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Verizon Workers Can Now Be Fired If They Fix Copper Phone Lines (arstechnica.com)
Verizon has told its field technicians in Pennsylvania that they can be fired if they try to fix broken copper phone lines. Instead, employees must try to replace copper lines with a device that connects to Verizon Wireless's cell phone network, ArsTechnica reports. From the article:This directive came in a memo from Verizon to workers on September 20. "Failure to follow this directive may result in disciplinary action up to and including dismissal," the memo said. It isn't clear whether this policy has been applied to Verizon workers outside of Pennsylvania. The memo and other documents were made public by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union, which asked the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission to put a stop to the forced copper-to-wireless conversions. The wireless home phone service, VoiceLink, is not a proper replacement for copper phone lines because it doesn't work with security alarms, fax machines, medical devices such as pacemakers that require telephone monitoring, and other services, the union said.
I left AT&T because they are fucking douche bags
I left Sprint because they were incompetent douche bags
I left T-Mobile because They were worse than AT&T...and they are douche bags
Now I'm with Verizon. Who do I go to next when they start pulling this type of shit on me?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Although this seems to formalize a policy, the reality is that the various telephone companies have been cutting budgets for maintenance of copper phone lines, switching stations, and networks for many years. Ask anybody who has a business need for POTS lines about how hard it is to get any problems with them corrected--it's basically impossible. If you fight with them long enough and ward off enough attempts to be switched to a VoiP service to replace the broken lines, they'll trigger a "truck roll" and then tell you "it's all good" when it's clearly not "all good."
For example, every one of our remote sites we have a POTS line for the times when (not if, when) the main internet access is offline, taking the VPN to access that facility from HQ offline as well. I have a POTS line at each that I can dial-up to and remotely administer things. Guess how much fun it is to discover a noisy line with a modem? (Hint: Not fun.) Guess how even much more fun it is to discover you have a noisy line at a site in the middle of the only time of year you ever need to use that POTS line, during the Internet outage at that site? (Hint: Super-not-fun.)
Who did what now?
It seems like they also wouldn't work if ...the POWER GOES OUT, or if someone drove by with a wireless signal jammer.
Sure, landlines may be mostly useless these days, but they do have a few considerations left.
Apparently it's not enough to getfederal subsidies for copper telecom.
No, they want to destroy the infrastructure they're getting federal subsidies to maintain.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Technicians can fix the copper line “if the customer does not qualify” for wireless service. In those cases, the tech must document the reason the customer didn’t qualify for VoiceLink.
“It is a requirement that migration to VoiceLink be your first option when the customer qualifies and the trouble is in Verizon's network,” the memo says.
So it looks like if a tech is called to a site where all they have is voice over copper, and they're having issues with said VOC, then the techs are to simply test to see if the wireless service will work there, and if so, switch them to it. If not, then fix the copper line.
I'm not defending Verizon, but the headline here is misleading.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
I'm sure your cable TV provider could provide you with a land line. Hmm ... maybe you need to become more tolerant of douche bags? ;-)
Basically, not only is Verizon abandoning the copper cable plant that they built and were expected to maintain because they accepted government money to build it and maintain it in the first place, but they are also involuntarily switching customers from a Public Utility Commission regulated utility to an unregulated one that lacks features of the land line service. I'm absolutely sure that the obvious illegality of this has been appropriately muted by well applied lobbying and campaign dollars to the appropriate local and state politicians right?
Greed: Don't fix the copper wire infrastructure we get paid to maintain.
Control: If you're moved off of copper wire POTS, then in an emergency or power outage you cannot effectively call for help. Wireless systems get overrun with numbers of calls if the emergency is large enough (hurricane, tornado, flood, etc) and your call will not get through. Or you won't have power (wireless), whereas copper is designed to (almost) always have power and JUST WORK.
Power: See above. Put on your tin foil hat, but this is one step in a wave to disrupt and control communication when a "state of emergency" or "martial law" is declared. Just wait.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
If it's not powered by the central office, then it's not telephone service, and the frauds at Verizon should be completely liable for all problems incurred by their false advertising.
