TAX BADS RATHER THAN GOODS A good rule of thumb is that when you tax something, you get less of it. That means that taxes on hard work, saving and entrepreneurial risk-taking impede these fundamental drivers of economic growth. The alternative is to tax those things we would like to get less of.

Consider the tax on gasoline. Driving your car is associated with various adverse side effects, which economists call externalities. These include traffic congestion, accidents, local pollution and global climate change. If the tax on gasoline were higher, people would alter their behavior to drive less. They would be more likely to take public transportation, use car pools or live closer to work. The incentives they face when deciding how much to drive would more closely match the true social costs and benefits.

Economists who have added up all the externalities associated with driving conclude that a tax exceeding $2 a gallon makes sense. That would provide substantial revenue that could be used to reduce other taxes. By taxing bad things more, we could tax good things less.

I can agree with him on gasoline. The decision makers in most South Asian countries appear to agree as well. They tax the hell out of gasoline.

My gripe is re mobile telephone user charges. Why are they being taxed excessively? Therefore, they are being consumed less. Why? Do the governments think the use of mobile phones is a bad? No need to say it is good; just be neutral. Treat it like anything else.

“Let us be clear,” the White House statement said, “online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs.”

However, it added, “We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

The bills currently under consideration in Congress were intended to combat the theft of copyrighted materials by preventing American search engines like Google and Yahoo from directing users to sites that allow for the distribution of stolen materials. They would cut off payment processors like PayPal that handle transactions.

The bills would also allow private citizens and companies to sue to stop what they believed to be theft of protected content. Those and other provisions set off fierce opposition among Internet companies, technology investors and free speech advocates, who said the bills would stifle online innovation, violate the First Amendment and even compromise national security by undermining the integrity of the Internet’s naming system.

The logic for substituting spectrum for civil works and vice versa depends on the price of spectrum. This is sort of like the perennial debate about energy scarcity. One group says we’re running out of oil. But other points out we will never run out of energy because as oil prices increase, more reserves will become visible, more energy sources will become viable. This is the story of shale, the new, new thing in energy. So it’s very difficult to define scarcity independently of price.

The alternative approach was tried by a consulting firm in India few years back. They changed their name a few years back and thus obliterated both names that were stored in my neurons. Their approach was to work some fancy benchmarks based on user numbers, terrain, etc. According to that study, India had a spectrum shortage. But the story is of course different in Lutyens Delhi (most likely there is a shortage) and remote Himachal (most likely not). So the unit of analysis is key to this approach.

So that is why I am skeptical about the statement below:

In a statement, AT&T said that the actions of the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice harmed customers. The cellular giant explained that the American wireless industry is suffering a spectrum shortage, which the merger would have mitigated.

“The AT&T and T-Mobile USA combination would have offered an interim solution to this spectrum shortage. In the absence of such steps, customers will be harmed and needed investment will be stifled,” the company said.

Irrespective of the fate of T Mobile, it would be good to find an answer to the question “what is spectrum shortage”?

So the lesson is, decide quickly.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission took steps Tuesday to block the proposed $39 billion merger of the mobile phone companies AT&T and T-Mobile USA.

The chairman, Julius Genachowski, made the move after the commission’s staff concluded that the deal would harm consumers, kill jobs and result in an overly concentrated wireless phone industry, F.C.C. officials said.

The decision puts another large roadblock in front of AT&T, the nation’s second-largest wireless phone company, in its effort to buy T-Mobile, the fourth-largest carrier. In August, the Justice Department filed a federal antitrust lawsuit to block the merger, saying it would stifle competition.

Report.

In the aftermath of the 2004-2005 hurricane season, when eight named storms caused a total of $15.5 million in customer losses from power outages, Florida embarked on a comprehensive reform preparing electric utilities for hurricanes. This effort included coordinated research through PURC on electric infrastructure and storm damage.

This research – funded by Florida’s utilities and done in collaboration with them – included an in-depth look at the economics of hardening the state’s electric system. A computer model developed for that purpose helps analyze the costs and benefits of undergrounding and other forms of hardening at a micro level. The research also included the deployment of an extensive network of weather monitoring devices to gather storm data and a companion software system for mapping the weather data to infrastructure damage.

In an effort to expand broadband Internet service, the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday approved an overhaul of its fund that subsidizes rural telephone service, turning it into one meant to offer broadband service to the millions of Americans who lack high-speed connections.

