What just about everyone loves about the Internet is its speed and convenience, and what’s not to like about instant messaging, near-instant email, Tweets and Twitter, and instant on-line shopping?  Yet there is a high and hidden cost… one far greater than most people realize or consider – and a number of these costs were detailed in a front-page story in The New York Times on September 23^rd, which outlined the results of a year-long study.

For example, on a world-wide basis, internet data centers, now numbering more than three million world-wide, “use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants.”   The United States alone accounts for about thirty percent of that.  One of the most staggering figures revealed by the study was that actual computer/server computations and data processing only took six to twelve percent of that electrical load.  The rest was merely to keep all systems “on alert” to handle intermittent peak loads and information surges.

It’s not that the technology to make data centers more efficient doesn’t exist.  It does.  The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center has refined its systems to achieve more than 90% efficiency, and a company called Power Assure markets a technology that enables commercial data centers to safely power down servers in off-peak periods.  Yet Silicon Valley Power – the utility that serves Santa Clara and Silicon Valley – has not been able to entice a single data center to adopt such energy saving programs.

Not only is the internet energy wasteful, but these data centers are significant sources of air pollution. In just the states of Virginia and Illinois more than a dozen data centers have been cited for violations of air quality standings.  In northern Virginia alone, Amazon – one of the larger operators of data centers – was cited with 24 violations over three years, including running diesel generators without a permit, and was fined over a quarter of a million dollars.

So why is there so much waste and unnecessary pollution caused by internet data centers?

One reason is that companies that live by the “instant” fear that failure to always have instant access will have an adverse impact on sales.  A corollary of that is that data center managers aren’t rewarded for saving on the electrical bill or reducing air pollution.  They’re rewarded for having data centers on-line and able to handle anything 99.999% of the time.  That’s another reason why Northern Virginia’s data centers together have back-up diesel generators with a combined output almost equal to a standard nuclear power plant… with air emissions far greater than most conventional power plants.

Another aspect of the problem, and one not touched by the Times’ investigation, is that this increasing electrical usage created by the internet puts additional strain on the national and regional power grids, an infrastructure that is already overstrained in many areas… and this is getting worse. For example, data centers in Northern Virginia now draw over 500 million watts of electricity and plans on the drawing boards suggest that load will double in five years.

Instant access… it’s wonderful… but can we really keep this up?

The other day, the local newspaper had a front page story announcing a new local, college-based reality television show – entitled “Cheapster.” The idea behind the show is for college students to come up with innovative ways to show their frugality… and the winner will receive $10,000.

While I’m certainly for wise spending, the whole concept of “cheapster” I find appalling, especially the title. Everywhere I look, there’s another facet of the “cheaper is better”  belief, from Amazon and WalMart to so many “sales” that a recent survey revealed that many consumers won’t buy anything unless it’s on sale. Part of this emphasis and concern about price is doubtless a result of the long recession and the slow rate of recovery, especially in better-paying jobs, but I think the emphasis goes beyond that… and the implications certainly do.

When we as a society emphasize “cheap,” we’re also inducing, if not forcing, manufacturers and retailers to produce goods in the cheapest way possible, even if that means outsourcing production to third-world sweatshops and child labor.  It’s also an inducement to deception, as in the case of the book industry, as I’ve pointed out, where the “cheapest” prices for bestsellers doesn’t necessarily translate into overall lower prices… and where the reduction in book outlets where people can browse has greatly contributed to a decline [in real dollar terms] in sales and certainly in the diversity of books provided by publishing firms, thereby effectively reducing choice.  Yes, I know that self-publishing ebooks has taken off, but most people don’t have the time to peruse all those titles… and that’s another facet of reducing choice in a realistic way.

Then there’s telecommunications industry where, despite all the claims to the contrary, overall people are spending far more on communications than ever before and where “basic” service is more expensive now, even for cellphones, than it was in the time of the great Bell monopoly.  This tends to be forgotten because long distance calling is “cheap,” if not close to “free.”

“Cheap” airline fares aren’t really, not with all the extra charges, and travelers pay more in the way of inconvenience because the cabins are jammed with luggage to avoid checked bag fees, and that means that flights take longer because it takes longer to load the aircraft… and that, in turn, increases operating costs and overall travel time.

Beyond the myriad deceptions of cheapness is also a larger question. What ever happened to other virtues, such as quality or reliability?  And what happened to the idea that price reflects value?

