Enough With the Low-Tech Boondoggles; "Tech firms eager to gobble stimulus funds"

Remember the quaint, good ol' Amurrican past, that Norman Rockwell world where graft and government bucks were shoveled at farmers, railroads, and local ward bosses who smoked cigars and wore pocket watches? Time and progress march on relentlessly into a future so bright you gotta wear shades. USA Today reports on the coming boom in high-tech payola in a story simply titled, "Tech firms eager to gobble stimulus funds":

[The $787 billion stimulus package] allocates tens of billions of dollars for tech upgrades to energy ($4.5 billion for smart grids), health care ($20 billion for electronic medical records), broadband deployment and education.

The dizzying amounts have tech giants jockeying to land government contracts, the first expected to be awarded in the next few weeks. IBM (IBM), General Electric (GE), Cisco Systems (CSCO), Intel (INTC) and some well-positioned start-ups are among suitors poised to capitalize.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime deal," says Sean Maloney, chief sales and marketing officer at Intel, which is working on broadband projects with governments in the U.S., Japan, Vietnam and others. "This dwarfs the Marshall Plan and the New Deal. It is unimaginably large, and will never happen again."

IBM, Cisco, GE, and Intel are among the companies expected to snag beaucoup bucks in the more than $100 billion in tech spending the stimulus is expected to generate over the next five years.

Whole story here.

To get a sense of how much bullshit spending is in this part of the stimulus, consider the $7.2 billion going to "broadband deployment." As of January 2008, over 95 percent of American workers who connect to the Intertubes at work did so via broadband. Billions of dollars have been spent wiring K-12 schools and public libraries across this sweet land of liberty; if they are not connected by now, they're never going to be. Somewhere between 90 percent and 94 percent of U.S. households that are active Internet users have broadband connections. And as hard as it might be for those of us who live and die online to understand, some people don't want high-speed connectivity. Especially when one considers that the same cable, satellite, and phone companies that service effectively 100 percent of U.S. households are already offering such services. This is, in other words, money to fix a problem that doesn't exist.

Multiply that ugly dynamic throughout the rest of the tech stimulus spending and you can start to grok the waste and misdirected resources inherent throughout the stimulus bill.

Comments

[domoarrigato]

I believe the word is "beaucoup"

[SugarFree]

"This dwarfs the Marshall Plan and the New Deal. It is unimaginably large, and will never happen again."

I want to see video. There's no way he said that with a straight fucking face.

[Nick Gillespie]

Merci beaucoup, domo.

[Taktix?]

At least everyone will be able to access their YouBread and iCircuses...

[Flex Nasty B.I.G.]

The linked USA Today story exemplifies what I see as the biggest challenge facing libertarians: pro-big-government reporting in the news media.

Read the story. It gushes over the benefits which will be provided by the stimulus package, but DOESN'T EVEN MENTION THE OPPORTUNITY COST i.e. the good things which would have been done with the stimulus funds had they been left in the hands of taxpayers.

In other words, reporting like that makes government spending sound like all upside and no downside. When the non-economist masses are consuming such news stories, it's no wonder they support big government.

This is why I rail constantly about the need for a libertarian-leaning "hard news" alternative to CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, aimed at the masses. It doesn't have to start big - a web site and a virtual team of 3 editors, twelve reporters, and a handful of support staff. If I had the capital I would start it myself.

[P Brooks]

This is, in other words, money to fix a problem that doesn't exist.

In other words, the notion of "marginal gain" is too complex for those idiots (gov't issue idiots, and MSM idiots) to grasp.

[Zeb]

Didn't the government give out a shit load of money already to the telecom companies 15 years ago to install broadband infrastructure?

I can't get a high speed connection where I live.

[J sub D]

Multiply that ugly dynamic throughout the rest of the tech stimulus spending and you can start to grok the waste and misdirected resources inherent throughout the stimulus bill.

Never one to underestimate my own ability to comprehend vast things (size and of the universe for example), I don't think I'll ever grok the entirety of "the waste and misdirected resources inherent throughout the stimulus bill" or government spending in general.

[J sub D]

Make that "(size and mass of the universe for example)".

I have a love/hate relationship with preview.

[R C Dean]

I can't get a high speed connection where I live.

Me neither, but I live in the middle of fucking nowhere by choice. Paying through the nose for a crappy, latent satellite connection to the intertubes is just one of those tradeoffs.

[potomos]

Why is that where I live about 70 miles from D.C. there still isn't DSL, 3g, FIOS, etc.? I'm fortunate that I at least have service through the local cable company. There are still many people in my area that can't even get cable, let alone any other digital service.

So the problem still is and always will be the infamous "last mile". Why do I never see any mention of this whenever they talk about this broadband bulllshit?

[Sandy]

Hell, I live 3 miles from DC and I don't have FiOS. (Local gov't requires new lines to be buried and Verizon didn't want to pay that cost.)

