There is only one issue, and you're dodging it: Should companies be forced to carry content they do not want to?
Regardless of your pseudo-intellectual posturing, the answer to that question can never be "Well, it depends on whether I agree with the politics or not".
No, of course not. The correct answer to that question is always, "Well, it depends on whether that company is a near monopoly or not."
ISPs are monopolies, or very nearly so. About 78% of Americans have either zero or one ISP that meets the FCC's minimum criteria for being a broadband provider. Zero or one. That means that when they block content, their users cannot get to that content at all.
As for those tech companies that a few folks above are claiming are "pro-censorship"? None of them are monopolies. None of them are even close. There are dozens of search engines, hundreds of social networks, and tens of millions of servers on the Internet, run by tens of thousands of companies.
Content creators have near-infinite numbers of choices, so requiring server companies to serve content that they find distasteful does very little to prevent censorship. Content consumers have very little (if any) choice in providers, so requiring ISPs to pass along content that they find distasteful is absolutely critical to preventing censorship. And that's why net neutrality is so important.
You mean like back when ISPs were throttling Netflix unless they paid?
Or deliberately added jitter to their cable service latency to cause problems for VoIP providers (but conveniently did QoS routing for their own, in-house VoIP services).
Nice reality distortion field there. Netflix was very much throttled, in effect, just not explicitly. Specifically, Comcast refused to upgrade their bandwidth to the nearest peering point to ensure an adequate experience for their customers unless Netflix paid them an extortion fee, all the while ensuring that their competing streaming services worked well, in what was, IMO, a deliberate, illegal, anticompetitive violation of antitrust laws. No Netflix did not throttle themselves. They paid for fast service to a peering point adjacent to Comcast. Comcast deliberately refused to upgrade things on their side even if Netflix paid for the upgrade, because it was never about the cost of providing the actual network connection; it was always about Comcast wanting an ongoing income from Netflix to make up for losses caused by competition with their paid streaming services.
Many of the companies screaming the loudest are the biggest advocates of censorship.
If by that, you mean that ISPs are in favor of censorship, you're right. If you're arguing that companies like Google, Netflix, Facebook, etc. are advocates of censorship, you're just chasing shadows and distracting people from the real issues.
Net neutrality isn't about big tech companies getting screwed by the ISPs. Those companies are big enough that any ISP that seriously tried to break them would get customers marching on their headquarters with pitchforks, and lawyers having pleasant conversations in front of a jury. You don't block Netflix or Google or Facebook and get away with it. Believe me, it has been tried. And there are entire industries selling personal VPN services that arose to get around those blocks.
No, net neutrality is not about the big players. Rather, it is about the next YouTube or Facebook or Netflix. Net neutrality means that those smaller players can't get throttled by the ISPs in favor of those big tech companies that can afford to pay their extortion fees. And in spite of the fact that these laws actually hurt the bottom line for those big tech companies, the employees of those companies are so strongly and nearly unanimously in favor of net neutrality that the upper brass are publicly supporting a policy that isn't in their best interest. That's how you know that what Pai et al are doing is screwing the public—when hundreds of thousands of highly skilled people with knowledge of how the technology works almost unanimously think that Pai's new policy is a threat to the freedom of the Internet.
And one of the greatest ironies of the whole issue is that the sort of people who love to throw this XKCD comic out there are the ones shitting themselves the hardest at the idea that ISPs might take their platform away, but when it is GoogleFacebookTwitterYouTube doing it we are invited to a lecture on how we are not entitled to a soapbox.
I'm sorry to say this, but your entire post is basically just a distraction from the actual issues here. You're conflating two completely unrelated situations.
Censorship by tech companies: okay, because you aren't entitled to a soapbox paid for by somebody else.
Censorship by ISPs: bad, because you are entitled to be able to use the soapbox that you paid for.
This perhaps needs further explanation, so that you can comprehend why "Weev" is completely and totally full of it.
Tech companies have the right to limit what is done using their servers. They are paying for the cost of keeping those servers on the public Internet, so they can set whatever rules they want to set, within reason. As a user, you are their customer, and you have to abide by their rules. More significantly, there are millions of other ways to make your content available online for a negligible amount of money without using the services of those particular companies. Your servers can be physically located anywhere in the world, which means that no tech company, no matter how big, is capable of completely censoring your right to free speech. Period. Full stop.
By contrast, ISPs do not have the right to block or throttle content from companies that exist on the public Internet. Those other companies are paying for their connection to the public Internet, and are not customers of the ISPs that historically did the throttling in question.
And you cannot reasonably argue that the customers of the ISP have to abide by their rules (throttling their access to sites on the public Internet), because their users have little or no choice in ISPs. Unfortunately, in the United States, ISPs are usually a monopoly at this point, with one or fewer viable broadband ISPs i
Ajit Pai is just the figurehead. Very few people have looked into the issues underlying this issue, and so they are relying on masses of warm bodies to make the argument for them with a heckler's veto. That sets a precedent that benefits no one.
Those of us who have looked into the issue have pointed out a long history of abuse by multiple cable companies (prioritizing their own in-house services to the detriment of competitors, etc.) that was stopped dead in its tracks by these regulations, and that would become legal again if these regulations are removed. We pointed out example after example of this.
So at this point, focusing on the people seems like the only sane approach. Their ideas can and have be proven objectively wrong. Repeatedly. The ideas aren't the problem. The people spouting absolute nonsense are.
Wouldn't matter. They made their decision already. This is just for show. After all, lots of us did make plenty of serious legal arguments, and they ignored us, too.
Really, it has nothing to do with the huge cost of writing off those older reactors and decommissioning them, and then building brand new ones?
You're subtly conflating two different things—the desire of the operator to operate a plant beyond its design life and the government-granted license to do so. Power plants are granted an operating license for a certain number of years. If they want to run the plant past its design life, they have to get extensive inspections and apply for a license extension from the NRC (and in some cases, license extensions from state-level organizations on top of that).
