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from the are-utilities-really-optional dept.
Broadband Internet access is a "core utility" that people need in order to participate in modern society– just like electricity, running water, and sewers, the White House said on Tuesday. A report written by the Broadband Opportunity Council, a group created earlier this year by President Obama and co-chaired by the Secretaries of Commerce and Agriculture, says that even though broadband "has steadily shifted from an optional amenity to a core utility," millions of Americans still lack high-speed Internet access.
The report cites 2013 data indicating that about 51 million Americans, or about 16 percent of the population, cannot purchase broadband access at their homes. That number may have dropped by now, but the White House says the government needs to make a bigger push to expand broadband deployment, especially in rural areas and low-income communities.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday September 25 2015, @07:05PM
You've missed my point. You don't need currency if you don't mediate an exchange. I'm starting from the assumption that we have or will soon reach a largely post-scarcity society. And in such a society there's no reason to exchange resources rather than simply providing them.
Look at open source software. Look at people who volunteer for the food bank, or meals on wheels, or amnesty international. There are plenty of examples already in society where resources are distributed or labor is performed without any exchange of currency or goods, simply because somebody saw a problem and took action to address it. So clearly such systems are possible; the question is only one of scale. Can we address all of humanity's basic needs through such systems? I'm not sure if we've reached that tipping point yet, but surely we can do better than we are today.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday September 25 2015, @08:08PM
So you think people will just decide to build a mine and then work it, that others will decide to just supply the resources required to dig and otherwise work that mine, that thousands of others will simply appear to help and that somebody else will just decide to build and operate a smelter and give away the finished metals and that even more absurdly, that without the pricing mechanism acting as a signal that all this will occur in exactly the right amounts to avoid massive waste. The invisible hand only works if you have a market and that includes prices, monetary units and the rest of it.
Getting some folks to volunteer time to help distribute food is wonderful, truly. But you can't build a whole economy around that sort of thing because so many tasks aren't the sort of thing you can pay people in feelz for doing. You can get people to work a food bank or soup kitchen, good luck getting them into the fields picking produce. Hard enough getting Americans to do that for money, what do you think is one the big drivers in this huge knock down drag out immigration fight? So automate that job you retort. Great, we solve a big problem, net productivity rises, etc. Great. There are still going to be a lot of jobs, at least within our lifetime, that machines aren't going to be able to do and very few people are going to just want to do for no compensation. Good luck running an emergency room on volunteers, better luck still finding the people who will keep track of the certifications of those imaginary volunteers, keep the storeroom stocked with medical supplies, etc.
Finally, lets grab the bull by the horns and deconstruct the Open Source movement. It is beginning to more and more appear it was a temporary reaction to a market inefficiency. It was more bother to monetize smaller works than the benefit of GPL brought in faster development time. So anyone developing software as a means to some other end found it of benefit to public license and the economics quickly selected against small efforts to develop and sell software as a product but still seems to permit large ones like Microsoft, Apple and Google. The Play Store seems to be bringing an end to that though. You can't download f*cking BusyBox without wading through paid apps, begs for donations, Pro versions, etc.
Again, these are 100 level economic concepts you appear to be entirely ignorant of. Please stop posting and start reading. Go get an introductory economics textbook and start on page one since you apparently know less than nothing on the subject. You know so many things that just aren't so it is going to take a major effort to simply unlearn what you have been fed by people who do not have your interests in mind.