Quote:
Originally Posted by bicker
How convenient.  |
It is just the way life is dude. You learn, you gain life experience, you expire.
If you speak in general a lot of things did work out.
But I should have narrowed my discussion. Things that involve basic greed of human nature. That has not changed in recorded history. Societies and individual make the same mistakes over and over again.
Maybe a good example to me is the current economy. If throws out all complementary economists and economic theory of the last 50 to 60 years and just looks at history, the same thing happens over and over. First credit becomes the basis for exchange of goods, not real wealth. The credit is often mortgaged again a commodity that suddenly starts booming. The credit becomes easier as there is perceived value in the boom. Most begin to think there is no end to the boom. When it collapses the credit markets collapse and there is an economic down turn.
It has happened a few times in the USA, and many times in other cultures, so it's not unique to American capitalism by any means.
But the key factor is people forget, or pretend they are a new brave world where the rules of the past are holding them back, and not harm will come to them as did previous generations.
But we have wildly left my original premise of the airwaves being public, and Don has a good point. Why just auction them, but charge an on going fee for their use? Then at least they are not owned. Even I have to pay property taxes on my real estate, as I can't just say I own it free and clear. If I don't pay, I can loose it for pennies on the dollar.
The other point is the limited amount of wireless spectrum that they could gain by eliminating all of UHF TV won't last them long.
If they have used up 400 MHz of spectrum and are already feeling a crunch 4 months or so after acquiring the latest 100 MHz, well UHF TV is only roughly 300 MHz more. That is less than what they currently own.
Then take the fact they were given 100 MHz in the mid 1980s. They needed more by the mid 1990s and obtained the old 2GHz point to point microwave band for 200 more Mhz. Now they have the 700 Mhz band for another 100 Mhz, or again I total of 400 MHz.
Considering birth rates and expansion of those that own a cell phone are growing in a non-linear fashion, if they were given UHF TV they would be out of spectrum by my guess in 15 to 20 years.
To me this is a akin to driving a Hummer and blowing up the middle east for more oil.
Instead of a more efficient use of spectrum, they just want more, as it's cheaper to deliver more cell phones to the public, more bills to send out, more money. Currently shorter towers closer together would indeed cost more, and cell phone bills would go up.
This to me is directly akin to cheap oil. We already know now that Standard Oil and General Motors killed the electric street car for the oil powered city bus. CAFE standards were reduced in the 1980s. General Motors killed their electric car, the EV around 2000.
Conclusion and probably my biggest point is continued frequency grabs are not sustainable way to do business nor more so that oil will last forever.
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