Yes, this. The USA isn't perfect in its conduct, but by and large the USA strives to be the protector of the post World War II international order, the cornerstone of which is that war for conquest of territory is forbidden. Everyone should be able to agree that this makes for a better world order than what came before, or what countries like Russia or Iran or China might care to replace it with.
As for the notion of asking that all NATO members contribute as recommended, it's certainly fair to point out that some aren't, and to chastise them for it. What concerned me about the remarks that were made was the suggestion that maybe we shouldn't come to the defense of countries we don't feel are doing enough. If Germany or France or Latver-whateveria is contributing less than they should, that's an issue sure, but dissolving the alliance itself is a very serious matter that should not be undertaken lightly, at all.
Exactly. "It took a few patches to become stable" sums it up right here. Reviews will fixate around that initial build they receive, and if it's problematic, they're going to say so. They usually don't come back and revisit it later, unless something radically changes. It does happen though, but it's pretty rare.
It shows just how massive the partisan divide is. It seems to have completely slipped peoples' minds that "breaking into the DNC to look for dirt to use against the Democratic Presidential Candidate" is EXACTLY what started a little controversy called "Watergate." But, because it's politically advantageous, a number of people seem to be dead set on ignoring or dismissing any evidence about what happened this time.
Let's be _absolutely_ clear: This isn't about sour grapes because the Democrats lost. This isn't about attacking Trump (though he and his supporters treat it as such, which is disturbing in its own way). This _is_ about what happens next time, because if you establish a precedent that it's basically okay for foreign governments to hack and dox political campaigns in the USA, they're going to keep doing it. Worse, others like China or Iran might just decide to join in. Worse still, candidates might preemptively cozy up to Russia or whomever in hopes of getting assistance against their opponent(s).
I agree, I'd much rather pay a one time flat fee, even if the game turns out to suck.
It's an interesting question, though, whether psychologically that holds true for the majority of people, especially given how successful some of the microtransaction games turn out to be. I could certainly envision that a lot of people would turn out to be drawn more towards a model where there's a low or nonexistent up front cost, with small/incremental costs for additional features. People would tell themselves "Oh, I won't buy those" or "I'll just buy the one or two I really want", and then they get hooked, and those 'small' costs add up, often to far more than a flat rate would be. We don't process prices in a purely logical fashion (hence the plethora of "x.99" prices, for instance), and several.99 and 1.99 purchases doesn't feel like as big of a hit as 9.99, despite the fact that they'll add up to more.
Cheap Natural Gas is what killed coal, not regulations. There's almost nowhere in the country now that some other form of generation won't be cheaper than coal.
That's why I'll be offering a special device called an AirPods retention strap. It consists of a small cord connected to the end of each AirPod, that you tie to the device. It's so genius, and so obvious, I don't know why anyone never thought of doing that before.
Yep. This is how Intelligence works. The secrecy levels and the caveats are used to protect the methods and sources that gathered the information. Raw reports are classified the highest, because of the likelihood that they can be used to identify the source behind them. The more you water down the information, you protect the source, and can share it more widely, but at the cost of exacting accuracy. For instance, if the OSS/MI6 had a spy in Hitler's inner circle that was passing them secrets, they'd go to ridiculous lengths not to let that guy get identified, to the point that they wouldn't immediately arrest a German spy in the Pentagon if doing so would risk revealing their own spy in Germany.
There's lots of historical cases in this going back and forth, where spy agencies try to construct plausible deniability to go ahead and act on information they already have, without giving away how they got it.
So, no, we're probably not going to get an explicit answer. But really, let me ask this - do you really think someone in Russia would take these kinds of risks and go to these lengths without Putin's approval? Do you really think Putin would look at something like this and go, "No, we should not do that to the Americans"?
As with most things done "on a computer" this isn't new. So let's translate it for the non-internet age.
Imagine that in a U.S. Presidential election, a group acting without the direct knowledge of the candidate broke into offices of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, intending to wiretap the offices and look for material that could be used to attack them and make them look bad.
