Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Jesse Jackson finally got something right
OK, now you're just being flat-out disingenuous. There's a difference between businesses that use the roads and the entity that administers them. Comcast isn't a company that "transports goods over roads;" it's the one building and maintaining them (or at least nominally doing so.)
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Jesse Jackson finally got something right
Where I live, I can choose between AT&T and Comcast at home
Then you've got better service than most people in the USA. The majority of citizens have one (or zero) 'choices' for residential broadband access, especially if you define broadband as a band that's actually broad enough to stream high quality video.
How much innovation have we seen in landline? The home phone is virtually no different now than it was when I was a kid 35 years.
Yeah, that's the mark of a mature product, particularly a basic utility. It doesn't change because it doesn't have to; it does what it needs to do and does it well. How much innovation have you seen over the same 35 years in power lines, gas, or water?
Compare that to your cell and how wireless networks have transformed by leaps and bounds in a decade.
Yes, because these are not yet mature products. As in biology, children grow much faster than adults.
When I was a kid, airline travel was perceived as the luxury of rich or well off people. Now, everyone flies for far lower fares than decades past.
I'm not that much younger than you, and when I was a kid I did some flying of my own, and my family was never rich. Two points worth raising, though:
1) Internet access is a basic utility, a necessity of modern life. Air travel is not, thus comparing them is less than perfectly fair.
2) More cost effective? You gotta be kidding me. Airlines these days are nickel-and-diming you for every little thing, squeezing the seats further together, and actively working to make the flights uncomfortable so you'll shell out extra for upgrades. Over the last few decades, technological advances have improved nearly every aspect of our lives... but air travel has somehow gotten worse! Raising it in support of your perspective really does nothing to help your case.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Jesse Jackson finally got something right
The problem is, due to the massive investment costs required to even get into the business, providing broadband connectivity services is an industry that is highly prone to consolidation and natural monopolies, the very antithesis of competition and free markets, and that's exactly what we're seeing going on, complete with collusion (whether formal or simply "understood", it's still collusion) between major players to divide up the market into local monopolies that do not compete with one another.
I agree, having competition brought about by the free market would be an ideal situation, but that's a highly ideaslistic situation in this case. Title II recognizes the situation for what it is, and essentially says "if it looks like a utility company and quacks like a utility company, regulate it like a utility company." Because that's what we've learned is the most efficient way to deal with utilities that provide basic infrastructure and are prone to natural monopolies.
...stopping dozens of terror attacks, including plots against the New York Stock Exchange
OK, this goes right alongside yesterday's "don't criminalize Justin Bieber" in the "you might want to rethink your examples" section. If terrorists struck Wall Street and managed to do what the DOJ has never had the guts to do since 2007--actually impose some serious consequences on the crooks that destroyed our economy and laughed all the way to the bank--would that really be a bad thing?
Re: Re: Re: Jesse Jackson finally got something right
Let me let you in on a little secret. Companies exist to earn a...profit. They aren't charities or non-profits, but they are there to take in more than spend. You act as if that is a dirty word, but it's at the root of basic economics and business.
There's nothing wrong with making a profit. There is, however, something very wrong with making a profit abusively.
And all that aside...why should the government go in and interfere with doing business? How does that encourage innovative market value propositions? Scoff at that all you want, but that is basic business.
Here's some slightly more advanced business: some things provide far greater value when their nominal value is decreased.
I've mentioned the history of steel before on here. It's kind of long, and I won't get into it too deeply, but suffice it to say that steel has been around since approximately the 14th century BC. It was always rare, difficult to produce, and valuable. I'm sure ancient smiths came up with many innovative ways to extract market value from it.
Then along came the Industrial Revolution, and a few guys worked out the secret to industrial steelmaking, the mass production of cheap steel. and it revolutionized society itself in a way that few technological advances in the history of our world have. Fire, agriculture, electronics and the printing press are some of the few that come to mind. Today, steel costs well under $1000/ton, less than $50/pound. Making it that cheap has enabled people to easily build stuff from it that resulted in the creation of enormous amounts of wealth!
Infrastructure isn't meant to be a high profit margin industry. It's meant to be a foundation to build on, and the lower the prices for basic infrastructure, the more accessible it becomes and the more wealth gets created. The Internet is a pillar of today's basic infrastructure, and just look at how much wealth it's created in society since the 90s. This is only possible when the infrastructure costs remain low, predictable, and as boring and "un-innovative" as possible.
Regardless, though, your comments assume that there exists some sort of free market in the ISP space. There does not -- if there was such a thing, then the need for a regulatory resolution would be a lot lower.
