This was tried in several states to make the telcos and cable companies open up their last mile lines at reasonable market costs. It didn't work at all. Either they paid off the state legislators to make it pointless and/or they gave special deals to their own ISPs that no one else could get.
On the contrary. What I propose has never been tried except at the local level, and to the best of my knowledge, it has worked well everywhere it was tried. A government-owned network is not the same thing a a corporate-owned network that the government requires the corporation to share, for several reasons.
First, they're for-profit companies that provide Internet service themselves, so they naturally see their cost for maintaining the lines as being nearly as much as they charge for service, making it impossible for anyone to price their service competitively. A fundamental principle of what I described is that the owner of the lines cannot provide service directly to consumers under any circumstances. As soon as you allow that, any such system is doomed.
Second, DSL is hopeless because distance limitations limit how far you can get decent data rates, and most telcos haven't bothered up grade their gear past about 6 Mbps anyway. Because the telcos pay to build out fiber networks themselves, forcing them to share doesn't make sense, so they rightfully refuse. Therefore, you get two tiers of service: the third parties who can only use classical DSL and the ILECs who can run fiber to the node or fiber to the curb.
Third, the ILECs, because they are competing with the CLECs, have no incentive to actually repair their lines and keep things maintained. If they screw up service badly enough, eventually the consumer might dump the CLEC and switch to their service. Thus, it is in their best interest to sabotage the CLECs service, or at best do nothing to ensure that it is reliable.
Requiring a company to provide service to its competitors fundamentally cannot work well. It is contrary to their best interests in pretty much every way. That said, the laws did work, just not well. I'm currently running my home servers off an CLEC that is only allowed to provide service because of these laws. The problem is not that forcing them to open up the lines paid for by our tax dollars is fundamentally unworkable so much as that our government then failed to follow through by continuing to build out the infrastructure with newer technologies, and thus the competition quickly became second class citizens. All of this is a problem solely because the government did not retain ownership of the infrastructure and did not continue to improve that infrastructure. And that is the fundamental difference between what I proposed and what you think I proposed.:-)
Poorly designed laptops with floating grounds are a very common problem, and are the bane of the audio recording world. This problem seems to come up on recording bulletin boards about every couple of weeks. I usually just suggest wiring up a pass-through audio cable with a plug on one end, a jack on the other, and the ground on the plug end wired to the building ground. It's quick, cheap, easy, and gets the job done.
In the end it's a central authority with too much power over you. Who cares if it's pure "government" or government proxying a small subset of companies? The end result is the same, it's still bad.
This is why I've been saying for years that the only real solution to our nation's Internet service problems is for the government to create a nonprofit organization that manages the last-mile infrastructure and leases access to corporations that compete for the right to package and sell the services. That organization must be forbidden by charter from interfering in the operation of those ISPs in any way. Only by the government taking direct action to promote competition can we have anything approaching a consumer-friendly market for Internet service. With such a system, even if all the ISPs in your area suck, you could get a loan for twenty grand and set up your own ISP in your community. That's a far cry from today's world in which a few incumbent, for-profit monopolies hold all the rights to lease their lines (even though those lines were mostly paid for by the government).
And even if it were true, there are ways for the government to provide universal health care that do not involve the government controlling that care. For example, the government provided power for millions in the Tennessee Valley, but does not run TVA. They just paid the bill for getting the organization started. There's nothing preventing the government from similarly creating a nonprofit corporation for health care and leaving management in the hands of their board.
No disagreement here. The Bush II era tax cuts were pretty clearly harmful to our Federal government and to our state governments that had to make up the difference when the Federal government started giving them less money.
To play devil's advocate, though, it is possible that some aspects of the economic meltdown might have been worse had there been higher taxation, in which case we might have ended up in the same shape or worse. It's not clear. Nor is it necessarily clear that the government spending less money would have reduced the deficit because that, too might have caused the meltdown to be worse. Any time when things have the potential to snowball, even the most basic assumptions about economics start to break down. In the long term, cutting spending or raising taxes (so long as you remain below that optimal point in the curve) tends to reduce the deficit on the average. In the short term, it usually reduces the deficit, too, but this is not always the case, depending on what else is going on. At best, economics is a pile of contradictory theories that are all correct some of the time and wrong most of the time....:-)
No surprise. There's a strong correlation between being funny and being intelligent. You have to be both intelligent and observant to come up with jokes that people find funny.