We must all freak out even though the article itself says there is an exception form to fill out if the copper line is required. For 99% of people who are out of a FIOS area this is a good thing as it gets their foot in the door for providing some form of wireless internet that will far exceed what they can offer via DSL. The
The vast majority of customers could care less about copper or wireless or whether they are getting money to maintain copper. Presumably the wireless system has a battery ups like cable to maintain service during short outages. Does everyone here have parents that work in a copper mine or something?
I'm an old guy, and for most of my life, POTS was iron-reliable. I picked up my phone, and it worked through rain, snow, sleet, hail, and even when the power was out.
Lately, my mom was having trouble with her landline. It started going out everytime it rained. I think it went out once when it just got humid! AT&T did "fix" it, but they must have just done a quick patch, because it started doing it again soon. They sent someone again, and did a better job of fixing it, but who knows when it will go out again.
The good thing is, it did encourage her to get a cellphone, which I'd been trying to nudge her to for awhile.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
When I switch from POTS service to a VOIP service, My bill when from $50 a month down to $25 a month. And the VOIP service included things like unlimited long distance, voicemail, and a few other features that weren't included in my POTS service, because they would have made the bill even more expensive. Are Verizon dropping the rates for any customer affected by changing over to a VOIP system? Because if they are continuing to charge people as if they are using a POTS system, then the customers are truly being fleeced.
A lot of people stay with POTS because they assume that land lines are more reliable and better quality. If they are no longer getting an actual copper connection, they shouldn't be paying the same amount, because then they could go with any other VOIP provider and save a lot of money.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
When asked about raising the data limits on wireless, they cry about how overloaded their wireless is.
The Stable Workers of America (SWA) union asked the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission to put a stop to the forced horse-to-car conversions. The motorized transportation service is not a proper replacement for horse transport because it does not work with grass and water. In addition, it cannot be bred at home and instead has to be bought in dealerships, which gives the dealerships too much power over human transportation.
There was a running joke in my hometown, people like me that had a TON of fax machines to service, that one of the main trunk cables running down one of our major streets, would flake out every time it rained. It got so bad, they PERMANENTLY attached a large tank of liquid nitrogen to freeze out the water. In the summer, you could see frost on that cable for about 3 blocks. In the last 6 months they have removed it and you can see a brand spanking new digital box sitting at the base of the pole. If thieves knew most of the copper lines weren't being used, they'd be ripping them down in droves!
The native New Hampshire people want you to fucking quit polluting their state with stupid.
Wait, so this means copper POTS lines might go over cell service? Um, what about emergency service calls? (a) will they get automagically located quickly/easily/correctly like traditional land line calls and (b) how long until somebody sues because their sick relative died because the signal to the paramedics that went over copper (woops, not actually copper, and the cell service was down) didn't go through?
So you liberretardians are squatting, imposing yourself on the natives
I don't think Verizon knows what the word discussion really means. No matter how hard that tech yells at that paper, at no point is it going to consider saying anything other than what is printed on it. >_>
> because it doesn't work with security alarms, fax machines, medical devices such as pacemakers that require
> telephone monitoring, and other services, the union said.
I firmly believe that Verizon should be forced to either maintain its wireline network, sell it to someone who will at a fair price, or upgrade it to common-carrier fiber available for use by all on vendor-neutral terms.
That said... I swear I remember reading about a final extension to the v.92 standard for use primarily by FAX machines & credit card terminals that modulated 2.4kbps of data with a shit-ton of forward error correction to make it LOOK like 9600 baud to a wireless (or VoIP) codec. The general idea was that the codec would think it was dealing with a nearly-uncompressable complex waveform, mangle it anyway, but mangle it in a way that preserved its ability to convey 2400 baud data anyway.
The main issue I remember was that most/all NEW fax machines made after ~2000 supported it, but by that point fax was a fading legacy use, and few people cared enough to actually buy a new one after ~2000. However, the rise of multifunction printers/scanners/fax machines after ~2008 (since adding fax capabilities to a device that already has printing and scanning capabilities costs almost nothing) should have mostly solved THAT problem by now.
From what I recall, legacy 2400kbps didn't work, because the codec would either try to treat it like audio suitable for even lower bitrates, or would just plain mangle it so badly that the modem at the receiving end couldn't make sense of it.
