist" because that word has gathered the "bad breath" of the totalitarian examples of Stalin's Russia and Mao's China. I think it is better to think of it as idealistic socialism.)

HOW UTOPIA DECLINED

So, I asked, if it was so ideal, why did you and your husband leave?

Well, it turned out that her husband ["wanted to be a success in the business world."] was not satisfied with the productivity of the work arrangements. He, along with some others, wanted to start a factory and hire outsiders to work there and also supply labor for the farm. ["The philosophy of this kibbutz was that all work was to be done by members and if something required extra hands, that work would not be undertaken if it required becoming a 'boss' to outside 'workers.' This arose in one case because we had a few extra fields where peanuts or potatoes could be planted, but not enough 'hands' to do the work, so the fields remained fallow."] The problem with that was the idealistic idea that no one should have any employees and no one should work for anyone else. The whole problem with capitalism, according to this view, is ownership of the means of production by the capitalist class and the necessary exploitation of labor class that that system implies.

Shortly before she and her husband left the kibbutz, a decision was reached to purchase a communal TV set. That, in her opinion, was the beginning of the end of the kibbutz as she knew it!

They came to the US where they completed their educations and found professional employment and raised their family.

THE END OF UTOPIA

She made two subsequent visits to her former kibbutz and sadly recounted how things had changed.

A decision was reached to build a factory and hire outside workers. ["There is now a factory for polymers, but there are only three workers, none hired from outside. The crops have changed to amaryllis for export rather than crops for local and internal consumption. And there is the major difference that they have migrant workers for the fields (interestingly, from Thailand primarily) -- which is so against the Marxist philosophical foundation)."] With additional income, kibbutz members demanded larger stipends and used that money to purchase their own record players and other luxuries.

Children no longer lived in separate housing. Apartments were enlarged to accommodate entire families.

As outside workers were hired to work the farm, more and more kibbutz members found employment outside the kibbutz. The number of kibbutz members working the farm declined to six (out of the total membership that remained about 100). Those earning larger salaries in their outside employment objected to giving their entire earnings to the kibbutz to be shared equally with those working the farm. ["More members now work outside the kibbutz than inside the kibbutz, but it is not true that they resent having their larger salary pooled back into a central source. "] Demands were made for larger stipends and they were met. The level of privately-owned luxuries increased. ["As exposure to material comforts increases, through television and movies -- and the consumer movement, the stipends must grow."]

More and more non-kibbutz Israelis settled in areas near the kibbutz until it was no longer remote from outside influences. The kibbutz had houses built on some of their former farmlands and rented them to non-members. ["While some kibbutzem do rent out houses for outsiders, the kibbutz where I worked and lived does not. Interestingly, of the 100 plus people who lived there in the '60's, so many have remained! I was truly astonished at how many old friends were still there. Of course, the obverse is also true, I did not see that many new people and changes, such as the pending decision to allow individual automobiles, is being pushed by the newer members."]

I must confess I was sad to hear how their utopian, idealistic socialism had been corrupted by capitalistic tendencies. The kibbutz members were now owners of a factory and farm that employed others as laborers and also landlords of rental properties. Oy!

ANY LESSON FROM THIS?

Well, we have been led to believe that democratic socialism does not go far enough and that "real communism" has never been tried.

The problem, we have been told, was with tyrants like Stalin and Mao and others who distorted communism and replaced the privileged capitalist class with "The New Class" (Milovan Djilas) of privileged Communist ruling elite.

The problem was the large scale of supposedly communist countries.

However, the story above has no tyrants at all. It is on a small scale of 100 people who voluntarily agreed to come together on a kibbutz. And yet, it still failed to maintain the idealistic utopian concept. [This apparently was an overstatement by me. My relative disagrees: "I think that by and large it still has maintained most of its Marxist underpinnings, but they are being eroded by time and a shrinking world. The kibbutz movement started primarily from a harsh need; how to survive and how to build an agrarian community with only a handful of people."]

Perhaps the problem is the basic concept: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"?

Perhaps it is irreversibly at odds with inate human nature?

Ira Glickstein

Another Bit of Knowledge

I've just completed my second contribution to Google's "Knol" - their run at Wikipedia's dominance in the free knowledge marketplace. Both Wikipedia and Knol materials are written by unpaid volunteers, but there are important differences.