The cost of dismantling a power plant means that power companies have a strong incentive to ask the government for extensions of their operating license. That doesn't give the government any incentive to grant the extension, though. The sole reason that the regulatory agencies have such a strong incentive to grant the extensions is because those plants produce critical base load, and there are no new nuclear plants to take their place, which is largely because of the NIMBY movement, not because a power plant can't pay for its decommissioning costs during its design life.
It costs about $320M (on average) to decommission a single unit in a nuclear plant. If you assume that each unit is 1 GW (for example), and assume a 30-year design life running at full power the whole time, that decommissioning cost accounts for only about 0.125 cents per kWh. Mind you, they don't run plants at full tilt all the time, and not all power plants use such powerful generators (500 MW generators are pretty common), so the cost can vary somewhat, but the point is that it is readily absorbed within the 2+ cents per kWh that the power plants charge for power. So clearly, they are economically viable, at least in areas that need that much power.
Actually, depending on the nature of the problem, some of the changes do get retrofitted to some extent. IIRC, there were a bunch of changes to the backup power infrastructure in existing power plants after the Fukushima disaster to reduce the risk of generator failure in the event of external power loss—things like moving the power distribution boxes away from areas that might flood, for example.
But the really big stuff often requires major changes to the containment building, changes to the reactor vessel design, plumbing changes, etc., which tend to be infeasible without a long-term shutdown. For those sorts of changes, you almost have to wait until they build a new plant, or at least add a new reactor to an old plant.
No matter what issue is raised with any nuclear reactor technology, somebody on this site pops up to say that would never happen if we only used reactors with some different element as fuel, some different physical layout, some different size, some different cooling scheme, yada, yada, yada.
That's because they're almost always right. Whenever a problem is identified in a nuclear reactor design, manufacturers work to update the designs so that future power plants won't exhibit those problems. As a result, the known flaws in existing reactors have been solved in new designs, and the only thing standing in the way of replacing all those old reactors with reactors based on newer, safer designs are NIMBY pseudo-environmentalists who have somehow convinced themselves that if they prevent new nuclear generators from being built, the need for base load will somehow magically go away.
Did I mention that their current hardware doesn't even do basic stuff like auto rain sensing and 360 degree cameras.
That's not true. At least on the Model X, their current hardware (if you buy the self-driving upgrade) has eight cameras, providing the computer with a full 360-degree camera view. Their current software, however, doesn't expose that to the user.
The real trouble is that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of SIP/RTP providers to use, especially if you are not as concerned with a provider that has super high quality or deliverability written into the SLAs. Also there are many poorly configured session border controllers or SIP gateways out there that are ripe for misuse by individuals with less than honorable intentions.
The real trouble, then, is that there isn't a global insecure gateways blacklist that flags those poorly configured SIP gateways and causes the entire world to drop all traffic from them. There should be a bar that says, "You must be this tall to ride the ride." If a SIP provider can't keep their systems up-to-date with reasonable security, they should not be allowed to inject calls into the POTS network by any means.
Overall what I'm trying to get at is that I agree with your desire to shutdown the scammers and reduce the spam/scam calls that we all receive on a regular basis but as someone that uses multiple Tier-1 SIP providers to guarantee deliverability from my voice infrastructure and with a legitimate need to have thousands of different source numbers generate from my voice infrastructure (none of which are numbers that I own or have any claim to) I can't get onboard with some of the restrictions you have suggested in an earlier post.
You might not own or have claim to them, but you presumably have authorization from the people who do. They wouldn't have to require that you in particular are leasing the number from some telco. It would be sufficient to require you to prove that you are authorized to use the number by the person or business that is leasing the number. Obviously, your customers provide you with the source numbers, so other than the fact it would be a bit of a paperwork headache, I don't see any reason you couldn't pass on that information to your upstream provider when signing on.
And it wasn't 18 nations. It's every nation, all of them, every time, ever since the first nation was invented.
I think you mis-parsed that sentence. The word "nation's" is singular possessive, so clearly, this is about a series of elections held by "18 Nation", which, judging by its name, I can only assume is either a magazine for teenagers or a porn site. Either way, its elections were influenced by social engineering, and I couldn't care less.:-)
But once your packets are high enough in the ISP hierarchy, there is usually no filtering, because it's not practical. Legitimate uses of source IP addresses that aren't assigned to you through that upstream provider is indistinguishable from address spoofing at that level.
Of course, there's also no need for egress filtering higher up in the hierarchy. By the time the packets get that high in the ISP hierarchy, they should already have been filtered by somebody at the bottom, or in the case of a giant ISP that is both an edge provider and a backbone provider, by the edge router adjacent to its non-ISP customers. The same is true for fake Caller ID, and companies that don't do proper filtering of their customers should be fined or kicked out entirely.
Policies should be made as close to the source as possible. In the case of Caller ID, IIRC, all Caller ID signals are blocked from normal phone lines, which means this really only applies to trunk line customers. Telephone companies that provide trunk lines to customers (not including trunks to other phone companies' exchanges) should be responsible for doing ingress filtering to ensure that the numbers being sent out are appropriate.
The problem, of course, is convincing all the telephone providers in places like India that they should obey those policies. The solution, of course, is for the next more-upstream provider to block all caller ID data for calls originating from telephone providers that break the rules repeatedly, until they relent and fix their policies. Either way, this is strictly a policy and enforcement problem that should have been fixed a decade ago.
That's fine. The telephone company that bridges those calls to the public phone network should have a whitelist of allowed caller IDs, and if you need to add numbers specific to your business to that whitelist, you should have to provide a very narrow list of allowed numbers to that upstream provider, and a real, live person should have to verify that those numbers really are yours before they allow them through. And it should cost $ to get each new number whitelisted.
