
So Much Fun. So Irrelevant. [Friedman on politicians & technology] - FluidDjango
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/opinion/friedman-so-much-fun-so-irrelevant.html?_r=1&ref=technology
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sc68cal
_Right now, though, notes Levin, America is focused too much on getting
"average" bandwidth to the last 5 percent of the country in rural areas,
rather than getting "ultra-high-speed" bandwidth to the top 5 percent, in
university towns, who will invent the future._

Well - this is because our political parties have come to the consensus that
in order to be successful in elections, city issues must be kept out of the
discussion.

<http://salon.com/a/sE_2zAA>

 _“The core of the Republican constituency in metropolitan America are the
growing, racially and economically exclusive ‘outer suburbs’ whose privileged
status Republicans seek to protect at all costs,” says former mayor of
Albuquerque David Rusk, now a consultant. He cited New Jersey Gov. Chris
Christie as an exemplar of the trend._

Democrats are equally to blame:

 _Republicans saw little gain by reaching out to minority voters (the quixotic
efforts of GOP maverick Jack Kemp excepted) and Democrats feared that if they
put too much effort into solving urban problems, says University of
Pennsylvania historian Thomas Sugrue, they would reinforce their image as the
party of ‘special interests.’_

That is root-cause of the difficulty of the "last-mile" delivery of broadband.
Our society at the end of WWII decided to give ourselves a huge present for
winning the war, in the form of an Interstate Highway System, and the politics
of suburban sprawl that resulted has stymied efforts to build any serious
broadband and mass transit systems that we require to continue strong economic
growth and improve national security.

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david927
_Historians have noted that economic clusters always required access to
abundant strategic inputs for success, says Levin. In the 1800s, it was access
to abundant flowing water and raw materials. In the 1900s, it was access to
abundant electricity and transportation. In the 2000s, he said, “it will be
access to abundant bandwidth and abundant human intellectual capital,” —
places like Silicon Valley, Austin, Boulder, Cambridge and Ann Arbor._

It's not about bandwidth, it's just about "human intellectual capital". And
those places are good, but the best "human intellectual capital" I have met
has been also in out-of-the-way places in Russia, Holland, Poland, Czech
Republic among others.

Physical location is deprecated. These clusters will be based virtually --
video conferencing and using it differently.