[Brandybuck]

The linked USA Today story exemplifies what I see as the biggest challenge facing libertarians: pro-big-government reporting in the news media

Whenever my conservative friends start ranting about the Liberal Media Bias?, I remind them that it's not a liberal bias, it's a pro-government bias. The same media that loves the spending and programs also loves the war. There is no criticism against government. If a program is criticized, it is only because it stands in opposition to an even bigger alternative.

Doesn't the media criticism of Bush prove they can criticize big government? Nah. They criticized him as a person, they criticized the very few attempts he tried to reform or roll back government, and they criticized the occasional small-government rhetoric that might of escaped his lips. The only substantive criticism of him was with regards to a limited subset of civil liberties.

[max hats]

To get a sense of how much bullshit spending is in this part of the stimulus, consider the $7.2 billion going to "broadband deployment." As of January 2008, over 95 percent of American workers who connect to the Intertubes at work did so via broadband. Billions of dollars have been spent wiring K-12 schools and public libraries across this sweet land of liberty; if they are not connected by now, they're never going to be. Somewhere between 90 percent and 94 percent of U.S. households that are active Internet users have broadband connections. And as hard as it might be for those of us who live and die online to understand, some people don't want high-speed connectivity. Especially when one considers that the same cable, satellite, and phone companies that service effectively 100 percent of U.S. households are already offering such services. This is, in other words, money to fix a problem that doesn't exist.

This is disingenuous. Broadband infrastructure can be measured in ways beyond pure access, there is also speed, quality and cost. Compare broadband in Europe with broadband in America. Europe's system is far superior, and that superiority can be largely traced to a higher level of government spending.

[R C Dean]

Compare broadband in Europe with broadband in America. Europe's system is far superior, and that superiority can be largely traced to a higher level of government spending.

What's the per capita spend on broadband infrastructure in Europe v the US, private and government?

I wonder if the higher quality of Euro broadband might have something to do with the much greater population density of Europe.

[R C Dean]

Hell, I live 3 miles from DC and I don't have FiOS.

My folks live even further out in the sticks than I do, and they have fiber optic to their house. Just an accident of geography - the phone company was laying a fiber optic trunk line down a nearby highway.

[Dan]

I'm actually quite familiar with a few of these plans, since I work in engineering for a large company that will benefit from the stimulus, and because my wife is a health care administrator who has been on the front lines of the health care digitization effort for well over 10 years.

Does Obama think that health care digitization is a universal god-send, a no-brainer technology that everyone would love to do if only the market didn't fail them? Governments are just like upper management and consultants, who can only see the top-line benefits of these programs, and who have no feel for how bleemin' hard they are to actually implement, and where costs can trickle back in to erase all the supposed benefits.

Health care digitization efforts have been piloted numerous times in my region. They keep failing. The problems are numerous - The rules, regulations, and procedures for charting are well known, and nurses are trained in it. They don't change easily. Doctors don't want to re-learn how to do things. Adding electronic records in a secure fashion tends to take longer than it does to scrawl a few lines of dictation from a doctor.

There are serious liability issues having to do with record storage and accidental release, and from errors due to software bugs. Usability flaws in data entry screens can cause entry errors that kill people. Some doctor throws a bunch of patients records on a USB thumb drive to study them at home, then loses it, and all hell breaks loose. This has already happened several times in our region.

There are no reasonable nationwide standards for sharing information which protects the rights of the patients while allowing the clinical data to be shared.

There are more insidious problems as well, such as doctors cutting-and-pasting from one patient to another to save time, thus losing nuance and eliminating the process of thinking about the patient while writing, leading to what some call 'cookie cutter' medicine where doctors spend more time staring at the computer than at the patient. There's still lots of research being done on the effects of digitization on patient care, and it's by no means a closed book.

The technology is also changing so rapidly in the area of PDAs, tablets, wireless connections, and other critical pieces of the puzzle that a nationwide standardization effort runs the risk of locking everyone into outdated technology before the first implementation is even finished.

There are huge software issues, and large software projects are risky. The government has tried to implement universal digitization processes in other agencies and failed.

With projects like this, the devil is always in the details. There are good reasons why hospitals aren't already completely digital. It's foolish to simply handwave them away and assume that all can be fixed if you just throw enough billions at the project.

Also, this project was added as part of the 'stimulus'. But the kind of people you need in the early years of a project of this scope are not idle resources - they're already working on important things. For a stimulus to even have a remote chance of working, it has to put idle resources to work. In this case, the government money will simply crowd out private capital. The multiplier for projects of this type will be less than one, and actually be anti-stimulative.

[Ed]

As a telecommer, yes there was a huge rush to build infrastructure during the dot-com days. Most of those companies went out of business because strangely the demand wasnt there (but the investment dollars were).

Need to get past the idea of running wires to every damn house in the kingdom. Wireless (cellular) broadband is the more obvious choice, and the technology is there. No need for the gubmint to make these infrastructure choices.