George Rebane

- EPA’s new approach to regulating the economy
- ‘Network Neutrality’ will not be wallet-neutral
- Waiting jobs, unqualified workforce

– [update] Nevada County is stimulated! (see here)

In the While We Slept Department – Last Wednesday the EPA invoked “endangerment finding” rules on CO2, confirming that it is a “dangerous pollutant”.  This gas, that we and all critters exhale in each others’ faces, has now become the global bogeyman of the catastrophic warming that is slated to doom us all unless, of course, we do it to ourselves sooner.  In what passes for wisdom, EPA has invoked a 1970s law, intended for other things, to give it control of all emitters of more than 250 tons annually.  However, this amount is so small as to require it to monitor over 41K establishments and over 6 million new construction permits per year – by its own words an “absurd result”.  So for starters, the EPA will arbitrarily up the 250 to 25,000 annual tons, and use the law anyway.  And no one makes a peep that this heavy handed and unelected bureaucracy can rummage around in the old laws drawer, pick out any that it likes, and modify the particulars so it can claim a basis for the next round of economy strangling regulations.   

Net Neutrality is a term most people have never heard, and probably don’t want to hear.  But if you use the Internet, and you do since you’re reading this, you might want to make your voice heard on it.  PC Magazine has a good definition –

Network Neutrality “refers to the absence of restrictions or priorities placed on the type of content carried over the Internet by the carriers and ISPs that run the major backbones. It states that all traffic be treated equally; that packets are delivered on a first-come, first-served basis regardless from where they originated or to where they are destined.”

We recall that packets are bundles of bits (0s and 1s) into which your content – text, music, video, photo, … – is packaged.  These packets are routed from source to destination via a labyrinth of telecom links through what we view as the Internet ‘cloud’.  But here’s the rub, some content contains realtime files (like audio or video) and other content is made up of non-realtime files like text (simple emails or Word files).  For good quality of service in a busy cloud, you would want the packets of a realtime file to get through so as not to cause dropouts or interruptions during playback at the destination.  This suggests that different types of packets may have to be treated differently (i.e. prioritized) in some fashion – yielding a ‘non-neutral’ network. 

Government is about to take the next thing that has worked beautifully so far, and have its way with it.  The proposed Net Neutrality (the name should raise an eyebrow) regulations would restrict who could charge how much for what kinds of packets they transmit over the Internet at what speeds.  Most technicians correctly argue that Internet related technologies are evolving so quickly in unpredictable directions, that the proposed regulations would stifle this critical communication medium - like granting the old Ma Bell a telephone monopoly stifled the American phone system in its later decades.  Regulations always have unintended consequences.  But it’s your wallet, and it should be your call to your electeds.  Right now the FCC is slated to quietly manufacture a “crossroads” for the Internet, and then direct which way we should all go.

There are waiting jobs, but no one to fill them.  Today jobs for accountants, electronic engineers, and physical therapists go begging.  And tomorrow people will be working jobs that have yet to be invented.  Only one thing is certain – no one but the government is inventing jobs for the unskilled, inept, and uneducated (more here).  RR readers know that I believe the greatest social tsunami headed our way is the growing unemployable component of the country’s workforce (here).  Most of the 15 to 20 million unemployed today will never again find a job in the private sector that will maintain their expected quality of life.  And these unemployed will be joined by newly unemployed – both educated and un-educated – as the ‘jobless recovery’ proceeds.  This will become the dominant social reality of these pre-Singularity years.  Yet few understand what’s happening, and fewer want to talk about it.  Systemic unemployment growth has become the latest 'Unmentionable' in our land, joining the established and acknowledged Unmentionables – unfunded entitlement and pension liabilities, dysfunctional public education, and the destruction of the dollar.

Meanwhile, the federal and state governments are doing all they can to insert friction at every conceivable joint and transit in the machinery of commerce.  In addition to the major economy killers now working their way through Congress, consider that the latest minimum wage ratchet left behind another 300,000 workers comprised of mostly the young (UC Irvine study).