Allowing anyone to provide any arbitrary number is complete and utter incompetence, and everyone scammed by these people probably have a legal right to file a very $$$$$$ contributory negligence suit against the scammer's upstream telecom provider for not blocking the fake caller IDs.
Not necessarily. If something can be changed by adding more cells in a particular place, it might be possible to turn cell division back on in that part of the brain, or trigged early apoptosis of undesired cells. True rewiring, of course, is a bit farther out of reach.
Why do you assume it's WiFi? It could be simple RF interference wreaking havoc. It affects older planes more than newer ones, which is a big clue, since older planes lack a lot of the high integration newer planes have. And newer planes are designed for a more modern world, where RF transmitters are common instead of rare - so modern planes can handle intentional RF transmitters much better (especially in an age with wireless headphones and such).
I'm not necessarily assuming Wi-Fi, but if they're talking about fixing it in software, that probably points to a problem with the isolation between avionics and the end-user network (unless the computers are a bit too quick to react to spurious sensor readings or something, and they think they can "solve" it by smoothing the data...).
Besides, banning electronic devices in the cabin (or even in checked baggage) wouldn't mitigate an attack caused by RF interference. The only real fix is to add shielding, because somebody could just as easily produce RF interference with a parabolic antenna aimed up from the ground.
An Indian student in the group voiced his annoyance at the use of the word "of" in the title, saying it was nonsensical and grammatically incorrect. Our Russian research advisor (who spoke English as well as any native speaker) was aware of the "of" usage, but didn't know if it was grammatically correct or not. Those of us from America all said that the usage was perfectly acceptable, no different than "get off of the bus" or the like, but we acknowledged it was a rather weird quirk of the English language and suggested that Indian English may have simply dropped it.
The preposition "of" is often considered to be implied, even in American English. For the most part, the meaning is the same with or without it. There are a few exceptions, however, particularly when idioms get involved.
For example, the following sentences have completely different meaning:
I helped my uncle get off of his horse.
I helped my uncle get off his horse.
The first implies that the uncle is getting down from atop a horse. The second implies something much less family-friendly.
And yet, when an automobile has a design flaw that causes a safety problem, NHTSA requires them to fix it at no cost to the customers. Some cars have seen many, many safety recalls. So at least anecdotally, it doesn't seem like forcing the manufacturers to pay for their own screw-ups results in more cover-ups.
Also, because it is cheaper to fix things before they are deployed than to incur the cost of fixing them later, a manufacturer-pays policy has the added advantage of making the manufacturer be more careful.
And even if that weren't a serious safety risk, that would still be the dumbest, most invasive possible approach to fixing the problem. The smartest, least invasive approach would be to permanently shut down the in-flight Wi-Fi on planes that can't be secured. No access to the network = no ability to crack into the systems.
Besides, anything you can do with a device on your person, you can also do with a device in the hold, using a timer or the built-in barometric pressure sensor. Banning devices from carry-on does nothing if the Wi-Fi network is still running, because the attack is still possible. And if the Wi-Fi network is not running, then banning the devices still does nothing because the attack wouldn't be possible either way. So no matter what, a ban does nothing but annoy passengers.
Because the legal power to force you to pay for a service whether you want it or not is not competition? If a private concern did that, you'd rightfully howl.
Private concerns do it all the time. They get "redevelopment funds" to build out the infrastructure, but then it is privately owned. You, the taxpayer, end up paying for it whether you use it or not, but you don't get the benefit of the government continuing to own the infrastructure and getting to benefit by leasing it to ISPs. Private infrastructure is generally the worst of all possible options other than perhaps no infrastructure at all.
Are you going to exempt people who continue to buy the better private service? What? Nooo?
From the infrastructure buildout cost? No. That wouldn't be feasible. From the cost of operating it? Yes. Municipal ISPs work just like any other ISP. If you aren't using it, you don't pay for it.
That said, they are usually much cheaper and faster than the commercial ISPs, because they don't need to turn a profit. And often, multiple commercial ISPs spring up to lease access from the city and provide additional value-add services (e.g. cable-TV-over-fiber) at prices that are also much cheaper than the existing cable companies and ISPs, because the infrastructure cost (the expensive part) is run on a non-profit basis. So in the long term, most people will be using it....
To give you a hint of what's to come, Detroit Metro airport built a massive new parking structure, staffed it, and nobody came. Private shuttle services to lots a mile or more away were more than worth it. So the government passed a "government is inefficient" 30% tax on those lots, and still had problems.
They made the mistake of assuming they could charge ridiculously high prices to pay off the cost of the structure quickly. This probably means that either they didn't really need the parking structure or they didn't do sufficient financial planning to support it over the lifetime of the loan. It happens.
But experimentally, public fiber services have not had those sorts of problems. Quite the opposite. In the absence of unreasonable regulatory hurdles from incumbent ISPs, new fiber providers kick the living crap out of the incumbents cost-wise and service-wise, regardless of whether those fiber providers are governmental or commercial. But government-owned fiber has the advantage of being able to be leased non-preferentially, which allows for true competition that would otherwise be infeasible because of the cost of the infrastructure. That makes it by far the best approach to rolling out fiber, in the absence of laws preventing it.
No, I'm proposing applying an average to entire states.
Yet, you have said repeatedly you want exceptions written into the law that says if the state average is low then that individual, despite paying their fair share, gets less because reasons.