What problem does the giant walkie talkie setup solve?
I bet you have lots and lots of guns too, don't you?
Why can't fiber just be run everywhere? Rural Electrification brought electricity everywhere (big ,thick metal cables).
Copper phone lines are available to all households.
Why the hell can't the same be done with fiber. Do it right and it should be good for 100 years.
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A vote for Hillary, well any Democrats on the ballot, is rewarding the tactics of the DNC. They don't care if people bitch and moan. They only care if people vote Democrat. Bitching and moaning and then voting Dem makes all your complaints irrelevant. Things will not change, a party will not reform, until they lose the votes of otherwise loyal voters. Your only power is your vote, not a letter nor an email nor a text nor a post nor a tweet.
You don't really want that. If you did, you would move to any number of countries with no effective government. Somalia, for example.
What you are asking for is to be fucked over by the wealthy, with no government to protect you. Good luck!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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You are right, this is not Captialism = death
Bohpal, however...
Because if you don't have power for an entire week, like after a hurricane, the battery is pretty much useless...
So is the phone company's.
I work for a competitor of Verizon and they can be brutally difficult to work with. It is a corporate culture thing - we saw it all the time. (We sometimes buy circuits from them)
We ordered service to a location once, and, on the day the Verizon tech was scheduled to install, they called us and said they 'couldn't find the building'. I got so pissed off that I left the office, drove out to the location, saw the 4-foot-tall numbers on the side of the building spelling out the address and called them from a line at that building. They found it the second time.
I'm sure some accountants pointed out to them the financial benefits (long-term) of minimizing service. After all, service is not a profit center.
And voting for Republicans rewards the tactics of the Republicans.
Actually the Republican party and the Republican establishment do not want Trump. Trump will have no loyal base of support, not in Congress, probably not even in his own Cabinet. We might get see a Cabinet invoke the 25th amendment and declare the President disabled. Then again Trump's twitter account will be taken from him so it might be more difficult to recognize when he is having an "episode".
But the fact that you sat down and wrote an email means you're more involved in the political process than 80-90% of the country and that doesn't go unnoticed.
Actually no, letters are so evaluated. Electronic media including emails is considered greatly inferior. And still even a letter is vastly inferior to a vote. The letter is just a sort of polling that gives them a heads up.
If you really want to make change though, petitions are the way to go right now. I know it seems silly but the internet has taken something that used to help convince a small town mayor and scaled it up so that it has at least the potentially to be effective on a national scale.
Again, digital, largely considered to be of little value. Actually going out and collecting paper and ink signatures is far more meaningful. Yet, still inferior to votes, just a sort of polling.
Look at the White House's online petition system. Perhaps action when some cause matches what they want to do anyway. Otherwise a cause is blown off and ignored if its not something they want to do anyway. Their online petition system is just a PR gimmick. Actually its likely just a scam to collect email addresses for political purposes. They require an email to create an account and your petition signing strongly indicates your political leanings.
Because if you don't have power for an entire week, like after a hurricane, the battery is pretty much useless...
So is the phone company's.
The difference is that the telephone company has contingency plans. You know, like backup generators, contracted fuel deliveries, etc. Yeah, you might have an emergency plan, but the telephone company's is better.
Also, who do you think the electric company is going to send repairmen to first? John Q. Public or the telephone company?
This again? Stein supports vaccination, but has a problem with the way business is conducted by the FDA.
http://www.snopes.com/is-green...
For the nuke comments, sadly, I have to give you that one.
https://twitter.com/DrJillStei...
Think I'm doing a write-in for my cat this term.
When you live in a sick society, just about everything you do is wrong.
Somalia is just a collection of weak, ineffective governments on top of each other. It's not quite an anarchy, but it's interestingly done much better since the collapse of the government (as of 2009), suggesting that in markets where the free market has been able to enter, life has improved. It's not a great place to live by any standards but has done relatively well compared to its neighbors. Of course, it looks like people are trying to ruin it by strengthening the state.
On a side note, the government is not here to "protect you" from the wealthy. It's here to extract resources from you to stay in power. If pretending to be against the wealthy (while transferring money to them through lucrative contracts and favors) helps achieve that end, it will be done.