The plan could lead to higher fees for consumers on their telephone landlines because the commission also approved changes in the complex compensation system by which telecommunications companies pay one another for completing or carrying calls on one another’s systems.

Full report.

You can imagine my surprise when I see a New York Times writer saying that fixed phones in America are becoming ornamental objects. It’s not that they are rooting out the copper lines or fiber; but that it does not make sense to have phones that are fixed to walls (except in baseball dugouts and places such as that).

The seed-strewn dugouts of baseball stadiums around the country may very well end up the final bastions of corded communication in this wireless era.

While landlines in homes collect dust and serve increasingly decorative functions, the attitude among baseball clubs is a familiar one in a sport tied tightly to old-fashioned ways: why change what works?

Is this a problem for us in South Asia. Yes, for the TOP (top of the pyramid) customers who actually receive bills. But for our clients, the bottom of the pyramid teleusers, there will be no shock; just disconnect. Because 99.7 percent of Indian BOP customers are on prepaid plans and 94.6 percent of Sri Lankan BOP customers are on prepaid. How can we address their problems? Lower priced data plans would be a good start.

A 2010 study by the F.C.C. found that one in six mobile device users had experienced bill shock, with 23 percent of those users facing unexpected charges of $100 or more. A separate F.C.C. report noted that 20 percent of the bill shock complaints it received during the first half of 2010 were for $1,000 or more in overage charges. Expensive charges can also be incurred for roaming, when a user travels out of a company’s defined area of coverage or, as often occurs, when traveling overseas.

Even so-called unlimited data plans often have a cap limiting downloads each month to a certain number of megabytes — a technical measure that, unlike a number of calls or minutes, cannot easily be tracked by the uninitiated. Last October, the F.C.C. highlighted the case of a 66-year-old retiree in Dover, Mass., who received an $18,000 bill after a promotional no-limit data plan expired without warning.

Twice as many Americans play computer games as do crossword puzzles. More go bird watching than attend classical music concerts. Iowa has six times as many hogs as people. A record 26.6 million households do not use land lines but rely only on cellphones. And about one in 13 women in their early 20s identify themselves as gay or bisexual.

Report.

Only 68 percent of Americans with access to high-speed broadband Internet are using it, while in places like South Korea the rate is 90 percent.

More than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies — including Wal-Mart and Target — require job applicants to apply online.

Various studies have shown that the major reasons people do not have broadband are: the cost of Internet services and the cost of computers; not knowing how to use a computer; and not understanding why the Internet is relevant.

So far there have been only scattered examples of the potential of mining social media. Last year HP Labs researchers used Twitter data to accurately predict box office revenues of Hollywood movies. In August, the National Science Foundation approved funds for research in using social media like Twitter and Facebook to assess earthquake damage in real time.

The accessibility and computerization of huge databases has already begun to spur the development of new statistical techniques and new software to manage data sets with trillions of entries or more.

“Big data allows one to move beyond inference and statistical significance and move toward meaningful and accurate analyses,” said Norman Nie, a political scientist who was a pioneering developer of statistical tools for social scientists and who recently formed a new company, Revolution Analytics, to develop software for the analysis of immense data sets.

Can we claim direct causal responsibility? No. But did we do what catalysts do? Yes. We’re happy the US will use less inefficient methods to disburse universal service funds (still too much as a percentage).

Consumers who still pay bills via snail mail. Hospitals leery of making treatment records available online to their patients. Some state motor vehicle registries that require car owners to appear in person — or to mail back license plates — in order to transfer vehicle ownership.

But the White House is out to fight cyberphobia with an initiative intended to bolster confidence in e-commerce.

Full report.

ALL the data you need on a smartphone, at full speed, for a single price — Sprint Nextel is the only major wireless carrier in the United States that still offers this with new cellphones.

And by the way, Sprint has not made a profit in a long time.

The slowest city, by the way, was also in Idaho: In Pocatello, it would take nearly 12 seconds to download that music file, according to the study by Pando Networks, a company that helps consumers accelerate downloads. In the nation’s fastest city, Andover, Mass., a Boston suburb, it would take just over one second.

Such speed distinctions might seem insignificant. But with larger files, downloading delays of just a few seconds can stretch into crucial minutes or hours and over time result in losses across many aspects of life, some experts say, beyond entertainment and games, affecting fields such as public safety, education and economic growth. It is not clear how many households throughout this state still have no Internet, but nationally, the figure is 28 percent — most of them in rural areas.

Full report.