No, what I said was that there are already exceptions in the law that allow residents states that collect large amounts of state-level taxes to deduct them from their federal taxes, and that this helps make up for those same states typically paying more in federal taxes than they get back in services from the federal government. And without those exceptions, I want exceptions written into the law that says that if the state average outflow to the federal government is low, the state-level inflow from the federal government should be proportionally low. I said nothing about any individual getting less despite paying his/her fair share. Any such scheme would be nonsensical. At the individual level, federal spending is inherently unequal. The wealthy will never be covered by Medicaid. The young will never get social security payments (at least until they get older, and maybe even then). And so on. It would be crazy to try to balance out federal spending proportional to taxes paid at an individual level, because federal aid is more closely related to (1/taxes_paid) than to taxes_paid at the individual level.
There's also a second reason not to tax that income at the federal level: the money you pay to the state in taxes was never really yours to spend in the first place; you would effectively be paying taxes on nothing. If I buy a stock at $1, and it climbs to $100 and then falls again, and I sell it at $2, I pay taxes on $1, not $99, because I lost all of that gain again during the tax year. Similarly, if I get money from my employer, but that money is claimed by the state before I ever see a penny of it, how is that different? That money was never mine; I had no opportunity to spend it; why should I pay taxes on it? It really doesn't make a lot of sense to tax that "money".
I sympathize with the homeless problem and again, the argument you should make is to lower federal taxes and spending so that CA has more resources within its borders to address the problem.
Except that I think we should raise federal taxes everywhere, and increase spending in CA to give California more resources to address the problem. The only way your approach would work is if the federal taxes went to zero. Otherwise, there will always still be an imbalance, because (n *.8)
We can agree to disagree. This conversation is now going in circles.
So why shouldn't states that routinely take in extra money in federal aid have to pay more in federal taxes?
Why can't the poor pay more taxes? Why can't the hungry feed themselves?
That's a non-sequitur. States get federal money largely because of things like where military bases are located, where defense contractors are located, where natural disasters happen, etc. It has almost nothing to do with whether the state is rich or poor, beyond that states with lower taxes tend to not grow as quickly, because they can't build up their infrastructure enough to attract businesses from other states that do, and as a result, often end up asking for more federal grants to keep things from getting worse. But even then, the overall poverty is, ironically, a result of under-taxation. It's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem. You have to spend money to make money—something that neoconservatives seem to too often forget.
I really don't understand why you feel it is so unreasonable to expect each state to get back resources from the federal government roughly in proportion to what they pay in taxes, on average. Isn't it the conservative position that we should all be more self-reliant?:-D
Different states have different needs. Not every state has SV to pay for an expansive welfare state. You undermine the point of federalism. The problem in CA are purely the making of CA.
How is a giant influx of homeless from other states caused by California? Please tell me. As for the "expansive welfare state", the "welfare" you're imagining is the farthest thing from reality. Most homeless services are provided by private non-profits, churches, and other similar groups, not by the government, though some of the homeless shelters are in buildings owned by the government, and I'm sure the state provides grants that help support some of those organizations as well.
The main governmental costs arising from the homeless influx are completely unavoidable except perhaps by deporting them back to their states of origin. For example, the state has to pay for constant repairs to public restroom facilities resulting from vandalism (because many homeless have serious mental health issues), additional police protection/temporary incarceration/psych holds whenever the mentally ill go off their meds or get high on meth and endanger themselves or others, mental health care, emergency medical care (brown recluse bites are particularly common when sleeping outside, for example), and so on. And you can't just ignore thousands of homeless people living in makeshift encampments in a city park. If you don't clear out those encampments, they turn into a public health crisis with thousands of people using the bathroom on public streets. This, in turn, means a large police presence, plus finding places to house them so that they don't end up right back there in a few days.
Ever thought of lower taxes, cutting back on state funding or using other avenues of tax to fund those programs?
And what do you propose to cut when all the essential programs are already hopelessly underfunded? You can only cut so much, and California has pared things to the bone already.
Well, I guess there's one other alternative: eliminate the income tax and increase property taxes (which are expected to remain deductible) to compensate. The net effect would average out in higher rental costs, and the federal government would get the same amount of revenue that it gets now....
If you also think it is an argument against insurance, universal healthcare, or any individual subsidy by a group.
I don't think that at all. Risk pools are extremely useful. What I said was that people who choose to engage in behavior that has higher risk should pay higher insurance. Companies that get more unemployment claims have to pay more for unemployment insurance. People who live in earthquake country have to pay extra for quake insurance. People who live in flood zones have to pay extra for flood insurance. People who constantly file more insurance claims have to pay higher premiums. So why shouldn't states that routinely take in extra money in federal aid have to pay more in federal taxes? It's just about the only situation where things have stayed as skewed as they are for as long as they have.
Then argue that more of your money should stay in the state.
What, precisely, do you think I'm doing when I'm arguing that state taxes should remain federally deductible? If we lose that deduction, it will reduce available money that goes into the local economy, funding the state through sales taxes, property taxes, etc.
How does insurance work without young and healthy?
This is completely different, because the young and healthy eventually become old and less healthy (unless they die). By contrast, the states that take more federal dollars than they pay in taxes have been fairly consistent for decades.
It is not my fault that you chose higher taxes and you are punishing me individually because collective thinking.
And it is not my fault that your state chose to not charge enough taxes to cover your needs, and forces the federal government to make up the difference. It is not my fault that your state effectively exports your homeless problem to my state and doesn't pick up the tab. In effect, you are punishing me individually because of your distorted sense of fairness. Two wrongs don't make a right, but that second wrong helps balance the scales. Removing the pro-California imbalance without removing the anti-California imbalance runs the risk of forcing California to choose between financial collapse and secession, neither of which would be good for California or for the rest of the country.
You pay taxes and you don't always get out what you pay. News at 11. Why do you think some argue taxes are theft? You pay into the unemployment pool while employed, yet you may never draw on it because you never lost your job.
That's actually a great example in favor of my position. Businesses pay different unemployment insurance costs depending on their rate of claims. What I'm saying is that this should be true for a lot more things than it currently is. States that constantly rely on federal aid should pay more in taxes so that things balance out.
