Mixed Signals

Yea, I say get on with it. Things will straighten themselves out. It’s not anyone’s fault but there own that they aren’t prepared. They’ve had 3 dang years to get ready. Democrats aren’t worried about the poor, old, and minorities. What they’re worried about is votes. They want to keep their jobs next voting cycle.
I also ran some numbers yesturday. Everyone, especially Congress and the President is worried about the economy. They keep trying to get people to spend some more, so that the economy will go back to the way it was. Well, what I did, was take there number, 6.5 million people that aren’t ready. Then took the high and low price of the boxes, $40 and $80. Multiplied them both by 6.5 million. Then, since there will probably be many who will buy more than one box, so I multiplied our prices by 3.25 million, half of the 6.5m. So, if we let the transition go as scheduled, we would see anywhere from 390 million dollars to 780 million dollars dumped into the economy, and in a relatively short amount of time. That is a substantial amount of cash flowing into the markets. I guess the boys running our country didn’t think of that.
And another thing, where does it say in our Bill of Rights, that we are all entitled to TV? It doesn’t. Therefore, having TV, free TV as well, is NOT a right. This should never have been an issue in the first place. Besides, the transition has been delayed three years now. It’s original date was sometime in the end of 2006. No one was ready then.
Democrats really tick me off. The resounding element I get from them is bigger government, and that government is the answer to any problem. It’s not. Government is usually the start of the problem. Think about it. It was in the wanning years of the Clinton administration that legislation was approved that gave banks the OK to start getting people into sub-prime, interest only, and ARM loans. This way many people can own a house. Thats the American dream right? Wrong. These loans went to people who couldn’t afford them. These people also bought more house than they could afford, thinking that it’ll go up in value and they’ll sell, making thousands of dollars in the process. Well, then the foreclosures started happening, and that was the start of our now recession. So the blame for all of it is three-fold. Government, Banks, and home buyers that weren’t too bright, and made huge financial mistakes. I, as a taxpayer, who makes good financial decisions(spelling?) should not have to pay for they’re stupidity.
And one last thing, a quote:
“The opposite of Pro is Con. So the Opposite of Progress, is Congress.”
Saw that on the internet, apperently it was written on the bathroom wall of the Capitol Building.
Ok, I’m done with my political rant now. I won’t argue politics, I’ve said my piece on it and now I’m done. I’ll discuss the transition, but that’s it.

The delay is a huge mistake. It only makes the confusion worse and 4 months from now, we’ll have the same problem. Those who couldn’t figure it out in 2 years aren’t going to have a moment of clarity with 4 more months. We need to just do it and get it over with. A couple weeks of television chaos and it will be behind us and then everyone will benefit going forward.

Lawrence, This whole thing is blown out of
proportion, just to give us something to talk
about instead of the dismal economy.
First, the only ones making out in this money
scheme are the government subsidize
communications conglomerates. The pictures will
be clearer and sound better? With a tube type
television your not going to get any more pixels
and the speaker is not going to be that much
clearer, because it is dried out, especially on old
sets. There is nothing stopping the stations from
changing over on that date, in fact the station in
our city is doing it anyway. They just have to
making sure the boxes are available. Heck give
them the rebate coupon when they purchase it,
and let them mail it in. Are these boxes
made in the USA? NO, so there goes the theory
of boosting our economy. As far as who the blame
is for the economy, you can add yours to a list
that’s as long as the unemployment line is in
Detroit.
What really ###### me off is that Madoff scam.
Here we have a whisleblower telling the SEC in
2001,2003,2005 and 2006 regarding this
character and they brushed it under the carpet! If
they allowed this type behavior, then there was no
way this could NOT have happened. I somewhat
agree that homeowners were at fault, but I place a
good portion of the blame on the unregulated loan
sharks that sold these houses ONLY on the
premise that the value of the homes would always
appreciate. At the time, no one questioned that!
Since the republicans controlled the house and
senate in 2000 to 2006, they had no excuse in
eliminating this. So both parties are at blame for
this, besides the economy was always on the
balance ever since 9/11 and didn’t avalanche
until people couldn’t make house payments
because gas was $4 / gal.

I thought this was about TV, not mortgages?
All the local stations by me are saying, “screw it, were switching over on the 17th as originally planned” Why is it that gov’t messes up everything?

Is it so hard to believe that maybe those 6 million people do not give a darn about having TV? I can get anything I want to see on my computer and frankly in the last few years I have not found one single show worth watching anyway. What do you all watch? I get more than enough news by logging on every day. There are no decent shows on and we do not watch sports. The movies are few and far between and if you do not care for action movies or junk movies you are out of luck. Personally I see no reason at all to waste money on any kind of TV, digital or not. The 6 million that have not made the change are the smart ones. Now I guess the government will try to MAKE us convert!