Only to a point. Once taxes exceed a certain point, they actually start to inhibit economic productivity, at which point you actually start to see a decrease in income from taxes. For example, if you increase sales tax beyond the point at which bartering starts to make sense, people stop buying things. If you increase property tax beyond the point where buying property makes sense, you start to see people defaulting en masse. When the cost of employing a worker gets too high due to payroll taxes, businesses can close down. And so on. And beyond any doubt, once taxes exceed 100% of income, no further increase of the tax rate can feasibly bring in more income no matter how good it might look on paper....
There are really only two ways that are guaranteed to resolve a budget shortfall. One is to decrease spending. The other is to invade another country and plunder its resources. I think we're too evolved for the latter at this point.:-)
This is BS. Government doesn't burn your tax dollars, it spends thems, so tax dollars stay in the economy. Really, you need to rethink that one.
You misunderstand. The point was not that the government is not spending the dollars, but rather that for money taken from the poor and (at least the lower) middle class citizens, every dollar that the government spends comes at the expense of a dollar that the individuals would otherwise have spent on something else had they not paid it to the government. Thus as far as the amount of money being spent, it's at best break-even unless the government either:
Engages in deficit spending
Takes money from people who would otherwise have saved that money rather than spending it (which basically means the extremely wealthy).
Well, yes, prop 13 is a disaster and is a significant part of the problem, but not for the reason you think. It doesn't really force property taxes to be artificially low on the whole. What prop 13 did was make property taxes on commercial property (which is rarely sold) artificially low, which meant that the general population had to pay a greater share of the burden. It also made selling a home and buying a new one problematic because doing so meant a substantial increase in your property tax bill. This, in turn, helped exacerbate an already depressed real estate market.
However, prop 13 is not the cause of the budget shortfall. More taxation does not cure budget shortfalls. Controlling spending cures budget shortfalls. It's the broken window fallacy. You take money away to pay for the government spending money, but with the exception of taxation on the extremely wealthy, that money is money that those people would have spent on something else, so taxes on the poor and middle class really take money almost directly out of the economy.
Not going to disagree with you there. The bubble needed to burst. It's just very unfortunate that it had to do so (and thus massively cut into property tax revenue) right when the state was already hurting from reduced income tax due to unemployment and reduced sales tax due to people cutting back on spending.
They not only pay taxes, but since they're excluded from collecting social security, medicaid, medicare or welfare, they get very little back for their money.
They also don't generally pay into medicare or social security.
Yes, some illegal aliens lie and use somebody else's tax ID and pay taxes. A significant portion do not, and are paid entirely in cash. They pay neither income tax nor social security nor medicare.
Okay, yes, illegal aliens pay sales tax. They do not, however, generally pay income tax, social security, or medicare. So they pay significantly less taxes than people operating above board, and that was the point.
BTW, renters do not pay property tax. The person who owns the rental property pays that. And no, you can't say that part of your rent goes to pay the tax; that tax would have been paid by the owner whether you were renting the property or not. The fact that the owner got reimbursed for paying it does not mean that the government has more money in its pocket than it otherwise would have (except insofar as it is income for the homeowner, and is thus taxed as income).
No, California's economic problems stem from a number of factors:
The largest percentage of illegal immigrants (most of whom don't pay taxes) of any state in the U.S. (Source: statemaster.com)
One of the largest homeless populations per capita of any state in the U.S. (due principally to climate)
A history of significant imbalance between dollars sent to the federal government and dollars gotten back. (Source: taxfoundation.org) Note that the state is doing better than break-even this year, as is every other state, but decades of losses add up.
A massively broken U.S. health care system that is causing every state in the nation to bleed.
Severe unemployment in historically strong sectors.
The bursting of much bigger housing bubbles than nearly anywhere else in the country, resulting in a sudden and dramatic drop in property tax revenues.
Over-reliance on sales tax revenue that took a dive due to the recession.
Decades of stupid politicians with no financial sense who spent every penny the state brought in. This is basically a fundamental problem with having 90% of your government officials be lawyers; most lawyers have never dealt with tough economic times, so most do not know how to live within their means.
There are probably plenty of other things that I'm not thinking of right now. Notice that none of these have much, if anything, to do with California's constitution.
The emergency nature of it might have been exacerbated by the attack, but even before the attack, they knew that if they managed to make a connection, they might only get one shot at stepping through. I don't know about you, but when I know ahead of time that I'm going to have a tight rollout in the morning, I put everything I need right by the door....