Exactly. Free market principles are wonderful, but we must always remember that they are only valid when conditions of freedom exist in the marketplace. And for that, there must be strong competition. Otherwise, you don't have a free market; you have a monopoly, and free market economic principles break down.
My personal take is that armed teachers is one of the better ways to stop a school shooting spree
Really? Let's keep in mind one simple fact: if there are armed teachers at a school, people will know. And more importantly, the students will know. Even if they aren't told which teachers are armed, they'll know that they're there, and someone's eventually going to find out the details.
That being true, which is more likely?
1) That an armed teacher would be able to stop a school shooting spree (which is, by definition, a premeditated act, since the kid had to acquire the gun and bring it to school beforehand) with the shooter forewarned that there are armed teachers around.
or 2) That a non-premeditated angry dispute could escalate into a tragedy when some disgruntled, overly hormonal kid steals a teacher's gun.
Yes, exactly. They're every bit as anticompetitive and abusive as any illegal monopoly that's been split up in the past; isn't it long past time we do the same with Comcast?
As I've said before, if you actually want businesses to behave better, the "cost of" bad behavior has to be painful. Verizon just paid out approximately $1.6 million over this case. If they made $5 million (just making up a number here, no idea what it was actually worth) off of their misbehavior, then that can be regarded as a 300%+ return on an investment of lawlessness!
The standard really needs to be "crime does not pay." If they made $5 million on this, the fine needs to be $10 million at the very least. Make the ROI negative--fix the incentives--and they'll stop doing this. (While lobbying for a return to easier laws, of course.)
an otherwise upstanding, respected police officer, husband, father of three and football and basketball coach.
That should have been, at the very least, a yellow alert right there; why are they trying to use it to demonstrate his good character?
As I've said before on here, too many adults seem to have very fuzzy memories of high school. For those of you who don't, think back for a moment. There are good kids and bad kids at every school, but where did you find the biggest concentration of thugs, bullies, and entitled teen sociopaths who think they ought to be treated like royalty and everyone else is beneath them?
If you answered "the football and basketball teams," congratulations! You still remember what high school was like!
A lot of that is a cultural problem, but a lot more of it is directly abetted by the coaches, who actively work to ensure their players can continue to play, and win, no matter what they might have done to disqualify themselves... and not just academically. This builds up a culture of active shielding from accountability that is rampant in the NFL and even worse in the NBA, with far higher rates of serious, violent crimes among these athletes than the societal average. But it doesn't start when you make it to the big leagues; the same problems are endemic to college and high school sports.
So yeah, this "fine upstanding guy" was a part of this disgusting and corrupt system, where he could easily use his influence as a policeman to help take the heat off of star players who did stuff they never should have done? No surprise there.
Trying to stop teenagers exploring sex is about as easy as stopping the tide from coming in, a futile exercise.
A lot of people like to say that. Actual hard data tells a very different story. Perhaps the most telling is historical pregnancy rates:
Pregnancy is the natural, though not infallible, consequence of having sex. That's a simple, non-controversial fact that everyone above a certain age understands. These days, we have ways to subvert that, with various forms of contraception easily available, but that wasn't always the case. Before the 1960s, when you had sex, you were rolling the dice, and if the (un)lucky number came up, that seed got planted.
Contraception changed everything. Suddenly terms like "safe sex" started to enter the lexicon. It was now (perceived to be) possible to have sex with no risk of pregnancy. So we all know what happened next.
Since everyone's doing it already and it's futile to stop teens from experimenting, having contraception available helped bring teen pregnancy rates way down.
Oh, wait, no, that's not what happened at all. In a classic example of moral hazard behavior, teen pregnancy rates went way up and continued spiking all the way into the early 90s, when we finally started getting a handle on the situation. It took until the early 2010s to get teen pregnancy back down to 1950s rates.
With no contraception available to hide the consequences of their actions, and yet a much lower pregnancy rate displaying the consequences that could not be hidden, there is only one conclusion that can be drawn: teens were having a lot less sex back then! So no, it's by no means futile; history tells us the exact opposite.
To answer the other part of your response, perhaps my original post didn't make my position clear. I don't care about making life good for the boys who did this. By that age, their basic personality is essentially fully-formed already. If they're the sort of kids who will sexually victimize a vulnerable girl their own age at 16, there's a very, very good chance that they are going to grow into the sort of adults who will sexually victimize a vulnerable woman their own age at 20, 30, 40, or all of the above. The future victims are the ones I care about making life better for.