Wikipedia has been around much longer and therefore has a far more extensive and detailed range of materials. Wikipedia contributors are anonymous and the style is collaborative - anyone in the world can take a shot at any Wikipedia article and edit anything they want into it. Fortunately, at least for important topics, Wikipedia has many active volunteers who generally correct false or misleading or partisan articles and edits pretty rapidly and fairly.

Knol requires writers to identify themselves and their affilliations at the head of their articles. They even verify the writer's identity by making an automated phone call to the writer's phone. They also encourage edits by anyone who is interested, but these edits must be approved by the original author before they appear. It will be interesting to see how Knol fares against Wikipedia. Right now, Knol is David vs the Wikipedia Goliath - but Google is a very successful company and, with them behind Knol, and able, as the premier web search engine, to make sure Knols are well-represented in the results when people do searches!

I am using my Knols as materials for my U Maryland students, replacing class materials previously only available on the U Maryland website.

My most recent Knol is Quantifying Brooks Mythical Man-Month and my previous one is Optimal Span.

Ira Glickstein

Fungible Energy

In a Comment to our Accretion of Power Topic, Howard wrote, in part:

In the long run, however, natural resources are what give power to a society, and modern societies are not isolated like primitive tribes. Consequently, economic power, defined as fungible resources, is necessary to support modern military power. [Emphasis added]

"Fungible" means "interchangeable" meaning the consumer or user cannot tell the difference between the product from source A or source B. While looking it up I came upon the above Dilbert cartoon that states:

Oil is a fungible commodity, the capitalist system virtually guarantees that you'll end up buying the lowest cost oil from sources unknown to you. [Emphasis added]

True, but does that negate Dilbert's desire to buy a fuel efficient car or the newly-forming national consensus that we need more domestic sources of oil and other energy? I think not.

Energy conservation, if it is done in a rational way, should save us money in the long run, regardless of what other nations may do. Since oil (and by extension any other form of energy that is interchangeable with oil) is fungible, any bit we save will reduce worldwide demand and therefore, eventually, reduce prices or at least reduce the rate of increase that would have occured absent the conservation.

Similarly, any decision to permit new drilling or wind farms or nuclear power plants or biodiesel and so on, will eventually increase supply and therefore reduce prices or at least reduce the rate of increase that would have occured absent the increased supplies.

The argument that newly-permitted drilling (or wind or nuclear, ...) will not "add a drop of oil for ten years" is, IMHO, a phony one. It is like telling a high school graduate not to go to college because it will take ten years to recover the lost income during the four to eight years he or she will not be in the workforce. You have to look at the long-term payoffs!

Also, since part of the price of oil is based on future expectations, the change in public attitudes about tradeoffs between the environment and energy has already reversed some of the rapid rise in energy prices worldwide.

Of course our energy conservation and expansion of supplies must be done in a reasonable and responsible way.

When we purchased our Prius we knew we were facing short-term increased costs and were "betting" on the long-term payback. The Prius costs a few thousand bucks more than a comparable non-hybrid and we were told we'd have to spend $4000 bucks to replace the batteries in four years. We originally figured it would not pay back our investment for five or six years. Well, with the more than doubling of gas prices over the four years we've owned it, and the new estimate that we'll only have to spend about $2000 to replace the batteries and they will last six years or more, it has already paid off!

Smart energy conservation could pay off much sooner than we think if energy prices continue to rise worldwide. Now that China and India and Russia and other countries have adopted something like capitalism, their productivity and standard of living have shot up and are expected to continue to rise to the level of western democracies. That means, despite energy conservation and development of new supplies, energy demand and therefore energy costs will continue to go up.

As I wrote in my Global Warming Topic, the increased use of energy worldwide will mean more release of previously sequestered carbon (gas, oil, coal) into the atmosphere. While I am not an alarmist who thinks all global warming is caused by humans and the "tipping point" is ten- or twenty-years away, I do accept that humans are responsible for a significant fraction of global warming and we should curb the release of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere to the extent possible without ruining the worldwide economy.

Politicians and "do-gooders" can trumpet conservation until they are "blue in the face" but most consumers and industries will do little until it hits them in the pocketbook.

I have long supported a punitive carbon tax. I believe, within ten years, most governments will screw up the courage to impose a substantial carbon tax despite its unpopularity with voters. Government regulation and imposed mileage standards and subsidies for alternative energy are counterproductive and simply enrich the well-connected and bloat government. Just raise the costs of excessive carbon and allow market forces to do the rest!

