The Register Star featured an article today about internet service in the county, “County dials up broadband efforts: Working with local providers and developing a map of who can’t get high-speed Internet access among officials’ goals“ By Nathan Mayberg. 

Counting the Number without Access Is Not Enough

It is good that our government officials are concerned with improving Internet access across the county. It is painfully obvious that Internet access is more important in our time than even rural electrification and telephone service was to earlier generations. Without Internet access people are increasingly cut off from an array of opportunities. They cannot participate fully in our culture and economy.

I want to focus on the quality of Internet access. Even in Hudson, the most densely populated part of the county, we barely have broadband service. Mid-Hudson Cable provides download speeds that are only marginally broadband. Despite their advertising campaigns proclaiming “blazing speeds” up to 5 MB/s (or for $5 extra per month – 10 MB/s) the actual service I have experienced, tested with easily available test sites on the Web, has averaged 3.7 MB/s over the last 2 years. Worse, the quality of this service is so bad that it has frequently made it difficult for me to conduct my business conferences over the Web. And, because cable Internet service is provided through a party line, when lots of people are online at the same time, the service becomes even slower and less responsive.

Some have said, “You live in Hudson, Get Verizon DSL.” Recently I have done just this. Now I get 5.2 MB/s download speeds and the service quality consistently allows for good video-conferencing. But this is as good as this service will ever get. DSL has its technical limitations. To be competitive in broadband access we need to reach for 20 MB/s and higher.

Use Next Contract to Leverage Services from Mid-Hudson Cable

What to do in the short term?

The contract between the city and Mid-Hudson is coming up for renewal next year. Our local government officials need to get involved.

• Any new contract with Mid-Hudson must contain service level standards that are enforced by monetary means. 
• We should expect Mid-Hudson to come to the table with a plan for enhancing Internet service in the future and this plan should be made part of the enforceable language of the contract. 
• And, the contract should address a real economic barrier to access in Hudson. We need a three tier system. It might look like this: basic Internet with 5MB/s service for $20 per month; better Internet access with 10MB/s service for $35 per month and world class service with 20MB/s service for $60 per month. In all cases the service level agreement would guarantee that Mid-Hudson actually deliver these speeds not just their current “blazing speeds”. 

Hudson Takes the Lead –  County Benefits

If Hudson takes the lead on this, everyone in the Mid-Hudson Cable service area will benefit. We have the density and economic power to get Mid-Hudson to improve Internet access and service. Once we set the standard other communities in the county with less economic power can tag along.

It is fairly widely known that income and wealth inequality in the US is as high or higher than at any time except perhaps the Robber Baron period at the end of the 19th century. Lots of articles and books explain how this has come about over the last 30 years. In a recent NYTimes Magazine article, “The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy” by Adam Davidson, we are even offered an affirmative defense of this by a buddy of Mitt Romney from Bain Capital Edward Conrad.

Conrad… “aggressively argues that the enormous and growing income inequality in the United States is not a sign that the system is rigged. On the contrary, Conrad writes, it is a sign that our economy is working. And if we had a little more of it, then everyone, particularly the 99 percent, would be better off.”

But, leaving aside the obvious disconnect between any rational measure of value add by the wealthy and their incomes and holdings, does economic inequality really matter? Is it just that those of us in the not wealthy class, now branded The 99%, are jealous of all the toys of the wealthy? Their four or five houses, countless cars, airplanes, and all the rest?

Are their some measurable consequences to economic inequality?

Turns out that whereas health outcomes, happiness, and any other indicators of the health of a society are not correlated with GDP among the developed nations. They are highly correlated with economic inequality.

Here is an opportunity to learn more. Take 17 minutes now and watch this TED Talk, Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies.

“We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust.”¹ 

Stay to the end where he points out that their are over 200 peer reviewed articles supporting his findings.

1. from the TED Talk website

Karen, with friends Esther and Rose Hanig, went off to Ramp Fest Saturday. I stayed behind to mind the store.

They gave the food and the ambiance rave reviews. They ate enough so I barely had to make dinner.

Here are a few photos taken by Karen.

Jeff Gimmel - one of the prime ramp movers

Sam Starr's Truck Pizza got in on the action

Karen got carded - "Drinking Age Verified"

A couple of weeks ago I came on a new sidewalk on Prospect Ave. that seemed to be out of compliance with local ordinances. At the time I wrote a bit about this, “Sidewalks in Hudson – Dangerous for Lack of Code Enforcement and Common Sense“.

Yesterday, my walk took me up Prospect again.

Now we seem to be seeing the finished product. Not only is it not as wide by 16 inches as the ordinance calls for, there is no curb.

