So no matter how this works out, Joe Sixpack is going to be paying for a faster, higher capacity Internet.
Don't be ridiculous. First, Comcast already enjoys 80% margins on their internet service. In other words, all their costs combined costs them $8/month/customer. Bandwidth alone is estimated at $1/month/customer. They are insanely profitable. Second, Comcast and co. already price at what the market will bear. They're duopolies, so if they could raise their price without losing customers they would have done so already. It's that simple.
If you think it does please name some monopolies that have formed without direct role of the government in creating them.
Are you kidding me? We broke up Ma Bell in 1984 and yet it has managed to reconstruct itself into AT&T and Verizon. Verizon bought out AllTel, a formidable competitor in the wireless arena for $10 billion more than anyone else was willing to pay, just before AllTel could start to compete.
Of course they do, what on earth makes you think that they don't.
WalMart's ability to drive down supply costs indicates they're not on the same level footing as their competitors. They have an advantage through their massive size and scale, and can even price below cost in order to drive out competitors from local markets. That is *not* a free market.
I guarantee that at the least, subscriber rates will jump if only to cover compliance costs.
How will a duopoly who already controls the market at prices at what the market will bear "raise prices"? If they could raise prices, they would have done so already. And compliance with what? You haven't specified anything the new regulatory scheme will force ISPs to spend money on.
Once the government has established regulatory control over the internet, it's just the standard increasing expansion of regulation (regulatory creep) that's been seen with nearly every other Federal regulatory area, whether those in charge have an (R) or (D) after their names, for the last 100 or more years.
Well that's funny. From where I'm standing the last 30 years has seen serious and harmful deregulation of various industries, such as healthcare, finance, and the internet. I have no problem with reregulating these failed areas.
I have to wonder if Democrats in favor of this have thought about how they'll feel when a conservative Republican President/Congress is elected at some point in the future and has these powers at THEIR disposal.
You mean the way it was when Bush was elected and appointed a Republican FCC commissioner? Well let's see, they reclassified broadband under Title I and screwed us all over. No I suppose we won't appreciate that.
As I understand it, internet service will be declared a public utility and regulated
Well there's your problem. You don't understand a darn thing about this reclassification plan.
Wow, I've never seen that before. Those two guys around her are total, utter douchebags. I feel like a nice beatdown would shut them up for a good while. They're just cowardly bullies picking on a woman who actually has some integrity. If these are the people reporting the news these days, it's no wonder things have become so bad.
"Practically speaking, the natural monopoly model lost much of its applicability in 1992 when the U.S. Congress prohibited local governments from engaging in exclusive franchise agreements."
Reasonable regulation where it's due.
Not taking over entire industries, though.
Competition is what drives quality of product in other segments of the economy.
There is not sufficient competition in internet service though, even with the available choices of dialup, DSL, cable, fios in some locations, several cellphone companies, satellite and terrestrial wireless.
With all those choices, why isn't competition driving prices down and quality up, like in other industries?
My guess is that there is already too much government regulation that stifles competition.
Oh, and "teabaggers?"
Why the homophobic language?
Are you kidding? Have you even bothered to turn an analytical eye on the broadband industry? Have you ever heard of a natural monopoly?
Satellite isn't broadband, and it along with dial-up and wireless can't compete with DSL and Cable. Heck, Cable is fast pulling ahead of DSL with DOCSIS 3.0 now. The things you mentioned aren't "competition", which requires similar products that can substitute for each other.
Essentially we have a duopoly in most areas, a monopoly in some. Without government forcing open-access rules on cable and DSL, we'll never have competition.
Yeah, nice try. The last time telcos had to worry about the meddling regulators was after the 1996 law passed. I remember...there was a period of about 5 years where the ILECs stumbled because they didn't know what hit them. There was budding competition, plenty of CLECs, that's when cable got in the broadband and telephony business. ILECs were fined for delaying facilities and repair orders for CLEC customers. You could get dial tone or DSL from a dozen competing providers.
Eventually, the ILECs regrouped, merged their way back to consolidation and monopoly status, put their competitors out of business with a combination of downright dirty tricks like delaying orders or claiming lack of facilities and predatory pricing....and what little complaints there were got silenced by their well paid lobbyists.
Revising history to conform to an idealogy is fun...but that doesn't mean it's the truth.
You think Tauzin or Dingell knew what they were doing? And Crazy "My Tubes" Eddie knew anything past his bottom line? Someone has to represent the public interest....clearly industry leaders and elected officials are not up to the task....the FCC needs to be strengthened and chartered with regulating all facets of "connectivity" before India and China eat our lunch. Oh wait, they already are.
