AT&T---They're Back

AT&T, Cingular and Bell South are set to merge into a new telecom giant that could bring a huge showdown with Verizon. The last few years have seen some real consolidation in the telcom industry...IMHO due to very poor planning during the .com boom that left many telcoms holding huge debt loads when the .bomb hit. Now, the Baby Bells that were formed when AT&T was broken up have mostly found their way back together in one of the two giants.

The whole idea of the telcoms consolidating is a bitter-sweet pill for me. On one hand, the US cell phone industry is third world compared to Europe and Japan. We have too many competing standards that keep us from truly reaching the potential that ubiquitous communications could bring us. As it is, we have telcoms spending huge sums of money to build cell infrastructure two or three times in the same area to support the different standards. Think what we might have if that money was spent on upgrading instead of competing.

On the other hand though, I'm not a fan of big business consolidating to two or three giants. As we've seen this year in the oil industry, there is just not enough competition to keep them honest. Exxon/Mobil raped the American public for record quarterly profits (while crying about the scarcity of oil and the money grubbing Arabs). Drive down the road and look at the gas prices--chances are, they're within a few cents of each other. If that isn't price fixing , it's at least lack of competition. Our government has shown itself incapable of controlling the oil giants (or more likely they choose not to endanger those huge campaign contributions) so I'm not at all confident that they'll control the telecom giants either. We're already suffering the rising cost of heating our homes, driving our cars and price increases due to the higher cost of shipping goods. The last thing we need are raising telcom prices on top of all that.

I'm not convinced that the good out weighs the bad, but if this merger follows recent history, this merger is a done deal. Open your wallets America.

courant.com | Phone Merger Rings Bells

Pain Management

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, I have some serious back problems. I had surgery 4 (almost 5) years ago to repair a disc at L5. After the surgery, I never recovered. I now have scar tissue around the spine that causes terrible pain in my lower back and down my legs into my feet. I've tried injection therapy, spinal cord stimulator twice (inserting a series of electrodes against the spinal cord and passing current through them to over-ride the pain impulses) and a morphine pump (drips a tiny amount of morphine directly into the spinal fluid). None of these procedures was successful so the only way that I can function is to control the pain with narcotics.

I guess this has all made me especially sensitive to politicians who try to portray legal narcotics as a scourge to make political hay. I ran across a like mind recently in Radley Balko, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute. Radley writes on many civil liberties issues, including the governments intrusion into the use of legal narcotics. I found this blog entry regarding a district attorney for Middlesex County, Mass who is crusading against the use of legal narcotics because users might get "accidentally" addicted. Radley's response was well thought out and right on the money--so much so, that I had to write a thank you. There is a long way to go, but we have to keep fighting the good fight to keep our civil liberties--glad to see someone fighting on my side.