Would that have been a scandal? Because that's never happe- oh, wait, it did. It was called Watergate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Now imagine that, instead of G. Gordon Liddy and pals, it was a bunch of KGB officers breaking in to wiretap the offices of the DNC. Does this substantially change what happened, if the Presidential candidate who benefits still does everything in his power to squash the resulting call for investigations? Should we just ignore it and move on? Because this is NOT the sort of thing we should be letting pass, regardless of who's doing it. It's not even necessarily about this particular election, because of the precedent it sets. What happens if next time it's a Democrat who's perceived as friendly to Russia, and a Republican that's a Russian hawk? Worse, what if future presidential candidates deliberately start cozying up to Russia because they know that if they don't, they'll get hacked and dox'ed. Think after that, it'll just be the Russians doing it? If I were China, I'd be paying close attention to this too, nevermind Iran.
Put another way, he's just handing them the keys to the kingdom for free instead of getting money for it.
Asking about how much money they gave is missing the point - the concern was never that a candidate takes money, it's that the candidate will then turn around and do what money-givers (i.e. Goldman Sachs in this case) want, putting them in positions of power and influence, etc. If he's going to just give them whatever they want anyway, it's entirely irrelevant whether or not they gave him money for it.
The money was never the point - it's what we expected to follow the giving of the money that was the concern, and now that's happening even without the money (which should be even more alarming).
Or blaming Obama for withdrawing troops from Iraq, when it was Bush who signed the agreement to do so. Point that out, and then they claim Obama should have renegotiated, despite the fact that the Iraqi government wasn't willing to agree on any terms that would have been remotely acceptable.
Or blaming Obama for the economy/budget deficit, despite the crash that took place under Bush before Obama was even elected. Could he have done more to fix it after he took office? Sure, but he was also facing huge resistance against anything he wanted to do towards that end.
And what did "private" society do to clean up the environment? Mobilized to force politicians to enact laws and regulations, that's what, because that's what works most efficiently. Government leads the parade because we put it there, because nobody else has the power to do what we need it to do. If we created some other entity with that ability, it would just be 'government' by a different name.
The EPA could certainly be run better. It could certainly do a better job. I've yet to hear real suggestions about that, as opposed to knee-jerk "Government bad, private sector free market good" drivel. The private sector would murder babies if it increased profits and nobody stopped them, because that's how capitalism works if left unchecked. Capitalism can do very good things, but like nuclear energy, if you don't control it, it makes a huge frakking mess. Don't believe me? Go read up on Slavery. (No, Slavery wasn't about race at first - it was about money. The racist stuff was what people invented to help themselves feel less terrible about the terrible things they were doing to other humans).
Clearly the problem is that we need to do a better job of controlling our government - but I think the problem is less that the agencies run amuck, so much as some of the people we're sending to Washington who have no interest in seeing the government be run well. We elect people that say "Government is Terrible", and then we're surprised when they give us terrible government?
What you're missing is that the Party members and their cronies own/run the coal mines and coal plants, too. It's not a communist system anymore, per se, but more of a state-owned enterprise that isn't even really socialism so much as it is "State Capitalism" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). They could shut it off or switch, but the party and its cronies are making money off the current power plants, and don't want to switch.
So imagine what would happen if the coal mines and coal plants were owned/run by the same people who were best buddies with, and members of the same party as, the people who run the government. The government may well have the power to shut down those coal plants overnight, but it doesn't matter a damn if they're not going to use it.
What's more, the latest reports from the investigation being conducted on the Bangladesh hacks indicate that there may have been insider help, in the form of weakening security protocols. If true, it explains a lot, because it's a lot tougher to keep hackers out when your own people are opening doors for them.
That, and Trump himself has a preference for hiring foreign workers (using H-2B visas) for his country club in Florida, despite the availability of local American workers. Maybe he'll close the loopholes - but I'm not holding my breath.
