Ryan Cooper

Matt Yglesias says if American broadband sucks, we should blame the customers : But in this particular case, we're not really talking about innovation at all. What's galling—to those of us who are galled by it—about America's broadband infrastructure is that we don't need more innovation. The relevant technology has been invented. What we need are more holes in the ground so that we can fill them with fiber optic cables. This is an expensive proposition, and the basic problem here is that when Verizon dipped its toes into making the investment it turned out that customers didn't want to pay for it. People who write about tech policy on the internet for a living place an unusually high subject value on high-speed internet access, so the resulting situation is frustrating for us. But the problem is really with the customers rather than the companies. There simply aren't enough people who want to pay a premium price for premium service. An iPhone, which I don...

My girlfriend just started at a nonprofit place here in DC, and watching her get worked like a pack mule (three nights in the first week getting off after 9:30 pm) is a good illustration of the significant price even white-collar types are paying for the collapse of the labor movement.  In most other developed countries, such a situation would mean the organization is drastically understaffed.  Check out this chart : This might be an underestimate, since so many people are underemployed , meaning they would take full-time work if they could.  Almost 86% of men and 67% of women work more than 40 hours per week . It also occurs to me that nonprofits are not really immune to the broader trend in American business of wringing maximum labor out of one's employees, especially the salaried ones.

Online advertising is famously ineffective.  Studies show that the "click through" rates, or how many people actually click on an advertisement out of those that see it, are minuscule.  On the other hand, this is a kind of study that was simply impossible before the advent of the internet.  Yglesias :  To those of us on the editorial side of online media this is a very frustrating dynamic. It’s hard to make money writing online because the advertising rates are pathetic compared to what was historically available in print. And the rates are pathetic because the utilization rates are pathetic. But what kind of click-throughs did those glossy magazine ads get? Something here doesn’t add up. Ezra Klein chimes in : At the beginning of Ken Auletta's " Googled ," Auletta talks with Mel Karmazin, then the CEO of Viacom. Karmazin is aghast at Google's campaign to measure the effectiveness of advertising by tallying clicks. "I want a sales person in the proces...