But does all that matter, so long as it’s “cheap”?

A week or so ago, a U.S. District Court approved the e-book settlement between Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins and the Department of Justice, a settlement that opens the way for Amazon to sell ebooks from those publishers at any price Amazon chooses.  The Justice Department, of course, hails the settlement as a groundbreaking and anti-monopolistic agreement that will provide cheaper books to consumers. In thinking this all over, I realized that the entire structure and operation of monopoly has changed in the last twenty years, while the definition has not, so much so that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, designed to prevent the harmful effects of monopoly has, in the case of the publishing settlement, become an instrument to support monopoly – and no one seems to realize this.  How did this happen?

A century ago, the operation of a monopoly was clearly defined.  A company, such as Standard Oil, bought up all the competition, or the majority of it, sometimes used low prices as a temporary measure to bankrupt competitors or drive them out, then took control of the market and raised prices to make a greater profit.  Today, companies like WalMart and Amazon have developed a very different monopolistic approach. They begin with selectively low prices and equally low wages for employees.  The low prices of highly visible selected goods attract more customers, and few people notice that other goods aren’t any cheaper, and in some cases, are even more expensive. WalMart gets around this by allowing customers to show competitors’ prices and then matching those prices… but most customers can’t and won’t do that for the majority of goods.  In the case of Amazon, Jeff Bezos lost money for years building that bookselling customer base.

Then, once the new monopolists have that customer base, they exert pressure on suppliers to provide goods for lower and lower prices.  Both WalMart and Amazon are excellent at this.  Amazon provides its marketplace for online retailers, then scans their sales, discovers what items are selling well and in large quantities, and either pressures the supplier to sell to Amazon directly for less, thus undercutting the Amazon affiliate, or finds another supplier to do so more cheaply. Recently, reports have surfaced that Amazon is using similar tactics with small and independent publishers, who don’t have the clout or the nerve that some of the larger publishers have.  Thus, in the end, the new monopolists aren’t gouging the consumer, but using excessive market power to gouge the suppliers and their own employees.  All the while they can claim that they’re not monopolists because people are getting goods for lower prices.

What the Department of Justice and the legal scholars seem to be overlooking is that such behavior is still restraint of trade – it’s just restraint of trade from the suppliers and through low employee wages rather than price-fixing from the retailer… and it has a definite negative impact on both local economies and the national economy, most obviously in the outcome that lower paid employees can’t live as well, don’t buy as much of other goods, and pay less in taxes.

In fact, Jeff Bezos even declared that his goal was to destroy the traditional paper-based publishing industry and take over the information marketplace. If that isn’t a declared intent to monopolize an industry, I don’t know what is. The new monopoly structure also may well be a far more deadly form of monopoly than the old one because it impacts the entire supply chain and effectively reduces incomes and the standard of living of tens of millions of Americans, both directly and indirectly. As I’ve noted before, already the publishing marketplace has changed, in that there’s less diversity in what’s published by major publishers, and more and more former midlist authors are having trouble getting published… or have already been dropped.

While Borders Books had its management problems, the final straw that pushed the company out of business was likely Amazon’s predatory pricing. In the years before its final collapse, Borders annual sales were around $4 billion, and it operated close to 400 brick and mortar stores with approximately 11,000 employees.  Those sales, and payrolls, not to mention the store rental costs, likely generated a positive economic impact of anywhere from $40 to $70 billion. While some of those sales have gone to Barnes & Noble or Amazon, most have not, and the operating expenses and payrolls paid by Borders are almost entirely an economic loss, since Amazon and Barnes & Noble didn’t add many new employees or, in the case of B&N, open new stores.  Books-A-Million did open some new stores, but only a handful.

Amazon’s policies have also resulted in lost revenue for independent bookstores, as well as closure of a number of stores of smaller regional bookstore chains, just as WalMart’s policies have adversely affected local and regional retailers. Yet the Department of Justice claims a victory in a settlement that reinforces the practices of the new monopolists where, apparently, the only determining factor is how cheaply consumers can obtain a carefully selected range of ebooks.

All hail the monopolists of “cheap” and “cheaper.”

