In Portland, stupid never dies
Our allegedly cash-starved city, which says it needs a new property tax to buy fire trucks and is chasing people out of town with skyrocketing water and sewer bills, is still jerking around over a proposed "low-cost" city-owned broadband system. The utterly failed Opie Sten wi-fi experiment wasn't enough to prove that City Hall can't get this done. The insanity just goes on and on and on.
| Posted at 4:52 PM | Permalink |
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Comments (10)
Don't worry another 50% bump in water rates and this thing will look real affordable.
Posted by Steve | September 21, 2010 5:13 PM
Infoswales?
Posted by Bark Munster | September 21, 2010 5:28 PM
Bolognaswales?
Mobile Effluent Network?
Badonk-a-Donk-FI (aka BAD-FI)?
It reads like a Laverne & Shirley episode, but it's not a sitcom, it's real life. They are just a bunch of hipster wannabes spending other people's money.
Heaven forbid they simply maintain the infrastructure crumbling beneath our bikes, buses, and feet.
THE SELLWOOD BRIDGE IS FALLING DOWN!
Posted by Mister Tee | September 21, 2010 6:28 PM
Nothing is going to change until people pack up their assets and get outta Dodge.
Posted by jc | September 21, 2010 7:09 PM
Just move the 500 million of Bike money over and you would have 120 million left for bikes. Oh wait, we had to grab 20 million from sewers to jump start the 620 million bike program. Oh well!
You just can't make this stuff up.
Posted by pdxmick | September 21, 2010 8:41 PM
Why don't they use one of these "tell us we're great" surveys they send out to ask us to prioritize this crap.
I'm guessing this would rank at the "don't spend our money on this" level.
Posted by Snards | September 21, 2010 10:12 PM
Doesn't the city know that there is already a city-wide wireless network that is affordable, and about a billion times better than what they could ever hope to deploy and maintain?
http://www.clear.com/oregon
6 Mbps wireless service for $40/mo. Less than cable, better than DSL; and it already exists without a dime of taxpayer money.
Posted by MachineShedFred | September 22, 2010 6:55 AM
MS Fred- That is just not fun and sexy enough!
Posted by dman | September 22, 2010 8:20 AM
Somebody's looking at making a hell of a lot of money off a city-owned broadband system. Somebody who's probably a good close friend of the mayor or one of his buddies. Whenever you see a stupid idea in city or state government that's repeatedly derided but keeps getting brought back from the dead, check to see who's making the majority of the profit, and whether he'd be castrated if you kicked the mayor in the chin.
Posted by Texas Triffid Ranch | September 22, 2010 12:25 PM
MS Fred:
Clear is a scam. Remember those old cable commercials that attacked the negative side of getting satellite TV? They always seemed so overblown, right? My television isn't going to lose signal if there's a storm, and so on.
Clear is worse. My internet cuts out when it's cloudy. And I live in a part of SE without really tall buildings to block the signal.
Just like most crooked telecom companies these days, they lock you into a contract and then have horribly unhelpful customer service when you spend the first two months trying to figure out why your internet connection blows.
And let's not forget the whole illegally-setting-up-sales-tents-in-public-right-of-way-and-then-continuing-to-do-it-after-they-were-warned thing.
Next month my contract is up and I'm getting local-company DSL.
Posted by Andrew | September 22, 2010 2:59 PM