"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." -- Judge Gideon J. Tucker
As fun as your radio setup is, it lacks scalability. What happens when every house has one? Total congested chaos. You can't hope to handle thousands of people all wanting to make a phone call that way.
Perhaps I might make a suggestion? You have radio comms experts. Pair up with some computer networking experts. Look into promising technologies - BATMAN mesh, perhaps something like distributed caching to conserve scarce physical transmission capacity (Might be able to adapt IPFS). With network engineers and radio hobbyists working in conjunction, you can probably achieve a bit more than either alone. You'll probably have to move away from amateur radio though, as the FCC has a rule against sending anything encrypted.
Also, solar. Look into solar. Not for the eco-stuff or anything like that, but for the independence. You install it and pretty much forget about it for the next thirty years, no longer beholden to any energy company and needing nothing more than occasional parts or fresh batteries, and the technology is basic enough that anyone with a hobbyist level of electronics knowledge can easily learn to maintain it. You don't get much more independent than that.
Now I'm with Verizon. Who do I go to next when they start pulling this type of shit on me?
Same networks, less douchebagery.
Just get one Whose T&Cs and coverage suit your needs
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
You know, like backup generators, contracted fuel deliveries, etc.
For their "switching" offices. Not for the neighborhood "hubs". Once it's battery runs down, my secondary, non-POTS, phone service is off line no matter how much back-up power I still have. The only time my primary, POTS, phone service went off line was when a tree branch fell and took down the line from the pole to my house. Otherwise, it has always worked - even during the "Big Blackout" of 2003.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
They are making use of open borders and a lack of legal protection to protect the dominance of the local population to migrate there, legally.
If there is no violence, actual threat, coercion, or fraud there should be no crime
If there is no crime, there should be no crime. Excellent tautology there.
Unfortunately history has shown repeatedly over and over that there's always someone out to benefit themselves by hurting others. You want to be rid of government _and_ shitty corporations. How do you expect that's going to work? Do you think the next Standard Oil just say to themselves "you know, we're too big and concentrating too much power lets break ourselves up let competition reduce our profit margins!" That's not a choice any company ever has made. Maybe you just think you can get the entire country to boycott such practices? Stop driving and heating their homes for several months or years out of pure libertarian idealism while their children freeze around them?
You say you have the highest rate of BitCoin acceptance anywhere. Well good for you. What are you going to do about it in your magic world where neither large governments nor large companies exist? You might get someone to start a local ISP and roll out cabling to the richest parts of your town, but who would you convince to drop hundreds of millions of dollars to link up with England or Brazil or India? Or even the tens of millions of dollars to link to the next county? And if there is an entity large enough to spend that kind of money, would they not then fall into your "shitty corporation" category? Not to mention someone to generate all the electricity to run your computers and the ISP and everything else. Or do you have a cool billion sitting around to build your own power plant? And the land to build it on? And where's the motivation to keep your plant from polluting the environment? After all the crap you pump in the river only affects the town downstream you and your friends a perfectly fine! And what's your motivation to provide timely and cheap access to your electricity? Competition? How many power plants do you think the population (never mind the environment) could sustain? And just building lots of smaller plants doesn't really work either since bigger is just flat out better in almost all power plant designs (in terms of lower cost per watt.) Perhaps just assume everyone will go solar? That's at least space and environmentally efficient. Who's going to spend the time and money on research to improve solar technology is another question though (and there's definitely no reason to believe we've reached the peak of solar yet! Unless we stop trying.) Maybe get a lucky tinkerer in his back yard have a eureka moment eventually but dedicated research also costs huge amounts of money -- the scale of which is usually only available to governments and large corporations.
The problem with all these libertarian dreams is that they only work if a majority of people don't follow them, at least if you scale them up past the size of a small town or so where people are close enough to have significant and direct influence on each other. Beyond that, it almost always breaks down into "we want everything the world has to offer but don't want to accept responsibility for our part in it." Its just not a winning formula.
