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Billion Dollar Handout To Upgrade TVs
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Mar 13, 2007 05:55 PM
from the if-we-can-send-a-man-to-the-moon dept.
from the if-we-can-send-a-man-to-the-moon dept.
db32 writes "SFGate has the story of the cutoff date for those rabbit ear antennas that some of us grew up with (Feb. 19, 2009). Now while the story of analog vs. digital TV has been beaten to death, still I think there is something more here. 'The Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration... said it is setting aside $990 million to pay for the boxes. Each home can request up to two $40 coupons for a digital-to-analog converter box, which consumer electronics makers such as RCA and LG plan to produce.' Beyond my disdain for most TV to begin with, I am blown away that with all of our current problems — homelessness and crime on the home front, war fighting and terrorism abroad — our government is seriously going to spend this much money on upgrading peoples' televisions."
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Makes perfect sense (Score:5, Informative)
$8 to $10 billion the last time this came up (Score:5, Informative)
If I told you I would give you $10 for a $1 bill, would you take it?
Parent
Re:Makes perfect sense (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that by doing so, they're aiding the campaign to implement DRM and "close the analog hole"s.
If digital TV provided the same freedom and flexibility as analog TV, this wouldn't even be a story on Slashdot.
Parent
I don't know why you are surprised.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell them they are happy.
Medicate them.
Tell them that the Government is protecting them.
Medicate them.
Provide an conduit for masses to not _need_ to think about day-to-day life.
Encourage them to medicate themselves.
Result; they will think that they are happy.
The Romans summed it up best, IMHO: (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Let them be happy, then. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
It's amazing you're still happy... (Score:5, Funny)
How are you going to get any happier if you don't take happiness from others?
Parent
Re:It's amazing you're still happy... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Let them be happy, then. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not advocating a Luddite movement, only pointing out that TV dulls your mind. Even putting aside politics, do you really think that a 1/2-hour long documentary on crocodiles would teach you as much as an article about them in National Geographic?
Picking up politics again, you'd be better informed if you stopped watching TV news altogether and read every issue of Harpers and The National Review. Add in the Economist if you're ambitious. Pick magazines from different parts of the political spectrum. Don't just read Mother Jones, but don't just read The American Spectator, either. Subscribe to a few and alternate which ones you read. Have them around your house, and if you have kids, let them see you reading. Even Rolling Stone has good articles. Fox News is political theater, not news, and CNN and the other networks are only vying to keep up. Even Olbermann, who is so fun to watch stick it to O'Reilly, is still entertainment, not news.
Every day I deal with people who think they're informed because they watch the news. They know about some missing kid, about Britney Spears, and they know that liberals want the terrorists to win. But mention that the US National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the Iraq war is making terrorism worse, and you don't get fierce debate--you get blank looks. TV is great for the "gotcha!" soundbite, but it's horrible for perspective and nuance. You need to read. No, I'm not saying that all educated people agree with me, politically or otherwise. I've worked with an arch-conservative who I really respected, because he had done his reading and was willing to talk about stuff. We don't have to agree, because this isn't about my opinion vs. your opinion. This is about having a common ground of facts on which we can base a debate. Over half of the people who rely on TV news still think that Iraq was behind the WTC attacks. How do you have a debate with a person like that?
Parent
Re:Let them be happy, then. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Bread and Circuses (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses/ [wikipedia.org]
already compensated for (Score:4, Interesting)
The weird thing is that the sales tax goes to the state not the feds, so it's nets out as a giant shift of funds from fed to the states.
Good Investment (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine the chaos when people have to access "news" from various/conflicting sources, and start coming up with their own minds.
Flawed perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
This argument can be used to make almost any expenditure look silly. I can't believe, with all of the homelessness, that our government is [sponsoring arts programs | paying for students to take field trips | building monuments to fallen soldiers | repaving roads |
Just because you have certain problems, doesn't mean that you do without anything else, until those problems are solved.
Then again, I can't believe that you bought yourself a television, when you could have donated your money to fight homelessness, etc...