Ira Glickstein

Accretion of Power

It seems to be a general principle of human interaction that power draws power to itself. One sees this on both small and large scales, from the level of a committee to the level of a nation or group of nations. I've been on both sides of the fence, that is, participated in the accretion and fought against it. It seems to me that accretion, like gravity, is a natural force in the affairs of man.

One of my experiences was serving on the college curriculum committee for about twenty-five years, many of which I was the chair. The committee didn't even exist when I began my thirty year stint at the University of Hawaii and our university president was a real academic. A few years later, in an attempt to become a "big time" university, the state hired a new president, an academic manager who vastly complicated the structure of his domain without actually accomplishing anything positive. One of the complexities he added was college curriculum committees that filtered program changes before they appeared at the university level committee and thence at his desk for his approval or disapproval. The engineering college created the mandated committee with no intention that it actually function as anything but a rubber stamp for the departmental curriculum committees. In fact, myself and others served in that capacity for many years. Our meetings were brief and perfunctory. However, as time went along and the curriculum grew more complex and the various departments expanded, curriculum changes grew more contentious. The college program committee meetings became the battleground upon which territoriality was played out. Having a friend on the committee became a requisite for professors trying to mark out new territory. Looking back, I don't see much that we accomplished that the departments themselves and the free market could not have accomplished. I don't know if optimal span theory takes this into account, but it is the nature of humans that when management creates a box on a chart, it will eventually fill with power.

Another of my experiences was in fighting such a power. Before World War II, a national organization (ECPD) was started to protect students and the public from fly-by-night schools claiming to offer engineering degrees. Accreditation by the Engineering Council for Professional Development carried with it some benefits for students wishing to take the certification exam in his or her state. Otherwise the organization had little impact among legitimate schools. (MIT and Stanford, for example, have never bothered to become accredited.) Student were generally oblivious to accreditation and large businesses did there own accreditation based upon experience with a school's graduates. However, after WWII engineering based experienced a large upturn and funds for the operation of the accrediting body experienced a similar surge. ECPD became more and more powerful. About twenty years ago, when two year schools of technology entered the scene, they augmented their domain by becoming ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) despite the fact that there is no point of academic contact between engineering and engineering technology. The national organization became more and more dominant in stipulating the courses and methods to be used in every school in the nation. As a consequence, creativity and innovation in the teaching of engineering now resides in the few schools of repute that refuse to submit to the accreditation process. It was never intended that accreditation be anything more than a minimal guarantee of quality, but the principle of accretion of power inevitably produced a kind of dictatorship of fear. Withholding of accreditation by the "good old boys" and their young acolytes who run the organization is a powerful weapon. At a national meeting when I seized the floor to express my thoughts and pass out revolutionary literature, not a word of encouragement came from the audience. It was not into later, in private places like the rest room, that professors screwed up enough courage to say they agreed that ABET had gotten completely out of hand. Even well-intentioned members of the board may have realized that something was amiss. At the end of the three day meeting they announced that a committee would be formed to look into the problem of too much restraint on academic creativity. Unfortunately, nothing ever came from that as far as I know. Neither power nor authority are often relinquished voluntarily.

With respect -Joel

Authority vs Reason

Joel said,

"Too often quoting authority leads to questioning credentials (as we have seen) and obscuring the real issues. It's a waste of mental energy. I'd rather deal with arguments themselves."

My first instinctive response was to agree wholeheartedly. I associate authority with church dogma, bureaucratic red tape, and conservative principles. Incidentally, I don’t understand how you can claim to be a conservative if you don’t accept the cultural authority of the past?

But then I looked at my own work and realized that I could get nowhere without relying on authorities. It would be totally impractical if a scientist had to start every data collection and argument from scratch and could not accept the authority of historical data, mathematical proofs and foundational principles of predecessors.

Even Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of giants. Doesn’t our entire culture stand on the shoulders of giants? A person who does not accept any authority is simply an anarchist. I sometime think anarchy is worth a try, but then I would not call myself a conservative.

Guardians at the Gates are GONE - Freedom of the Press!!!

There have always been "guardians at the gates" preventing free access to the "press" - until now!

Prior to the invention of printing, books were manually copied by scribes and only the established church or kings or writers with rich patrons could afford to publish their books in multiple copies.

The first printed books had their letters manually carved into blocks of wood, a very labor-intensive and therefore expensive process. That effectively blocked most writers from publishing in multiple copies.

Even after the invention of movable type around 1450 by Gutenberg books were still quite expensive and limited in quantity. For example, fewer than 200 copies of the famous Gutenberg Bible were ever printed.