Incidentally, this is also part of why the Obama administration, and others before it, wanted a trade agreement - because we want to sell more agricultural products to Japan. The copyright stuff was shoehorned in there by the **AA, and it was an unfortunate side effect, not the initial intent.
What makes me think they need people to buy their stuff? The fact that they still focus on getting rich despite the fact that they're already ridiculously wealthy. It's NEVER enough. The people who get that rich pretty much always want more.
For #1, you basically have to shift the tax burden from personal incomes, which will be dwindling anyway as jobs get automated, to something else that basically amounts to "tax the work the robots do." Whether that's corporate taxes or capital gains taxes or something, I don't know - but this isn't exactly unprecedented, because we used to rely primarily on tariffs and duties, and only switched to income taxes around the end of the 19th century.
The second will be a bit harder, because it's going to require a paradigm shift. This is why I think a universal basic income program is a better alternative than expanding current welfare problems. It's one thing if "those people are getting a free ride while I work for what I get" versus "I get the same check they do, plus I get extra since I work too."
Inflation is the short answer, yes. There's a bit more to it though.
The more detailed answer is that "money", whether it's physical bills/coins, bitcoins, or digits in an account on a computer, is just a proxy for real things - goods and services. Direct barter is pretty inefficient, in terms of time/effort/etc, so we abstract it with money. Now, while there's really no upper or lower bound on how much 'money' there is, there's a finite amount of physical goods and other productivity in the economy at a given time. Ideally, we'd have a perfect 1:1 ratio so that the amount of money flowing around matches the amount of physical goods/etc. In practice it's pretty difficult to actually do that to an exacting amount, so keeping it reasonably balanced is one of the primary responsibilities of a country's central bank, like the Fed.
The economy is generally growing, which means more goods and services, which means more money is needed to keep pace. Inflation isn't inherently bad, not in small amounts. It's only when inflation goes high that it gets bad. More importantly, negative inflation (deflation) is really really bad, because in that situation, the economy grinds to a halt because nobody wants to spend money (because it'll be worth more tomorrow), and we get into a nasty cycle that's hard to break out of - one that usually requires a lot of inflationary pressure to counteract, such as printing money or a central bank injecting more funds like the Fed did. Otherwise, if the government isn't willing to do enough, you wind up like Japan with your economy stuck in neutral for a decade or two.
So back to the question of reimbursement for bank theft losses - sure, you could probably absorb one or two of these without any real economic impact. The problem tends to come in the long run when you've established a policy of doing so, because it can quickly get out of control - try explaining why you'll reimburse Alice but not Bob for their losses.
The basic problem is that it's equivalent to the Russian government printing 2 billion rubles and handing it to the bank to replace a physical theft. There's still the matter of the stolen 2 billion rubles floating around out there. If you don't deal with that somehow, by tracing it down and freezing/deleting it (at which point you're effectively returning it), then all you've done is magically create 2 billion rubles.
Needless to say, this can lead to some serious problems in the long run.
Why do they have to remain though? What happens when we just don't need that many people working in jobs that pay sufficiently well to qualify as "middle class"? Manufacturing is up in the USA, but manufacturing _employment_ is way down.
Incidentally, Friedman also supported the most reasonable solution to the problem we'll be facing - a universal basic income. When you get past the initial fact that it's handing money out to people (via Government), it's actually a surprisingly libertarian/capitalistic solution. No need for huge bureaucracies overseeing multiple different benefit programs, just someone to sign and send out the checks. No more need for a minimum wage - the market can freely price human labor at appropriate rates, because nobody -needs- their job to survive.
People won't stop working, either. It's just not in our nature. Look at the military, where people can retire with a significant paycheck as early as 38. Do they stop working and play video games all day? Some might, but most just get a new job in the civilian world and combine that pay with their retirement. You'd see people go back to school, or maybe stay home to take care of kids (which is itself a full-time job, just not a paid one).
Most importantly, basic income would keep the economy functioning in a world where most of the productivity was generated by machines, by maintaining the supply and demand signals.
It's not exactly what I'd call a good sign, though.
