Joe’s Blog!

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Originally uploaded by zeusfaber.

I left St Louis this morning to spend Thanksgiving with the family. I had planned to bring the cat along but he didn’t want to come, or at least it didn’t seem like it. I put him in the car for the short 2 hour drive. Before getting off my street he was whining like a big baby. By the time I reached Grand and 40 he had pooped in the back seat, so I took him home and filled his water and food bowls and then was back on the road. Finally, I got to my parents place in time for the food and completely ready for the holiday and some R&R. Dinner was all vegetarian other than the obligatory turkey. It’s nice when you have all you can eat and you can eat all of it.

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Originally uploaded by zeusfaber.

After dinner and clean up we went for a nice evening ride to work off some of the heft we acquired. All in all a great Thanksgiving.

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Originally uploaded by zeusfaber.

If you watch TV or have seen the news lately you may have heard about something called Net Neutrality. The cable companies are even producing commercials against it, say it is just a “scheme for the million dollar tech companies”. I have Charter Cable here in St Louis and I see this commercial a couple times a week. At any rate, if you don’t know what it is and you use the internet, then keep reading.

Net Neutrality is effectively the notion that all data traversing the internet is treated the same way, regardless of its purpose or destination. So for example, you are reading this on my blog, the systems allowing access to my blog look at you no differently then if you were trying to access CNN.com or Playboy.com. Another good example is phone usage, a popular trend is to use your computer as a phone or to have a service like Vonage, where your phone is plugged into your broadband and not the normal phone line. In this case your phone calls are treated the same way as your email or web browsing. Hopefully now you see how the net is neutral, it does not discriminate by service, destination or otherwise.

What cable, phone and other companies want to do is get rid of net neutrality. Why? They would like to charge the large users of the net more money. They would like to charge the Google’s and Microsoft’s of the word more because more people visit their sites. This sounds fine on the surface but there are two issues. One, they are already getting charged. Companies already get charged for their connection to the internet and the bandwidth they use. Especially in the case of a Google or Microsoft because they have there own data centers which SBC or whomever had to lay fiber optics to. Second, this allows for a “fast lane” and “slow lane”. Basically, if a company doesn’t want to pay the fee then they will be relegated to the “slow lane”, which means they do not get the guarantee that customers/vistors to the site will have access to it nor the speed at which someone would access it.

Why is this a bad thing? Think of who will be able to pay the extra fee’s if net neutrality is removed? By and far, large companies. Now, think of how these large companies became large companies (Google is a good example). They started out small and then grew out of demand for their product. If net neutrality did not exist at the birth of Google it is likely they would not have had the money to pay to get into the “fast lane”. Which then means that if you or I tried to do a bit of searching on their site it would have been slow and cumbersome. Also think about the ramifications on free press. Would you want ma’ Bell deciding what news source you use? If net neutrality is removed, your small, local news paper website may not have the money to pay the fee’s but I am sure CNN or Fox News will. I hope you can see the issue here.

Removing Net Neutrality will be taking shots at innovation, freedom and the American way. Because on the net everyone is treated equally, there are no discriminatory practices. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you are doing or what sites you are doing it on, everyone (that has an internet connection) has equal access and availability.

I saw Annie Hall on TV today. This movie cracks me up. Here’s a couple quotes I love:

[Alvy addresses a pair of strangers on the street]
Alvy Singer: Here, you look like a very happy couple, um, are you?
Female street stranger: Yeah.
Alvy Singer: Yeah? So, so, how do you account for it?
Female street stranger: Uh, I’m very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Male street stranger: And I’m exactly the same way.
Alvy Singer: I see. Wow. That’s very interesting. So you’ve managed to work out something?

And Jeff Goldblum’s best performance ever as a “Party Guest”:

[a guest is calling his meditation guru]
Party guest: Hello? I forgot my mantra.

Alvy Singer: [narrating] After that it got pretty late, and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I… I realized what a terrific person she was, and… and how much fun it was just knowing her; and I… I, I thought of that old joke, y’know, the, this… this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy; he thinks he’s a chicken.” And, uh, the doctor says, “Well, why don’t you turn him in?” The guy says, “I would, but I need the eggs.” Well, I guess that’s pretty much now how I feel about relationships; y’know, they’re totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and… but, uh, I guess we keep goin’ through it because, uh, most of us… need the eggs.

IMDB has many quotes from the movie if you want to reminisce.

The great economist and a purveyor of personal freedom pasted away on Thursday. He was a Nobel Prize winner, is the father to monetary policy and an amazing personality. Regardless if one agrees with him or with what his research has produced, one must appreciate the massive effect on the world he has had and the fact that at the core of his opinion is freedom, whether it be financial, emotional, political or otherwise.

Never heard of Milton Friedman? Let Wikipedia educate you, here is his entry.