Well, a couple of the Mark IIs could power the ancient chair, which normally would suck down all the power in a ZPM, so presumably they were at least within an order of magnitude of a ZPM's output. Either way, even a couple of those would have been enough to allow them to reach distant gates to pick up people who got stuck, would have powered the shields during the alien attack, and would have solved dozens of other problems that they shouldn't have had to deal with. And that was my point---not ZPMs so much as Mark IIs.
I could deal with the Ori. They were mostly a fairly natural extension of the whole Oma Desala thread, which, short of freezing, was about the most plausible way to have Daniel Jackson leave the show for a while in such a way that he could either come back or not. If they'd killed him off, there would be no going back. If they had sent him to do something somewhere else, there would have to be a timeline for his return. And it would be pretty out-of-character for him to quit, much less return after doing so.
The notion of worshippers giving them power was pushing the realm of believability, but at least it was central to driving the plot, and central to the show's overall theme (that mere power does not necessarily make something a god).
The wormhole aliens were just plain bizarre. The angelic guides were just a bad deus ex machina. I never saw LOST.
Voyager's ratings sucked compared with previous Trek shows. On a broadcast network, in an era when cable networks were only beginning to gain steam and cut into the networks' ratings, it got barely 2.1 million viewers on its next-to-last episode (the lowest rated episode for that series). Stargate Universe is doing almost that well in a much more fragmented market and on a cable-only network with many fewer potential eyes. Voyager was a flop by comparison. It ran for five seasons in spite of its ratings because Paramount execs were scared s**tless of going down in history as "the guy who cancelled Star Trek again". It took Enterprise being a similar dog to convince them that they had worn out the franchise.
SyFy isn't canceling Universe because of poor ratings. It's one of the higher rated shows on the network, last I checked, comparable to Atlantis in its last couple of seasons. They're canceling it because NBC Universal doesn't give a flying f*** about science fiction; they know they can make ten times as much money by showing professional wrestling and absurd paranormal crap like Ghost Hunters. The same company that cancelled the first Star Trek series has once again shown exactly what they consider entertainment, and it's reality TV shows, paranormal shows, and other such dreck.
I say screw 'em. By pushing science fiction fans away, NBC Universal is sealing their fate. Science fiction lovers, being highly technically savvy, are far more likely to find a way to make internet distribution work, eliminating unnecessary middlemen like the NBC Universal and going straight to the production companies (mostly in Canada). Once such a model is proven to work for one genre, it will only be a matter of time before the other genres follow, and dinosaurs like NBC Universal will shrivel up and die. No great loss.
Google and other content providers don't want ISPs and telecoms to be able to charge you (or them) for bandwidth usage not to protect YOUR rights, but to enable THEM to be the ones charging for the content.
I guess rather than saying that they aren't really affected, I should have said that they aren't affected much. Then my meaning might have been more clear. Sure, it affects them, but being big corporations who can afford to use Akamai and to host mirrors of their content on Comcast's side of the slow links, the impact is really minimal in the grand scheme of things.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh. It's like a bad hacker movie, only lamer. Everybody knows it's always a UNIX system (even when it's a 1990s era Mac).
Rabbit season!
On the contrary. What I propose has never been tried except at the local level, and to the best of my knowledge, it has worked well everywhere it was tried. A government-owned network is not the same thing a a corporate-owned network that the government requires the corporation to share, for several reasons.
First, they're for-profit companies that provide Internet service themselves, so they naturally see their cost for maintaining the lines as being nearly as much as they charge for service, making it impossible for anyone to price their service competitively. A fundamental principle of what I described is that the owner of the lines cannot provide service directly to consumers under any circumstances. As soon as you allow that, any such system is doomed.
Second, DSL is hopeless because distance limitations limit how far you can get decent data rates, and most telcos haven't bothered up grade their gear past about 6 Mbps anyway. Because the telcos pay to build out fiber networks themselves, forcing them to share doesn't make sense, so they rightfully refuse. Therefore, you get two tiers of service: the third parties who can only use classical DSL and the ILECs who can run fiber to the node or fiber to the curb.
Third, the ILECs, because they are competing with the CLECs, have no incentive to actually repair their lines and keep things maintained. If they screw up service badly enough, eventually the consumer might dump the CLEC and switch to their service. Thus, it is in their best interest to sabotage the CLECs service, or at best do nothing to ensure that it is reliable.
