NYCPHP Meetup

[Mitch Pirtle]

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 1:06 PM, David Krings <ramons at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> That is the part that I still don't get as a foreigner. Why is most of the
> infrastructure here in the US in such a bad state?

That is the price we pay for things getting invented over here. Radio
is another example. First time I saw a car radio in Switzerland and
the name of the song was displaying I almost had a heart attack. Then
I used something called TeleText to check the news on a TV, without
internet access.

Simple things to a European, but totally tomorrow-land stuff to an
American. We may have invented TV and radio over here, but we also are
stuck supporting the caveman-era technologies that were rolled out
when they were first invented.

The Europeans sat back, and watched us blow our fingers off with our
experiments; and when the pain stopped and things started looking
really good, they said "Hey, this whole radio thing is a brilliant
idea, and we can include text in our broadcast as well."

For Brooklyn, the problem is that the original cabling was hung from
poles going behind all the houses. Say you are Verizon, and you want
to do the Right Thing by putting in modern facilities. You are going
to have to contact every tenant for every residence to get permission
to go out back and replace that cabling. Let me know when you are
done, assuming I live that long.

-- Mitch, noting that the cable companies DID get to wire stuff where
it belonged