Comcast and TWC are already monopolies in these communities. Sure it's strictly unfair for municipalities to have some extra bonuses when competing. But currently with de-facto monopolies in place there is no fair competition in those communities and extremely low probablility of fair competition arising on its own without government intervention. This is not a problem fixed by the application of laissez-faire free markets. These monopolies are not even providing the service that the citizens want, but they are preventing others from entering the market anyway. Worse, the state government has passed laws cementing this system into place.
If a politician, *especially* a local politician, wants to keep the job then the self-interest motivation says to listen to those local voters who live within walking distance. Thus I would trust the motivations of the local politician here over that of the distant and impersonal broadband corporation. It does not seem clear that the local politicians are opposing Comcast and TWC merely because of huge profits to be made, but instead they want their own local broadband because this is what the voters have been asking for (not 100% of them of course).
I could be wrong of course, but I suspect that the needs of the cable and broadband users in those munipalities are of absolutely no interest to Comcast, or any customer anywhere in the world for that matter. But the needs of the local cable and broadband users matter to the local politicians, to some amount greater than or equal to zero.
At the very very least, let the free market sort if out. Oh wait, we have a monopoly here so there is no free market, and state laws forbidding the creation of competition from local boards.
Do you believe that the corporations (namely, Comcast and TWC) are not a bunch of amoral self serving scumbags, only with the ability to misserve a much larger constituency than the local governments?
So, keep the proven evil company in power which the voters of the town have zero chance of affecting, versus the locally elected politicians who grew up with those same voters who can vote them out of the office on a regular basis? Do you think that there is no level of local that is small enough to allow a legitimate government and that we should relinquish all control to the corporations as the only legitimate authority?
I could understand your argument if you were talking about remote and distant federal or state governments being unaccountable to the people. But city council? If the voters can't affect city council then the democracy experiment is at an end (good thing we have a running start on our new feudal system).
Problem is, the private industry is NOT providing the service in many cases. And where the service is poor to non-existent these states are forbidding the municipalities from fixing it. Yup, Texas and North Carolina, home of big government.
Of course, if North Carolina and Texas claim loudly from one side of their mouths that they demand more State's rights without federal interference, then turn around and with the other side of their mouths deny their municipalities from having municipal rights, then they're just hypocrites. Of course, that is a redundant word when discussing politicians.
But then you're requiring that web designers actually *design* their web pages. That's unreasonable when some third party can do it for you while also including no-thought advertisement revenue at the same time.
The same ADA laws apply in Texas though. Texas is many dimensions away from being a utopia. It's certainly not the place to move to in order to escape irrational lawyers or to find more personal freedoms.
If disbarred, would they just get a junior lawyer to do their dirty work for them while still collecting the misbegotten profits? On the other hand, these guys do face a non-zero chance of jail time as well from the previous shenanigans, so that could put a damper on things.
Politics gets involved though when bidding. If there's federal funding, then all of the representatives want to get a chunk of that money to their districts somehow. Quid pro quo; I vote for your bill if you approve my amendment that requires the steel to come from my county. Doesn't matter which party these politicians are from, they're all in on the game, even those who campaign against government waste are amongst the big wasters themselves.
Normally such things like the speed regulator is not that expensive as there's no new track to be laid and no new property rights to acquire. But no, this is the US and the US does not know how to do things cheaply.
Why is it billions of dollars to something that should be much cheaper to implement? It's not a difficult concept. Unlike the highways we don't have to worry about millions of drivers refusing to follow the law. There are not very many train operators. Here's an idea, put up some speed measurement radar guns, and send some giant speeding bills to the operators if the limits are exceeded.
Or how about requiring all operators to file the equivalent of a "flight plan". They specify how fast they will go at certain places and certify that they will not exceed those speeds even if they are late due to delays at a station.
I think there's a lot of engineering inflation happening here: unions get involved, contractors bid on the systems, cost overruns ensue, things get over-engineered, politicians get involved to ensure that their favorite local constituent contractor gets a piece of the pie, etc. Billions of dollars is stupidly overpriced for something so basic. They're not creating new trains and new rails, not acquiring land rights, etc.
Deaths on roadways are decreasing. Newer cars are safer than older cars. And this is despite the fact that we still can't get them to slow down.