I have heard about CA being two states in one; SV with other cities and the rest of the state being ignored with failing infrastructure with increasingly harder laws to follow commanded from on the high rooftops of SV that don't have to live with the hard laws they pass because city living.
Whoever told you that was wrong. The richest parts of Silicon Valley have good infrastructure. Much of the rest is an absolute disaster. This spring, a major road between the Bay Area and Santa Cruz (one of the bedroom communities adjacent to the Bay Area) collapsed in multiple places, along with both of the backup routes around the problem, leading to multi-hour backups every day for a couple of months. And there are still significant roads (e.g. Highway 35) that have not reopened. Oh, and the newly built Bay Bridge is having serious problems caused by rusting bolts, rusting cables, etc. Most of the city streets are a patchwork of half-a**ed repairs that have never been repaved, resulting in a painfully bad ride. Honestly, from what I've seen, the roads in the middle of nowhere are better than Bay Area and Bay-Area-adjacent roads. They still never get repaved, but at least they don't get enough traffic to damage them.
And it isn't just roads. I live smack in the middle of SV, and there's still no fiber available where I live—only cable. Up until about two years ago, the only option was 3 megabit DSL. My parents, in a TN town of ~10k people, are about to get fiber before me. So no, our infrastructure isn't that great.
If CA wants to have higher taxes to help their poor and elderly I don't think anyone would be upset about it. If TN had horrible care then just as those residents in coastal states highly effected by hurricanes can use their feet so to can they do so for weak social programs. However, when it is federal then all citizens are forced to pay so if you are going to pay you might as well try and get something out of it.
Funny you should mention that. The one thing the Bay Area has going for it is better services for the homeless. Unfortunately, this really isn't optional for us. The harsh reality is that a shocking percentage of the country's homeless end up in California eventually. We have 12.5% of the population of the U.S., but 28% of the homeless population. And there's no evidence that this is driven by better homeless programs, but rather evidence suggests that it is driven by the moderate weather, which ensures that people don't freeze to death during the winter. Oregon and Washington have the same problem, but IIRC have far fewer services for the homeless.
Unfortunately, the federal government gives out its money to California at less than a per-capita rate, and we have 2.25x the per-capita rate of homeless, so this influx of homeless from the rest of the country means that California effectively has to pay for other states' homeless problems through our state income taxes. Those costs really should be borne at the federal level, because they are the country's problems. The income tax deductions in part help California pay for costs that other states really should have been helping out with for the past thirty years.
So when Californians say that they feel they're getting screwed, we really mean it, and we have good reasons for thinking that. If you don't live he
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No, of course not. The correct answer to that question is always, "Well, it depends on whether that company is a near monopoly or not."
ISPs are monopolies, or very nearly so. About 78% of Americans have either zero or one ISP that meets the FCC's minimum criteria for being a broadband provider. Zero or one. That means that when they block content, their users cannot get to that content at all.
As for those tech companies that a few folks above are claiming are "pro-censorship"? None of them are monopolies. None of them are even close. There are dozens of search engines, hundreds of social networks, and tens of millions of servers on the Internet, run by tens of thousands of companies.
Content creators have near-infinite numbers of choices, so requiring server companies to serve content that they find distasteful does very little to prevent censorship. Content consumers have very little (if any) choice in providers, so requiring ISPs to pass along content that they find distasteful is absolutely critical to preventing censorship. And that's why net neutrality is so important.
Or deliberately added jitter to their cable service latency to cause problems for VoIP providers (but conveniently did QoS routing for their own, in-house VoIP services).
Nice reality distortion field there. Netflix was very much throttled, in effect, just not explicitly. Specifically, Comcast refused to upgrade their bandwidth to the nearest peering point to ensure an adequate experience for their customers unless Netflix paid them an extortion fee, all the while ensuring that their competing streaming services worked well, in what was, IMO, a deliberate, illegal, anticompetitive violation of antitrust laws. No Netflix did not throttle themselves. They paid for fast service to a peering point adjacent to Comcast. Comcast deliberately refused to upgrade things on their side even if Netflix paid for the upgrade, because it was never about the cost of providing the actual network connection; it was always about Comcast wanting an ongoing income from Netflix to make up for losses caused by competition with their paid streaming services.
If by that, you mean that ISPs are in favor of censorship, you're right. If you're arguing that companies like Google, Netflix, Facebook, etc. are advocates of censorship, you're just chasing shadows and distracting people from the real issues.
Net neutrality isn't about big tech companies getting screwed by the ISPs. Those companies are big enough that any ISP that seriously tried to break them would get customers marching on their headquarters with pitchforks, and lawyers having pleasant conversations in front of a jury. You don't block Netflix or Google or Facebook and get away with it. Believe me, it has been tried. And there are entire industries selling personal VPN services that arose to get around those blocks.
No, net neutrality is not about the big players. Rather, it is about the next YouTube or Facebook or Netflix. Net neutrality means that those smaller players can't get throttled by the ISPs in favor of those big tech companies that can afford to pay their extortion fees. And in spite of the fact that these laws actually hurt the bottom line for those big tech companies, the employees of those companies are so strongly and nearly unanimously in favor of net neutrality that the upper brass are publicly supporting a policy that isn't in their best interest. That's how you know that what Pai et al are doing is screwing the public—when hundreds of thousands of highly skilled people with knowledge of how the technology works almost unanimously think that Pai's new policy is a threat to the freedom of the Internet.
I'm sorry to say this, but your entire post is basically just a distraction from the actual issues here. You're conflating two completely unrelated situations.
This perhaps needs further explanation, so that you can comprehend why "Weev" is completely and totally full of it.