Government exists for a reason. Sure they have a habit of stepping into areas they really shouldn't be (marriage is a good example) but what you need is checks against that, not complete elimination. And even the libertarians who grudgingly accept a small government still don't want to pay taxes as if governments can magically pull money out of thin air (well technically they can just print it, but that only leads to mass inflation. So yay you get to keep your $1000 this year but its only worth $10 in next year's money and pennies the year after. Savings! Then again a lot of you want to return to the gold standard so back to pulling money out of thin air.)
Ok so I've definitely ranted far too long already but the TL;DR is this: Libertarian idealism is simply impractical on any sort of large
"It's all connected. You're seeing the fish flopping, it's the fish flopping. I'm telling you weird stuff like this happens just before the tsunami. When rivers run backwards that should be a warning sign. Next birds will fly backwards and people will just grunt at it, if tomorrows a decent down day, look out next week. I got a tingly feeling here, tingly like as in people are turning in expectations, this could get ugly..."
I had some relevant tech comment in mind but it just dissolved into disgusted anger and an anxious concern for the future. So I just pasted the above paragraph, which I paste on those WTF occasions. PLEASE, let's just do this first in California and give it a few years, see how it all works out. Roll it all out in California! Point to point Gigabit Internet to every home, cell phone tattoos, IoT tooth fillings and rubber duck antennas protruding from every skull. Those wireless electric meters are old-fashioned, let's replace them with newer models that yell at passers-by! Well hell, how about electricity by wireless? Hail Tesla! I can hardly wait until the whole state becomes a cluster-fuck electromagnetic shit-storm that glows at night. We'll be able to read by it.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
My phone company (Telus) updated the switch down the road. Now when the power goes out we get 8 hours before the phone dies due to it having one battery. This in a place that is low on the list for electricity getting restored, often 3 days and no other options such as cell phone coverage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Because, as the article states, fax transmission fails on cellular networks. My home state's means testing process for health insurance assistance requires applicants to mail or fax documents supporting my eligibility, including the applicant's birth certificate, most recent tax return, and the last 30 days of pay stubs. The instructions specifically state that a fax is more likely to be received by the deadline than mailed printed documents.
Here is the REAL issue - they want the copper wire cannibalized from ALL of their customer's connections - - - copper is getting expensive, and VALUABLE! For a single client, or even a cluster, this isn't much, but factored over the NATION . . . it's a SH1T_L0AD of money (copper-to-cash-salvage-sales). HOWEVER, the issue for the poor end-user is that they LOSE the ability to access the telephone system when local power-drops occur, and do not have the safety-net provided by the 'local loop' copper line that is - basically - ALWAYS ON, and that can provide life-saving access to emergency services (ambulance, police, fire, etc.) that are NOT available over wireless systems when the local power grid goes tits-up! THAT is the reason I pay a penalty / premium for my services - just so I can have access to emergency services during power outages - and being totally disabled under Social Security, and a disabled veteran, this issue can very well mean the difference between a writhing death on the floor - and the life-saving services of an ambulance from my local emergency medical facility. I have a 10 mBit DSL service that gives me decent internet access, over a COPPER-LINE telephone link - - - that my 30-year old 'princess' phone can access when the lights go out - and provides me with the security and reliability of communications to emergency services when the area goes dark from local power-loss issues ! ! ! Bottom line - in my opinion - any company that removes the copper line link and replaces it with a wireless link - without explicit authorization - should be liable for aggravated manslaughter charges if anyone dies due to the inability to access medical services - especially during the very high stress periods of power outages !.
redneck geek
I live deep in the woods in central Oregon. My phone line has ~35 repair tube things on it (big pringles-sized black cans) between the main pole and the 5 miles to my house. Falling trees break it almost every year. Verizon and AT&T provide land line access, and CenturyLink provides my 0.6MBps DSL (I know, ugh).
Who -owns- the line? And wouldn't switching to a cell access point fuck everyone's DSL? I know so little about phone lines....
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
... more dangerous than a man with the nuclear codes and a really really short but spiteful temper?
Red herring. His codes allow him to authenticate communications with a chain of command. The chain of command still has to accept the orders as lawful and constitutional. Crazy orders will be disobeyed. They will also likely cause the Cabinet to invoke the 25 amendment and declare him sick and unable to carried out his duties. Trump is alone. He's an outsider, railing against the establishment, the people who will form his cabinet and the Republican component of Congress. He can easily be removed if he starts the sort of crazy talk you suggest.
