Is the Internet Headed for a Massive Slowdown or Shutdown?

After the Great Internet Slowdown Life Becomes a drudge, even with alcohol.

The great new Internet buzz is that the our providers are planning to slowdown everyone's connection unless we pay more for service.

That sounds much like a conspiracy theory for many reasons.

What they may be offering is a speed-up for higher paying customers.  That's nothing new.  Many Internet suppliers offer it or more megabytes of data at higher megabit rate for higher priced plans.  It's one of the reasons our house stays away from cable internet offerings that charge on varying scales the result may not be prices we want to pay, but will be obligated to.  It's like giving a credit card to someone you can't trust and then dealing with the results.  Very wealthy people might do that, but working class folks like my family can't afford to.

Personally I am using DSL (Verizon)  I don't expect a slow down at  all. I've had some bad ones with Verizon over the last year.  But they fixed the problems by various means.

In February the DSL completely shut off. We called that night, but nothing could be done until the next day.  Luckily there was a lot of Olympics stored on the television's DVD.  The repair man worked on the lines specifically for our house for a few hours and we were back to normal which wasn't very good.

A couple of months later trucks pulled up (not specifically labled Verizon) and reran some wires along the telephone, etc lines for the whole neighborhood. I didn't realize it until the Internet started recovering from the funk it was in for months that it was likely a more extensive fix for the whole area's phone and DSL lines.  (They all look alike to me).

Still occasionally my contact with the Internet slogged till it seemed like the Devil had a choke hold.  I complained again via Twitter and mentioned Verizon as my provider.

Verizon tweeted back to explain to them what was happening.  I hadn't a clue so ignored it, but a couple of weeks later in another slog a message popped up telling me my computer resources were overused and that may be why my Internet was slow.  It was specifically a message from Verizon.

And Big Brother was right.  Okay creepy but what can you do when someone publicly complains and then ignores your offer of help?  Opening Task Manager I saw I was using a lot of CPU, and I mean a lot, like 60-90% when I get the messages from Verizon.  Closing programs or restarting the computer has always fixed the problem since.  I like restarting and opening what I want fresh  I'm not sure all programs let go of their space when just closed. 

Another way I've able to speed up the Internet a bit is by linking to the modem via cord instead of WIFI.  I know not all can do it, but if you can it is a bit faster.

I'm going to wait and see what happens at the least.  It would make more sense to add speed to those who pay more than to subtract speed from the rest of us.

Many people grab attention wailing about gloom and doom for our Internet connections. Even Amy Goodman is on the bandwagon as I see from Twitter.  I stopped listening to her when she helped some wacko push conspiracy theories against President Obama.

I use Speakeasy speed test as I have for years to check my line speed.

As liberals we need to keep grounded in reality and not run after crazy prognostications or link any and all problems to "them" whether the government, fat cats, politicians, or other unnamed entities because we need to be able to convince people of a whole lot more than Internet speed warnings. We all know the story about crying wolf. Apparently though many groups and individuals still think its a viable option and woe to those who ignore them. That's why all of us on the West Coast are dead from Fukushima radiation. We ignored the crazies that worked off a You Tube video of guy with a Geiger counter on a Cali beach getting pings (they always produce pings) when folks from Russia and New York told us we're all gonna die!

Like I did with Amy Goodman, people learn not to trust you if you cry gloom and doom a lot.

Check your line speed (Speakeasy). Check your resources (Task Manager).  Restart your computer if things are slowing down.  You'll be a lot happier in the end if you can fix a slowdown rather than complain about it. (I think).  If you are having real problems, complain to your provider and see what they can do to help.  We have real problems in this nation as was exposed by the police murder of Michael Brown in Missouri.  Playing around with conspiracies is just a waste of time.

A lot of bad things happen out there.  We need to keep focused on the real bad things and ignore crazy stuff.  It's going to be a tough fight as it is.

If we're all pushed to a slow line except for those who pay more, then it will be time to complain and make a fuss.  I suspect another tier of speed will open for high payers.  It might have been part of the reason for the rewiring of the lines. In fact if Netflix, etc. get a special path that might free up more space for the rest of us in the slower lanes.

And BTW its about slowing down Internet at the worst (which I don't believe), not blocking info from you no matter what posturing Send Money! bloggers want you to believe.  

It's a greedy, duplicitous Internet/Pundit world out there, Grasshopper.  Don't believe everything you hear/read.  BTW, many of the most outraged and vocal were the most outraged and vocal over Ferguson last month.  It's beginning to look like this group just latches onto the biggest outrage to collect donations (I do not believe everyone mad about Mike's Brown murder was doing it for donations.  Most do not have blogs and others, like me have no, way for you to donate and we still care about what happens in St Louis County and whether they will be unshackled from their racist police complex that targets minorities (as easily discernible lower income citizens) for prosecution of many minor crimes to pay or their big salaries while keeping "taxes" low.

Many people receive more in donations if they spread the crazy.  Just let them prove this one before we repeat it, Okay?

Picture above clipped using Windows Snipping Tool and used via Creative Commons License Attribution (CC by 2.0) thanks to flickr user Mike Licht of notionscapital.com at Flickr.com who appears to have adapted it from a painting by Jean Beraud.  Full Licht pic here.