Since then, printing has become less and less expensive and the quantity of books published has greatly expanded.


THE BAD NEWS

However, Freedom of the Press was more a goal than a reality. Many governments own and control all newspapers and other media or impose various restrictions and censorship on privately-owned media. Most of these repressive governments restrict the distribution of publications from abroad.

Even in countries where the media is free, there are economic and ideological barriers to publication of unpopular viewpoints and/or new, unproven authors.

Until recently, the cost of setting a book in type was prohibitive. Publishers would not invest the tens- or hundreds of thousands of dollars required to set up, print, distribute, and publicize a new book unless they were sure they could sell thousands or tens of thousands of copies. To get a book published via the normal route you must first find an established agent, which is not an easy task. Then, the agent must find a publisher who is willing to invest the cash required up front.

Even self-publishing has been expensive until recently. For example, my brother self-published a book about public speaking about ten years ago and he had to front nearly ten-thousand dollars for his first run of a few thousand books. Fortunately for him, his book was eventually picked up by Random House and is now available on Amazon and other major bookseller websites. But, that is not the norm at all. Most self-published books go nowhere and the authors are left with boxes of unsold books.

Indeed even the yet-to-be famous Henry David Thoreau had this experience in 1853. In his journal he "brags" that he has "a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." Those 700 were copies of his "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" that he published at his own expense. Fewer than 300 of the original 1000 printed had been sold or given away and he was stuck with the remainder.

Ideological bias by the journalistic and publishing industry is also a factor preventing "freedom of the press" from being actualized. People who go into these professions tend to have leftist biases and may therefore not recognize, or not want to popularize, views that may differ from their own. Most media are concentrated in a few large cities and many who work there are totally unaware of how the rest of us think.

BUT THERE IS GOOD NEWS !!!

The advent of the Internet has leveled the playing field to a large extent. Certainly fewer people will read this TVPClub Blog than will read the Drudge Report or the New York Times, but, at least, anyone in the free world can easily click and read either.

And, remember the Drudge Report started in the kitchen of a strange guy Keith Olbermann called "an idiot with a modem". It is now viewed by three MILLION visitors a month and earns massive advertizing bucks for Matt Drudge! (I look at it almost every day, sometimes multiple times per day.)

DRASTIC CHANGES TO ECONOMICS OF BOOK PUBLISHING - HOORAY !!!

Modern technology has only recently allowed a drastic change in the economics of book publishing.

The first change occurred about a decade ago and I call it "the Kinko' Book". I wanted to have copies of my PhD Dissertation to give to family members and friends and students. So, since it was already a word-processor document on my PC, I printed it out and took it to Kinkos where they copied and spiral-bound it into a nice booklet for about $20 a copy for a couple-dozen copies. A few years later, after my dad passsed away, I also made Kinko Books of two sets of his writings to give to our children and his friends and relatives.

Kinko Books make sense if you are only going to need a few dozen copies. The books I made were letter-size and had color front and back covers with black and white insides. Although a Kinko Book cannot be confused with a professionally-published book, they cost about the same or more.

The second change is more exciting. With modern digital technology it is now almost as inexpensive to print a single copy of a professionally-bound book as it is per copy for a larger run. The new technology is called "print on demand" and there are several companies competing in this marketplace.

As many of you know, I published a free online novel a few months ago. Several of my friends and relatives expressed a desire for a printed version. I looked into it and found Lulu "Print on Demand" and have recently published my novel 2052-The Hawking Plan there. (The printed version is a much more tightly edited version of the online book.)

The economics are amazing! There is absolutely no set-up or up-front charge for the Author, no monthy charge for the Lulu "storefront" and no cost at all except for a per-copy charge, and, of course, shipping and handling (less than $4 for a single copy via USPS Media mail).

Right now, printed copies are available at 2052-The Hawking Plan. Within a couple of months, Lulu may be able to get Amazon and other major online sellers to list the book as well. (If you live in The Villages, FL area and would like to buy a copy, you can get one from me for the list price. $18 - "chai", and you won't have to pay the shipping and handling.)

If you have written anything, such as a family history, your personal journal, poetry, fiction or what-have-you, this is a great way to get a couple dozen professional-looking copies for your friends and family for a very reasonable price.

The "guardians at the gate" are gone! You do not need an agent. You do not need to find a publisher to put up the money for up-front costs. You do not need to pay those expenses yourself. You do not need to get the approval of the literary profession. You can DO IT YOURSELF and only pay for the copies you need.

Ira Glickstein