tempest in a teacup

Or, should I say, broadband-aid. :P

*gets things thrown at him*

Ars Technica has been doing a lot of articles about the state of US broadband lately (here’s their latest one). I’ve ranted before about how lame the so-called ‘broadband’ in the US is (the fastest connection I can get in my area is 1.5 Megabits per second, and I live in an urban area), but another thing that this problem has reminded me about is the importance of regulation in free markets.

After the stagflation of the 1970s, most of the Western nations spent the ’80s and ’90s in a fit of deregulation, ostensibly to improve market efficiency. Deregulation is good in certain cases (most people seem to point to the airline industry as one badly in need of it, and post-deregulation one could certainly make the case that - post-9/11 shenanigans notwithstanding - the budget airline space has really taken off).

However, claiming that deregulation is universally good is misguided. People who make such claims (I’m pretty sure we all know who they are) ignore one of the important lessons of basic economics: that markets are not infallible. Market failure is inevitable most of the time, and government regulation is needed to mitigate the effects of market failure. Some of these problems have market based solutions - the success of cap-and-trade initiatives in dealing with emissions certainly demonstrates this - but even these need to be regulated so that the supply of permits is kept in check.

Regular telecom companies are subject to this kind of regulation (which is why infrastructure owners are required to act as common carriers), but broadband companies aren’t, resulting in a de facto monopoly or duopoly for broadband services in most areas. Less competition almost always results in higher prices - and that is more or less the situation the US is in now compared with most other advanced industrial nations.

If you ever need to shoot down market fundamentalists, the situation of broadband is as good an argument as any.

Just when I thought Sonic Unleashed was looking pretty nice

/headdesks

Amazon's going to be filing for my H-1B visa on Tuesday.

Just for some perspective, there are 65,000 H-1B visas given out every year to foreigners who want to work in the United states. The actual number of applicants is something like ten times that number, so what USCIS ends up doing is running the applicants through a lottery and picking 65,000 names at random.

Yes, whether or not I get to stay in this country will depend on some programmer's implementation of int rand(). You can probably imagine what I think of this process, so I won't vocalise it.

If I fail to get it with this filing, I can only apply next April…and my existing visa expires on July 9th, meaning I'll have to leave the country. I'll have to do this even if I get the visa (since it only takes effect on October 1st) but in the event of a longer delay I'll have to look at the possibility of moving to another Amazon location. Truth be told, the prospect of having to uproot myself from a fairly comfortable existence isn't really doing much for my peace of mind at the moment. It was easy enough to push to the back of my mind when the date was months away, but now it's pretty much all I'm thinking about.

Maybe I'll try to drown it out with caffeine tomorrow morning.

This had me shaking my head

The main line that threw me for a loop was

While in prison, Mr Ranjan contested and won a seat in parliament for his party, an ally of the government.
…
Mr Ranjan is expected to remain an MP until the next election.

I think it's fairly obvious that this is bloody ridiculous.