Australia Wants to Regulate Internet Streaming

Paul writes "After an incident that occurred on a popular television show's internet stream, the Australian government has once again demonstrated that it simply does not understand the internet by indicating that they intend to regulate streaming video. I wonder what these geniuses plan on doing with porn streamed from Europe?"

Comments

Re:Can anyone say "knee jerk"

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Yay for us! (Us, Australia, that is.)

Considering Bob Brown's starve-in-the-dark economic policy and Mark Latham's post-election meltdown, John Howard was the least worst of the choices offered to us.

On the topic at hand, never mind the porn, can't we ban Big Brother for being offensively stupid?

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What am I thinking? We'd have to ban three quarters of all human activity.

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No, that would not be a good thing!

20 million people elected the wrong leaders.

[Futurepower(R)]

Put the story in perspective: Only 20,264,082 (July 2006 est.) people live in Australia.

Re:Can anyone say "knee jerk"

[The OPTiCIAN]

> That's the defense that capitalists always turn to, yes.

I hold that it's a fine defence, and I hope that my case below convinces you of this.

> and they certainly won't rise now with Work Choices ( Business Choices )

The point of work choices isn't to deliver higher wages, it's to use the good times to deliver reforms that will benefit us in the bad times.

Keating has recently been in the media taking credit for 'the recession we had to have' and pointing out that though he was criticised for it, the economists who have been directing the US reserve bank have been praised for delivering the same outcome - keeping wages under control. Although I'm overall a critic of Keating's economics during his period as Prime Minister, the reforms that he and the Howard opposition pushed to deliver in the 80s (and which the opposition backed) set the country up for the success it enjoyed in the 80s. Unfortunately the reforms didn't go far enough, particularly in the area of labour regulation.

Work choices is the sort of reform that Howard, Hewson and economic soulmates have wanted to deliver throughout this period and is designed to benefit two distinct groups:
1) People who are looking to hire labour but currently can't due the risk of picking the wrong person or picking a bad time and being stuck with someone they can't afford to support. Ie: Small business owners.
2) The very bottom of the economy who are not in employment and who previously had no prospects of empoyment. It is not a feasible option to hire someone with no work experience in the confidence that you can retrench them if it doesn't work out. Previously these people wouldn't have been hired.

This is a crucial reform needed to fight the patterns of long-term unemployment which accumulated between the end of the Macmahon and beginning of the Howard administrations. Only recently has this group started to be reduced, and only through constant deregulation will we be able to bring these people back into society.

If Beazley wins the next election and delivers on re-regulating the labor market and re-instating the power of unions all that will happen is that we'll have an immediate benefit of wage rises for low-income earners but then the next time we go through a down in the economic cycle we'll crash seriously and need our own equivalent of margaret thatcher to brutally de-stall the economy and get things moving again.

It's all too rare that politicians sacrifice political capital during the good times to bring in inevitable reform. That's what Howard's doing on this matter, and I support it wholeheartedly. Make hay while the sun shines.

> The most telling of statistics is the distibution of wealth. 1% of the population own 99% of the wealth.

That statistic is wrong, and the correct one is irrelevent. If I go out tomorrow and start a successful manufacturing and export business that hires lots of people and brings lots of money into the economy then that is a fantastic thing, and the fact I should get rich from it is nothing to be ashamed of. In doing so I have increased the wealth gap but everyone is better off - my customers, my employees and myself. Using the distribution of wealth as a measure of the success of a society is based on the mistaken notion that there is a fixed amount of wealth in an economy that has to be divided up between the members of that economy. This is absolutely not true.

As you take away the incentive for successful people to be successful you destroy the economy. I strongly recommend you read this article by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html
Graham is hardly a pin up for the right wing - he supported Kerry in the last US election.

Please read that article, and if you'd like to continue the discussion further post here or email me, craig att ahdore do com.

If you get into this sort of thing I'd also strongly recommend F A Hayek's _The Fatal Conceit: The Err

Re:Can anyone say "dumbass socialist"?

[d3ac0n]

But the simply fact is that businesses will only ever pay workers as little as they can possibly get away with. When the economy is going strongly, they take all the profits - wages do not rise - and they certainly won't rise now with Work Choices ( Business Choices ). But when the economy is going badly, businesses us this as an excuse to decimate wages and sack workers, while they still take profits ... just slightly lower profits.

Ok , we have two fallacies here.

One, that businesses do not increase wages in an improving economy. This is patently false, and all you have to do to disprove it is look around at any company that is doing well in a strong economy. Wages go up. Guess what? In a company that is doing well in a poor economy, wages go up. In a company that is doing so-so in a good or poor economy, wages go up. The ONLY situation where wages remain flat or go down is in a company that is in serious financial trouble. Why? Because EMPLOYEES CAN ONLY LIVE SO LONG ON FLAT WAGES before they quit and go to another company with better opportunity.

This isn't the 1800's, where travel is hard and you work for the same coal company all your life because there isn't any better place to go. There is ALWAYS somwhere to go, sometimes better, sometimes not as good, but there is always opportunity available in a capitalistic society. it's YOUR job to take advantage of it.

Two, and I realise that this will be a shocker to the socialists and neo-commies on /., but BUSINESSES EXIST TO MAKE A PROFIT! It's true! Businesses are not social institutions designed to give you a paycheck! They exist to make money for thier owners, and THAT IS NOT A BAD THING! It is this Profit-motive that drives the need for good people to do the work required to make the owners profits. In other words, your job exists because someone else put thier financial future on the line to create a business that would make them money, even make them wealthy.

I recommend spending some time reading up on the subject. Perhaps "Atlas Shrugged" would be a good place to start? You really need to better understand how the real world works, and stop living in your little socialist fantasy land where big Eeeeviiil coporations steal all the food from little babies mouths and it's only BIG Government that can save us all. You just make yourself look like a fool.