And no, while the FCC isn't supposed to be "politicized", its structure expressly states that there will be two commissioners for each party, and the chair will be from the President's party. The President doesn't get to dictate the policy, but that doesn't mean his choice won't have a huge impact on the policies they pursue.
Far more likely they'd just immediately knuckle under to the MPAA/RIAA/etc and grant them the power to basically demand that a given user get cut off from the internet, without so much as a chance to defend themselves. That's what the media cartels REALLY want.
Worse, most of the media owners increasingly now ARE your ISP, so they wouldn't even have to go to court, just send over an interoffice email.
In fairness, this isn't a 100% left/right divide, although there seems to be more opposition from Democrats than Republicans. That said however, the important thing is to remember who voted for which, and work to get those people out of office. And the best way to do that? Most likely through support of primary opponents that make an issue of this.
I haven't seen a posting yet of the entire list, but in addition to the two named in the summary, Chris Coons (D-Delaware) and Steve Maines (R-Montana) are also noted in TFA as voicing opposition.
Some to a greater or lesser degree, certainly, and different voices can have different degrees (or types) of opinion/slant, but it's there nonetheless. It's also accompanied in many cases by a strong push to distrust the "mainstream media", which usually means "everyone that isn't us." To be sure there's more of that on the right than the left, but it does exist on the left nonetheless, and for both sides it generally amounts to "the rest of the media isn't covering things we want, the way we want."
And this isn't necessarily a terrible thing, because it's very hard to be -completely- neutral. The problem is that most people are just not equipped to perform the kind of critical thinking required to find the actual truth amid conflicting stories and sources. Most didn't grow up with having to do so, and haven't adapted to the new environment. This isn't the first time it's been like this though - we can go back to older periods of time when the news was similarly partisan and fractured, and the world didn't end. We can also look at other english-speaking countries that have heavily partisan media, and the world didn't end there, either. If anything, the period we had in the late 20th century where the "News" was seen as inherently trustworthy and neutral was an anomaly.
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Yes, this. The USA isn't perfect in its conduct, but by and large the USA strives to be the protector of the post World War II international order, the cornerstone of which is that war for conquest of territory is forbidden. Everyone should be able to agree that this makes for a better world order than what came before, or what countries like Russia or Iran or China might care to replace it with.
As for the notion of asking that all NATO members contribute as recommended, it's certainly fair to point out that some aren't, and to chastise them for it. What concerned me about the remarks that were made was the suggestion that maybe we shouldn't come to the defense of countries we don't feel are doing enough. If Germany or France or Latver-whateveria is contributing less than they should, that's an issue sure, but dissolving the alliance itself is a very serious matter that should not be undertaken lightly, at all.
Exactly. "It took a few patches to become stable" sums it up right here. Reviews will fixate around that initial build they receive, and if it's problematic, they're going to say so. They usually don't come back and revisit it later, unless something radically changes. It does happen though, but it's pretty rare.
It shows just how massive the partisan divide is. It seems to have completely slipped peoples' minds that "breaking into the DNC to look for dirt to use against the Democratic Presidential Candidate" is EXACTLY what started a little controversy called "Watergate." But, because it's politically advantageous, a number of people seem to be dead set on ignoring or dismissing any evidence about what happened this time.
Let's be _absolutely_ clear: This isn't about sour grapes because the Democrats lost. This isn't about attacking Trump (though he and his supporters treat it as such, which is disturbing in its own way). This _is_ about what happens next time, because if you establish a precedent that it's basically okay for foreign governments to hack and dox political campaigns in the USA, they're going to keep doing it. Worse, others like China or Iran might just decide to join in. Worse still, candidates might preemptively cozy up to Russia or whomever in hopes of getting assistance against their opponent(s).
I agree, I'd much rather pay a one time flat fee, even if the game turns out to suck.
.99 and 1.99 purchases doesn't feel like as big of a hit as 9.99, despite the fact that they'll add up to more.
