Divining the deep implications of the writers' strike

I sent a note to a friend of mine who is a longtime Hollywood actor & photographer, recently turned producer. When the strike began, he had just landed a big recurring role in one of CBS’s new shows, which has since been canceled (along with several other projects he had some involvement in). I asked him his opinion of the settlement. Here’s his reply:

It seems to have either been a stupendously costly farce, or a bold step in the right direction. I have no opinion worth making, but I do have a beard, a lot of time for making photographs, and a bank account that would make a ascetic shudder.

Whiny Techies or Dishonest Salesmen?

I cannot help but add a coda onto my latest article. Steven Pearlstein, econ columnist for the Washington Post, has written this piece on the recent complaints wrt to Comcast. To quote Mr. Pearlstein:

The latest rallying cry is “network neutrality.” This campaign started out with the legitimate goal of making sure that consumers could continue to access whichever services or content they want, rather than having to take those offered by the cable and phone company duopolists. But lately the campaign seems to have morphed into a broader demand that all consumers should be able to pay the same monthly fee for using the Internet, no matter how much bandwidth they use or how much their movie downloads and video chats are slowing service to everyone else in the neighborhood.

Perhaps this is the kind of economic illiteracy we should expect from people who get their information from “The Daily Show” and the Daily Kos. But isn’t it time for the rest of us to move on and acknowledge that the days of the online free lunch are over?

As you may imagine from my recent post, my complaint is not with charging more for more bandwidth, but for dishonestly promising me an “always on all you can eat” connection, then cutting me off when I use it all the time for all I can eat. I sent Mr. Pearlstein the following reply, reproduced below….

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