I have two good options for internet service at my home in the Fresno High
area: AT&T DSL which tops out at 1.5Mbits at my location or comcast which is
much faster but can’t be unbundled from cable TV service which I don’t want and
costs almost $80 / month. This is not attractive to a young professional like
myself and doesn’t score the city any points when trying to attract other young
professionals to the area.
This is why I was excited to see Google’s announcement
today about offering
its own internet service to interested municipalities. What’s more, they want
residents and city officials to nominate their own communities to be among the
first on Google’s rollout list. If we can get enough interest going, perhaps we
can be one of the first cities on Google’s new internet service area plus it
would get us some national attention and in a good way. Can we do it?
The service Google will be offering is 1Gb on an all-fiber network which is
many hundreds of times more than my current service with AT&T. Lets force AT&T
and Comcast into a real competition for once. I’m tired of crappy internet
service and sometimes it makes me wish I lived elsewhere.
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Our newsroom
‘guild’ votes
Tuesday
on whether or not they will allow wage cuts for guild members. The
proposed wage cuts would be 0-6%, applied progressively based on annual
salary. There are a number of other
concessions the company is asking
for as well. Basically, if we make those concessions, the company will
only lay off 16 full time guild employees rather than 21. There are no
assurances that the company won’t just lay off more people later anyway.
In fact, I think there’s a good possibility it will.
This used to be a great company to work for, then we saw the cost of
benefits skyrocket, followed by buyouts, more buyouts, layoffs and a
wage freeze, followed by suspension of 401k matching and the pension
plan. Now there are more layoffs coming and possibly even wage cuts
along with a host of random concessions.
We rode that bubble hard and forgot to diversify, in fact we did just
the opposite. Right before the bubble began to burst we doubled down on
our bet that newspapers would never fail. We increased our exposure to
an already enormous risk at what
could be the absolute worst possible time in history. Just as bad, we
used debt to finance our added risk. Worst of all, we continue to
actively shift blame to the poor economy rather than take responsibility
and come up with a plan for success.
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