We have very specific reasons for wage floors. The big reason for those is that we (as a people) believe every person should be able to meet basic requirements for life in our country. Things like food and some form of housing. We have pretty much said we would like to avoid having people living on the streets as much as we can. A wage floor is meant to guarantee some level of access to these things.

A lot of municipal broadband offerings in the US have actually been 'private' companies with municipal backing (ie a municipal contract specifically to do the physical connections). Some people have just argued that these are not 'private companies' because of the 'municipal backing'. I'd rather avoid the argument then take sides.

In the US for a time the FCC mandated the phone companies offer DSL to any company that wanted to offer services over it, however those companies killed it by setting prices themselves with little government oversight. Also it meant to companies you had to deal with when having service issues, because the phone company was competing as an ISP as were the ones providing service over their connection. So they prioritized their own customers over their rivals to make things even worse. So with the 'ammo' of bad performance and bad service to wave around the phone companies said to the government "See that was a horrible idea, stop making us provide our competitors with access!" Hence that has basically been tossed out in the US right now.

This is less a theoretical natural monopoly as discussed by that economist, and more a physical and political natural monopoly because we would rather not have cables for 50 companies all running through our property. Also from a financial perspective, few companies want to own those physical connections as they cost a lot to lay in the ground or on a pole. So a very real type of natural monopoly emerges in that the public wants a limit on the hassle and bother caused from tearing up their lawn every year or less depending on demand for services.

Also some areas are not deemed as sufficiently profitable and without government involvement may never have any access if left to the companies to decide. I mean this is the cause of limited availability in many areas. A lot of this is not really 'not profitable' it is instead 'it's mildly profitable in the long run, but has a high initial investment'. We are way to focused on short term returns and not nearly enough on benefiting customers.

The European model has long been that because running the cables is a natural monopoly it is best for the government to handle the cable and let private business compete on top of that. The fact that most of Europe has wild ISP competition without impacting provided speeds suggests that their model may in fact be better.

Also attempts at this in the US have had mixed results. Well run municipal broadband has succeeded at providing low cost physical infrastructure and even ISP services without needing any tax money. Badly run ones have been financial disasters wasting both fees and municipal funds. Which honestly is pretty much the same record as most private corporations before the consolidations began leaving us with what is often a dozen monopolies spread across the country who never directly compete.

Ok AC... How about the corporations do the same? If a company owes me money I'm lucky if I ever see it, let alone 'on time'. Hell many bills I have such as my cell phone and internet access require me to pay them a month in advance! I don't agree with doing that and so they always consider me a month behind and in their terms I am. However this 'deal' was a completely one sided one where I could not have my say in what rights and responsibilities we both had. I don't have a choice in providers either beyond 'this company that wants to screw me' and 'that company that wants to screw me'.

I know this is a really late reply, I've learned sometimes it's best not to come back to comments I've made and look at replies so I do it rarely.

However for a 'shit happens' situation even in your world of 'have a spare payment in savings'.... I had the engine in my car go a few years ago and it cost $1.6k to replace the engine (including labor). I didn't have payments, but lets say I was still paying $300/month on the car (roughly what my payments had been) and I had $1.3k in savings... Do I fix the car (my only means of transportation) or do I pay the bill that month?

Even at $50/month in savings (What my parents always told me to put away) $1.3k is 26 months worth of savings. Or slightly over two years (minus any slight increase due to interest). They combined made about $50k/year and that was the savings they tried for. It didn't often happen though as something would come up and gobble up any savings they ever made.

In the US and outside of major cities which have some basic form of mass transit... Access to a vehicle can often be a requirement for living.

I live 30 minutes from one of the top 100 cities in the US by population, but their are few jobs here. For a population of 5000 the number of local jobs is around 1200 (it used to be much higher by as much as 3x what it is now). Everyone else must work outside that (usually in the city). Medical care is also at least 20 minutes away. No mass transit options exist at all.

And don't even think to say 'move to the city' it's more expensive to live in the city then it is to live here and own a car. But shit happens and oh my god you could be a whole 3 days late on a payment! Wow that's just so criminal!

Your reminding me of when I learned COBOL... using microfocus in the 90's... I've never programmed in it after learning it though... I do however like the ability to describe the specific parts of what are effectively strings (though I don't think they are ever referred to as such) when handling input and output. I miss the fine ability to output text in C or C++ where I need a lot more effort to create the precision COBOL has...

I found it funny at one job I had where they wanted me to where a suit every day to work... They were paying me $28,000 a year at the time and requiring me to crawl around on the floor at times to check network wiring or move around equipment... I'd need to use a dry cleaners daily to have some hope of keeping these suits clean. It took a lot of effort to explain this to someone and how dress slacks and a dress shirt with a tie may be somewhat better for my work 'uniform' than wearing a suit given some of the activities I had to do... I also argued for a raise based on this mandate, but that didn't go over with them at all.