Future growth and earnings potential are all calculated by analysts who don't have a clue about how a real company works. They're as much influenced by hype as Apple customers are. The analysts are helping with the trend away from rating a company based on actual profitability and reliable dividends (investment) and towards raw growth and potential for growth (gambling). Which is why companies that have never turned a profit can have high valuations and companies that are solid and sustainable are not exciting enough to be highly valued.
Nobody is self-appointed. City council is voted in, the city council hires the police. Utlimately the police employers are the citizens who pay the taxes. If the citizens want better police then they need to put pressure on the city councils, possibly by voting other people in. Sure, you don't knew with new candidates whether or not they'll provide stronger oversight of the police or not and mistakes are bound to be made.
Ultimately though, if there's going to be a legal judgement then the money comes from tax payers. There is no one else to pay it, unless you think there's a magic pool of money from the feds to do this, but that pool comes from tax payers too. As far as the $20,000 settlement, that's a tiny pittance for the city of Atlanta, and they saved a lot of money by settling instead of defending themselves.
Linux is in other mainstream devices, like Tivo and Android. It's not a geek thing. It's a sensible choice to make when designing high end products. Saves development costs, saves royalty costs, higher quality than most commercial embedded operating systems especially with networking and security. Why wouldn't a manufacturer want to use it?
Except that the ads on the internet ARE impacting on stuff I want to access. Slowing things down. When I had relatives using dialup they'd spend half that time slowly waiting for ads to load before they could see the stuff they really wanted, it was not a negligeable impact.
I don't care what their business model is. It is not my responsibility. Let them go out of business if they can't figure it out.
The thing is, the advertisers are the ones getting the bargain here; it costs them a very low amount of money to present the ads. They don't have to pay the postage. They don't even have to pay the full cost of sending out the ads, instead piggybacking on the ad viewer's ISP accounts. If they sent the ads out with no cost to the viewers, no degraded system performance, and cut back on the utterly obnoxious crap they send out, then there would be no need for adblock!
True. We have the right to not listen. This is an old old story, advertisers and spammers have long argued that we MUST listen to them. They're so concerned about losing their low cost and high reward business model that they want to restrict our freedom to stick our fingers in our ears.
With television I leave the room if a commercial comes on. With radio in the car, I change the channel when commercials come on. Or better yet, I listen mostly to NPR on the radio, no commercials, all voluntary contributions, no blacklisting of people who fail to contribute. With newspapers I toss the advertising sections or use them for compost. Only on the internet do the advertisers think we should be required to view their junk.
My life is more expensive because of advertisers. The viewers of the ads have to pay for them, and that's immoral. They suck up our bandwidth without asking, they are the primary distributor of malware, they slow down our computers, and so forth. If I turn off adblock my system becomes noticeably slower. If you know someone with dialup internet, ask them how much they like waiting 5 minutes for some ads to load? And don't bitch at dialup users for not being rich like you and getting broadband.
Snail mail never makes us pay extra for the shitload of junk mail and fliers that arrive every day. Instead the advertisers have to pay for it all. Granted they get bulk discounts. However internet advertisers are taking advantage of the system, sending stuff out for a relatively low fraction of the actual cost. This is real freeloading and it is the advertisers' business model.
Next major problem with advertisers is getting all those bloggers to sign up for their ads. No radio or television station ever showed random advertisements that they knew anything about. Every single ad on radio or television was approved of before going on the air. This is extremely rare on the internet. Instead people who want to make some money off of their inexpensive hobby just add some third party script to their site, the dice is rolled and random ads show up along with a few pennies. Those sites should just go away; if they can't be responsible enough to serve up responsible ads then they should go out of "business".
That's the major problem here. Advertisements on the internet are irresponsible. Huge, obnoxious, insulting, clogging things up, delivering malware, and so forth. You'd have no more than a handful of people with ad blockers if the advertisers were responsible human beings.
Agreed. Ad blocking is not about denying revenue. Instead, ad blocking is about preserving our own systems and network. These advertisements are NOT free to us, they cost the viewers real money! They introduce malware, they slow down computer performance, they suck up amazing amounts of our bandwidth that we pay for. If they want to show us ads then they should pay for it!
What's next, they're going to blame us for throwing away the weekly snail mail advertiser without reading it?
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Comcast and TWC are already monopolies in these communities. Sure it's strictly unfair for municipalities to have some extra bonuses when competing. But currently with de-facto monopolies in place there is no fair competition in those communities and extremely low probablility of fair competition arising on its own without government intervention. This is not a problem fixed by the application of laissez-faire free markets. These monopolies are not even providing the service that the citizens want, but they are preventing others from entering the market anyway. Worse, the state government has passed laws cementing this system into place.