It's an interesting question, though, whether psychologically that holds true for the majority of people, especially given how successful some of the microtransaction games turn out to be. I could certainly envision that a lot of people would turn out to be drawn more towards a model where there's a low or nonexistent up front cost, with small/incremental costs for additional features. People would tell themselves "Oh, I won't buy those" or "I'll just buy the one or two I really want", and then they get hooked, and those 'small' costs add up, often to far more than a flat rate would be. We don't process prices in a purely logical fashion (hence the plethora of "x.99" prices, for instance), and several
Cheap Natural Gas is what killed coal, not regulations. There's almost nowhere in the country now that some other form of generation won't be cheaper than coal.
That's why I'll be offering a special device called an AirPods retention strap. It consists of a small cord connected to the end of each AirPod, that you tie to the device. It's so genius, and so obvious, I don't know why anyone never thought of doing that before.
Yep. This is how Intelligence works. The secrecy levels and the caveats are used to protect the methods and sources that gathered the information. Raw reports are classified the highest, because of the likelihood that they can be used to identify the source behind them. The more you water down the information, you protect the source, and can share it more widely, but at the cost of exacting accuracy. For instance, if the OSS/MI6 had a spy in Hitler's inner circle that was passing them secrets, they'd go to ridiculous lengths not to let that guy get identified, to the point that they wouldn't immediately arrest a German spy in the Pentagon if doing so would risk revealing their own spy in Germany.
There's lots of historical cases in this going back and forth, where spy agencies try to construct plausible deniability to go ahead and act on information they already have, without giving away how they got it.
So, no, we're probably not going to get an explicit answer. But really, let me ask this - do you really think someone in Russia would take these kinds of risks and go to these lengths without Putin's approval? Do you really think Putin would look at something like this and go, "No, we should not do that to the Americans"?
As with most things done "on a computer" this isn't new. So let's translate it for the non-internet age.
Imagine that in a U.S. Presidential election, a group acting without the direct knowledge of the candidate broke into offices of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, intending to wiretap the offices and look for material that could be used to attack them and make them look bad.
Would that have been a scandal? Because that's never happe- oh, wait, it did. It was called Watergate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Now imagine that, instead of G. Gordon Liddy and pals, it was a bunch of KGB officers breaking in to wiretap the offices of the DNC. Does this substantially change what happened, if the Presidential candidate who benefits still does everything in his power to squash the resulting call for investigations? Should we just ignore it and move on? Because this is NOT the sort of thing we should be letting pass, regardless of who's doing it. It's not even necessarily about this particular election, because of the precedent it sets. What happens if next time it's a Democrat who's perceived as friendly to Russia, and a Republican that's a Russian hawk? Worse, what if future presidential candidates deliberately start cozying up to Russia because they know that if they don't, they'll get hacked and dox'ed. Think after that, it'll just be the Russians doing it? If I were China, I'd be paying close attention to this too, nevermind Iran.
Put another way, he's just handing them the keys to the kingdom for free instead of getting money for it.
Asking about how much money they gave is missing the point - the concern was never that a candidate takes money, it's that the candidate will then turn around and do what money-givers (i.e. Goldman Sachs in this case) want, putting them in positions of power and influence, etc. If he's going to just give them whatever they want anyway, it's entirely irrelevant whether or not they gave him money for it.
The money was never the point - it's what we expected to follow the giving of the money that was the concern, and now that's happening even without the money (which should be even more alarming).
Or blaming Obama for withdrawing troops from Iraq, when it was Bush who signed the agreement to do so. Point that out, and then they claim Obama should have renegotiated, despite the fact that the Iraqi government wasn't willing to agree on any terms that would have been remotely acceptable.
Or blaming Obama for the economy/budget deficit, despite the crash that took place under Bush before Obama was even elected. Could he have done more to fix it after he took office? Sure, but he was also facing huge resistance against anything he wanted to do towards that end.
And what did "private" society do to clean up the environment? Mobilized to force politicians to enact laws and regulations, that's what, because that's what works most efficiently. Government leads the parade because we put it there, because nobody else has the power to do what we need it to do. If we created some other entity with that ability, it would just be 'government' by a different name.