Somewhere in a NSA memo... (Score:5, Funny)
Ancient Romans had government-subsidized gladiator matches. Americans have Fox-subsidized American Idol. Same difference.
How about the other direction... (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is opposite of:
Demagoguery works both ways...
Re:How about misdirection... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, not buying it. Why can't grandma pony up 40 bucks, especially since she gets a fat social security check every month? Instead of your demagogic misdirection, how 'bout you face facts: The government is subsidizing mind control devices in order to ensure the passivity of the populace.
(As a person who hates TV and doesn't own one, it really pisses me off that my tax dollars are being spent on this boondoggle. Fortunately, the avarice of the convert-makers will ensure that the device costs far more than 40 dollars.)
You want demagoguery? How about this: The government should send a check for 40 dollars to every single cigarette smoker to account for increased prices (because of lawsuits & taxes). Or maybe the government should send 40 grand to Coca-cola for every soda/pop machine that is removed from our schools because of those uppity parents' groups.
Your demagogic judo misses a very salient point: TV is bad for you. It's bad for your mind, your body and your soul. Why is the government subsidizing something that, by almost all accounts, is detrimental to our health? Children spend 44.5 hours per week in front of screens [mediafamily.org] -- as much time as I spend at my job -- and the government is not only unconcerned they're funding this? Don't you see something wrong here?
The posters who mentioned Bread & Circuses are right on. This is about pacifying the population. If we didn't have TV to numb our brains people might start to wake up to all the nefarious shit going on around us. Ideally, TV would be an excellent medium to tackle these social ills, but the mega-media-corps rarely seem to do so, especially when their own bottom line is at risk.
Instead, we will all continue working all day, going home to veg for a few hours and then waking up and doing it again... and with our softened brains we'll never have time to ponder why a highly-advanced country like ours works so much, yet has so little to show for it (besides bigscreen TVs). With American Idol on we'll never deduce that the rich are stealing from us through inflation, real-estate boom & busts, taxes and other financial trickery that make it possible for the middle classes' earning power to actually decline [spectator.org] over the last 30 years despite the rich getting fantastically richer.
We are being FUCKED. But most people are too hypnotized to notice.
Parent
As one who worked on digital tv (Score:4, Insightful)
I can tell you the reason why the industry needs a subsidy:
No one wants to pay for DRM.
The market hasn't failed. Rather, the content companies have begun to realize that people don't want to pay more to get less.
I mean, why would I buy a tv with fewer features?
The content companies have begun to realize that they need to provide some kind of short-term incentive to get the customer to give up the rights to which they have become accustomed. Once the first generation grows up without the ability to record tv, they'll think it's normal. And the worst of it is that it isn't the content companies paying the bill, but the American taxpayer!
With DTV, the public domain goes away. DRM isn't there to prevent some content from being rebroadcast; it is there to keep all content away from the net. Even things legally in the public domain.
Call your Senator and tell him to oppose this bill. Tell him you don't want Congress wasting money...
You don't understand at all.. (Score:5, Informative)
I use rabbit ears (well, hoop antenna) with my Mythbox and ATSC tuner card just freaking fine and record to my hearts content (it's technically easier/cheaper to implement a perfect ATSC capture card, than a decent analog capture card, a decent analog card needs some sort of on-the-fly encoding, ATSC card just need dump the MPEG2 stream out. I don't have any problem recording TV at all.
Broadcast DTV is not DRM-encumbered at all. Cable companies enjoy a bit more DRM that is harder to break than their analog channel scrambling, but that is a moot point for ending analog broadcast TV and helping people to have the new standard accessible.
Parent
I rarely approve of government spending... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I rarely approve of government spending... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Bread an Circuses (Score:5, Insightful)
If you deny the peasants their bread and circuses [wikipedia.org], they might just up and start paying attention to the world around them, and realize that their government is whittling away their freedoms one by one.
By the way, the plan to allocate these funds was announced back when the FCC announced plans to force migration to digital -- years ago.