On the post: Jesse Jackson Insists He's Lobbying For Weaker Net Neutrality Rules To Help Protect The Poor
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Jesse Jackson finally got something right
On the post: Tiger Woods Fails Parody, Streisands 'Offending' Content As A Result
Re: Golf
On the post: Jesse Jackson Insists He's Lobbying For Weaker Net Neutrality Rules To Help Protect The Poor
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Jesse Jackson finally got something right
Then you've got better service than most people in the USA. The majority of citizens have one (or zero) 'choices' for residential broadband access, especially if you define broadband as a band that's actually broad enough to stream high quality video.
Yeah, that's the mark of a mature product, particularly a basic utility. It doesn't change because it doesn't have to; it does what it needs to do and does it well. How much innovation have you seen over the same 35 years in power lines, gas, or water?
Yes, because these are not yet mature products. As in biology, children grow much faster than adults.
I'm not that much younger than you, and when I was a kid I did some flying of my own, and my family was never rich. Two points worth raising, though:
1) Internet access is a basic utility, a necessity of modern life. Air travel is not, thus comparing them is less than perfectly fair.
2) More cost effective? You gotta be kidding me. Airlines these days are nickel-and-diming you for every little thing, squeezing the seats further together, and actively working to make the flights uncomfortable so you'll shell out extra for upgrades. Over the last few decades, technological advances have improved nearly every aspect of our lives... but air travel has somehow gotten worse! Raising it in support of your perspective really does nothing to help your case.
On the post: Jesse Jackson Insists He's Lobbying For Weaker Net Neutrality Rules To Help Protect The Poor
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Jesse Jackson finally got something right
I agree, having competition brought about by the free market would be an ideal situation, but that's a highly ideaslistic situation in this case. Title II recognizes the situation for what it is, and essentially says "if it looks like a utility company and quacks like a utility company, regulate it like a utility company." Because that's what we've learned is the most efficient way to deal with utilities that provide basic infrastructure and are prone to natural monopolies.
On the post: New House Intelligence Boss Doesn't See The Need For Any Surveillance Reform
OK, this goes right alongside yesterday's "don't criminalize Justin Bieber" in the "you might want to rethink your examples" section. If terrorists struck Wall Street and managed to do what the DOJ has never had the guts to do since 2007--actually impose some serious consequences on the crooks that destroyed our economy and laughed all the way to the bank--would that really be a bad thing?
On the post: Jesse Jackson Insists He's Lobbying For Weaker Net Neutrality Rules To Help Protect The Poor
Re: Re: Re: Re: Jesse Jackson finally got something right
On the post: Jesse Jackson Insists He's Lobbying For Weaker Net Neutrality Rules To Help Protect The Poor
Re: Re: Re: Jesse Jackson finally got something right
There's nothing wrong with making a profit. There is, however, something very wrong with making a profit abusively.
Here's some slightly more advanced business: some things provide far greater value when their nominal value is decreased.
I've mentioned the history of steel before on here. It's kind of long, and I won't get into it too deeply, but suffice it to say that steel has been around since approximately the 14th century BC. It was always rare, difficult to produce, and valuable. I'm sure ancient smiths came up with many innovative ways to extract market value from it.
Then along came the Industrial Revolution, and a few guys worked out the secret to industrial steelmaking, the mass production of cheap steel. and it revolutionized society itself in a way that few technological advances in the history of our world have. Fire, agriculture, electronics and the printing press are some of the few that come to mind. Today, steel costs well under $1000/ton, less than $50/pound. Making it that cheap has enabled people to easily build stuff from it that resulted in the creation of enormous amounts of wealth!
Infrastructure isn't meant to be a high profit margin industry. It's meant to be a foundation to build on, and the lower the prices for basic infrastructure, the more accessible it becomes and the more wealth gets created. The Internet is a pillar of today's basic infrastructure, and just look at how much wealth it's created in society since the 90s. This is only possible when the infrastructure costs remain low, predictable, and as boring and "un-innovative" as possible.
That's what Title II is all about.
On the post: Jesse Jackson Insists He's Lobbying For Weaker Net Neutrality Rules To Help Protect The Poor
Re: Re: Jesse Jackson finally got something right
Exactly. Free market principles are wonderful, but we must always remember that they are only valid when conditions of freedom exist in the marketplace. And for that, there must be strong competition. Otherwise, you don't have a free market; you have a monopoly, and free market economic principles break down.
On the post: Florida Senator Apparently Voted The Wrong Way Over USA Freedom Act [UPDATE: Or Not]
Re: Re:
At least the Keystone vote went the right way, by a similarly narrow margin.
On the post: Cops Decide Running Surprise School Shooter Drill During Class At A Middle School Is A Great Idea
Re: Re: Re:
Really? Let's keep in mind one simple fact: if there are armed teachers at a school, people will know. And more importantly, the students will know. Even if they aren't told which teachers are armed, they'll know that they're there, and someone's eventually going to find out the details.
