Jon Humphrey
Total lifetime comments: 240
Recent Comments by Jon Humphrey
Your opinion matters very little to me and intelligent people everywhere. Your wishes mean nothing as your actions show who you really are. You are a man with power who uses it to harm the many to benefit the few. The big difference between you and me is that I give people well researched information they can check. You, like your friend Trump, simply say crazy things, that sound "strong" only to idiots, and hope they believe you. I'm sure your army of idiots and special interest friends will continue to manipulate you into harming your community. It's what they do with weak minded people to maintain power.
Before I get into the meat and potatoes of all of Satpal’s many lies and inaccuracies here let me just say how interesting it is when our Trump Democrats like Satpal say all of the same, crazy, uneducated, poorly researched things that Donald Trump himself would say like what he said above.
Remember when the Whatcom Democrats were swearing that Satpal was a progressive, even though Shewmake, Ramel, Lilliquist, etc. share many of the same views as the Trump administration, especailly in their “economic policies” as he proves again here. Ah the memories.
Look at him attacking not just public infrastructure but public healthcare too even though every other developed country does both fiber to the premises and universal healthcare successfully and at lower prices than we do for terrible private services.
Anyway, LIlliquist is out there using the tactics of Trump in the background too, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
Satpal’s Insane Rants Unpacked and Fact Checked:
1. Satpal is 100% wrong about this being a new public utility. As highlighted in the book “Fiber” by Susan Crawford, and on many other sources, many places have been running public fiber networks successfully for decades and providing better service at much lower prices. Satpal just lies here and hopes you are not willing to do any research of your own. After all, if the establishment wanted your opinion they would have already given it to you. Remember, our elected officials and government staff hate public input, especially at the PUD, that’s why they love meeting with their good friends at big telecom in the background instead.
2. As covered in the book “Captive Audience” the big telecoms meet with each other and carve out territories. We have virtual monopolies everywhere, so no, from a functional standpoint you do not have real choice. Actual competition costs money so the telecoms simply don’t do it and there is no way to hold them accountable as there is with a public provider. Having a public option also changes the behavior of the private providers for the better and creates actual competition. Lilliquist himself said that years ago when he almost had a spine. The Democrats took care of that spine issue over the years apparently.
3. No truly significant advances have been made by private tech companies. We are always behind the 8-ball for speed, reliability and all copper tech, like DSL and Comcast Coax, is obsolete. If you don’t have a wired fiber to the home connection, your connection is overpriced and obsolete. The Biden’s fiber preference is going to be removed too, so get ready for CenturyLink/Lumen to offer you a turd with wires in it and call it broadband, because now they can actually get funding for turd-net.
4. Satpal is well aware that the testing the state and telecoms use is NOT accurate. That’s why we use RRUL, real-time response under load, network testing. I’ve talked about this many times before. Even if his statement were true, with 150 Mbits down and 25 Mbits up, being adequate (which it’s not for a household or business), none of the connections in town hold up to that testing for more than a few seconds. WIth the exception of Quantum Fiber, which is only slightly better than Comcast. Quantum has no intention of really competing with Comcast, CenturyLink or anyone else. Remember the telecom territories. None of them provide anything close to what you can get on public networks in Chatanooga, TN, many other parts of WA state, the rest of the developed world, etc. anyway.
5. GIG speed is a marketing term. Again, virtually every provider here does NOT provide true GIg speed service and their service is NOT symmetrical like real Fiber service is supposed to be. Even if they did, the cost for a Comcast “business” connection at $300 or more a month, with potential overage fees, would get you a 10 Gig symmetrical fiber connection with no data caps on public networks like in Chatanooga. $50 would get you a true Gig connection. Poor residents get 50 Mbits almost for free.
6. A Dig Once Policy would reduce the cost of installation by 90%. So no, there are NO NEW TAXES necessary. That’s a fairytale that Satpal and his good special interest friends tell you to try to scare you.
We just need the right policy.
Fiber would attract new jobs in many other industries too. So fiber makes money, improves quality of life, and increases opportunities. We already pay too much in taxes. It’s time for our elected officials to use that money wisely, on infrastructure, and not pretend after many tax increases that they somehow still don’t have enough.
However, Satpal has been the most corrupt, least effective, County Executive so I didn’t expect him to understand that. He shouldn’t hold his breath waiting for the people he forced out of their homes during the pandemic with his Reagan era policies to thank him.