A film that most Americans had never heard of or considered appears on U-Tube, and anti-American riots break out in Egypt and Libya, during which four Americans are killed, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya. While recent information suggests that the demonstration was planned as a cover for the assassination, the fact remains that there was a demonstration in Egypt and the Libyan plotters had no trouble in rounding up plenty of outraged Muslims, and additional protests have since occurred in Malaysia, Bangladesh, and Yemen. Some might dismiss this as a one-time occurrence.  Unfortunately, it’s not.  Several years ago, a Danish newspaper published some satirical cartoons of Mohammed, and that caused violence and uproar.  When the novelist Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling on all good Muslims to kill Rushdie and his publishers, forcing Rushdie into seclusion for years.

Some people might declare that things are different in the United States… and they are, in the sense that our population doesn’t have so many “true believers” who are willing to kill those who offend their religious beliefs or so-called religious sensibilities, but we do have people like that, just not so many.  After all, what is the difference between fanatical anti-abortionists who kill doctors who perform legal abortions and fanatical believers in Islam who kill anyone who goes against what they believe? Is there that much difference in principle between Muslims who want Islamic law to replace secular law and fundamentalist Christians who want secular law to reflect their particular beliefs?  While there’s currently a difference in degree, five hundred years ago there certainly wasn’t even that.

What’s overlooked in all of the conflict between religious beliefs and secular law is the fundamental difference that, for the most part, secular law is concerned with punishing acts that inflict physical or financial harm on others, in hopes of deterring such actions, while religious law is aimed at requiring a specific code of conduct based on particular religious practices of a single belief. The entire history of the evolution of law reflects a struggle between blind adherence to a narrow set of beliefs and an effort to remove the codes that govern human behavior from any one set of beliefs and to base law on a secular basis, reflecting the basics common to all beliefs. Historically, most religious authorities have resisted this change, not surprisingly, because it reduced their power and influence.

Thus, cartoons of Mohammed or satirical movies do not cause physical harm, but they are seen to threaten the belief structure.  Allowing women full control of their bodies likewise threatens the belief structure that places the life or potential life of an unborn child above that of the mother.  When blind faith rules supreme and becomes the law of any land, no questions to that law are acceptable.

When a specific belief structure dominates a culture or subculture, the lack of questioning tends to permeate all aspects of that society.  To me, it’s absolutely no surprise that there’s a higher rate of denial of scientific findings, such as evolution and global warming, among Christian fundamentalists because true science is based on questioning and true belief is based on suppressing anything that raises questions… and such societal suppression is the greatest danger of all from blind faith, whether that faith is Islam, LDS, Christianity, or even a “political” faith, such as Fascism, Nazism, or Communism.

Some twenty years ago, at the Republican convention that nominated George H.W. Bush for his second term, Pat Buchanan made a speech essentially claiming that what he stood for was the beginning of a fight for the soul of the Republican Party.   That struggle has persisted for twenty years, and now the Republican Party platform seems largely in conformity to what Buchanan outlined.  Paradoxically, some opponents of Republican policies might claim that platform proves that the Party has no soul, but I don’t see anyone raising the larger question:  Should a political party aim to have “a soul”?

Over the more than two centuries since the U.S. Constitution was adopted, there have been more than a few disputes and scores of court cases involving the respective roles of religion and government in American society, the idea of separation of  church and state notwithstanding.  Yet doesn’t anyone else find it strange that, in a society that theoretically does not want government dictating what its people should believe, and in a land created to avoid just that, one of the major political parties has been striving to find its soul, when the very idea of a soul is a highly religious symbol?

Not only that, but the closer the Republican Party has come to adopting Buchanan’s positions, the more the partisans of this “soulful” party have attempted to force government to adhere to positions based on highly religious views – many of which are not shared by the majority of Americans.  And requiring a secular state, which the United States is, despite the “under God” phraseology, to require conduct based on religious views is diametrically opposed to what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

Part of the reason for the growing push to embody “religious” ideas in statute is likely the fact that the United States has become more diverse, and many feel that the nation does not follow the “traditional” values and have reacted by attempting to prohibit any government program that they see as opposing or not supporting such traditional values. There have always been those who did not fully embrace such values, including such Founding Fathers as Thomas Jefferson, but the idea of using government to insist on such values in law, as opposed to defining acceptable conduct in secular terms, has continued to increase, particularly in the past twenty years.

Even if the United States continues to diversify, I suspect that the founders of this nation, who were largely skeptical of political parties, would be even more skeptical about fighting for the “soul” of a political party.