Tech companies have the right to limit what is done using their servers. They are paying for the cost of keeping those servers on the public Internet, so they can set whatever rules they want to set, within reason. As a user, you are their customer, and you have to abide by their rules. More significantly, there are millions of other ways to make your content available online for a negligible amount of money without using the services of those particular companies. Your servers can be physically located anywhere in the world, which means that no tech company, no matter how big, is capable of completely censoring your right to free speech. Period. Full stop.
By contrast, ISPs do not have the right to block or throttle content from companies that exist on the public Internet. Those other companies are paying for their connection to the public Internet, and are not customers of the ISPs that historically did the throttling in question.
And you cannot reasonably argue that the customers of the ISP have to abide by their rules (throttling their access to sites on the public Internet), because their users have little or no choice in ISPs. Unfortunately, in the United States, ISPs are usually a monopoly at this point, with one or fewer viable broadband ISPs i
Those of us who have looked into the issue have pointed out a long history of abuse by multiple cable companies (prioritizing their own in-house services to the detriment of competitors, etc.) that was stopped dead in its tracks by these regulations, and that would become legal again if these regulations are removed. We pointed out example after example of this.
So at this point, focusing on the people seems like the only sane approach. Their ideas can and have be proven objectively wrong. Repeatedly. The ideas aren't the problem. The people spouting absolute nonsense are.
Wouldn't matter. They made their decision already. This is just for show. After all, lots of us did make plenty of serious legal arguments, and they ignored us, too.
You're subtly conflating two different things—the desire of the operator to operate a plant beyond its design life and the government-granted license to do so. Power plants are granted an operating license for a certain number of years. If they want to run the plant past its design life, they have to get extensive inspections and apply for a license extension from the NRC (and in some cases, license extensions from state-level organizations on top of that).
The cost of dismantling a power plant means that power companies have a strong incentive to ask the government for extensions of their operating license. That doesn't give the government any incentive to grant the extension, though. The sole reason that the regulatory agencies have such a strong incentive to grant the extensions is because those plants produce critical base load, and there are no new nuclear plants to take their place, which is largely because of the NIMBY movement, not because a power plant can't pay for its decommissioning costs during its design life.
It costs about $320M (on average) to decommission a single unit in a nuclear plant. If you assume that each unit is 1 GW (for example), and assume a 30-year design life running at full power the whole time, that decommissioning cost accounts for only about 0.125 cents per kWh. Mind you, they don't run plants at full tilt all the time, and not all power plants use such powerful generators (500 MW generators are pretty common), so the cost can vary somewhat, but the point is that it is readily absorbed within the 2+ cents per kWh that the power plants charge for power. So clearly, they are economically viable, at least in areas that need that much power.
Actually, depending on the nature of the problem, some of the changes do get retrofitted to some extent. IIRC, there were a bunch of changes to the backup power infrastructure in existing power plants after the Fukushima disaster to reduce the risk of generator failure in the event of external power loss—things like moving the power distribution boxes away from areas that might flood, for example.
But the really big stuff often requires major changes to the containment building, changes to the reactor vessel design, plumbing changes, etc., which tend to be infeasible without a long-term shutdown. For those sorts of changes, you almost have to wait until they build a new plant, or at least add a new reactor to an old plant.
That's because they're almost always right. Whenever a problem is identified in a nuclear reactor design, manufacturers work to update the designs so that future power plants won't exhibit those problems. As a result, the known flaws in existing reactors have been solved in new designs, and the only thing standing in the way of replacing all those old reactors with reactors based on newer, safer designs are NIMBY pseudo-environmentalists who have somehow convinced themselves that if they prevent new nuclear generators from being built, the need for base load will somehow magically go away.
That's not true. At least on the Model X, their current hardware (if you buy the self-driving upgrade) has eight cameras, providing the computer with a full 360-degree camera view. Their current software, however, doesn't expose that to the user.
The real trouble, then, is that there isn't a global insecure gateways blacklist that flags those poorly configured SIP gateways and causes the entire world to drop all traffic from them. There should be a bar that says, "You must be this tall to ride the ride." If a SIP provider can't keep their systems up-to-date with reasonable security, they should not be allowed to inject calls into the POTS network by any means.
You might not own or have claim to them, but you presumably have authorization from the people who do. They wouldn't have to require that you in particular are leasing the number from some telco. It would be sufficient to require you to prove that you are authorized to use the number by the person or business that is leasing the number. Obviously, your customers provide you with the source numbers, so other than the fact it would be a bit of a paperwork headache, I don't see any reason you couldn't pass on that information to your upstream provider when signing on.
I think you mis-parsed that sentence. The word "nation's" is singular possessive, so clearly, this is about a series of elections held by "18 Nation", which, judging by its name, I can only assume is either a magazine for teenagers or a porn site. Either way, its elections were influenced by social engineering, and I couldn't care less. :-)
Of course, there's also no need for egress filtering higher up in the hierarchy. By the time the packets get that high in the ISP hierarchy, they should already have been filtered by somebody at the bottom, or in the case of a giant ISP that is both an edge provider and a backbone provider, by the edge router adjacent to its non-ISP customers. The same is true for fake Caller ID, and companies that don't do proper filtering of their customers should be fined or kicked out entirely.
Policies should be made as close to the source as possible. In the case of Caller ID, IIRC, all Caller ID signals are blocked from normal phone lines, which means this really only applies to trunk line customers. Telephone companies that provide trunk lines to customers (not including trunks to other phone companies' exchanges) should be responsible for doing ingress filtering to ensure that the numbers being sent out are appropriate.
The problem, of course, is convincing all the telephone providers in places like India that they should obey those policies. The solution, of course, is for the next more-upstream provider to block all caller ID data for calls originating from telephone providers that break the rules repeatedly, until they relent and fix their policies. Either way, this is strictly a policy and enforcement problem that should have been fixed a decade ago.