Perhaps our Code Enforcement Officer Mr.Wurster could shed some light on this state of affairs?  Or perhaps it is to the Superintendent of Public Works Mr. Perry that we should address a question. It is not clear in the city Code  about who is responsible for overseeing sidewalk construction. 

We pulled the plug on Mid-Hudson Cable (MHC) for our internet service a couple of weeks ago in favor of Verizon DSL service. I have written about MHC’s terrible service and misrepresentations earlier. Most recently here.

Being fortunate enough to live less than 17,000 ft¹ from the Verizon office next to the Post Office, DSL is available to me. Through acquaintances I learned of their good luck with DSL. 

After the installation I ran a number of tests using the same test site, Speedtest.net,  that I have used to measure the bad performance of Mid-Hudson. This showed that Verizon is very consistently delivering 5.2 MB/sec download and 750KB/sec uploads with a ping of 50 millisecond. And, my continuing tests using Speedtest.net show that the service is consistent throughout the day. No more of the slow downs so common to the party line affair of cable internet services.

Though this is hardly world beating service² the real surprise came from the impact of the fast ping speed.³

I use Skype videoconferencing for both business and family purposes. With MHC the ping regularly measured in the hundreds of milliseconds. This caused jittery or frozen video and chronic echoes in the audio. My first Skype conference with clients revealed great audio without echoes. I even abandoned by headset. Just using the microphone on the desktop gave me great sound and the frozen video are now a memory.⁴

1. the current maximum distance from a switch office for DSL
2. the US is 13th in the world with South Korea at the top with an average 13.8MB/s download speed of
3. Ping is the time between the click of a mouse and the return of a packet of information from the host server to your web browser
4. Verizon logo used without permission

Wonder about the Impact of the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United Decision? 

Government in the US, as everywhere, has always been tilted in favor of the wealthy. But, the Citizens United  decision in 2010 giving corporations the right spend unlimited money has made government, really at every level, into the sole playground of the rich and big corporations.

A couple of weeks ago This American Life broadcast “TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN FOR OFFICE”. Listen to this program. It will further clarify how totally corrupt our government has become.

My earlier posting, “New Sidewalk, Short on Common Sense and Oversight, a Disaster for Pedestrians“, about the new sidewalk in front of Wunderbar brought a number of comments and some interesting dialogue about what is really going on with sidewalks in Hudson. As wunderbar commented about that posting, “Stay your gavel and break out your ruler”. In fact, this sidewalk was built to the city’s code requirements.

With Carole Osterink pointing me the way to the applicable city codes (Chapter A330. CURB, SIDEWALK AND STREET REQUIREMENTS and Chapter 266. STREETS AND SIDEWALKS) where the requirements are spelled out in considerable detail, I now see a bit deeper into this problem. 

BTW – Carole has a different take on sidewalks in a recent posting, “Where the Sidewalk Ends”. Her words speak one story, the photos seem uniformly to support the assertion that our sidewalks are a hazardous mess.

The city has ordinances that are not being enforced. And, based on the evidence of a new sidewalk just up the block from the Wunderbar sidewalk as you turn the corner onto Prospect Ave., not being administered with consistency. The code calls for the width of a sidewalk to be 5 feet. 44 inches is a bit shy.

It seems that perhaps the deeper issue revolves around a reluctance by the city to enforce its own codes to get property owners to rebuild sidewalks. In some places, like lower Allen St. near Front St., the sidewalk has simply disappeared. We need an injection of pride of place. Hudson is such a compact walkable place, with many charms. But, one hesitates to walk almost anywhere without gazing fixedly downward for fear of  treachery by sidewalk. 

Clearly this problem cannot be solved without some action by the elected officialsThis might include developing a multi-year city wide project and perhaps the city asking for bids from contractors for large volume sidewalk construction so that the cost of the construction can be driven down. This could also facilitate whole blocks being rebuilt at once so that the finished product is a flat, safe surface for pedestrians.

Another area of enforcement that would appear to be flagging is the attention to the details spelled out in the ordinances for the materials and tamping of subsoils before concrete is poured. Everywhere in the city there are examples of subsidence of the sidewalk relative to the curbing of one and more inches. This can only be the result of poor construction techniques.

Finally, wheelchair ramps. Laws, regulations, and general social consent that disabled people should have fair access to social spaces have been in place for decades. Somehow, our sidewalks are exempt. There are innumerable intersections where there are no curb ramps. As part of a rebuilding of sidewalks we should put these ramps into place.

I do still stand by my comments that the sidewalk constructed in front of Wunderbar defies common sense. Practical people solve problems in a way that is workable and durable. This abrupt transition between the two sidewalks is not workable nor safe. The city code enforcement and the contractor should have come up with a solution that resolved this. Lacking some vigorous action by city officials or the shame of the owner of the building adjacent, this sidewalk mess will be with us for years (decades?).

