This is a meme but it’s not a bad metaphor at all, and the Senator was unfairly maligned for using it.
He was fairly maligned for being against network neutrality, though.
He was fairly maligned for being against network neutrality, though.
If you’re around my age, you don’t need to use the Bing to picture in your head that graphic of horses being able to run through the tubes.
(Jon Stewart also kinda made me and everyone I knew think Arby’s was terrible for a long time.
With great memes comes… the responsibility to recognize that not everyone has Katz!)
;)
(A sibling comment points out that calling them "tubes" instead of "pipes" reinforces this garbled-regurgitation impression)
>And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
He thinks the Internet is like a pneumatic tube, where too much usage means people are entirely cut off for a time. In truth it's like a water pipe. Too much usage results in reduced throughput to each user, but no one is even temporarily cut off.
Networks avoid queues. A well-designed network will handle email with no perceptible slowdown even under extreme congestion. The Senator's metaphor predicts that email will regularly take days to arrive because of congestion. The standard pipe analogy predicts this will almost never happen.
But really, the Internet is like a global packet-switched network of networks. We deserve politicians who can handle the truth.
> an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
Tubes or trucks: movie downloads were not causing emails to be delayed by 4 days, even back in those days.
See e.g. "Al Gore and the Internet" by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf https://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/...
The US is a country of 330M people, the world is a community of 8B people. If we want to be able to live side by side, we need rules and policies. It's always going to messy.
I would love it if in the next few decades we improve "the game" and figure out better ways to incentivise the players towards common good.
"The game" is brutal. The players only care for themselves. "The game" is as unfair as it gets. Most don't live side by side, they survive inspite of others. Competition is brutal. Got sick with cancer? Sorry, lose all "points". Want to buy X? Sorry, me (cancerless) will out bargain you.
How can we change it though? Looking at history, changes come through either (usually bloody) revolution, or through politics themselves.
So unfortunately, someone needs to play the game in order to change it.
I am not moralizing here, by the way. I am not claiming that corporations should be less sociopathic. Maybe they should be but we’ve had much better success in aligning sociopathy than in making the amoral, moral - see capitalism vs communism - so I think it’s an open question.
Another group of entities which, while comprised of people, does not act in the way you’ve come to understand a human to act is politicians. The incentives to act in whatever way that is most effective totally dominates their behavior. A politician who does not do what the job asks (amass political power) will not be a politician for long.
I think that's where we seem to differ? "Whatever is most effective"
I'll grant democracy as practiced has many side effects and incentive traps.
However, it also does generally align politician's goals with their voters, under threat of being kicked out of office.
I’m only saying that effectively sociopathic agents do not deserve the courtesies, the benefit of the doubt that we afford regular people.
I don't believe there are that many politicians who literally don't believe anything they support and are only doing it because they think it will win them elections.
Greater than zero, but less than most.
Most spend a non-trivial amount of time on electioneering, and a non-trivial amount of consideration on the re-electability impacts of a given decision, but also do things for a variety of other reasons (e.g. personal convictions, campaign promises, lobbying, etc).