The EPA could certainly be run better. It could certainly do a better job. I've yet to hear real suggestions about that, as opposed to knee-jerk "Government bad, private sector free market good" drivel. The private sector would murder babies if it increased profits and nobody stopped them, because that's how capitalism works if left unchecked. Capitalism can do very good things, but like nuclear energy, if you don't control it, it makes a huge frakking mess. Don't believe me? Go read up on Slavery. (No, Slavery wasn't about race at first - it was about money. The racist stuff was what people invented to help themselves feel less terrible about the terrible things they were doing to other humans).
Clearly the problem is that we need to do a better job of controlling our government - but I think the problem is less that the agencies run amuck, so much as some of the people we're sending to Washington who have no interest in seeing the government be run well. We elect people that say "Government is Terrible", and then we're surprised when they give us terrible government?
What you're missing is that the Party members and their cronies own/run the coal mines and coal plants, too. It's not a communist system anymore, per se, but more of a state-owned enterprise that isn't even really socialism so much as it is "State Capitalism" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). They could shut it off or switch, but the party and its cronies are making money off the current power plants, and don't want to switch.
So imagine what would happen if the coal mines and coal plants were owned/run by the same people who were best buddies with, and members of the same party as, the people who run the government. The government may well have the power to shut down those coal plants overnight, but it doesn't matter a damn if they're not going to use it.
What's more, the latest reports from the investigation being conducted on the Bangladesh hacks indicate that there may have been insider help, in the form of weakening security protocols. If true, it explains a lot, because it's a lot tougher to keep hackers out when your own people are opening doors for them.
That, and Trump himself has a preference for hiring foreign workers (using H-2B visas) for his country club in Florida, despite the availability of local American workers. Maybe he'll close the loopholes - but I'm not holding my breath.
Incidentally, this is also part of why the Obama administration, and others before it, wanted a trade agreement - because we want to sell more agricultural products to Japan. The copyright stuff was shoehorned in there by the **AA, and it was an unfortunate side effect, not the initial intent.
What makes me think they need people to buy their stuff? The fact that they still focus on getting rich despite the fact that they're already ridiculously wealthy. It's NEVER enough. The people who get that rich pretty much always want more.
For #1, you basically have to shift the tax burden from personal incomes, which will be dwindling anyway as jobs get automated, to something else that basically amounts to "tax the work the robots do." Whether that's corporate taxes or capital gains taxes or something, I don't know - but this isn't exactly unprecedented, because we used to rely primarily on tariffs and duties, and only switched to income taxes around the end of the 19th century.
The second will be a bit harder, because it's going to require a paradigm shift. This is why I think a universal basic income program is a better alternative than expanding current welfare problems. It's one thing if "those people are getting a free ride while I work for what I get" versus "I get the same check they do, plus I get extra since I work too."
Inflation is the short answer, yes. There's a bit more to it though.
The more detailed answer is that "money", whether it's physical bills/coins, bitcoins, or digits in an account on a computer, is just a proxy for real things - goods and services. Direct barter is pretty inefficient, in terms of time/effort/etc, so we abstract it with money. Now, while there's really no upper or lower bound on how much 'money' there is, there's a finite amount of physical goods and other productivity in the economy at a given time. Ideally, we'd have a perfect 1:1 ratio so that the amount of money flowing around matches the amount of physical goods/etc. In practice it's pretty difficult to actually do that to an exacting amount, so keeping it reasonably balanced is one of the primary responsibilities of a country's central bank, like the Fed.
The economy is generally growing, which means more goods and services, which means more money is needed to keep pace. Inflation isn't inherently bad, not in small amounts. It's only when inflation goes high that it gets bad. More importantly, negative inflation (deflation) is really really bad, because in that situation, the economy grinds to a halt because nobody wants to spend money (because it'll be worth more tomorrow), and we get into a nasty cycle that's hard to break out of - one that usually requires a lot of inflationary pressure to counteract, such as printing money or a central bank injecting more funds like the Fed did. Otherwise, if the government isn't willing to do enough, you wind up like Japan with your economy stuck in neutral for a decade or two.
