{"id":127,"date":"2006-01-25T00:08:41","date_gmt":"2006-01-24T18:38:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wokay.in\/wp\/?p=42"},"modified":"2006-01-25T00:08:41","modified_gmt":"2006-01-24T18:38:41","slug":"holy-crap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2006\/01\/25\/holy-crap\/","title":{"rendered":"Holy Crap!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I seem to have missed this news entirely: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chennaionline.com\/colnews\/newsitem.asp?NEWSID=%7B0FBD2EC9-6BDA-4734-A48E-1C7BA3075343%7D&#038;CATEGORYNAME=Chennai\">the Tamil Nadu government is planning to take over the cable operators in the state<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Hmm, so two or three years without any obvious power-mad incidents was too good to be true. Indira Gandhi nationalised banks, and now Jayalalitha is planning to nationalize (should that be state-ize?) cable access systems.<\/p>\n<p>A few thoughts:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>If this is meant as an anti-DMK measure, it&#8217;s stupid. Anti-incumbency will eventually push the DMK back into power anyway. The DMK will then ensure that the state-owned broadcasting apparatus it controls shows only Sun TV and there is a total blackout of Jaya TV. As <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Foundation_%28novel%29\">Salvor Hardin<\/a> said, it&#8217;s a poor blaster that can&#8217;t point both ways.<\/li>\n<li>This can&#8217;t be passed off as an isolated incident. The central government has its own creeping nationalization process going on. It has the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wokay.in\/display.php?ulid=222\">utterly loathsome ADC regime in telecom<\/a>, and closer to the topic of television, it has stolen cricket broadcasting rights from the people who bought them legitimately and passed them to its inhouse pet Doordarshan.<\/li>\n<li>The cable TV takeover is ostentiably being done to improve customer satisfaction. I shudder to think what customer satisfaction will be like after six months of government operation.<\/li>\n<li>Points one and three suggest that anything done to shaft a political opponent will very likely end up shafting the electorate more.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I seem to have missed this news entirely: the Tamil Nadu government is planning to take over the cable operators in the state. Hmm, so two or three years without any obvious power-mad incidents was too good to be true. Indira Gandhi nationalised banks, and now Jayalalitha is planning to nationalize (should that be state-ize?) [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[54,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-public-policy-and-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AOU2-23","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}