That being true, which is more likely?
1) That an armed teacher would be able to stop a school shooting spree (which is, by definition, a premeditated act, since the kid had to acquire the gun and bring it to school beforehand) with the shooter forewarned that there are armed teachers around.
or 2) That a non-premeditated angry dispute could escalate into a tragedy when some disgruntled, overly hormonal kid steals a teacher's gun.
On the post: Comcast CEO Still Pretending His Company's Horrible Satisfaction Ratings Are Just A Normal Part Of Being So Huge
Re:
On the post: Florida Senator Apparently Voted The Wrong Way Over USA Freedom Act [UPDATE: Or Not]
On the post: Harry Reid Wants To Attach Part Of SOPA To Surveillance Reform Bill
On the post: Public Domain Monkey Selfie Now In A Trademark Application, Using Photoshopped Gap Images [Updated!]
Re: I think this legal question was answered in 1974
On the post: Verizon Agrees To Pay Up For 'Inadequately Disclosed' Fees For Broadband Customers
As I've said before, if you actually want businesses to behave better, the "cost of" bad behavior has to be painful. Verizon just paid out approximately $1.6 million over this case. If they made $5 million (just making up a number here, no idea what it was actually worth) off of their misbehavior, then that can be regarded as a 300%+ return on an investment of lawlessness!
The standard really needs to be "crime does not pay." If they made $5 million on this, the fine needs to be $10 million at the very least. Make the ROI negative--fix the incentives--and they'll stop doing this. (While lobbying for a return to easier laws, of course.)
On the post: New Book Reveals Significant Cybersecurity Information Sharing Between Tech Companies And NSA; So Why Do We Need A New Law?
On the post: Sexual Relationship With A Minor, Theft Of Services And Destruction Of Evidence Nets Police Officer One-Year Prison Sentence
That should have been, at the very least, a yellow alert right there; why are they trying to use it to demonstrate his good character?
As I've said before on here, too many adults seem to have very fuzzy memories of high school. For those of you who don't, think back for a moment. There are good kids and bad kids at every school, but where did you find the biggest concentration of thugs, bullies, and entitled teen sociopaths who think they ought to be treated like royalty and everyone else is beneath them?
If you answered "the football and basketball teams," congratulations! You still remember what high school was like!
A lot of that is a cultural problem, but a lot more of it is directly abetted by the coaches, who actively work to ensure their players can continue to play, and win, no matter what they might have done to disqualify themselves... and not just academically. This builds up a culture of active shielding from accountability that is rampant in the NFL and even worse in the NBA, with far higher rates of serious, violent crimes among these athletes than the societal average. But it doesn't start when you make it to the big leagues; the same problems are endemic to college and high school sports.
So yeah, this "fine upstanding guy" was a part of this disgusting and corrupt system, where he could easily use his influence as a policeman to help take the heat off of star players who did stuff they never should have done? No surprise there.
On the post: High School Kids Staring Down Child Porn Charges In Sexting Scandal
Re: Re:
A lot of people like to say that. Actual hard data tells a very different story. Perhaps the most telling is historical pregnancy rates:
Pregnancy is the natural, though not infallible, consequence of having sex. That's a simple, non-controversial fact that everyone above a certain age understands. These days, we have ways to subvert that, with various forms of contraception easily available, but that wasn't always the case. Before the 1960s, when you had sex, you were rolling the dice, and if the (un)lucky number came up, that seed got planted.
Contraception changed everything. Suddenly terms like "safe sex" started to enter the lexicon. It was now (perceived to be) possible to have sex with no risk of pregnancy. So we all know what happened next.
Since everyone's doing it already and it's futile to stop teens from experimenting, having contraception available helped bring teen pregnancy rates way down.
Oh, wait, no, that's not what happened at all. In a classic example of moral hazard behavior, teen pregnancy rates went way up and continued spiking all the way into the early 90s, when we finally started getting a handle on the situation. It took until the early 2010s to get teen pregnancy back down to 1950s rates.
With no contraception available to hide the consequences of their actions, and yet a much lower pregnancy rate displaying the consequences that could not be hidden, there is only one conclusion that can be drawn: teens were having a lot less sex back then! So no, it's by no means futile; history tells us the exact opposite.
On the post: High School Kids Staring Down Child Porn Charges In Sexting Scandal
Re: Re: Re:
What novel legal theory are you inventing to support that idea?
On the post: High School Kids Staring Down Child Porn Charges In Sexting Scandal
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