7. This is a critical resource that supports our police, fire, libraries, public schools and more. It is PART of the budget of a modern city, not an addition to it.
(I have covered all of this in my articles, but if you don’t want to take my word for it, so have dozens of other authors, entire countries and orgs like the Fiber-Optic Association, Community Broadband Networks, Yale Author Susan Crawford and many more.
Lilliquist’s Lies: Now onto the lies of our other favorite Trump Democrat.
Liliquist, who is currently overseeing the Public Works Commission, stated the following lies to citizens who forwarded his responses to me today. I will tackle them one at a time.
1. Lilliquist claims that the disastrous Uptown report was refined into a “real plan.” This is like saying that he gave you a pile of shit to build a table with and then told you to pick out only the choicest pieces of shit to work with and then build a table with that. Here is my article on that:
https://nwcitizen.com/entry/how-to-get-nothing-done
The Uptown report can’t be used to create a plan. It is too deeply flawed as we’ve shown and lacks the research to be a plan in the first place.
2. Lilliquist is now referring to the virtually worthless “conduit ordinance” we wrote about here as a “Dig Once Policy” now. Lilliquist is doing the equivalent of putting lipstick on a donkey and passing it off as a beautiful woman. Well no matter what they call it, it’s not a beautiful woman, it’s a donkey with lipstick on it just like our conduit ordinance is NOT a DIG ONCE POLICY in any real sense. Here’s the article on that:https://nwcitizen.com/entry/updated-conduit-policy-worthless/P2300
In short, they have nothing like a proper Dig Once Policy. They have a do nothing “Conduit Ordinance” which is virtually worthless they are passing off as a Dig Once Policy because they are liars and have been lying for a decade now. Please stop reelecting them.
3. Lilliquist says this is part of a 10 year plan. However, just like it’s worthless when someone tells you they will address climate change by 2050, you know after Miami is underwater permanently and all of southern CA burns down, a 10 year plan means nothing since the date is too far off in the future.
The truth is that they still have no plan for providing open access, like Mount Vernon does on its public network, or for the COB acting as a provider. They say they’ll talk about it, maybe, for another decade or so and let us know.
4. Our elected officials do NOT care that this network provides the backbone for our critical services as mentioned above and has no real redundancy. They say that maintaining our critical infrastructure costs too much, you know like the Governor of CA said about the fire hydrants and broken, dry reservoirs, feeding those hydrants during the latest fires. Guess what the hydrants ran dry causing hundreds of millions in damages and an unnecessary loss of life. Fiber doesn’t cost nearly that much to install.
Think about a communications failure during an emergency. Well, even after being asked to do so, the COB still doesn’t care about routine maintenance and upgrades to this critical infrastructure.Overall, they are hoping you won’t do any research of your own. The fact that I did is why they kept me off of the big telecom led BAG (Broadband Advisory Group). Had I been there I would have been able to create real change, but guys like Satpal and Lilliquist have made their careers off of pretending to be progressives in public but acting like Trump when they make policy decisions. Remember how they abandoned us during the pandemic? I remember.
The response to rural broadband will be multi-tiered:
Conflicts of Interest:
The conflict of interest here is obvious here as Musk owns the company that will benefit the most from his payoff to Trump. Money spent on Starlink will go directly into his pocket and the pockets of other predatory one percenters. This is obvious theft from the American people by the Trump administration.
With Verizon employee Ajit Pai most likely coming back to the FCC we can expect that Americans will continue to pay the highest prices for the least bandwidth in the developed world, as they do now.
Was Money Wasted on Rural Broadband?:
It’s true that the Biden Administration refused to learn the lessons from the Obama and previous administrations and lesson #1 is that YOU DON’T GIVE MONEY TO BIG TELECOM BECAUSE THEY STEAL IT! So yes, much of the funding spent on “rual broadband solutions” went directly into the pockets of big telecom investors who delivered inferior products and continue to. However, money spent on public infrastructure was spent well.
Had Dig Once policies been established and fiber-optics installed as a public utility, prices would be low.