That's fine. The telephone company that bridges those calls to the public phone network should have a whitelist of allowed caller IDs, and if you need to add numbers specific to your business to that whitelist, you should have to provide a very narrow list of allowed numbers to that upstream provider, and a real, live person should have to verify that those numbers really are yours before they allow them through. And it should cost $ to get each new number whitelisted.
Allowing anyone to provide any arbitrary number is complete and utter incompetence, and everyone scammed by these people probably have a legal right to file a very $$$$$$ contributory negligence suit against the scammer's upstream telecom provider for not blocking the fake caller IDs.
Not necessarily. If something can be changed by adding more cells in a particular place, it might be possible to turn cell division back on in that part of the brain, or trigged early apoptosis of undesired cells. True rewiring, of course, is a bit farther out of reach.
I'm not necessarily assuming Wi-Fi, but if they're talking about fixing it in software, that probably points to a problem with the isolation between avionics and the end-user network (unless the computers are a bit too quick to react to spurious sensor readings or something, and they think they can "solve" it by smoothing the data...).
Besides, banning electronic devices in the cabin (or even in checked baggage) wouldn't mitigate an attack caused by RF interference. The only real fix is to add shielding, because somebody could just as easily produce RF interference with a parabolic antenna aimed up from the ground.
The preposition "of" is often considered to be implied, even in American English. For the most part, the meaning is the same with or without it. There are a few exceptions, however, particularly when idioms get involved.
For example, the following sentences have completely different meaning:
The first implies that the uncle is getting down from atop a horse. The second implies something much less family-friendly.
And yet, when an automobile has a design flaw that causes a safety problem, NHTSA requires them to fix it at no cost to the customers. Some cars have seen many, many safety recalls. So at least anecdotally, it doesn't seem like forcing the manufacturers to pay for their own screw-ups results in more cover-ups.
Also, because it is cheaper to fix things before they are deployed than to incur the cost of fixing them later, a manufacturer-pays policy has the added advantage of making the manufacturer be more careful.
And even if that weren't a serious safety risk, that would still be the dumbest, most invasive possible approach to fixing the problem. The smartest, least invasive approach would be to permanently shut down the in-flight Wi-Fi on planes that can't be secured. No access to the network = no ability to crack into the systems.
Besides, anything you can do with a device on your person, you can also do with a device in the hold, using a timer or the built-in barometric pressure sensor. Banning devices from carry-on does nothing if the Wi-Fi network is still running, because the attack is still possible. And if the Wi-Fi network is not running, then banning the devices still does nothing because the attack wouldn't be possible either way. So no matter what, a ban does nothing but annoy passengers.
Private concerns do it all the time. They get "redevelopment funds" to build out the infrastructure, but then it is privately owned. You, the taxpayer, end up paying for it whether you use it or not, but you don't get the benefit of the government continuing to own the infrastructure and getting to benefit by leasing it to ISPs. Private infrastructure is generally the worst of all possible options other than perhaps no infrastructure at all.
From the infrastructure buildout cost? No. That wouldn't be feasible. From the cost of operating it? Yes. Municipal ISPs work just like any other ISP. If you aren't using it, you don't pay for it.
That said, they are usually much cheaper and faster than the commercial ISPs, because they don't need to turn a profit. And often, multiple commercial ISPs spring up to lease access from the city and provide additional value-add services (e.g. cable-TV-over-fiber) at prices that are also much cheaper than the existing cable companies and ISPs, because the infrastructure cost (the expensive part) is run on a non-profit basis. So in the long term, most people will be using it....
They made the mistake of assuming they could charge ridiculously high prices to pay off the cost of the structure quickly. This probably means that either they didn't really need the parking structure or they didn't do sufficient financial planning to support it over the lifetime of the loan. It happens.
But experimentally, public fiber services have not had those sorts of problems. Quite the opposite. In the absence of unreasonable regulatory hurdles from incumbent ISPs, new fiber providers kick the living crap out of the incumbents cost-wise and service-wise, regardless of whether those fiber providers are governmental or commercial. But government-owned fiber has the advantage of being able to be leased non-preferentially, which allows for true competition that would otherwise be infeasible because of the cost of the infrastructure. That makes it by far the best approach to rolling out fiber, in the absence of laws preventing it.
Oops. I forgot to preview that last paragraph. It should read "... because (n * .8) < (n * 1.6) for all values of n."
No, I'm proposing applying an average to entire states.
No, what I said was that there are already exceptions in the law that allow residents states that collect large amounts of state-level taxes to deduct them from their federal taxes, and that this helps make up for those same states typically paying more in federal taxes than they get back in services from the federal government. And without those exceptions, I want exceptions written into the law that says that if the state average outflow to the federal government is low, the state-level inflow from the federal government should be proportionally low. I said nothing about any individual getting less despite paying his/her fair share. Any such scheme would be nonsensical. At the individual level, federal spending is inherently unequal. The wealthy will never be covered by Medicaid. The young will never get social security payments (at least until they get older, and maybe even then). And so on. It would be crazy to try to balance out federal spending proportional to taxes paid at an individual level, because federal aid is more closely related to (1/taxes_paid) than to taxes_paid at the individual level.
There's also a second reason not to tax that income at the federal level: the money you pay to the state in taxes was never really yours to spend in the first place; you would effectively be paying taxes on nothing. If I buy a stock at $1, and it climbs to $100 and then falls again, and I sell it at $2, I pay taxes on $1, not $99, because I lost all of that gain again during the tax year. Similarly, if I get money from my employer, but that money is claimed by the state before I ever see a penny of it, how is that different? That money was never mine; I had no opportunity to spend it; why should I pay taxes on it? It really doesn't make a lot of sense to tax that "money".
Except that I think we should raise federal taxes everywhere, and increase spending in CA to give California more resources to address the problem. The only way your approach would work is if the federal taxes went to zero. Otherwise, there will always still be an imbalance, because (n * .8)
Agreed.