Terrible (Score:5, Funny)
Good (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a good idea to keep signals available to current TV owners.
Why bother to have more than one priority? (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, I do think this is an example of wasteful government largesse. But I really hate the given justification.
How about, "Innocent people continue to be raped and murdered on their way home at night. And yet, the government continues to spend money on post office boxes. Is your child's life worth less than a post office box?"
The notion that because something is very important that it therefore innately subsumes all lesser priorities is not consistent with any form of logical cost benefit analysis. Rarely if ever is there a linear relation to investment and payoff in terms of moneys allocated to resolving social issues, and the sort of qualitative analysis you mentally apply to "homelessness" vs. "television" is an irrational and inappropriate way to compare what is actually a quantitative analysis of "unit payoff per unit investment to resolve homeless" and the corresponding.
Anyway, I think a better question than "how can the government waste money on instead of ?" might be "why do I trust the government to be responsible for these monies in the first place?" It's pretty much a given that, whatever Uncle Sam does 'for our own good' with our own money, ninety percent of us are going to pissed about it.
Rabbit Ears aren't going anywhere (Score:5, Informative)
Not Entirely Irrational (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The FCC controls airwave licenses.
2. A significant number of people out there do not have the means, or rightfully refuse to upgrade to a television capable of decoding over the air digital signals.
3. A significant number of people out there do not have the mans, or rightfully refuse to purchase cable and/or satellite service, yet they continue to watch TV via over the air signals.
4. Eliminating analog over the air signals will open up gobs of frequencies for other uses; including 2-way communications, IP communications, and more digital channels, both TV and radio.
5. Finally, $990 million is _nothing_ compared to how much auctioning off the new spectrum will generate in revenue for the FCC. The last auction generated something like $40 billion; $990 million in order to generate good will among the populace, and ensure that the working class (working poor) does not get cut off from their TV, is a win-win.
If the government didn't have a plan like this, most likely the analog over-the-air signals would end up continuing. This is a *bad* thing, as that spectrum is very valuable, and being used inefficiently.
Is this government intervention? Yes, of course it is. Unfortunately, this is a situation that libertarian's like myself have to learn to handle delicately, because it involves an actual *public* good, that being frequency spectrum.
Why all the fuss? (Score:4, Funny)
$1bn in foreign aid (Score:4, Insightful)
Chip H.
The government will make a net profet on this deal (Score:4, Insightful)
A billion sound like a lot of money but in the US that amounts to less then four bucks per person.
I paid $200 for mine. (Score:5, Interesting)
We don't have cable TV or satellite TV and we don't want it. I bought the Samsung unit to interface to a 32-inch Sony CRT television that is about twelve years old.
All the stations in my area, save one, are already broadcasting both analog and digital. With digital, I get dramatically better picture quality, though it's harder to use because you tend to have to re-tune the antenna (see below) when you change channels, particularly between UHF and VHF (those distinctions persist into the digital realm, too).
It takes some getting used to. When signals are weak, your TV displays weird freezing and pixellation, and the sound stutters. It's quite disconcerting at first.
Somebody awhile back wrote that with digital broadcast TV, you either get a perfect display of the channel on your screen, or you get no image or sound at all. That's just not true. You always have to deal with the freezing, stuttering, distorted audio and pixellation, although if you are persistent, you can learn how to tune in each station correctly and the breakup happens far less often.
And by the way, you still need the rabbit ears. Broadcast digital TV requires an antenna--the same kind of antenna required for broadcast analog TV.
The main reason that the US government is starting this program is two-fold. First, broadcast television is where most citizens (who don't have cable or satellite) still get their news, and being able to hear the news daily is considered a part of participating in democracy. Second, Congress mandated the cessation of analog broadcast TV at the end of 2009, so Congress is placing a burden on some (mostly poor) citizens who could become disenfranchised from the democracy through not being able to watch news broadcasts on their TV as a direct result of Congress' actions.
This is an Obscenity (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, this is chump change... (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously, the government knows that the incestuous US 'service' economy needs people to buy shit they don't need or it all collapses.
