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posted by janrinok on Sunday April 22 2018, @07:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the pretty-much-like-everywhere-else-without-broadband-internet dept.

Here's an article:

On Thursday mornings, locals from Sharon Township, Michigan, can drive to the 100-year-old town hall and meet with their local government. The supervisor, planning chair, and zoning administrator all gather at a long wooden table, where they share a box of doughnuts and wait for the heat to kick on. On these days, the township clerk dutifully saws open envelopes containing tax payments from residents and—if it's anything like the frigid February Thursday when I visited—has to take a break to thaw her fingers, numb from the frozen mail.

The digital divide is perhaps more starkly illustrated here, in Washtenaw County, than anywhere else in the US. Sharon Township is just 30 minutes outside of Ann Arbor, and a little over an hour from Detroit, in the next county over. Its 1,700-odd residents are spitting-distance from some of the most technologically advanced areas of the state, including the University of Michigan. Yet when it comes to internet access, Sharon Township may as well be in the mountains of West Virginia.

On a map showing Michigan's internet access at the county level, the square representing Washtenaw looks like one of the best-served regions in the state. Fewer than 10 percent of residents don't have access to broadband internet. But the fact that the city centers are so well-served only makes it more difficult for communities like Sharon Township to get access. Telecom companies aren't expanding their land-based networks to reach these relatively small markets, and money for rural broadband get earmarked for areas farther away.

"It looks like we're covered," said Kathy Spiegel, the Sharon Township Planning Commission Chair. "When Peter [Psarouthakis, the township supervisor] first started going to meetings at the state level, they said Washtenaw County had full coverage and he just kept laughing."

[...] "The issue is very much like rural electrification," said Spiegel, referring to the federal subsidization of electric infrastructure in the 1930s that ensured all Americans had power. "Areas will die if they don't get internet. It's become essential, and if we want to keep a community here, you've got to have something."

Before the Rural Electrification Act was passed in 1936, many Americans were on the far side of a different technological divide. Though we take for granted the ubiquity of electricity now, for a long time many Americans were left behind by electric companies that didn't want to spend the money to power remote, rural, poor, and less-populated areas. Senator George Norris, who represented Nebraska from 1913 until 1943, later recalled in his autobiography that at the time rural Americans had become sharply "conscious of the great gap between their lives and the lives of those whom the accident of birth or choice placed in towns and cities."

It's difficult not to draw similarities between that "great gap" and the digital divide holding so much of America back today. Many solutions have been proposed, and successfully executed in specific areas, but a widespread, ambitious solution like the Rural Electrification Act is little more than a dream at this point.

Instead, as the internet continues to become more and more vital to daily life, the areas without access drift further away from the rest of the country.

"Our world is a little bit different than everybody else's," said Ruth Bland, the school technology coordinator in West Virginia. "We can't just sit in this county and let the rest of the world go by."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 22 2018, @07:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 22 2018, @07:00PM (#670442)

    The problem with Ebay's system is it encourages you to under-bid - if you always bid the most you're willing to pay, you're guaranteed to never get a great deal.

    Yes, quite correct. You might always end up paying the most you are willing to pay. The context that gets lost on most bidders is that they should not bid the "most they are willing to pay" but instead should bid "the most they are willing to pay that they still consider to be a good deal.

    I.e., For a given CPU, bidder X might be willing to pay, at most, $120.00. But then they don't feel they "got a good deal". But, if they could grab the CPU for at most $75.00 they would feel they had gotten "a good deal".

    So they should bid $75.00 at the outset, not $120. Then they either get a good deal or they don't pay a cent.

    But it seems that most interpret ebay's instructions of determining "most" as the maximum they would ever pay for this thing, without considering reducing that max to be their actual "I got a good deal" price point. Why they do this, I don't know.