Thursday, September 09, 2010
Seth the AT&T Blogger Guy Shows Us All the Stuff They’re Doing In New York
In this video we find AT&T’s rep, Seth Bloom, reaching out to New Yorkers in particular and explaining, as simply as possible, while their calls suck and how AT&T is trying to fix the problem.
Essentially AT&T is starting to move some calls to the the 850 MHz band for more in-building coverage. The best thing about this video is that Seth the AT&T Blogger Guy looks like someone you’d want to give a noogie to (that’s a good thing) and they show you whats inside those crazy switch boxes on top of buildings. Double rainbow.
I think AT&T really hit it out of the park with this: they explained in plain English what was wrong and they showed how they are fixing it. And they did it not in an email but in a detailed discussion with an AT&T who explained the technology clearly and succinctly. I’m almost starting to like AT&T again.
Sadly, their other outreach efforts didn’t work so well.
The Real Baltimore: Invisible Hand Waves Good-Bye
The Real Baltimore: Invisible Hand Waves Good-Bye
On the streets of 'The Wire', Thomas Ferguson on financial crisis and the people of Baltimore
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. Many of you might recognize the row of housing behind me and maybe the sound of the sirens. We're in Baltimore, where The Wire was shot, and many of you probably have seen that show. We're here discussing the economy, Wall Street, state financing, and what's happening to people living in houses like this. And joining us to discuss all this is Tom Ferguson.
TOM FERGUSON, POLITICAL SCIENTIST AND AUTHOR: Hi.
JAY: So tell us, what has Wall Street got to do with people living in houses like this?
FERGUSON: Well, Wall Street affects people here, you know, in the Wire part of Baltimore the way they affect pretty much the whole rest of the United States. They basically take enormous risks. If those work out for them, they keep the profits. If it doesn't work out for them, we end up having to make up the losses. And since they're banks, they take down the rest of the economy, and they take down not only themselves but the rest of us, and then the place stays down for years. I mean, you know, the problem of a financial crisis is bigger than just an ordinary recession. That's what Wall Street—I mean, it's that sort of second-order effect, not just on the fact that they've—we've had to make up their losses themselves [sic], but the way they can do all the collateral damage.
JAY: One of the big problems in Baltimore is affordable housing, even though so many houses are actually sitting empty and boarded up. But there's no money for affordable housing. There's a big crime problem in Baltimore, but apparently right now in Baltimore there's a no-overtime policy at the police department, something people have seen in an episode of The Wire. So how does that—those two things—.
FERGUSON: Okay. There's—they connect in not just the one but in several ways. First of all, just on mortgage financing, what you get is the system that pushed mortgage loans out on people, in many cases deliberately unaffordable, where you do these, you know, adjustable-rate mortgages that jump real fast, that they can't possibly be paid off, and are often sold through mortgage brokers, where the mortgage broker, because they get paid deliberately from the company making the loan, which then sells it to Wall Street, which goes into the collateralized debt obligations, which go into the mortgage bonds, etc., all that stuff, they saddled this place with an enormous amount of debt that was essentially unpayable and that they knew was unpayable to begin with. One effect of Wall Street on a place like this is it bankrupts big chunks of it, and that of course then, as it collapses, well, not just the value of the houses that people couldn't pay the mortgages on but all the houses around them go down. The usual problem in towns like this is there's no tax base, and so it's tough to issue bonds that anybody wants. And nobody is going to make them big loans, because they've [inaudible] just yesterday or so Harrisburg said it was going to miss a bond payment, for example. You'll have to go beyond just sort of fixing on banks on that problem. I mean, somebody's going to have to come in and provide low-interest finance to solve that type of a problem. You probably can't get that through a private banking system.
JAY: For people that watch the TV show The Wire, they know that the city of Baltimore was constantly running out of money for its policing, particularly problems running out of money for schools and not enough money to pay teachers. You can see behind us boarded-up houses. There's not enough money for affordable housing. At municipal and state level, there's this financial crisis that's hit and likely is going to hit even more seriously as some of the federal stimulus money that was going to states runs out.