Interestingly enough, when we had the derecho event on the east coast a few years ago, the power was out for a week at my WV place. The phone worked - but only for local calls. They had the backup batteries. No long distance or cell service worked.
Yes, voice is less bandwidth, but it is bandwidth
Let's start with these assumptions:
This means one minute of voice is (0.006 + 0.006) * 60 = 0.72 Mbit, and 30 hours total 0.72 * 60 * 30 = 1296 Mbit, costing 1296 / 8000 * 10 = $1.62.
If your point is that $1.62 is greater than zero, then congratulations on being "the best kind of correct". My point is that $1.62 per customer per month is a tiny cost compared to (say) the $8.00 per month that telcos charge for having Caller ID on a POTS line. And that's assuming retail pricing; Verizon's home phone division probably gets a wholesale discount on the use of Verizon Wireless's cellular network.
Actually the Republican party and the Republican establishment do not want Trump.
So? The party (and the resulting government) is more than one person.. though with the amount of party line voting that goes on its sometimes hard to remember that.
Electronic media including emails is considered greatly inferior.
I think you need to join the 21st century. Email is no longer the unloved stepchild of communications. Most people treat it as a legitimate form of communications (and many companies don't even bother reading paper letters/resumes/etc anymore.. which I know isn't the same as the government but it definitely indicates a broader trend.)
And still even a letter is vastly inferior to a vote
No, no it isn't. For exactly the reason I mentioned: One vote gives you 1/350millionth of a say in government, applied to a broad range of issues, once every 4 years. Letters can be written whenever you want and can be specific to an issue that's important to you -- and you can even send it if the elected official isn't the one you voted for!
Trouble with letters isn't that they are useless. The trouble is that people assume if they send a letter that the politician will magically agree with everything they say and implement their ideas immediately. Which is not how things work. Just because you want something and even just because you spent the time drafting a letter, doesn't mean they'll listen to you. But then again they might so its always worth a try if your opinion is that strong.
Again, digital, largely considered to be of little value.
20 years ago perhaps. Maybe even 10 years ago. But that's no longer the case. People have realized that just because I use a keyboard instead of a pen doesn't make my thoughts less relevant, and similarly with online petitions -- just because the "signatures" are in the form of email addresses doesn't mean they aren't just as valid as a written one.
And the online petitions have scale on their side. If you go out canvassing you might get a few hundred signatures. That might be enough to get your local city government to install a new stop light but spread across the hundreds of millions of people in the entire country, 100 signatures from one tiny little area isn't even worth looking at.
100,000 "signatures" with representation from every state on the union on the other hand.. that's hard to ignore. Even if you allow a little fudge room for fakes and duplicates, that's a hell of a lot of people as I said. Even if the politicians ignore it, the media sure as hell won't and once they get involved politics kind of has to keep up.
Of course just like a real petition, you can't just collect signatures and sit on them. There still has to be someone running the operation who's willing and able to take the results to the politicians and/or media. But I'd just assumed that was obvious.
Look at the White House's online petition system
I'd rather not. The whitehouse running their own petition system would be like letting a criminal be the judge at his own trial -- you'd never get a guilty verdict.
Groups like the EFF and OpenMedia.ca as well as many similar groups internationally.. those are the ones you want to go to. I of course tend to focus on internet issues but you can find organizations setting up these kind of petitions for environmental issues and I'm sure many others.
Just keep in mind that the petition is only one step along the way. Someone has to first raise the issue, then raise awareness of the issue, then start and operate the petition, then take the results to someone who will listen and has the power to do something about it. Just like a door-to-door petition process. The petition itself is only one step along the way but its the most important one since its adding the voice of the people to the issue. In recent years, these online
Not in influencing sitting Congressional representatives. Far fewer people write than vote, and their letters are taken to be indicative of how people are likely to vote, and they can address a particular issue.
Consider the TPP, which according to one of my Senators might get voted on after the election. You can, if you like, note if anyone who represents you favors the TPP and vote against them at the next election, but that does exactly no good if the vote is before the next election (neither of my Senators are up for re-election this year), and fails completely to influence your Senators. If they know that some of their constituents are against the TPP, they may take that into account. If you privately decide to vote against a Senator who backs the TPP, your Senator will never find out that the TPP had any influence on his or her reelection.
Seriously, you vote for President once every four years, and your vote matters a lot less if you're not in a swing state. You vote for each Senator once every six years, and Representatives once every two, and a lot of other people are going to vote at the same time. If you bother to send a letter now and then, you are exerting some influence, in a timely manner, on the issues you particularly care about. It's a cheap and easy way to add to your impact on the country.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
It is not remotely a tautology.
Yes, I was glibly taking the example to its extreme. Obviously feeding a troll here but come on. Read between the lines.
Who do you think pays now?
The big "shitty" corporations, which the OP grouped in with government as things he wanted to see reduced or eliminated. Though I'd be a bit surprised if they didn't have some sort of government subsidy mixed in there.
Libertarian and anarchist are not the same thing, by the way.
I'm aware. Anarchists want no government. Libertarians want a magic government that does exactly and only the things they want, exactly and only at the time they want them, for free, and disappears as soon as the task is complete.
Both are unworkable in the real world, but the anarchist vision at least would be plausible if humans didn't have such a strong desire for leadership.
Verizon has set a corporate policy that copper lines will not be repaired, they will be replaced with fiber. Period. Any employee caught violating corporate policy faces penalties up to and including termination. Is it really newsworthy that Verizon expects employees to follow corporate polices, and that failure to abide by corporate polices may result in termination? Can't an employer terminate workers that fail to follow instructions?
I'm over 35,000' to the CO. So no DSL for me. Years ago they started to increase the cost for the POTS line. I had been paying about $10/month, for decades. Next thing I know it's $30, then $50, I terminated it then. I still have the copper to my house, I have no idea if it goes all the way back to the CO or they ripped part or all of it out.
So it's cable or cell.
Same thing with my 56K line that I had years ago. I think I used to pay $30/month for that. Then they decided I think around 1997 that they didn't want them anymore and the price would go up every month. I bailed when that hit $80/month and I called and said - WTF are you doing! They said they'd keep increasing the cost until I get rid of it.
Mod me down for this?
How many more incidents do we need on video where J. Random Citizen is complying and gets shot anyway before we admit there's a problem?
ou gonna claim something off-camera required THAT action in every one of them?
Seriously, fuck you for continuing to exist if all you're gonna do is mod me down for expressing a view you don't like. Get bent, then remove yourself.
When you live in a sick society, just about everything you do is wrong.
Our land line would crap out for days whenever there was a heavy rain. By the time the tech came out to fix it, it had dried out again and worked sorta OK again. Rinse (rain) and repeat. All this for $83 a month with no frills.
I finally convinced my spouse that we could get our number (that we've had for 42 years) ported to VoIP, with 911 service and all the goodies, for $5 a month. It was a happy day when I took out my Western Electric dikes and went SNIP.
Now I have to get her off her Verizon cell phone. I pay Ting $15 a month (cheap GSM Blu phone), I don't wanna look at her bill.
What's your problem with DNC tactics
They directed the sleazy tactics at Democratic voters, their own people.
Sanders is a lot less electable than Clinton.
That is quite debatable. And if they really cared about electability then Hillary would not have been the choice. She may not even be able to beat Trump, that is how terrible a candidate she is. Hillary was selected because of the power and influence of Bill and his friends and their money.
Refusing to vote Democrat because you don't like the DNC will do absolutely nothing to reform the DNC.
That is a historically ignorant statement. Losing elections is a prime reason for a shakeup in party leadership, and a change in party direction.
Actually the Republican party and the Republican establishment do not want Trump.
>So?
The point is that effective Presidents, Presidents that get what they want, need to have many allies and supporters in Congress. Trump will not even have many such supporters from his own party. This will be the most obstructionist do nothing Congress ever iff Trump wins.
Electronic media including emails is considered greatly inferior.
I think you need to join the 21st century.
You confuse the user's perspective with the politician's perspective. From the politician's perspective the easier the communication medium the less value it has. 100 handwritten letters is viewed as far more valuable that 100 emails. Plus emails often tend to be not-so-original, and/or more a momentary and passing emotion, not much more that a tweet.