If a politician, *especially* a local politician, wants to keep the job then the self-interest motivation says to listen to those local voters who live within walking distance. Thus I would trust the motivations of the local politician here over that of the distant and impersonal broadband corporation. It does not seem clear that the local politicians are opposing Comcast and TWC merely because of huge profits to be made, but instead they want their own local broadband because this is what the voters have been asking for (not 100% of them of course).
I could be wrong of course, but I suspect that the needs of the cable and broadband users in those munipalities are of absolutely no interest to Comcast, or any customer anywhere in the world for that matter. But the needs of the local cable and broadband users matter to the local politicians, to some amount greater than or equal to zero.
At the very very least, let the free market sort if out. Oh wait, we have a monopoly here so there is no free market, and state laws forbidding the creation of competition from local boards.
Do you believe that the corporations (namely, Comcast and TWC) are not a bunch of amoral self serving scumbags, only with the ability to misserve a much larger constituency than the local governments?
So, keep the proven evil company in power which the voters of the town have zero chance of affecting, versus the locally elected politicians who grew up with those same voters who can vote them out of the office on a regular basis? Do you think that there is no level of local that is small enough to allow a legitimate government and that we should relinquish all control to the corporations as the only legitimate authority?
I could understand your argument if you were talking about remote and distant federal or state governments being unaccountable to the people. But city council? If the voters can't affect city council then the democracy experiment is at an end (good thing we have a running start on our new feudal system).
Problem is, the private industry is NOT providing the service in many cases. And where the service is poor to non-existent these states are forbidding the municipalities from fixing it. Yup, Texas and North Carolina, home of big government.
Don't forget, it's not just the confederate flag that they're flying, but the confederate *battle* flag.
Of course, if North Carolina and Texas claim loudly from one side of their mouths that they demand more State's rights without federal interference, then turn around and with the other side of their mouths deny their municipalities from having municipal rights, then they're just hypocrites. Of course, that is a redundant word when discussing politicians.
But then you're requiring that web designers actually *design* their web pages. That's unreasonable when some third party can do it for you while also including no-thought advertisement revenue at the same time.
And don't forget, many of us use noscript, so we end up seeing blank pages for sites like that and move on to a competitor instead.
The same ADA laws apply in Texas though. Texas is many dimensions away from being a utopia. It's certainly not the place to move to in order to escape irrational lawyers or to find more personal freedoms.
If disbarred, would they just get a junior lawyer to do their dirty work for them while still collecting the misbegotten profits?
On the other hand, these guys do face a non-zero chance of jail time as well from the previous shenanigans, so that could put a damper on things.
Politics gets involved though when bidding. If there's federal funding, then all of the representatives want to get a chunk of that money to their districts somehow. Quid pro quo; I vote for your bill if you approve my amendment that requires the steel to come from my county. Doesn't matter which party these politicians are from, they're all in on the game, even those who campaign against government waste are amongst the big wasters themselves.
Normally such things like the speed regulator is not that expensive as there's no new track to be laid and no new property rights to acquire. But no, this is the US and the US does not know how to do things cheaply.
Why is it billions of dollars to something that should be much cheaper to implement? It's not a difficult concept. Unlike the highways we don't have to worry about millions of drivers refusing to follow the law. There are not very many train operators. Here's an idea, put up some speed measurement radar guns, and send some giant speeding bills to the operators if the limits are exceeded.
Or how about requiring all operators to file the equivalent of a "flight plan". They specify how fast they will go at certain places and certify that they will not exceed those speeds even if they are late due to delays at a station.
I think there's a lot of engineering inflation happening here: unions get involved, contractors bid on the systems, cost overruns ensue, things get over-engineered, politicians get involved to ensure that their favorite local constituent contractor gets a piece of the pie, etc. Billions of dollars is stupidly overpriced for something so basic. They're not creating new trains and new rails, not acquiring land rights, etc.
Deaths on roadways are decreasing. Newer cars are safer than older cars. And this is despite the fact that we still can't get them to slow down.
Nobody expects the Illuminati.