Parent
Re:Yeah, this is chump change... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Yeah, this is chump change... (Score:5, Insightful)
Its far more than capitalism, this is what drives evolution. Why on earth do Peacocks have such rediculous plumage? Is doesn't improve their ability to survive, and certainly other species can find mates w/o such massive shows. Man has been collecting worthless crap since we walked erect, seashells, pretty rocks, shiny baubles. Even the most primative tribes put on feasts to show their wealth to other tribes. It's what drives evolution.
If noone bought things they didn't need, we'd eliminate all jobs but agriculture and medicine with a 90+% unemplyment rate.
Get rid of manufacturing jobs and we'll all be working the fields, just like ancient Sumeria. There wil be no doctors because they be too busy growing their own food. You need tractors, irrigation, distribution networks, etc. so the 1% of farmers can grow enough food for the rest of us. Those in turn need energy, miners, etc for resources. The fact that a reasonably educated westerner can't figure out the resource allocation to accomplish the basic goal of feeding 600 million Americans is why Communism fails, and why government screws things up.
Parent
Re:Yeah, this is chump change... (Score:5, Insightful)
The hell it doesn't! That precisely what it's for. The guy with the most bling gets the chicks. And that's how they decide who's "worthy". That's how nature works, and that's what life is all about...getting laid and reproducing. Every single thing we do is for that explicit purpose. And that would include all the plumage and war trophies, and for that matter, that's what capitalism is all about. It is, and we are nature in its purest form.
Get rid of manufacturing jobs and we'll all be working the fields, just like ancient Sumeria. There wil be no doctors because they be too busy growing their own food.
All the manufacturing and agricultural work is supposed to be done by machines. We have the knowledge to live this way, but the subjugation of other humans seems to be more profitable, and natural for the moment. Contrary to what most of you might think, we really are not in control. We are still motivated by the most basic of instincts.
Parent
Re:Yeah, this is chump change... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Citizens of USA called Americans (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Yeah, this is chump change... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Yeah, this is chump change... (Score:4, Interesting)
To you a gaming console may be useless crap, to someone else it may be a fantastic release from their long day working at a manufacturing plant building tractors to work the fields. Without said console they may little fun and their quality of life decreases.
Are books useless? They don't contribute anything meaningful in a physical product sense... so surely they're useless crap too?
It's a slippery slope when you try to start judging the 'worth' of items based purely on whether you 'need' them to survive.
Parent
You're confused... (Score:4, Insightful)
The summary, which claimed "our government is seriously going to spend this much money on upgrading peoples' televisions." shows a serious lack of understanding. "The government" is us.
In simple terms, this just means that we, as taxpayers, will be giving ourselves $80 in coupons, and funding bureaucrats along the way. For the $80 we get, we'll probably spend that and an extra $40 to support those bureaucrats, given the inefficiencies of the federal government. Furthermore, this will likely be taken as a signal to RCA and LG that they can hold prices higher for a while, because it amounts to a mandated time payment plan (buy now, pay at taxtime), and hides the true cost. The net effect is that the taxpayer will be inefficiently funding bureaucrats and private industry.
Absolute best case, if you're a liberal, is that this is a minor means of income redistribution.
Parent
Re:Yeah, this is chump change... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
yes, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
It's not misuse, it's responsible (Score:3, Insightful)
So, because of their doing, they are taking a little responsibility and offering people a more painless way to make the switch. Whether or not $40 is going to be enough, remains to be seen (they might sell the boxes for $300, who knows.)
I don't think it's a waste of money. I think things like.. ohh, you know, g
So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not "just fucking television." It's a MASSIVE consumer market. The government would do this as much for the consumer as for the industry that doesn't want a good fraction of their viewer base cut off. The government makes a lot of tax money from TV businesses.. or did you think it was all Wayne's World?
Parent
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
While I have the means to buy a digital TV, I am not about to say that it is fair we cut people who don't have the means off. I would call it a problem, and big or small this should be solved.
RonB
Parent
Re:They may, but they won't have to... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)