Requiring a company to provide service to its competitors fundamentally cannot work well. It is contrary to their best interests in pretty much every way. That said, the laws did work, just not well. I'm currently running my home servers off an CLEC that is only allowed to provide service because of these laws. The problem is not that forcing them to open up the lines paid for by our tax dollars is fundamentally unworkable so much as that our government then failed to follow through by continuing to build out the infrastructure with newer technologies, and thus the competition quickly became second class citizens. All of this is a problem solely because the government did not retain ownership of the infrastructure and did not continue to improve that infrastructure. And that is the fundamental difference between what I proposed and what you think I proposed. :-)
Poorly designed laptops with floating grounds are a very common problem, and are the bane of the audio recording world. This problem seems to come up on recording bulletin boards about every couple of weeks. I usually just suggest wiring up a pass-through audio cable with a plug on one end, a jack on the other, and the ground on the plug end wired to the building ground. It's quick, cheap, easy, and gets the job done.
Duck season.
Or black cloth gaffer's tape. You can fix anything with gaffer's tape.
Exactly. Conductor-insulator-conductor is the very definition of a capacitor.
This is why I've been saying for years that the only real solution to our nation's Internet service problems is for the government to create a nonprofit organization that manages the last-mile infrastructure and leases access to corporations that compete for the right to package and sell the services. That organization must be forbidden by charter from interfering in the operation of those ISPs in any way. Only by the government taking direct action to promote competition can we have anything approaching a consumer-friendly market for Internet service. With such a system, even if all the ISPs in your area suck, you could get a loan for twenty grand and set up your own ISP in your community. That's a far cry from today's world in which a few incumbent, for-profit monopolies hold all the rights to lease their lines (even though those lines were mostly paid for by the government).
And even if it were true, there are ways for the government to provide universal health care that do not involve the government controlling that care. For example, the government provided power for millions in the Tennessee Valley, but does not run TVA. They just paid the bill for getting the organization started. There's nothing preventing the government from similarly creating a nonprofit corporation for health care and leaving management in the hands of their board.
No disagreement here. The Bush II era tax cuts were pretty clearly harmful to our Federal government and to our state governments that had to make up the difference when the Federal government started giving them less money.
To play devil's advocate, though, it is possible that some aspects of the economic meltdown might have been worse had there been higher taxation, in which case we might have ended up in the same shape or worse. It's not clear. Nor is it necessarily clear that the government spending less money would have reduced the deficit because that, too might have caused the meltdown to be worse. Any time when things have the potential to snowball, even the most basic assumptions about economics start to break down. In the long term, cutting spending or raising taxes (so long as you remain below that optimal point in the curve) tends to reduce the deficit on the average. In the short term, it usually reduces the deficit, too, but this is not always the case, depending on what else is going on. At best, economics is a pile of contradictory theories that are all correct some of the time and wrong most of the time.... :-)
Good comedians are funny. Slapstick is silly. There's a difference.
No surprise. There's a strong correlation between being funny and being intelligent. You have to be both intelligent and observant to come up with jokes that people find funny.
Only to a point. Once taxes exceed a certain point, they actually start to inhibit economic productivity, at which point you actually start to see a decrease in income from taxes. For example, if you increase sales tax beyond the point at which bartering starts to make sense, people stop buying things. If you increase property tax beyond the point where buying property makes sense, you start to see people defaulting en masse. When the cost of employing a worker gets too high due to payroll taxes, businesses can close down. And so on. And beyond any doubt, once taxes exceed 100% of income, no further increase of the tax rate can feasibly bring in more income no matter how good it might look on paper....
There are really only two ways that are guaranteed to resolve a budget shortfall. One is to decrease spending. The other is to invade another country and plunder its resources. I think we're too evolved for the latter at this point. :-)
You misunderstand. The point was not that the government is not spending the dollars, but rather that for money taken from the poor and (at least the lower) middle class citizens, every dollar that the government spends comes at the expense of a dollar that the individuals would otherwise have spent on something else had they not paid it to the government. Thus as far as the amount of money being spent, it's at best break-even unless the government either:
Well, yes, prop 13 is a disaster and is a significant part of the problem, but not for the reason you think. It doesn't really force property taxes to be artificially low on the whole. What prop 13 did was make property taxes on commercial property (which is rarely sold) artificially low, which meant that the general population had to pay a greater share of the burden. It also made selling a home and buying a new one problematic because doing so meant a substantial increase in your property tax bill. This, in turn, helped exacerbate an already depressed real estate market.
