Tag Archives: free trade

Clean Green Metro Florida by Brookings Institution

Amy Liu spoke about globalization last week in Orlando,

Leaders will seize the clean economy
about clean industries leading economic growth.
Even though she was talking linear growth,
her Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings Institution
has some interesting points that mesh with the exponential growth like compound interest

Georgia can get on with in solar and wind power.

The Florida Economic Development Council

2013 FEDC Conference 26-28 June 2013
was the venue for Amy Liu’s

A Globally Competitive Florida: Regional Opportunities in the Next Economy.
To summarize her slides (which are

in a format not easily linkable,
she bashes Congress to motivate cities leading.
In particular, Florida’s 20 metro ares have 61.75 of land area,
94.1% of population, and 95.9% of output.
Nothing surprising there: cities are densely populated.
Two of the biggest in Florida are in our Floridan Aquifer:
Orlando and Jacksonville.
(She didn’t mention the aquifer; I did.)

The national economic
recovery is slow, the middle class has been hard-hit,
and Florida is recovering faster, except on unemployment.
The U.S. population is rapidly getting older and by 2050
53.7% will be minorities, each of which have very different
educational achievements, and much of this is happening
in metro areas.



Her solution is Continue reading →

Gigabit Internet in Chattanooga

If we’re going to copy Chattanooga about something, how about this:
133 US cities now have their own broadband networks by Nate Anderson in Ars Technica:

Such publicly owned networks can offer services that incumbents don’t,
such as the 1Gbps fiber network in Chattanooga, Tennessee, run by the
government-owned electric power board. And they sometimes have more
incentive to reach every resident, even in surrounding rural areas,
in ways that might not make sense for a profit-focused company.

According to this map of

Community Broadband Networks
by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance,
quite a few small cities in south Georgia have municipal cable networks:


All three of Moultrie, Thomasville, and Cairo use CNS,
whose brochure for Moultrie says you can get:

Downstream Upstream Monthly Cost
5 Mbps 1 Mbps $29.95
12 Mbps 2 Mbps $35.95
22 Mbps 3 Mbps $49.95

Now that’s not 1 Gbps, but it’s a darn sight faster than the
allegedly 3Mbps AT&T DSL!

If Moultrie, Thomasville, and Cairo, and yes, Doerun can do this,
why can’t Valdosta and Hahira?

And then how about add on a wireless network to reach the rest of us
rural folk?

Maybe then we wouldn’t be the
Internet backwoods.

-jsq

The Internet backwoods: that’s south Georgia

Saturday I heard somebody bragging about how fast the Internet is in Atlanta.
That would be maybe a tenth of the speed it is in Tokyo.
But still blazing fast compared to the broke-down wagon in a muddy ditch
speeds we get in south Georgia:

I wrote that article more than a year ago, and Internet speeds in rural
Georgia have not improved much if at all.
This isn’t just about playing Farmville.
It’s about communicating with your relatives,
about competing in business,

Continue reading →