I think it was wise to delay the change til summer. a winter deadline was never practical.
Consider the safety risk of cutting off rural and urban poor and seniors from their main source of news in the middle of the severe weather crises that many states are in the middle of right now.

On reason for the delay is the coupon program ran out of money. This was predicted last November. Yet the Democratics in Congress, which controls the purse strings, did nothing. Why did they wait until Feb. to make this move? Why is it all the Republicans fault? Where were the dems back in 1999 & 2000 when these decisions were being made? Congress ignored the issue until they realized real voters were going to be effected and they panicked.
Also, don’t blame the broadcasters. TV stations did not choose to make this switch. It was mandated by the Government so they could sell of the spectrum currently occupied by TV stations. If you think a $40 – $80 converter box is too costly, imagine having to replace every piece of equipment in you TV station while keeping ALL the analog equipment running in parallel. You spend millions of dollars for which you get . . .nothing. Now the government says you have to keep it going another 3 months. Some stations will have to lay off personnel to pay for keeping the analog signal going. ($8,000 a month in electricity alone for some.) How is that going to help the economy?

People’s own sheer stupidity if they aren’t prepared. Boo hoo.

As for the right thing, I suppose you think owning a house is a right as well? Owning a car, a bycicle, a playstation, etc. are rights? No, they’re not. You have to earn them. Work for them. TV is the same, whether it’s used for vital information or not. Get a radio, they’re vastly cheaper, and can give the same vital information. But even that is a privelage(spelling). Newspapers and the like are the same way. Not rights. Just because someone else has something, doesn’t automatically entitle you to it. I’m tired of this attitude that I like to call “American Entitlement Syndrome”. I don’t think it’s a right to have a TV. I work and I earn my TV, my internet, my cell phone, my truck that doesn’t work right now, my wife’s car, etc. The only true rights we have are written in the Constitution. Perhaps it’s time we wrote a Bill of Not Rights, for those who think it’s their right to have everything.

They need to mandate stronger signals. The real travesty of digital TV isn’t that some people don’t have converters yet. The real problem is that digital TV does not work very well. The “cliff effect” renders weak signals unusable, and you will still have a blank screen even with the converter. Of course, this big, big problem is not even mentioned by the media (hello, ABC News?) or the government. Everyone will find out about this the hard way.

Bill of Fake Rights would be a better name for it though…….

As always, there are people on here with no respect for the elderly and no respect for the economic limitations of others. The delay is wise, no poor elderly and isolated person should be blindsided by this. It’s not going to kill them to take extra time to ensure thay have done everything possible to make this transition go smoothly. There are sure to be repercussions that have not even been anticipated that will need to be dealt with, so why make the jump when it is aparent that there are still known issues to resolve?

The DC examiner is reporting that Obama’s decision to postpone the digital transition was influenced by Obama’s telecommunications advisor, R. Gerard Salemme, who has a conflict of interest. The delay benefits Salemme’s company, Clearwire, as well as Sprint at the expense of Verizon.

Duh. Is there still a medium out there called radio to connect the poor, rural, people to the weather warnings? In my poor, rural community, the radio is much more important for school closings, snow warnings, etc. The freeing up of analog frequencies was supposed to be for Homeland Security reasons. Now, if this is a matter of national security, why is our namby pamby government delaying? Are they putting our security at risk for the sake of a bunch of people who are not going to be “ready” six months from now? Pull the plug and get on with it.

I agree with the above poster. If everyone knew about the switch, why are we creating more problems by suggesting that people don’t know. Probably the only people that don’t know about the switch are the ones that don’t watch tv. If you watch tv, you are bombarded with crawls reminding you to prepare. And this has been going on for so long that I find it hard to believe that people didn’t think about applying for a coupon until just now.

If you delay it for 10 more years, there will still be millions who are NOT ready for it. Just go ahead and “DO IT” !!

One thing you can bet on is that there won’t be any more people prepared in a few months then there are now. They are postponers and will jump on the bandwagon as soon as the TV goes off.

97% of people heard about the switch. So we are going to delay the transition and spend more federal money, because 3% of the population are clueless or waited until the last minute to request a converter box. Better yet, most of these people have complained that all they have is their old TV which keeps them connected, so connected to reality in fact that they claim not to have know about the switch, despite watching TV all time.

Lawrence, glad your back on, Was reading an
article on a IEEE newsletter (Electrical Engineering
magazine), which states that a lot of owners are
going to be a little surprised that they not only will
have to buy the box but also a new type antenna!
After everyone changes, they will be limited in
bandwidth and they will be jamming as much info
into this new bandwidth as possible to generate
more revenue. The old analog antennas are not designed for this new technology.

people need to wake up, twenty years ago I was HD circuits at a tech school, Congress then said in the year 2000, we would change to digital 2000 came and gone now we were going to change in 2006, 2006 came and gone we are still waiting, whill the rest of the world moves on. And we wonder why we are losing market share.