Subsides will not help! As we learned when incompetent County Executive Sidhu partnered with equally incompetent former PUD Commissioner Grant, and WAVE, for a Nooksack Tribe Starlink project that mostly failed. Why? Because even with discounts many can’t afford it. Starlink is simply too expensive and its performance is spotty often delivering bandwidth well below the state’s minimum high speed standard especially when load tested. As an owner of a successful business that lives in a million dollar home the idea that $50 or $100 for Starlink a month is unaffordable may seem odd to you, but 60% of Americans are functionally poor. Also, should we give Musk corporate welfare instead of put our money into fiber? No.
No Other Connection is Equivalent to Fiber:
Even Musk himself will tell you that he needs more fiber on the ground for Starlink to work correctly, as he did in a fierce wireless article a few years ago. As explored in “Fiber” and many other sources, every wireless technology is an extension of fiber.
Fiber provides virtually unlimited bandwidth that uses very little power, lasts over a century if buried and has low environmental impact. In fact it can help with climate change because it can be used to manage smart grids, lasts a long time and much more. Starlink is very wasteful and doesn’t work well often. Would you accept a car that only runs some of the time and then not very well? Especially if you lived in the middle of nowhere? Well that’s what Wireless and Satellite solutions are. We are telling people in rural America to accept garbage broadband when we did the much more complex task of running them electricity via the Rural Electrification Act many moons ago. They need fiber. Not DSL or Coax, or something worse like wireless and satellite, fiber. And truly robust fiber.
Musk is NOT a genius:
Just like Steve Jobs was the idiot figurehead that abused workers and stood on the backs of much smarter people like Steve Wozniak, the guy that actually made the original Apple computers work, Musk is just another idiot businessman who believes he is smarter than he is. The reason dumb people think they’re smart is explained by the “Dunning-Kruger Effect.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Tesla was originally founded by much more capable engineers and its success is still related to its employees today. Like most companies the figureheads tend to be bat-shit crazy morons not capable of doing the engineering work. Why workers tolerate that, and don’t just form employee owned companies, I’ll never know.
Articles and Books:
Assuming that you would like to actually educate yourself on the topic here are some sources.
“Fiber” by Susan Crawford is available at the library.
“The 5G Myth” by William Webb should also be available at the library.
Local Author Leslie Shankman compares connection types in the article below. Note: Comparing Starlink to fiber is like comparing apples and oranges, btw.
https://nwcitizen.com/entry/fiber-vs-cable-vs-wireless/writer/66
More on Starlink: (aka Starlink has already been tried to solve our rural broadband problems and it sucks compared to real fiber, and requires fiber to work well anyway.)
https://nwcitizen.com/entry/starlink-is-no-star/search/c6f96d4b1dd79c0466eb025c40b1b360
The solution is what it’s always been. To establish Dig Once policies, treat broadband as the necessary utility it is, and run it to every home.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. You admitted to having 2 connections. A 5G and Starlink connection because neither really works well enough on its own. So let’s see, that’s at least $200/month to $500/month in connections plus equipment costs for a connection that requires fiber to work well. Oh, and you could get Gigabit for $58/month on public networks. What a joke.
Again, you are comparing apples and oranges. Wireless is not even close to equivalent to fiber. Also, answer some of the questions put to you. Are you an investor? Your public profile seems to suggest yes. Do some reading and add about 30 years of IT expereince to your resume and then maybe you can stand up to a real discussion with me.
Otherwise readers should view your comments as what they are. Unsupported propoganda.
LOL, talk about knowing enough to be dangerous. Your response is completely nonsensical.
5G networks and Starlink REQUIRE fiber-optics to work just like everything else. Yes, it’s nice he did something during an emergency, but I’m talking about data moved and price per Mbit. Of course, had cheap public fiber been available the local areas you refer to would have had their own emergency response systems and not had to beg oligarchs for help. Oh wait, emergency responders already have FirstNet. Starlink also makes a lot of money by greasing the wheels of the war machine, so his “help” in the Ukraine was just to serve the MIC. Starlink also makes custom military satellites.
You are again comparing apples and oranges. Wireless and satellite are EXTENSIONS OF FIBER! Try reading a book sometime like the ones I mentioned.
Starlink’s own pricing sheet shows that it has much higher cost than fiber-optics per Mbit. At only 100 mbits for $100 (sometimes as it doesn’t hold up to testing) it is at least 20 times more expensive than public fiber networks like the one in Chattanooga, TN and much less reliable. Chattanooga offers Gigabit, that’s 1,000 Mbits for about $58 per month. They offer 10 Gigs for what Starlink offers their highest tier for which which is at least 45 times slower than public fiber. Starlink also comes with data caps.