FERGUSON: Sure [snip] if the Wall Street role in this was simply to take the enormous risks that collapsed the economy. And whenever the economy goes down, the tax collections fall way off. And, you know, the states and the localities cannot borrow endlessly, so they're sort of stuck. They can't print money. And so the debt limits are really hard and fast. In that situation, you have a problem. You know, in a market-driven society like that, where you've got this huge cyclical downturn and you won't use federal policy to effectively pump up the economy to get to full employment, cities are—you know, it's really a catch-22. It won't work, no matter what you do. These people in effect can run all they want. Their problem is the national income's way lower than it should be. It's a super-cyclical problem; it's not just cyclical. It's a financial crisis gives you worse than a regular business downturn. If you don't have a national policy either to get back to full employment pretty fast or to bail out towns and cities, then they're caught between a rock and a hard place, and you just get this endless nightmare, which you can see in, you know, both cities and state. Baltimore, obviously, state of California, they're cutting back. The income is still either not rising at all or falling. Tax collections fall off. It just gets worse and worse.
JAY: So there's elections coming in November. So if you lived in one of these areas, or to people who do, what should they be asking their politicians?
FERGUSON: Well, they need to be asking the Democrats: why didn't they act like Democrats? And that answer—and actually do something for ordinary people? Why did you just rescue the banks? That's the question they should be asking the Democrats. And, of course, you don't have to ask that question, I think, if—I mean, I wouldn't like to get directly into partisan politics, but who would ask a Republican, you know, why they rescued the banks and not the ordinary population? The unemployment is the—you know, you only have to have one panacea, and full employment is the panacea. If you get people back to work, almost everything else will right itself.
JAY: Alright. So how does the government get [inaudible]
FERGUSON: Well, we all—I think we all know what they did wrong, which was, when they came into office, they offered a stimulus program that was about half the size of the one they should have. And they also didn't do anything on housing [inaudible] the Obama administration's housing programs have just been—and mortgage relief, they're not—they just do nothing. They should have just done what they did in the New Deal: moved vigorously to put people back to work. You should have seen, you know, cranes and construction stuff everywhere, kids who couldn't find jobs, Civilian Conservation Corps, Federal Emergency Relief, you know, all that stuff should have—that should have happened.
JAY: [inaudible] still what they should be doing?
FERGUSON: Yeah. Their—well, their problem is we all know we're stuck in a kind of underemployment equilibrium, meaning you're stuck with high unemployment for years and years. Yeah, they need to move vigorously against this. It's plain that the invisible hand is just waving goodbye. Okay?
JAY: So the Republicans say you do that and you wind up, number one, creating an inflationary cycle, and two, they say these kinds of government-made jobs eventually run out and don't actually build anything.
FERGUSON: Republican—well, Republicans—first of all, do the government jobs build anything? You know, if we go down the street, you'll run over a whole load of WPA [Works Progress Administration] bridges and buildings in this town that were built. Now tell me they didn't build anything. You know, I'm looking down the street, okay? The question about the deficit is, if you come back to full employment, national income goes back up, the tax base goes back up. The claims about inflation are just nonsense. That's the thing that was so crazy. When everybody—when Obama came into office, it is true, exactly what you said, Republicans said, you do this, you'll get a huge inflation deal. Well they did about a half-size thing, and there's no trace of inflation at all [snip] people now fearing deflation. You know, when was the last time in our lifetimes—I've never seen deflation specters before, and yet that is plainly a possibility here. And, I mean, we're not—there's—you show me where inflation is in the United States.
JAY: So the counterargument goes, whether it's inflationary or not, you can create a kind of crisis of credibility about the currency, 'cause where is all the stimulus money coming from?
FERGUSON: The whole world's buying dollars. You know, I mean, since this crisis began, stepping back from 2008, I mean, the dollar has gone up and up. Indeed, the administration's plans to some extent were—I think they were hoping for an export boom. That's never going to happen. And when you have a crisis in the euro, nobody wants to sort of lay in 25 years' worth of euros much. It's not like there's lots of currencies out there. I mean, people are even buying the yen right now. There's a limit to the yen for yen. I think that whole story is, frankly, a fantasy.