That's a non-sequitur. States get federal money largely because of things like where military bases are located, where defense contractors are located, where natural disasters happen, etc. It has almost nothing to do with whether the state is rich or poor, beyond that states with lower taxes tend to not grow as quickly, because they can't build up their infrastructure enough to attract businesses from other states that do, and as a result, often end up asking for more federal grants to keep things from getting worse. But even then, the overall poverty is, ironically, a result of under-taxation. It's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem. You have to spend money to make money—something that neoconservatives seem to too often forget.
I really don't understand why you feel it is so unreasonable to expect each state to get back resources from the federal government roughly in proportion to what they pay in taxes, on average. Isn't it the conservative position that we should all be more self-reliant? :-D
How is a giant influx of homeless from other states caused by California? Please tell me. As for the "expansive welfare state", the "welfare" you're imagining is the farthest thing from reality. Most homeless services are provided by private non-profits, churches, and other similar groups, not by the government, though some of the homeless shelters are in buildings owned by the government, and I'm sure the state provides grants that help support some of those organizations as well.
The main governmental costs arising from the homeless influx are completely unavoidable except perhaps by deporting them back to their states of origin. For example, the state has to pay for constant repairs to public restroom facilities resulting from vandalism (because many homeless have serious mental health issues), additional police protection/temporary incarceration/psych holds whenever the mentally ill go off their meds or get high on meth and endanger themselves or others, mental health care, emergency medical care (brown recluse bites are particularly common when sleeping outside, for example), and so on. And you can't just ignore thousands of homeless people living in makeshift encampments in a city park. If you don't clear out those encampments, they turn into a public health crisis with thousands of people using the bathroom on public streets. This, in turn, means a large police presence, plus finding places to house them so that they don't end up right back there in a few days.
And what do you propose to cut when all the essential programs are already hopelessly underfunded? You can only cut so much, and California has pared things to the bone already.
Well, I guess there's one other alternative: eliminate the income tax and increase property taxes (which are expected to remain deductible) to compensate. The net effect would average out in higher rental costs, and the federal government would get the same amount of revenue that it gets now....
I don't think that at all. Risk pools are extremely useful. What I said was that people who choose to engage in behavior that has higher risk should pay higher insurance. Companies that get more unemployment claims have to pay more for unemployment insurance. People who live in earthquake country have to pay extra for quake insurance. People who live in flood zones have to pay extra for flood insurance. People who constantly file more insurance claims have to pay higher premiums. So why shouldn't states that routinely take in extra money in federal aid have to pay more in federal taxes? It's just about the only situation where things have stayed as skewed as they are for as long as they have.
What, precisely, do you think I'm doing when I'm arguing that state taxes should remain federally deductible? If we lose that deduction, it will reduce available money that goes into the local economy, funding the state through sales taxes, property taxes, etc.
This is completely different, because the young and healthy eventually become old and less healthy (unless they die). By contrast, the states that take more federal dollars than they pay in taxes have been fairly consistent for decades.
And it is not my fault that your state chose to not charge enough taxes to cover your needs, and forces the federal government to make up the difference. It is not my fault that your state effectively exports your homeless problem to my state and doesn't pick up the tab. In effect, you are punishing me individually because of your distorted sense of fairness. Two wrongs don't make a right, but that second wrong helps balance the scales. Removing the pro-California imbalance without removing the anti-California imbalance runs the risk of forcing California to choose between financial collapse and secession, neither of which would be good for California or for the rest of the country.
That's actually a great example in favor of my position. Businesses pay different unemployment insurance costs depending on their rate of claims. What I'm saying is that this should be true for a lot more things than it currently is. States that constantly rely on federal aid should pay more in taxes so that things balance out.
Whoever told you that was wrong. The richest parts of Silicon Valley have good infrastructure. Much of the rest is an absolute disaster. This spring, a major road between the Bay Area and Santa Cruz (one of the bedroom communities adjacent to the Bay Area) collapsed in multiple places, along with both of the backup routes around the problem, leading to multi-hour backups every day for a couple of months. And there are still significant roads (e.g. Highway 35) that have not reopened. Oh, and the newly built Bay Bridge is having serious problems caused by rusting bolts, rusting cables, etc. Most of the city streets are a patchwork of half-a**ed repairs that have never been repaved, resulting in a painfully bad ride. Honestly, from what I've seen, the roads in the middle of nowhere are better than Bay Area and Bay-Area-adjacent roads. They still never get repaved, but at least they don't get enough traffic to damage them.
And it isn't just roads. I live smack in the middle of SV, and there's still no fiber available where I live—only cable. Up until about two years ago, the only option was 3 megabit DSL. My parents, in a TN town of ~10k people, are about to get fiber before me. So no, our infrastructure isn't that great.
Funny you should mention that. The one thing the Bay Area has going for it is better services for the homeless. Unfortunately, this really isn't optional for us. The harsh reality is that a shocking percentage of the country's homeless end up in California eventually. We have 12.5% of the population of the U.S., but 28% of the homeless population. And there's no evidence that this is driven by better homeless programs, but rather evidence suggests that it is driven by the moderate weather, which ensures that people don't freeze to death during the winter. Oregon and Washington have the same problem, but IIRC have far fewer services for the homeless.
Unfortunately, the federal government gives out its money to California at less than a per-capita rate, and we have 2.25x the per-capita rate of homeless, so this influx of homeless from the rest of the country means that California effectively has to pay for other states' homeless problems through our state income taxes. Those costs really should be borne at the federal level, because they are the country's problems. The income tax deductions in part help California pay for costs that other states really should have been helping out with for the past thirty years.
So when Californians say that they feel they're getting screwed, we really mean it, and we have good reasons for thinking that. If you don't live he