Future growth and earnings potential are all calculated by analysts who don't have a clue about how a real company works. They're as much influenced by hype as Apple customers are. The analysts are helping with the trend away from rating a company based on actual profitability and reliable dividends (investment) and towards raw growth and potential for growth (gambling). Which is why companies that have never turned a profit can have high valuations and companies that are solid and sustainable are not exciting enough to be highly valued.
Nobody is self-appointed. City council is voted in, the city council hires the police. Utlimately the police employers are the citizens who pay the taxes. If the citizens want better police then they need to put pressure on the city councils, possibly by voting other people in. Sure, you don't knew with new candidates whether or not they'll provide stronger oversight of the police or not and mistakes are bound to be made.
Ultimately though, if there's going to be a legal judgement then the money comes from tax payers. There is no one else to pay it, unless you think there's a magic pool of money from the feds to do this, but that pool comes from tax payers too. As far as the $20,000 settlement, that's a tiny pittance for the city of Atlanta, and they saved a lot of money by settling instead of defending themselves.
I'd be happy if Adobe came out with a decent PDF reader again.
Linux is in other mainstream devices, like Tivo and Android. It's not a geek thing. It's a sensible choice to make when designing high end products. Saves development costs, saves royalty costs, higher quality than most commercial embedded operating systems especially with networking and security. Why wouldn't a manufacturer want to use it?
Who pays then, when the government elected by the people do misdeeds?
It's like The Road Warrior (mad max 2) in that sense. The original Mad Max was a lot better than the rest of the franchise. But still lots of fun.
Except that the ads on the internet ARE impacting on stuff I want to access. Slowing things down. When I had relatives using dialup they'd spend half that time slowly waiting for ads to load before they could see the stuff they really wanted, it was not a negligeable impact.
I don't care what their business model is. It is not my responsibility. Let them go out of business if they can't figure it out.
The thing is, the advertisers are the ones getting the bargain here; it costs them a very low amount of money to present the ads. They don't have to pay the postage. They don't even have to pay the full cost of sending out the ads, instead piggybacking on the ad viewer's ISP accounts. If they sent the ads out with no cost to the viewers, no degraded system performance, and cut back on the utterly obnoxious crap they send out, then there would be no need for adblock!
True. We have the right to not listen. This is an old old story, advertisers and spammers have long argued that we MUST listen to them. They're so concerned about losing their low cost and high reward business model that they want to restrict our freedom to stick our fingers in our ears.
With television I leave the room if a commercial comes on. With radio in the car, I change the channel when commercials come on. Or better yet, I listen mostly to NPR on the radio, no commercials, all voluntary contributions, no blacklisting of people who fail to contribute. With newspapers I toss the advertising sections or use them for compost. Only on the internet do the advertisers think we should be required to view their junk.
My life is more expensive because of advertisers. The viewers of the ads have to pay for them, and that's immoral. They suck up our bandwidth without asking, they are the primary distributor of malware, they slow down our computers, and so forth. If I turn off adblock my system becomes noticeably slower. If you know someone with dialup internet, ask them how much they like waiting 5 minutes for some ads to load? And don't bitch at dialup users for not being rich like you and getting broadband.
Snail mail never makes us pay extra for the shitload of junk mail and fliers that arrive every day. Instead the advertisers have to pay for it all. Granted they get bulk discounts. However internet advertisers are taking advantage of the system, sending stuff out for a relatively low fraction of the actual cost. This is real freeloading and it is the advertisers' business model.
Next major problem with advertisers is getting all those bloggers to sign up for their ads. No radio or television station ever showed random advertisements that they knew anything about. Every single ad on radio or television was approved of before going on the air. This is extremely rare on the internet. Instead people who want to make some money off of their inexpensive hobby just add some third party script to their site, the dice is rolled and random ads show up along with a few pennies. Those sites should just go away; if they can't be responsible enough to serve up responsible ads then they should go out of "business".
That's the major problem here. Advertisements on the internet are irresponsible. Huge, obnoxious, insulting, clogging things up, delivering malware, and so forth. You'd have no more than a handful of people with ad blockers if the advertisers were responsible human beings.
Agreed. Ad blocking is not about denying revenue. Instead, ad blocking is about preserving our own systems and network. These advertisements are NOT free to us, they cost the viewers real money! They introduce malware, they slow down computer performance, they suck up amazing amounts of our bandwidth that we pay for. If they want to show us ads then they should pay for it!
What's next, they're going to blame us for throwing away the weekly snail mail advertiser without reading it?