[extropy-chat] that bad old internet

[Spike]

> Samantha Atkins

> > Spike wrote:
> > 
> > > As a thought experiment, ignore the means and list those
> > > who would have the motive to mess up the internet, or whose
> > > lives may have been better off without it:
> > > 
> > > Bricks'n'mortar merchants
> > > 
> 
> Why?  It is cheaper to put something on the web and sale it 
> perhaps with drop shipment than run showroom floors.

This falls under the category of those who do not use
the internet.  Much of merchandising is presentation.
If the masses come into your showroom, pick out some
merchandise, then go home and order it all off the
internet, your sales will suffer.  With the furniture
showroom example, the markup is huge, sometimes double
the price a warehouse can provide.  Right now car sales lots
are being somewhat protected by the few manufacturers,
but there are plenty of classes of merchandise which
are not so protected.

Consider consumer electronics: presentation costs are
low, so profit margins on things like stereos, TVs,
computers, MP3 players etc, are razor thin, often less
than 10%.  Samantha, our friends in Taxamento demand
7.8% of the sales price.  To the merchants, that must
sound like the state government saying: Sell all the
electronics you can, then hand over *all* the profit.

 
> > > Anyone who sells primarily information, such as
> > > Ministers
> 
> Many ministers are flocking to the net to reach a larger flock.

There is that, but of course the internet is a competition
for their flock's attention, and a wonderfully competent
competitor it is indeed.

There are a couple of points that are specific to this
example.  A minister's primary duty is to prepare sermons.
A good sermon is a little research project.  An extraordinarily
good sermon is of interest even to the non-religious, filled
with detailed historical research, etc.  This research
requires resources available to only a few, those with access
to large theological libraries for instance.  The head pastor
of the theology school I once attended was a master of this
skill, finding wonderfully obscure references and connections.

The internet has made this kind of research two orders of
magnitude easier to do.  One can now google up all kinds of
stuff without ever leaving one's home.  But it also makes it
extremely easy to google up the other side of the story.

In the case of Seventh Day Adventist (I chose that one
only because I know the specific case, but I would imagine
it applies to pretty much all of them) the effect is this:
the pro-SDA material is plentiful, cheap, readily available 
and extremely well-funded.  But those who have opposing 
opinions are not heard, for they have no organized funding, 
no distribution network, no sponsors, nothing.  There are
SDA bookstores but no anti-SDA bookstores.  The writings
of D.M. Canwright are *very* difficult to find, for instance,
even if one is determined.

The internet changes all that, for now it costs almost
nothing to publish a web page.  There is a lot of very
SDA-damaging material that took me *years* to find, that
can now be googled in minutes.  I could imagine a lot of
ministers taking a dim view of it all.  My in-laws
pastor has convinced them that the internet is basically
evil and should be avoided.


> > > Real estate professionals
> 
> Web ads are a boom to their business, so why would the care?

The total number of sales is not increased by the
internet, but it makes it much easier to go around
the real estate professional all together.  Google up
the forms on how to do a for-sale-by-owner and learn
how easy it is.  The internet makes it easy to advertise
your own home without going to the general listing.

Real estate sales people often get commissions of 3% 
or in some cases even more.  Samantha in our
county of Santa Clara, 3% of a typical home price
is 15 to 20 thousand bucks, which is a lotta money
to me.  I think I could figure out how to do a FSBO
for that.

 
> > > Teachers (some of them)
> 
> What for?  Any teacher interested in teaching would send her 
> students all over the internet for educational purposes... -Samantha

Ja, some teachers have taken advantage of the technology,
but I suspect many (if not most) have not.  The internet
can make it very difficult to grade the students if not all
of them have access.  It also makes it a challenge
for the teacher to determine who is plagiarizing.  If they
Google on each student's work they could find out, but
that takes a lot of time.

We still need to deal with this too: the quality of
teachers must continue to drop because it is such a low-
paying job, with ever-increasing liability of working 
with children.  Many teachers may not be able to afford
a high-speed internet connection.  My brother-in-law
and his wife are elementary school teachers in south-
central LA.  Dial-up modem only.  Googling at their
home is extremely frustrating.   

My own recent experience is in judging a science fair 
for the local elementary school.  Many of the students'
projects consisted of choosing a topic, googling on it,
printing out a few web pages and pasting it to a backboard.
They produced some terrific *looking* projects, stuff that
woulda won hands down in my day (I had to use that phrase {8^D)
but on closer examination they could have been put together
in about an hour.  No continuity, very flashy.  Judging
the science fair came down to searching for research
projects that contained some actual research.

A major headache for teachers is that not all students
have access to the internet.  As time goes on, the
disparity between haves and have-nots increases to
such an extent that grading the student's performance
is becoming ever harder.  Often teachers become more
concerned about equality and fairness than in having
their top students achieve excellence, so they spend
much or most of their time helping the slower students.
How do you help someone who has no internet connection?
They are missing the most basic tool of the 21st
century.

My burden is for my own neices, aged 11 and 13.  Their 
parents do not allow them any access to the internet
because of... well, you can imagine any number of reasons
why not.  These girls are polite, honest, upstanding
citizens, excellent students and excellent readers.
But their vast cluelessness knows no bounds.  They are 
so naive, so very unaware of the world in which they will 
soon enter, it worries me.  What happens when they enter
college without internet research skills?  They will know
all about American history (sort of) from their wide
reading about how children lived in past decades.  But
they will know almost nothing about the things that
matter for prosperity in our world.  This latest adventure
with the pastor telling my in-laws that the internet is
evil didn't help matters at all.

spike