Public Worker #Pensions Suffer Because of Unfair Hedge Fund Practices #wiunion #union

A post and an article linked below some of my thoughts on this subject explain how hedge fund managers have been hurting Pension Funds (including those for public workers) and other investors.  I try to explain why the news media ignores this "inconvenient truth".

Much has been made of the almighty Hedge Funds possibly because of all the money their managers seem to magically make.

After the Dot com melt down of the late 90s and early new millennial years youngish hedge fund managers kept popping that could truthfully say they made 1-2 million and even much more in their first years in the business.   Mainstream news was on these folks like sap on a split stem.  Business sections, especially love multimillion dollar success stories.  And in reporting on these new "winners" in the economy our news sources tend to promote their message.  This would happen even if mainstream writers weren't at least a bit biased towards the wealth created by such people.

You can see that mainstream media is prejudiced towards the rich and their wealth creation stories by how many sources have special "business and finance" parts.  Newspapers, magazines, and online publications have sections or even whole separate works aimed at people interested in making a lot of money as quickly as possible.  On air or cable stations have special programs or even entire channels aimed at the subject.

How many sections do you find in an newspaper or special regular programs or cable stations dealing with cleaning your house or apartment.  The second subject might be more useful and in fact necessary to prevent residents from falling ill, but there is almost no money in the profession.  You aren't going to see or read interviews with Delores, the house cleaner, who just may the only one be keeping a family from getting Typhus or Ptomaine poisoning, and that's a shame. Personally I'd like to pick the brains of quality professional cleaners to enhance my own cleaning skills.  And think of the clean you'd see if people got into house cleaning contests across the nation.  But don't hold your breath waiting for the Fox Cleaning Channel .

There seems to be a reason or two for the adversion to low earning jobs as icons and promotion of high earnings ones.  First, most people and media love get rich stories (Media which is usually supported by advertising especially love millionaires.  Dolores can't buy the expensive ads they need to sell).

In fact, some publications are still promoting the idea that Day Traders can get rich fast.  If 2008 didn't kill that old wives tale (which wouldn't earlier die after a few DSers killed people over their losses in the previous decade), then I don't know what will.  There are people though still making a lot of money "advising" day traders, and other businesses offering tools the poor frazzled smucks can use.  That may be the reason the lie continues.

And hedge fund managers were seen as big winners; millionaires and billionaires that could tell us what to do to make millions ourselves.  What they told us was to invest with them.

Unfortunately, it wasn't just Mom and Pop who may have gone this way and lost even compared with government bond yields.  Hedge funds attracted a lot of pension fund managers looking to make up for losses from earlier bad investments (like dot.com investments or the oil price bubble of late 2007- Spring 2008).

I'd like you to read an Economist Article and/or a piece by Tim O'Reilly linked at bottom of this post. O'Reilly is a dot com guy, but of course, because he's made a lot of money he needs to protect, and he's brilliant, so he's on this like ants on a rotting banana.

Apparently hedge fund managers have been setting their fees so high that yields after fees are subtracted, are lower than with "Treasury Bills" or government bonds according to a Financial Times article quoted by Mr. O'Reilly .

In fact, the FT author that O'Reilly quotes and to which he links suggests that over-all investors in hedge funds may have gained nothing over the last decade, and the managers extracted everything.

And believe me, I know how boring this is to read, except that it's talking about what may be your pension fund to which you give up to half your income and hope there will be an increase so you won't be cast into poverty when you can no longer work long hours.

First, let me give you an example of what happened to the California pension funds around 2008.  From what I read the managers were convinced to jump on the oil stocks  as prices skyrocketed in late Spring of 2008.  By this time, the price of  oil was already so elevated that the pension bought high.  But we were all supposed to see prices even higher.  $200 a barrel was supposed to be the price by fall.

Instead by  late June oil prices started plummeting because of a world wide recession that was developing partially because of the high cost of fuel. Instead of the $5 a gallon gas we were supposed to be seeing in the fall we saw gas nearing $2 a gallon by November,  if I remember correctly.  So the pension funds managers here took funds (selling low) out of that  fiasco and put it in ventures that also suffered greatly in 2008.

It must be very difficult to care for so much money, but the CalPers managers overseeing the fund that year were replaced, so it's possible they were seen as especially incompetent.

Then again if pension fund managers are still investing in what look like get rich quick schemes and not even realizing when they are losing the shirts of the public workers, maybe there is something wrong with the whole culture.

If I were working at a public job or maybe any job with a pension fund, I'd be very concerned.  It's bad enough that Republicans want to cut benefits, wages etc. for jobs done by public employees, but having hedge fund managers use the money to enrich themselves instead of doing the job they claim they are doing, enhancing the bottom line of all concerned, is especially egregious.

The above are mostly my own thoughts.  Please read one or both links below for high quality analysis by people who know a lot more than I do re: financial investment:

Tim O'Reilly's post at Google + on what appears to be legal but almost a scam perpetrated by  Hedge Fund managerss  (easy to get the main points) Besides offering his excellent piece O'Reilly links to the Financial Times which offers you 8 FT articles a month if you register with them and where you can apparently then read their original report.  (I did not go ahead and register and read that one.)

The Economist article on same recently published book   "Rich managers, poor clients A devastating analysis of hedge-fund returns" which I think adds some dimensions and makes it's own guess why Pension Fund managers have been so blind to the actual results of investing in Hedge Funds.