So back to the question of reimbursement for bank theft losses - sure, you could probably absorb one or two of these without any real economic impact. The problem tends to come in the long run when you've established a policy of doing so, because it can quickly get out of control - try explaining why you'll reimburse Alice but not Bob for their losses.
In theory they could.
The basic problem is that it's equivalent to the Russian government printing 2 billion rubles and handing it to the bank to replace a physical theft. There's still the matter of the stolen 2 billion rubles floating around out there. If you don't deal with that somehow, by tracing it down and freezing/deleting it (at which point you're effectively returning it), then all you've done is magically create 2 billion rubles.
Needless to say, this can lead to some serious problems in the long run.
Why do they have to remain though? What happens when we just don't need that many people working in jobs that pay sufficiently well to qualify as "middle class"? Manufacturing is up in the USA, but manufacturing _employment_ is way down.
Incidentally, Friedman also supported the most reasonable solution to the problem we'll be facing - a universal basic income. When you get past the initial fact that it's handing money out to people (via Government), it's actually a surprisingly libertarian/capitalistic solution. No need for huge bureaucracies overseeing multiple different benefit programs, just someone to sign and send out the checks. No more need for a minimum wage - the market can freely price human labor at appropriate rates, because nobody -needs- their job to survive.
People won't stop working, either. It's just not in our nature. Look at the military, where people can retire with a significant paycheck as early as 38. Do they stop working and play video games all day? Some might, but most just get a new job in the civilian world and combine that pay with their retirement. You'd see people go back to school, or maybe stay home to take care of kids (which is itself a full-time job, just not a paid one).
Most importantly, basic income would keep the economy functioning in a world where most of the productivity was generated by machines, by maintaining the supply and demand signals.
It's not exactly what I'd call a good sign, though.
And no, while the FCC isn't supposed to be "politicized", its structure expressly states that there will be two commissioners for each party, and the chair will be from the President's party. The President doesn't get to dictate the policy, but that doesn't mean his choice won't have a huge impact on the policies they pursue.
You think they'd actually go to court?
Far more likely they'd just immediately knuckle under to the MPAA/RIAA/etc and grant them the power to basically demand that a given user get cut off from the internet, without so much as a chance to defend themselves. That's what the media cartels REALLY want.
Worse, most of the media owners increasingly now ARE your ISP, so they wouldn't even have to go to court, just send over an interoffice email.
In fairness, this isn't a 100% left/right divide, although there seems to be more opposition from Democrats than Republicans. That said however, the important thing is to remember who voted for which, and work to get those people out of office. And the best way to do that? Most likely through support of primary opponents that make an issue of this.
Take note of who voted for, and against, this.
I haven't seen a posting yet of the entire list, but in addition to the two named in the summary, Chris Coons (D-Delaware) and Steve Maines (R-Montana) are also noted in TFA as voicing opposition.
Some to a greater or lesser degree, certainly, and different voices can have different degrees (or types) of opinion/slant, but it's there nonetheless. It's also accompanied in many cases by a strong push to distrust the "mainstream media", which usually means "everyone that isn't us." To be sure there's more of that on the right than the left, but it does exist on the left nonetheless, and for both sides it generally amounts to "the rest of the media isn't covering things we want, the way we want."
And this isn't necessarily a terrible thing, because it's very hard to be -completely- neutral. The problem is that most people are just not equipped to perform the kind of critical thinking required to find the actual truth amid conflicting stories and sources. Most didn't grow up with having to do so, and haven't adapted to the new environment. This isn't the first time it's been like this though - we can go back to older periods of time when the news was similarly partisan and fractured, and the world didn't end. We can also look at other english-speaking countries that have heavily partisan media, and the world didn't end there, either. If anything, the period we had in the late 20th century where the "News" was seen as inherently trustworthy and neutral was an anomaly.