Yeah but to be fair they used their older Oblivion engine, which had just a horrific physics engine, for F3. What they accomplished in terms of story and open-endedness warrants them a pat on the back (of course their battle system, difficulty levels, and AI sucked). I'm just hoping their next engine will allow for more immersion. Considering they haven't even given anyone a peek into what their next game looks like, I feel good about the prospects.
Do you have any evidence for your claims? How does Democratic=supported regulation of industries that influence the fate of our economy in any way related to "fascism"?
Fifteen years ago, the assets of the six largest banks in this country totaled 17 percent of GDP. The assets of the six largest banks in the United States today total 63% of GDP.
Mussolini himself said "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." Do you not see how the formation of super-large corporations and their increasing influence on government politics is equivalent to the invasion of fascism? Can you not see how the break-up or regulation of these extremely large corporations is akin to fighting the creep of fascism?
Who was it on the Supreme Court who voted to give corporations equal rights to people? What presidents in the last century attempted to break up giant corporations? From the Republican side only Teddy Roosevelt was anti-trust, and eventually he was shunned from his own party.
I hope you realize your entire post is anecdotal, and doesn't do anything to dispel his well-sourced arguments (with numerous polls and statistics to back him up) that Republicans are far more theocratic in their beliefs than Democrats.
Actually he's pretty intelligent. His points about the complete terribleness of the Republican party over the last 30 years versus the not-so-badness of the Democratic party ever since WW2 are quite accurate and well-sourced.
True Libertarians believe that people should be held accountable for the downstream effects of all of their actions
That's a lovely libertarian mantra. But, in reality it could never exist. When individuals in a state of nature join together for their mutual benefit (forming a society under Lockean political philosophy) their definition of "mutual" will never be the same.
Consider the founding generation. They revolted to promote their mutual goal of liberty. After 12 years of living under the relatively libertarian Articles of Confederation they ditched it for a relatively *colossal* new federal/constitutional government of 1789. They traded liberty for security (a more powerful government to which states would be more greatly subordinated).
From there it gets more complicated. Some joined together to protect their property rights. Others joined together to strip others of their property rights (the right to own slaves). Colorado became a state to control its source of water. Arizona became a state to use the federal government to get its "fair" share of that water.
Competing goals. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness often dependent upon public law -- which creates winners and losers.
When enough people feel they're consistently losing (such as, the top 1/10th of 1% quadruple their incomes as average income declines 10%, all under the auspices of "trickle down" economics), that's something to be concerned about.
You can't dismiss it with quaint depictions of liberty and happiness being exactly what you say it is.
The top tenth of 1% of the population receives half of every available dollar of income (almost as much as the bottom 50%). The question is whether they are paying "more" like they were 30 years ago, prior to income taxes becoming more regressive, before their share of the national income quadrupled while the average American lost ground.
I mean, is it a good thing that 300,000 Americans quadrupled their incomes, and pay less tax on that money today than they would have 30 years ago? To the "less tax" crowd that may sound like an ideal world. But, is that ideal when, at the same time, average income dropped 10%?
In 1980, Ronald Reagan asked "are you better off today than you were four years ago?" He got elected and proceeded to make income taxation less progressive. The result has been as described above.
But, if the average American asks the same question Reagan did, he's accused of being a "deadbeat," "wanting something for nothing."
I won't go into details on the massive deficits Reagen wracked up, the destruction of environment, the elimination of a great deal of government funded basic scientific research, etc.
What a troll you are. First the graph only goes back to '95, which is just plain disingenuous. Second it doesn't take into account Bush keeping the cost of the wars "off the books". Obama simply added them back on. You *know* Republicans generated far more deficits than Democrats did. You know this because you've been told over and over, and been shown an endless amount of evidence. Yet your mind is so screwed up, so backwards and twisted, that you will do everything in your power to lie to yourself, and lie to others, just so that you don't have to face the truth. It's fascinating and yet disturbing watching you lead a life in a tiny bubble of fake reality.
Deregulation of the Telecommunications Act occurred under Republican Administrations. Indeed, the first 4 or 5 years after the Act was passed was characterized by budding competition in the broadband industry as line sharing was forced on the incumbents. It was a Republican FCC that reclassified broadband under Title I, essentially destroying their powers, and refused to take any sort of action to increase competition.
While Clinton made a mistake allowing the repeal of Glass-Steagal, it needs to be noted it was the Republicans in Congress who created the bill and pushed it through.
Why were you modded flamebait? Everything you said is true. I hate right wingers who mod people down just because they can't come up with an intelligent rebuttal. And then they criticize Democrats for being "intellectual elites". Sigh... America is doomed at this rate.
