There are several fallacies here. First, the idea that watching TV doesn't constitute "real wealth" is false. The very manufacturing plants you admit are valuable exist solely to provide goods and services that consumers demand. No, TVs aren't necessities, but that doesn't mean they aren't of economic value. Value is in the eye of the beholder, and lots of people quite clearly get utility from their television sets. So televisions are just as much a form of wealth as any other good.

Second, power plants are in almost all cases privately funded, at least in the U.S. The money you pay each month to your local electricity provider is going to a privately owned firm, albeit one that likely enjoys rate-of-return protection granted by government. Power is not running out, either. Will the cost of energy today persist as fossil fuels become more difficult to obtain? Probably not, but lots of neat forms of energy become viable once prices rise. By the time oil, uranium, coal, and natural gas resources all begin to dwindle, new technologies will have made new forms of elecricity generation economically feasible.

You claim that people tend to underestimate long-term costs and overestimate short-term gains. The LED example, however, actually shows that people are making the right decisions by sticking with plasma. The amount of electricity required to power a TV is still quite inexpensive--around 3 to 5 cents per hours--and so it'd take years to make up for a $300 price difference. And since pretty much any TV currently sold is going far past its obsolescence, it's fairly unimportant how long a TV will last. 8 years of 12 years are both very long timeframes among the modern consumer.

It's never made sense to me why governments think that micromanaging things like what lightbulbs can be sold or how much power TVs can consume is a smart method for curbing energy use.

If your goal is to improve energy efficiency, economists have figured out a remarkably simple and efficient method: tax electricity use. A 25% surcharge on each kilowatt-hour used would cause people to buy more energy-efficient products, meaning companies would shift resources toward building less power-hungry devices. A simple energy tax has the same ultimate effect as regulating efficiency across myriad consumer electronics, but without the need for a massive government bureaucracy.

You're mixing up Blu-Ray DRM with ATSC digital broadcasting. The "analog hole" with respect to unprotected outputs won't ever be disabled by broadcasters because the broadcast flag has been ruled enforceable. The article you link to specifies that MS merely chose to voluntarily comply with the flag, but there is no penalty for circumventing it and nearly every converter out there ignores it.

What are you talking about? There are no "holes" to be patched--MPEG2 transport streams are unencrypted. Though I don't doubt that content owners would surely love to impose DRM on broadcast content, it's simply not provided for in the ATSC specifications for MPEG2 over-the-air transport streams.

The infamous Broadcast Flag--the only element of DRM to have ever loomed over broadcast television--is dead and buried. Besides, none of the DTV converters currently available have any DRM-compliance built in.

Barring the highly unlikely event that Congress decides to modify the ATSC spec after tens of millions of TVs with DTV tuners are owned by consumers, there is zero chance of DRM becoming an issue with digital television programming.

You forget that you don't have a right to have your favored use of the airwaves dominate other, potentially more valuable uses. Nobody is entitled to spectrum, and nobody ever promised that analog broadcasts would be around forever.

Of course it's a pain when technology leaps ahead of us--as an owner of ISA cards, EIDE disks and Socket 478 CPUs I know all too well how painful obsolescence can be. But times change, and the benefits of adapting to progress far outweigh the costs, however severe they may sometimes seem.

A decent $100 UHF directional amplified rooftop antenna will easily pick up a UHF DTV signal 30 to 40 miles away at minimum if there aren't any obstructions. Some people can even get a usable signal from even further away. Also, a cheap $35 indoor UHF amplified antenna from Terk can get a signal up to 20 miles away even in fairly dense urban areas. Not nearly as good as old-fashioned analog, to be sure, but a lot of DTV signal strength is good equipment.

It's not a question of who needs spectrum, but rather how we should allocate the airwaves in a way that gives the most utility to the greatest number of people. The key is getting as much value for society as possible from a resource that only can go so far.

Television broadcasts aren't the only possible use of spectrum. What about wireless broadband? Or digital terrestrial radio? Or mobile phone service? Every chunk of spectrum occupied by an analog TV channel is one less piece that can be used for something else. With the remarkable technologies that now exist--WiMax, EVDO, and soon LTE--policymakers must realize that spectrum has a whole lot of potential and none of it involves analog anything. Compare the number of people who rely on TV broadcasts to the number of people who subscribe to mobile phone service, and it's quite clear which type of spectrum use is more popular among consumers.

You forgot one important justification for the DTV changeover: ending a massively wasteful use of spectrum.

A single analog TV channel uses a 6 Mhz of spectrum. And most channels sit vacant to avoid interference. Just four channels--24hz--is enough bandwidth to run a full-fledged mobile 3G network. You tell me what's a smarter way to use that chunk of spectrum.

Besides, relatively few people even get television from an antenna anymore. Technological advances have always caused some to lag behind--why should TV be any different? I don't get why people just assume that it's in the public's interest for broadcasters to control massive quantities of spectrum when pretty much every engineer and economist has demonstrated that broadcasting analog television signals is a complete waste of spectrum.

I see why you might think that market didn't "demand" a conversion to digital broadcasting, that's only because the people who benefited from the analog era had no incentive to move on.

Command-and-control spectrum allocation is on the way out. Letting politically powerful lobbies like the National Association of Broadcasters dictate how the public airwaves are used is unacceptable. We need to figure out a way to use spectrum intelligently, and the DTV conversion is a good step in that direction.

As a renter you have the right to everything the landlord promised in the lease. A landlord could not get away with inserting unconscionable terms into leases because renters would never agree to them.

Also, comparing the market for apartments to the feudal system is absurd. For the average Joe, owning land today is more attainable by orders of magnitude than it was in the feudal era. And there are thousands of independent apartment owners in every city vying for renters.

Read the article again. This isn't an device interference issue, but rather an issue where AT&T is moving EDGE/GSM to a higher frequency band that has inferior characteristics to other bands that AT&T used to use for EDGE. The problem is that the higher frequency doesn't offer the same signal strength in certain places, so EDGE users who've been switched to the 1900mhz band will notice a lower signal in certain areas.

The fact that running a new cable isn't cheap does not mean that the enterprise of running cable is a natural monopoly.

You think building a nationwide wireless network, with backhaul and everything, is cheap? No, it's actually extremely expensive, yet we have at least 4 separate nationwide cellular networks. The strangest part: they all make a decent profit, at least for the most part.

In the current climate, with greedy and corrupt city councils that make it prohibitively expensive for all but the most deep-pocketed companies to lay wire to homes and businesses, it's no surprise why many simply assume that last-mile service must be a natural monopoly. Except we still have overbuilders, like RCN, who still manage to pony up the capital.

I say we make it easy for overbuilders and the competitive entrepreneurs who want to lay wire to homes and compete with incumbents. The FCC should make nationwide rules that pre-empt local franchise authorities who exist only to serve a vocal minority of citizens who want their favorite objectives forced upon would-be competitors at the expense of everyone else. Then we might actually have 5 or 10 choices, not just 1 or 2 like most of us have today.

What's so cumbersome about simply abstaining from Google? Lots of substitutes exist to all of their services, many of which have more robust privacy guarantees.