[rpd] IPv4 Soft Landing BIS

[Owen DeLong]

> On Jul 29, 2017, at 04:15, Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.mu> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 28/Jul/17 21:02, Owen DeLong wrote:
> 
>> Let’s use a better analogy… This is more like a store being operated in a time of shortage.
>> Let’s use eggs for the example.
>> 
>> As a store owner, you know that there is a looming shortage of eggs because of some horrible
>> disease that has afflicted all of the local chickens and egg production is less than 1/4 of
>> normal.
>> 
>> Would you limit the number of cartons of eggs each customer can buy and prohibit customers from
>> getting in line again if they need more eggs? Would you tell the commercial bakery down the street
>> that you will not sell them 12 dozen eggs because you might have families coming in tomorrow that
>> might need eggs?
>> 
>> No, you’re going to pocket the cash as fast as you can and sell the eggs to whoever wants to buy
>> them.
> 
> Not to go completely off-topic, and certainly irrelevant to the ongoing discussion about this policy proposal, but; I (and a few others on this list, I'm sure) spent some of their early childhood growing up during some kind of war in their country. For me, it was when Obote was being ousted by Museveni, 1985, Uganda. Rationing of goods and food was the norm at pretty much every shop, large and small.

Was this done voluntarily by the shopkeepers or was it enforced by some form of government-like entity?

Further, was the rationing set up such that anyone who bought food less than two years ago couldn't buy food today, or was it more like everyone gets x amount of food per time period and everyone started suffering from the same level of rationing at the same time?

The proposal at hand implements the former. 

> Even now, in South Africa, there are certain items on the shelves - in supermarkets - that will have a notice attached to them to limit the number of units a single person can purchase, in case of a national shortage, e.g., milk.

Do these limits prevent you from coming back and buying more the next day?

> In pure capitalism theory, one wants to get rid of capacity as quickly as possible, as it's cash in the hand and makes business sense (the same way I want to get rid of as much bandwidth as I can when I build that capacity). But as I've seen in recent decades, for some reason or other, it isn't always the case.
> 
> Again, I'm just questioning the analogy, not the policy proposal... still making my mind up about the latter.

Sure. There are situations where fair rationing is the only sensible thing to do. However, this proposal treats those with existing resources different from those without. That's not rationing, that's dividing the community into classes and then treating those classes differently. If you'd like an African historical example of how this can end, we need look no further than the Belgian colonial control over Rwanda and the events after independence. 

Owen

> 
> Mark.