No matter how much evidence you provide for the innocence of these researchers, the paranoid will simply decry the people conducting the investigation as "part of the conspiracy".
That's the major problem with the anti-AGW group. If they could point to any legitimate research that was submitted to peer review and survived dissection by experts which punched holes in AGW, they would have done so by now. Instead they rely on simply muddying the waters with screams of deceit and conspiracies, essentially propaganda to confuse the laymen. And unfortunately those who are simply inclined to not want to spend any more money, whether it be to save the environment or provide for the health of the poor, will lap up the lies and spit them out as if they were gospel.
I see the same ridiculous, already debunked arguments used by anti-AGW people on this forum every time one of these articles comes up. They don't read for information. They post and run away. There are many moderators who simply mod informative posts down just because the science completely disagrees with what they want reality to be. There's no pleasing them.
It's a shame that our evidence for water turned out to likely be false, but that shouldn't stop us from continuing to look. We're not going to be travelling to Mars until at the earliest the '30s, so there's no real rush.
Slashdot Mirror
The particles in my body date back to the big bang.
So no matter how this works out, Joe Sixpack is going to be paying for a faster, higher capacity Internet.
Don't be ridiculous. First, Comcast already enjoys 80% margins on their internet service. In other words, all their costs combined costs them $8/month/customer. Bandwidth alone is estimated at $1/month/customer. They are insanely profitable. Second, Comcast and co. already price at what the market will bear. They're duopolies, so if they could raise their price without losing customers they would have done so already. It's that simple.
If you think it does please name some monopolies that have formed without direct role of the government in creating them.
Are you kidding me? We broke up Ma Bell in 1984 and yet it has managed to reconstruct itself into AT&T and Verizon. Verizon bought out AllTel, a formidable competitor in the wireless arena for $10 billion more than anyone else was willing to pay, just before AllTel could start to compete.
Of course they do, what on earth makes you think that they don't.
WalMart's ability to drive down supply costs indicates they're not on the same level footing as their competitors. They have an advantage through their massive size and scale, and can even price below cost in order to drive out competitors from local markets. That is *not* a free market.
There have been no franchise laws since 1992. What the heck are you talking about?
I guarantee that at the least, subscriber rates will jump if only to cover compliance costs.
How will a duopoly who already controls the market at prices at what the market will bear "raise prices"? If they could raise prices, they would have done so already. And compliance with what? You haven't specified anything the new regulatory scheme will force ISPs to spend money on.
Once the government has established regulatory control over the internet, it's just the standard increasing expansion of regulation (regulatory creep) that's been seen with nearly every other Federal regulatory area, whether those in charge have an (R) or (D) after their names, for the last 100 or more years.
Well that's funny. From where I'm standing the last 30 years has seen serious and harmful deregulation of various industries, such as healthcare, finance, and the internet. I have no problem with reregulating these failed areas.
I have to wonder if Democrats in favor of this have thought about how they'll feel when a conservative Republican President/Congress is elected at some point in the future and has these powers at THEIR disposal.
You mean the way it was when Bush was elected and appointed a Republican FCC commissioner? Well let's see, they reclassified broadband under Title I and screwed us all over. No I suppose we won't appreciate that.
As I understand it, internet service will be declared a public utility and regulated
Well there's your problem. You don't understand a darn thing about this reclassification plan.
The same way you cheat an honest man, you can smear someone with their own words.
What? Are you accusing me of cheating and smearing and honest man? How dare you!
Wow, I've never seen that before. Those two guys around her are total, utter douchebags. I feel like a nice beatdown would shut them up for a good while. They're just cowardly bullies picking on a woman who actually has some integrity. If these are the people reporting the news these days, it's no wonder things have become so bad.
41
Have you ever heard of the 1996 Telecommunications Act? Your anti-government bent is baffling.
Sigh... over and over again:
"Practically speaking, the natural monopoly model lost much of its applicability in 1992 when the U.S. Congress prohibited local governments from engaging in exclusive franchise agreements."
http://www.mackinac.org/10118
Reasonable regulation where it's due. Not taking over entire industries, though.
Competition is what drives quality of product in other segments of the economy.
There is not sufficient competition in internet service though, even with the available choices of dialup, DSL, cable, fios in some locations, several cellphone companies, satellite and terrestrial wireless.
With all those choices, why isn't competition driving prices down and quality up, like in other industries?
My guess is that there is already too much government regulation that stifles competition.
Oh, and "teabaggers?" Why the homophobic language?
Are you kidding? Have you even bothered to turn an analytical eye on the broadband industry? Have you ever heard of a natural monopoly?