However, prop 13 is not the cause of the budget shortfall. More taxation does not cure budget shortfalls. Controlling spending cures budget shortfalls. It's the broken window fallacy. You take money away to pay for the government spending money, but with the exception of taxation on the extremely wealthy, that money is money that those people would have spent on something else, so taxes on the poor and middle class really take money almost directly out of the economy.
Not going to disagree with you there. The bubble needed to burst. It's just very unfortunate that it had to do so (and thus massively cut into property tax revenue) right when the state was already hurting from reduced income tax due to unemployment and reduced sales tax due to people cutting back on spending.
They also don't generally pay into medicare or social security.
Yes, some illegal aliens lie and use somebody else's tax ID and pay taxes. A significant portion do not, and are paid entirely in cash. They pay neither income tax nor social security nor medicare.
Okay, yes, illegal aliens pay sales tax. They do not, however, generally pay income tax, social security, or medicare. So they pay significantly less taxes than people operating above board, and that was the point.
BTW, renters do not pay property tax. The person who owns the rental property pays that. And no, you can't say that part of your rent goes to pay the tax; that tax would have been paid by the owner whether you were renting the property or not. The fact that the owner got reimbursed for paying it does not mean that the government has more money in its pocket than it otherwise would have (except insofar as it is income for the homeowner, and is thus taxed as income).
No, California's economic problems stem from a number of factors:
There are probably plenty of other things that I'm not thinking of right now. Notice that none of these have much, if anything, to do with California's constitution.
The emergency nature of it might have been exacerbated by the attack, but even before the attack, they knew that if they managed to make a connection, they might only get one shot at stepping through. I don't know about you, but when I know ahead of time that I'm going to have a tight rollout in the morning, I put everything I need right by the door....
Well, a couple of the Mark IIs could power the ancient chair, which normally would suck down all the power in a ZPM, so presumably they were at least within an order of magnitude of a ZPM's output. Either way, even a couple of those would have been enough to allow them to reach distant gates to pick up people who got stuck, would have powered the shields during the alien attack, and would have solved dozens of other problems that they shouldn't have had to deal with. And that was my point---not ZPMs so much as Mark IIs.
I can't believe Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father!
I could deal with the Ori. They were mostly a fairly natural extension of the whole Oma Desala thread, which, short of freezing, was about the most plausible way to have Daniel Jackson leave the show for a while in such a way that he could either come back or not. If they'd killed him off, there would be no going back. If they had sent him to do something somewhere else, there would have to be a timeline for his return. And it would be pretty out-of-character for him to quit, much less return after doing so.
The notion of worshippers giving them power was pushing the realm of believability, but at least it was central to driving the plot, and central to the show's overall theme (that mere power does not necessarily make something a god).
The wormhole aliens were just plain bizarre. The angelic guides were just a bad deus ex machina. I never saw LOST.
Voyager's ratings sucked compared with previous Trek shows. On a broadcast network, in an era when cable networks were only beginning to gain steam and cut into the networks' ratings, it got barely 2.1 million viewers on its next-to-last episode (the lowest rated episode for that series). Stargate Universe is doing almost that well in a much more fragmented market and on a cable-only network with many fewer potential eyes. Voyager was a flop by comparison. It ran for five seasons in spite of its ratings because Paramount execs were scared s**tless of going down in history as "the guy who cancelled Star Trek again". It took Enterprise being a similar dog to convince them that they had worn out the franchise.
SyFy isn't canceling Universe because of poor ratings. It's one of the higher rated shows on the network, last I checked, comparable to Atlantis in its last couple of seasons. They're canceling it because NBC Universal doesn't give a flying f*** about science fiction; they know they can make ten times as much money by showing professional wrestling and absurd paranormal crap like Ghost Hunters. The same company that cancelled the first Star Trek series has once again shown exactly what they consider entertainment, and it's reality TV shows, paranormal shows, and other such dreck.
I say screw 'em. By pushing science fiction fans away, NBC Universal is sealing their fate. Science fiction lovers, being highly technically savvy, are far more likely to find a way to make internet distribution work, eliminating unnecessary middlemen like the NBC Universal and going straight to the production companies (mostly in Canada). Once such a model is proven to work for one genre, it will only be a matter of time before the other genres follow, and dinosaurs like NBC Universal will shrivel up and die. No great loss.
I guess rather than saying that they aren't really affected, I should have said that they aren't affected much. Then my meaning might have been more clear. Sure, it affects them, but being big corporations who can afford to use Akamai and to host mirrors of their content on Comcast's side of the slow links, the impact is really minimal in the grand scheme of things.