Wow, love the union hate there... So you would rather everyone (except you I'm assuming) work in third world poverty conditions because that is what capitalism seeks (those with the means controlling production and hence wages)? That is what unions were designed to fight. If you cannot afford goods because 'unions' then it most likely means that you are paid shit and if your wages had been rising along with 'wealth' in this country you wouldn't have an issue. However that hasn't been the case in decades, general pay for labor has been stagnant in real terms and in many cases decidedly regressive. Your wages have not kept up with inflation in goods and the companies are amazingly happy about that.

Now I'm not saying unions as we know them now are all good, but unions are not some evil attempting to kill you by making it so you cannot buy things. That would be the corporations. It so happens the corporations found a great way of subverting unions by bringing in 'professional management' because workers are stupid after all... It didn't take that many shills to cause unions to fall for this trap of being run by the same people running companies... Enter corruption and rent seeking from the new 'management' who are often buddy buddy with the companies they function with... and you have the modern corrupted form of unions. Done to you buy the rich for the rich and keeping your wages down since the 50's and 60's...

The rich don't care about inflation, their gains are far higher than inflation by 3-4 times. Kansian Economics clearly tells them that inflation means growth of their wealth. Inflation is a means in which they can gradually increase prices over time with no other requirements. On the other hand companies 'don't have' the funds to increase worker pay for the lower rungs by even the same amount as inflation and so are constantly priced out of those goods and services as companies look to new markets with money to buy their products.

Since I didn't link to it before... Here is the average speed of a given stream to the end user for August 2014 in the US: http://ispspeedindex.netflix.c...

Cablevision tops the list at a meer 3.11 Mbps...
Verizon DSL holds the bottom at 1.31 Mbps...

If you average those it is 2.21 Mbps as the mid point for US streaming speed...

Google numbers are very area specific, or I'd link to those as well.

That is:
a) 5 Mbps only for video with nothing else using the connection.
b) & that assumes the speed from source to end point is actually equal to the rate quoted for the service.

That last point is the real stickler. Netflix and Google both show data that suggests few if any networks an end user in the US can buy can actually handle much more than ~2.5 Mbps on average right now from their service. So your connection can say '25/1' like mine, but youtube stutters regularly in SD... Which means they cannot actually deliver even a couple Mbps from youtube to me. The data says I'm not even remotely a-typical.

This is a load of crap. Size means shit to companies as amazingly large as these. They could easily roll out high end broadband to most if not all of the US, but it would cut into their staggering profits. The reduction of profits is the reason they do shit like this. Or shit like buying my state government to ban municipal broadband at the same time they shrugged off a failure to live up to their promises that the state collective paid them (massively) to live up to for a decade. And of course they didn't even get a slap on the wrist for that. I wish I could tell the government I'd do 'X' and then get paid for a decade to do that before going "Oh, no. I'm not really doing X or even plan on doing X' and they wouldn't even try to recoup the lost money...

I'm not a programmer. You don't want me to be a programmer. I can work with pseudo code and flow charts to describe how things need to be done, but I suck at doing the actual code. I can program, but it's the lesser subset of my skills. My key abilities are in problem solving, planning, and communicating with others.

My bachelors degree is actually 'Business Administration: Management Information Systems'. What I've always done best is analysis and the job I've tried to get over the years are in the systems analyst/business analyst, though I actually wouldn't mind getting back into doing the job of a director of technology (with the title this time) or a CTO. The route to that is certainly not programming either.

My 'network admin' job was the sole IT person for a charter school with several hundred people. I did the job of a director of technology, a network admin, and a support person all in one. Maybe you should stop being condescending?

My region (Northwestern PA) has had a handful of job openings at any time and a population of 908,367 people. Some of those jobs I really don't have the skills for such as requiring experience in SAP/SME, Sharepoint, Webfocus, SAS, etc which basically require that you've had a job working with those technologies to get them. I could lie, but frankly while I know what those technologies are, I certainly couldn't answer questions about them. Some I couldn't get right now because they have a hard requirement of a Bachelors degree. What is left I often have been applying for, degree be damned.

I could move to Pittsburgh or Philly except I really cannot afford to move. I've been living on ~$500/month for four years. I have no funds. My relatives who have money aren't giving me money. I cannot get a loan as I defaulted on all my debt when unemployment ended and I simply couldn't pay them anymore. I simply have no way to move. I couldn't live there a day, let alone a month. I've talked to a few companies in Pittsburgh offering jobs and they won't give me an interview until I move where they are. They most certainly don't have any desire to help me.

I live just outside of Erie PA to be bluntly specific. Nearby are Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh all roughly 100 miles away. But even those cities only have 3-5 times the jobs of my own region. I wouldn't call that 'thriving' and Pittsburgh and Cleveland are both over 300k. The bulk of IT workers are tied up in places like Seattle, So Cal, and Austin. Those places truly have an 'IT industry' like it tends to be thought of.