JAY: But is part of the issue, too, is that it's just the question of taxation, which is that there's going to be enormous pressure, if you have this kind of government works program, to start taxing wealthy people to pay for it?
FERGUSON: Oh, if you've got an issue with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, you know, and the administration basically wants to freeze them in place for middle- and lower-income folks, and the upper 2 percent or so they want to do taxes, it's not much of a tax rise. It just puts it back to where it was in the 1990s, where nobody was particularly claiming they were hugely overtaxed.
JAY: If you forget that some people like it or don't like it, in terms of its pure economic effect, does taxing the wealthy slow down the economy? 'Cause that's the argument.
FERGUSON: Well, if you tax anybody in a recession, you will slow buying, I mean, in the sense that aggregate demand will fall. But, you know, that's an easy offset: you just do a government program [inaudible] which in general it won't be spent at the same rate it's all saved anyway. I mean, that's part of the problem. So you're better off with a vigorous government program. And the real issue on those tax cuts is what happens 5 or 10 years out. And, you know, I think there's a case for not—I'm not an alarmist about the state of the US deficit. Most of the stuff that's written on this is just nonsense, and, you know, we're nowhere near going all bankrupt or anything like that. That's why people are buying dollars, and it's just—that's all they're—and the—why the yield curves don't look at all like an incipient financial panic in dollars or anything like that. Quite the reverse. So I wouldn't—you know, I don't worry about that stuff very much.
JAY: Alright. So a final word, if you're going to say something to people living around here.
FERGUSON: They need full employment more than anything else. That's what you've got to have. You need an economic program to put people back to work fast.
End of Transcript
Zumodrive Takes Cloud Storage And Syncing Up A Notch
Cloud storage and file synchronization is becoming increasingly important as users access the Internet and their data via a plethora of devices – desktop computers with large hard drives, laptops with smaller drives, and netbooks and mobile devices with relatively small internal storage. There are a lot of online storage/syncing startups and products out there to choose from, ranging from Microsoft Foldershare, dropbox and Sharpcast to pure online storage services like Wuala, box.net and drop.io.
Newcomer Zumodrive, from Y Combinator startup Zecter, enters this space with an interesting twist. Like other syncing services, Zumodrive creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But instead of syncing those files with all of your other devices, Zumodrive tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them.
That’s not such a big deal when in comes to PC-to-PC syncing where hard drive storage isn’t an issue. But I have far more music files than will fit on even my laptop. Zumodrive lets me access them (even via iTunes) in a way that makes them appear local. And when it comes to netbooks and mobile devices with very limited hard drive space, Zumodrive is a Godsend. It just appears to make your hard drive limitless in size.
One other thing Zumodrive does that’s smart is it actually syncs files you use a lot across all your devices. That way you’ll have access to those important files when you’re offline. You can right click on any file to make it local on that machine. The service also makes guesses as to other files that should be synced locally.
The product is launching into private beta today. If you’d like to try it out, we have 1,000 invitations, just use the invite code ireadtc or click here.
And that’s not all. Zumodrive will soon have an iPhone application to allow users to access files from that device. If you are interested in testing out an early private version of the iPhone app, you can sign up here once you have registered for Zumodrive.
The Zecter guys previously launch a product called Versionate, an office-wiki product, that we first covered in July 2007. We wrote about them again a year ago. Work on the product is on hold for now as the founders focus on Zumodrive, but they say they may develop it further in the future.
Zecter has raised a total of about $1 million and is based in San Mateo, California.
Video: A stupendously exciting demo of Ford’s Sync 3.0
Ford and Microsoft has been hard at work upgrading their lovechild named Sync 3.0. The latest version upgrades simply adds more features but maintains the easy-to-use voice-activated system. Simply press the button on the steering wheel and say one of the pre-recorded commands. That’s it. Simple and easy. Exciting video demo after the break.
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