All of the rates for Starlink are unaffordable to the poor. https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/starlink-internet-review/ and the testing they use to confirm their speeds is NOT load testing, so therefore inaccurate. Again, Musk himself admits that he needs fiber on the ground for Starlink. I guess you’re just not going to talk about that. Shhhh, facts don’t fit your propaganda so mum is the word.
So you are admitting that you are ok with fascist conflicts of interest to support a technology you don’t really understand, that doesn’t work well, that you have no evidence to support, to create oligarchs? Do you also understand that your private company will be looking at all of your data and own you? I’m sure the answer is no as your commentary shows virtually no research in general.
Most of the research from SPACEX started with NASA. SPACEX admits that they rely heavily on NASA. So again, just like we should have had robust public broadband systems in place for emergencies and to remain competitive as a developed country, we should have funded NASA more as that is always the cheapest, best, route in the long run.
Electric cars won’t save the planet, they might make a bit of a dent, but only mass transit can make a real impact. So Musk didn’t create electric cars because he gives a shit, he did it because he thought their might be a market for it just like Nissan. Also, he didn’t really create electric cars at all. There was a time in US history when they were more popular than fossil fuel vehicles and again he bought the company from more talented engineers who handed him their work.
Again, you’d have to actually read something other than MAGA propaganda for a change to get that. Try, “The Future is Now.” It’s above a 4th grade reading level but you can use your Starlink connection to look up the big words, you know, when it works.
Musk is not a doer, his employees are, he’s just the oligarch that bought the company and now he’s cashing in on his donations, I mean investment.
Stop pretending like businessmen do real work. There is no more useless pursuit than economics. The entire system is made up and you will find out soon that you voted against your own interests, especially when it comes to healthcare.
Also, you say your connections work well. Where is your data, where are your load tests, where are your metrics? What are you doing with your connections? No one who knows what they’re talking about is going to take you seriously until you backup your arguments with actual data based on real testing methods.
You totally avoided responding to the Rural Electrification Act, testing, the failed Starlink project in the county, etc. I will respond again when you demonstrate an even fundamental understanding of the technologies you’re pushing. After all there is a high likelihood that you are a Starlink investor. You have made no significant argument based on real data.
In Japan the cost of Gigabit FTTP is about $25 US with no equipment fees. Oh yeah, Starlink has high equipment fees too and a short lifespan on their equipment. Can’t wait for those satellites to need maintenance in space or fall though the atmosphere every few decades when fiber lasts for centuries when buried. My God, take a second to think about your sentences before saying them out loud.
Hang on, I’ll get you going with your response, “Me like Starlink, don’t look into me investments, Musk good, stand by Trump, wear MAGA hat, so must be good man-person. Me no like books or testing. Make me and Musk sad. Tears under MAGA hat.”
One incredibly important point made in the movie “Cabaret” is that in pre-Nazi Germany the Germans were, in many respects, a cosmopolitan society. However, their Democratic system had become corrupt and their major parties had turned on their workers and working families often to appease special interests. Nothing justifies what follows, but it seems like a point to make out loud.
The Corporate Democrats, which the Whatcom Democrats are a shining example of, are definitely to blame. As a liberal, Bernie, supporter myself I have had the local Dems. try to cancel me for telling the citizens of Whatcom County the truth about fake progressives here in our fight for economic and social justice in telecom. It was the Democrats, still lead by pathological liar Andrew Redding, that tried to kill the issue and did not care who they hurt along the way. Even working families with children. They have since moved targets to a few people trying to resolve the homelessness issue because they want to line the pockets of their big developer donor friends. They are making up serious lies about them too, as they always do. They are a pitiful joke and they hate workers. However, Harris would have been better than Trump. Still, with good 3rd party candidates like Stein on the ballot, I can’t understand why anyone voted for either major party. They are both awful.
Good points Randy. I would just add that the state’s map has significant problems.
1. Much of the data for the map comes from voluntary responses. Which is one of the least accurate ways to get information.
2. The tester the state used is a less accurate browser based tester.
So, while the map (which is what the PUD is using, btw) may be good for locating complete broadband deserts, it is not a good map for developing a long-term plan of action.
Also, we should be shooting for Gigabit as a standard to everyone. 100/20 for high speed and 25/3 for a baseline is too low especailly when we apply Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth.