Go back and read again. You are claiming it is perfectly fine for a 2000 page bil;l with last minute changes to go up for a vote. How is that not voting on a bill you don't know the contents of?
I fail to see how voting yes to a bill that has a nasty unrelated bill that will harm millions stuffed inside that you didn't know about is any different from opening a spillway when you have no idea if anyone will drown or not. If a legislator votes yes, they are responsible for each and every bit of it. If they are willing to do so without actually knowing what that might be, they are far too irresponsible to be in a position of power.
Not requiring months of back and forth to get things fixed, ACTUALLY calling back when they promise to call back, not suggesting patently absurd "fixes" or excuses. The actual ability to monitor their own network's condition and communicate that to their representatives in a timely manner. Need I go on?
Sorry, not a strawman, but thanks for playing. It's not even an exaggerated analogy since one bill can harm millions all at once and for years to come.
Voting yes on a bill when you don't know what is in it is dereliction of duty.
You must have missed the part where municipal broadband is usually proposed when there are no providers interested at all. Not only is there no competition in those towns, there's not even a monopoly provider.
In many of the places where there is a monopoly provider it's because without that grant, there would be no provider at all. Sad but true.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that monopoly grants are unacceptable. But to make that happen, municipal broadband will become more important, not less.It could take many forms. It could even end up that the town owns the last mile and leases it to providers on a cost recovery basis, perhaps while itself being a provider of last resort or being the standard setter.
Even where Comcast and TWC (for example) could legally compete, they formed a "gentleman's agreement" to not compete.
But as for revoking/never granting monopoly status, that will just result in no broadband at all in most cases.
Negotiation is fine. Printed drafts are fine. Provisional versions are fine. I have no idea what makes you think I said otherwise. But to actually PASS something, it is necessary to know what you're voting for. Anything else is negligence. That, in turn, requires that it remain stable long enough to read and understand every last bit of it.
How would you feel about "we must open the spillway to find out if anyone will be drowned!"? I know that you would soon be known as "the defendant" and you would not have a good time in court if you did that.
The correct statement should have been unless and until this bill is in a steady state for not less that 2 weeks, my vote will be no. This is not negotiable.
There are ways to force ill behaved reps to behave in a manner consistent with their duties and obligations as a representative.
You act as if the cable and broadband providers are chomping at the bit to do their own private buildout with no assurances of a captive market. They are not and they never have been.
In fact, even where it is permitted, Comcast and TWC made "gentleman's agreements" not to compete.
USPS is far from horrible. In fact, the other guys depend on USPS for the final leg in a lot of package deliveries. Without USPS, some places would have no delivery at all.
They have proven just as fast, less expensive, and more accountable. Of course, nobody is perfect. I have had packages damaged by FedEx, UPS, and USPS. However, only USPS made good on it by actually paying out the insurance I bought. FedEx actually claimed inadequate packaging when they clearly ran the box through with a forklift. They also claimed inadequate packaging when they dropped the item down 4 flights of stairs in full view of the recipient.
As for schools, neither public nor private schools are all that good. But public schools have a notable disadvantage, they can't just toss out under performing students to keep their stats up. They are obligated to deal with them.
How would it choke off growth? I don't know of any existing or proposed municipal broadband that forbids commercial competition (but I do know of more than one commercial entity that pays lots of money to get laws forbidding municipal broadband). If they are so incredibly competitive and so much more efficient, they can surely move in and compete. Perhaps even buy out the municipal system at a fair price once they prove how much better they are.
And about that growth, it seems that with newly imposed caps and other antics, the commercial entities you are so enamored of are doing their best to move us backwards.
Meanwhile, fiber in conduit is a damned good bet for technology. I have no doubt that there will be performance improvements to be had. Most of them will be a matter of switching out endpoint hardware rather than the actual fiber. That is not exactly a secret.
In many cases where municipal broadband is considered, there is no game in town at all. If they are the only game in town it's because the other players have chosen not to show up, even after being given millions of dollars to show up. Perhaps we should claw the hundreds of millions back and start a federal loan program for municipalities willing to show up.
They aren't scared of a bomb, they are scared of an email that claims there is a bomb. If they saw an actual bomb, their fear would make perfect sense.
In 1924, General Motors was headed for a scandal. Although reports of sickness had been coming out of all three tetraethyl refineries, the story was concealed from the newspapers. But things came to a head at the TEL refinery in Bayway, New Jersey. Dozens of workers contracted lead poisoning from breathing the toxic vapors and became violently insane. Five men died within a short time and news coverage was unavoidable.
Midgley stopped at nothing in trying to convince the public that his antiknock additive was safe. He would pour TEL additive onto his own hands and take deep breaths from the bottle in front of large audiences, all the while insisting that it was harmless and that repeated daily exposure was nothing to worry about. What the public didn’t know was that Midgley had recently spent six weeks in Florida, golfing in the sunshine in an attempt to clear his own lungs of lead particles.
So, he might not have known from the very beginning, but he certainly knew early on and did his best to keep it quiet. That strikes me as knowing and willful.
Yeah, the speed was terrible (though it was state of the art at the time), but there was enough competition to keep them honest and they were small enough that you could talk to someone who actually had the ability to make a decision and fix things.
That's what makes the people swallow the lie, but it doesn't explain governments pushing for measures that cannot touch the bad guys with the AKs but can and will affect decent people.
Sadly, that is often not true. Consider internet service. Where people have any choice at all, it's between a shit sandwich with crap sauce or a crap sandwich with shit sauce.
Slashdot Mirror
Go back and read again. You are claiming it is perfectly fine for a 2000 page bil;l with last minute changes to go up for a vote. How is that not voting on a bill you don't know the contents of?
I fail to see how voting yes to a bill that has a nasty unrelated bill that will harm millions stuffed inside that you didn't know about is any different from opening a spillway when you have no idea if anyone will drown or not. If a legislator votes yes, they are responsible for each and every bit of it. If they are willing to do so without actually knowing what that might be, they are far too irresponsible to be in a position of power.
What else do you want?
Not requiring months of back and forth to get things fixed, ACTUALLY calling back when they promise to call back, not suggesting patently absurd "fixes" or excuses. The actual ability to monitor their own network's condition and communicate that to their representatives in a timely manner. Need I go on?
Sorry, not a strawman, but thanks for playing. It's not even an exaggerated analogy since one bill can harm millions all at once and for years to come.
Voting yes on a bill when you don't know what is in it is dereliction of duty.
You must have missed the part where municipal broadband is usually proposed when there are no providers interested at all. Not only is there no competition in those towns, there's not even a monopoly provider.
In many of the places where there is a monopoly provider it's because without that grant, there would be no provider at all. Sad but true.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that monopoly grants are unacceptable. But to make that happen, municipal broadband will become more important, not less.It could take many forms. It could even end up that the town owns the last mile and leases it to providers on a cost recovery basis, perhaps while itself being a provider of last resort or being the standard setter.
Even where Comcast and TWC (for example) could legally compete, they formed a "gentleman's agreement" to not compete.
But as for revoking/never granting monopoly status, that will just result in no broadband at all in most cases.
That would certainly be plausible and dangerous.
Negotiation is fine. Printed drafts are fine. Provisional versions are fine. I have no idea what makes you think I said otherwise. But to actually PASS something, it is necessary to know what you're voting for. Anything else is negligence. That, in turn, requires that it remain stable long enough to read and understand every last bit of it.
How would you feel about "we must open the spillway to find out if anyone will be drowned!"? I know that you would soon be known as "the defendant" and you would not have a good time in court if you did that.
The correct statement should have been unless and until this bill is in a steady state for not less that 2 weeks, my vote will be no. This is not negotiable.
There are ways to force ill behaved reps to behave in a manner consistent with their duties and obligations as a representative.
So what's your solution? How will you cause that competition to happen? We anxiously await your better solution!
You act as if the cable and broadband providers are chomping at the bit to do their own private buildout with no assurances of a captive market. They are not and they never have been.
In fact, even where it is permitted, Comcast and TWC made "gentleman's agreements" not to compete.
Well, let's see, I'm not voting for Hillary either.
USPS is far from horrible. In fact, the other guys depend on USPS for the final leg in a lot of package deliveries. Without USPS, some places would have no delivery at all.
They have proven just as fast, less expensive, and more accountable. Of course, nobody is perfect. I have had packages damaged by FedEx, UPS, and USPS. However, only USPS made good on it by actually paying out the insurance I bought. FedEx actually claimed inadequate packaging when they clearly ran the box through with a forklift. They also claimed inadequate packaging when they dropped the item down 4 flights of stairs in full view of the recipient.
As for schools, neither public nor private schools are all that good. But public schools have a notable disadvantage, they can't just toss out under performing students to keep their stats up. They are obligated to deal with them.
How would it choke off growth? I don't know of any existing or proposed municipal broadband that forbids commercial competition (but I do know of more than one commercial entity that pays lots of money to get laws forbidding municipal broadband). If they are so incredibly competitive and so much more efficient, they can surely move in and compete. Perhaps even buy out the municipal system at a fair price once they prove how much better they are.
And about that growth, it seems that with newly imposed caps and other antics, the commercial entities you are so enamored of are doing their best to move us backwards.
Meanwhile, fiber in conduit is a damned good bet for technology. I have no doubt that there will be performance improvements to be had. Most of them will be a matter of switching out endpoint hardware rather than the actual fiber. That is not exactly a secret.
In many cases where municipal broadband is considered, there is no game in town at all. If they are the only game in town it's because the other players have chosen not to show up, even after being given millions of dollars to show up. Perhaps we should claw the hundreds of millions back and start a federal loan program for municipalities willing to show up.
There is at least one case where organized crime used a back door into phone switches to spy on law enforcement.
They aren't scared of a bomb, they are scared of an email that claims there is a bomb. If they saw an actual bomb, their fear would make perfect sense.
That and when it reported the wrong position, it was implausibly far from the true position. It's much worse when the error is plausible.
like this?
As long as you ignore that the vaccination rates and violence or autism rates don't correlate particularly well.
RTFA! He knew the stuff was dreadfully toxic and hushed it up so it could remain in production.
From TFA:
In 1924, General Motors was headed for a scandal. Although reports of sickness had been coming out of all three tetraethyl refineries, the story was concealed from the newspapers. But things came to a head at the TEL refinery in Bayway, New Jersey. Dozens of workers contracted lead poisoning from breathing the toxic vapors and became violently insane. Five men died within a short time and news coverage was unavoidable.
Midgley stopped at nothing in trying to convince the public that his antiknock additive was safe. He would pour TEL additive onto his own hands and take deep breaths from the bottle in front of large audiences, all the while insisting that it was harmless and that repeated daily exposure was nothing to worry about. What the public didn’t know was that Midgley had recently spent six weeks in Florida, golfing in the sunshine in an attempt to clear his own lungs of lead particles.
So, he might not have known from the very beginning, but he certainly knew early on and did his best to keep it quiet. That strikes me as knowing and willful.
If you are bothered by the human being barking incessantly, you should call mental health services to come get him :-)
Corrupt corporations paying corrupt legislators to support their monopolies.
Yeah, the speed was terrible (though it was state of the art at the time), but there was enough competition to keep them honest and they were small enough that you could talk to someone who actually had the ability to make a decision and fix things.
That's what makes the people swallow the lie, but it doesn't explain governments pushing for measures that cannot touch the bad guys with the AKs but can and will affect decent people.
Sadly, that is often not true. Consider internet service. Where people have any choice at all, it's between a shit sandwich with crap sauce or a crap sandwich with shit sauce.
It's the difference between a guesstimate before the fact to an analysis with 20/20 hindsight.