And still even a letter is vastly inferior to a vote
No, no it isn't. For exactly the reason I mentioned: One vote gives you 1/350millionth of a say in government, applied to a broad range of issues, once every 4 years. Letters can be written whenever you want and can be specific to an issue that's important to you
Sharing your opinion in a letter/email/etc removes no politician from office, so they are largely irrelevant to politicians. The only thing that matters to a politician is votes. People can share their opinions all they want and politicians know it is meaningly, most will loyally vote for their party, so their party already had their vote or the other party could not obtain their vote; the majority of the remaining will be convinced to vote one way or the other by something that is said or done close to the election.
Letters/emails/etc are just a survey mechanism, an unscientific one at that. All they do, if anything, is give a politician heads up on an issue they need to manage opinion on, or distract from, when the election season comes around. They really are nothing more than a transient unscientific sort of poll.
And still even a letter is vastly inferior to a vote.
Not in influencing sitting Congressional representatives. Far fewer people write than vote, and their letters are taken to be indicative of how people are likely to vote, and they can address a particular issue.
Only in extremely rare circumstances, such as when the person is an NRA member. In nearly all circumstances letters are a transient unscientific poll that gives a politician a heads up about a topic they might need to manage around election time, but usually the issue is irrelevant by that time. Keep in mind that most people are loyal party voters so their opinions are irrelevant, their party already has their vote and the other party can not obtain their vote; as for the remaining they are overwhelmingly swayed one way or the other by something that occurs or is said very close to the election.
This will be the most obstructionist do nothing Congress ever iff Trump wins.
Agreed. Which is why I hope he wins. I have a feeling Clinton will get stuff done, and a lot of it won't be for the good. An ineffective government is still (slightly) better than an aggressively evil one IMO.
100 handwritten letters is viewed as far more valuable that 100 emails
Sure, but its not necessarily more valuable than 10,000 emails. Or 100,000. Scale is important.
Sharing your opinion in a letter/email/etc removes no politician from office, so they are largely irrelevant to politicians
That's an extremely pessimistic view. That assumes that politicians do absolutely nothing beyond sit on their thumbs for 3 out of 4 years. The issues that won't get them removed from office are actually more likely to get noticed during non-election years as its far less likely to bite them in the ass down the road than hot topics.
politicians know it is meaningly
A decent politician knows that they're representing all of the people in their jurisdiction, not just the ones that voted for them. Obviously when they're gearing up for an election they're going to target their core audience but again, for the rest of the time they actually have a job to do and its pretty pessimistic to assume they just aren't bothering to do it.
All they do, if anything, is give a politician heads up on an issue they need to manage opinion on, or distract from
Or you know, take action on. Write up a bill. Request a more scientific survey. Whatever else might be needed.
I don't know what world you're living it but you seem to think that the government does nothing at all other than run election campaigns. That's just not reality. These people have a job to do and sure, they might not always do it the way you want them to but they ARE doing it for at least 2 and often closer to 3 out of every 4 years.
Sure if your letter comes stapled to a $1000 check it will likely get a bit more consideration, but normal letters get read too. Every politician will have an aid (or 2 or 3 or 10) that does nothing but read letters all day and while they're certainly not bringing every single one up to the attention of the politician, if they start seeing the same issue being discussed over and over again by multiple letter writers, it will get noticed and perhaps at least discussed even if nothing comes of it in the long run.
Think of it like a log file. If you see one Russian IP address some day, you'll think nothing of it. If you see 100 that day you might raise an eyebrow. If you see 100000 you're simply going to have to take action, even if that action is "ehhh they tried but it didn't work so whatever" -- you at least looked into it enough to make the decision that no further action was required.
Voting is essentially meaningless these days on a national scale. There's just far too many people (making individual votes almost insignificant) and you have to cover far too many issues with a single 2-option choice for it to have any significant impact on the country (both of which are practically identical these days, and half the claims they make fall through anyway even when they aren't outright lies.)
Its during the non-election times where we should be focusing our efforts if we want to see real change on specific issues. When politicians are doing politics rather than glorified sales pitches.