Graffiti an Eradicable Problem

Articles in The Gossips of Rivertown and Register Star about the marking of fresh concrete sidewalks in front of WunderBar and the forthcoming The Crimson Sparrow with graffiti inspired considerable comment.

Can’t Erase This with a Trowel

A recent walk up the street revealed a problem with this sidewalk work that can not be eradicated with a trowel. There is a mismatch in elevation of roughly three inches as you walk up Warren and another at the end of the new section of an inch or more, an obvious hazard to pedestrians, an insurmountable barrier to wheelchairs.

Common sense dictates that sidewalks be flat, regular surfaces without such hazards. Doubtless design standards for sidewalks say more.

What does this say about the owners of these buildings? What does it say about the workmanship of the contractor, a local one at that, to build something like this? And, where is the oversight of the city? Can one simple jack hammer a sidewalk and put down anything you want? 

By way of prediction, this ramp of concrete that the contractor put it to mask this travesty will not survive more than a winter of two before it begins to disintegrate. Good old mother nature, here through the freeze-thaw cycles of our winters, will reduce this to rubble.

Bad Construction and Poor Oversight Persist  for Years (Decades?)

A recent PBS Newshour report by Paul Solman on Thursday 3/15/12 in his series “Making Sense of Financial News” gave pause concerning the role of high frequency traders (HFT) on Wall St. (and doubtless on other markets around the world). First, you might ask what are HFTs? These are traders who use computer-based algorithms to select, buy, and sell shares on the markets. The speed of these transactions and the “thinking” that is performed is driving the HFTs to locate in lower Manhattan as close as possible to the main Internet port in the city. The few microseconds saved by not being a half mile away on Wall St. turns out to have great significance to HFTs.

The existence of HFTs first came to public notice when the great “flash crash” took place. On May 6, 2010 at 2:42 pm the Dow Jones industrial average, already down by 300 points that day, suddently lost more than 600 poijts in 5 minutes. 20 minutes later the market had regained the 600 point loss. Investigations pointed to the role of HFTs in these events. Since then there has been a lot of discussion of the stability of financial markets and the potential role of HFTs.

The Solman report noted that HFTs represent 2% of all the firms trading on Wall St., but conduct over 75% of the transactions. So, when you here that volume of the Big Board today was 3.56 billion shares (3/26/12) 2.67 billion were traded by HFTS. Solman also noted that the average time a share is held is 22 seconds.

What seems strange is that the question of the function and utility of HFTs is never examined beyond economists trotting out the well worn explanation that they are providing liquidiity to the market. By liquidity they mean the presence of buyers and sellers in the marketplace when someone wants to make a transaction. But is this a serious claim in favor of HFTs? Does this incredible display of computing power really mean anything more than people gambling on a fractional move within a few seconds?

Now an aside. In a video presentation¹ by Steve Lambert about his work, “Capitalism Works For Me! True/False” he notes that people seem perfectly at ease thinking about global warming and the need to undertake massive changes in the fundamental underpinnings of our world, but when it comes to our economy we engage in endless euphemisms and obfuscations. From his website he says:

“For 50 years it has been unacceptable, politically, in the United States to ask what is basically a straightforward question. We have a particular economic system, it’s called capitalism. We have every right as a society to ask of that system, is it working? Is it working for us? Do the benefits and the costs balance themselves out in a way that says, do we want to keep this system? Or that says, we want to change this system? Or that says, we ought to look at an alternative system. We’ve been afraid to ask that question. We’ve been afraid to have public debates—that’s the legacy of the cold war. We can’t afford anymore to not do that. We have to raise the question.”

To turn back to HFTs, why do we need this kind of transaction? How do they contribute to economic growth? These activities are by definition a zero sum game. They are like every other form of gambling a zero sum game. There are winners and losers, but no incremental gain for the economy. Other than enriching the HFTs at cost to others with smaller computers and fewer PhDs on staff what do we get for allowing these activities? Potentially catastrophic destabilization of financial markets? Where is the upside for society as a whole? Isn’t  a primary purpose of any economy to increase the size of the pie, not just to redistribute existing wealth?

1. I saw this at the the de Cordova Sculpture Garden and Museum in Lincoln MA

Mid-Hudson Cable continues to provide substandard internet services here. I have written of this earlier. Last summer I suckered up for the “up to 10 MB/sec” service for an extra $5 per month. Recently I updated my test results over this time span. The average download speed (all results based on 130 tests from August 2011 through today) is 5.9 MB/sec; the average upload speed is .43 MB/sec. The ping time average is 160 milliseconds.

So, in the strange world of Mid-Hudson Cable 5.9 equals “up to 10 MB/sec”. One does not need a calculator to see that there is a 40% shortfall here.

You can download the spreadsheet here to check out the data