Satellite isn't broadband, and it along with dial-up and wireless can't compete with DSL and Cable. Heck, Cable is fast pulling ahead of DSL with DOCSIS 3.0 now. The things you mentioned aren't "competition", which requires similar products that can substitute for each other.
Essentially we have a duopoly in most areas, a monopoly in some. Without government forcing open-access rules on cable and DSL, we'll never have competition.
Yeah, nice try. The last time telcos had to worry about the meddling regulators was after the 1996 law passed. I remember...there was a period of about 5 years where the ILECs stumbled because they didn't know what hit them. There was budding competition, plenty of CLECs, that's when cable got in the broadband and telephony business. ILECs were fined for delaying facilities and repair orders for CLEC customers. You could get dial tone or DSL from a dozen competing providers.
Eventually, the ILECs regrouped, merged their way back to consolidation and monopoly status, put their competitors out of business with a combination of downright dirty tricks like delaying orders or claiming lack of facilities and predatory pricing....and what little complaints there were got silenced by their well paid lobbyists.
Revising history to conform to an idealogy is fun...but that doesn't mean it's the truth.
You think Tauzin or Dingell knew what they were doing? And Crazy "My Tubes" Eddie knew anything past his bottom line? Someone has to represent the public interest....clearly industry leaders and elected officials are not up to the task....the FCC needs to be strengthened and chartered with regulating all facets of "connectivity" before India and China eat our lunch. Oh wait, they already are.
Yeah but to be fair they used their older Oblivion engine, which had just a horrific physics engine, for F3. What they accomplished in terms of story and open-endedness warrants them a pat on the back (of course their battle system, difficulty levels, and AI sucked). I'm just hoping their next engine will allow for more immersion. Considering they haven't even given anyone a peek into what their next game looks like, I feel good about the prospects.
Do you have any evidence for your claims? How does Democratic=supported regulation of industries that influence the fate of our economy in any way related to "fascism"?
Fifteen years ago, the assets of the six largest banks in this country totaled 17 percent of GDP. The assets of the six largest banks in the United States today total 63% of GDP.
Mussolini himself said "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." Do you not see how the formation of super-large corporations and their increasing influence on government politics is equivalent to the invasion of fascism? Can you not see how the break-up or regulation of these extremely large corporations is akin to fighting the creep of fascism?
Who was it on the Supreme Court who voted to give corporations equal rights to people? What presidents in the last century attempted to break up giant corporations? From the Republican side only Teddy Roosevelt was anti-trust, and eventually he was shunned from his own party.
I think the majority of people on this forum consider you to be a crazy right-wing troll. That you don't realize this is quite amusing.
I hope you realize your entire post is anecdotal, and doesn't do anything to dispel his well-sourced arguments (with numerous polls and statistics to back him up) that Republicans are far more theocratic in their beliefs than Democrats.
Actually he's pretty intelligent. His points about the complete terribleness of the Republican party over the last 30 years versus the not-so-badness of the Democratic party ever since WW2 are quite accurate and well-sourced.
True Libertarians believe that people should be held accountable for the downstream effects of all of their actions
That's a lovely libertarian mantra. But, in reality it could never exist. When individuals in a state of nature join together for their mutual benefit (forming a society under Lockean political philosophy) their definition of "mutual" will never be the same.
Consider the founding generation. They revolted to promote their mutual goal of liberty. After 12 years of living under the relatively libertarian Articles of Confederation they ditched it for a relatively *colossal* new federal/constitutional government of 1789. They traded liberty for security (a more powerful government to which states would be more greatly subordinated).
From there it gets more complicated. Some joined together to protect their property rights. Others joined together to strip others of their property rights (the right to own slaves). Colorado became a state to control its source of water. Arizona became a state to use the federal government to get its "fair" share of that water.
Competing goals. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness often dependent upon public law -- which creates winners and losers.
When enough people feel they're consistently losing (such as, the top 1/10th of 1% quadruple their incomes as average income declines 10%, all under the auspices of "trickle down" economics), that's something to be concerned about.
You can't dismiss it with quaint depictions of liberty and happiness being exactly what you say it is.
The top tenth of 1% of the population receives half of every available dollar of income (almost as much as the bottom 50%). The question is whether they are paying "more" like they were 30 years ago, prior to income taxes becoming more regressive, before their share of the national income quadrupled while the average American lost ground.
I mean, is it a good thing that 300,000 Americans quadrupled their incomes, and pay less tax on that money today than they would have 30 years ago? To the "less tax" crowd that may sound like an ideal world. But, is that ideal when, at the same time, average income dropped 10%?
In 1980, Ronald Reagan asked "are you better off today than you were four years ago?" He got elected and proceeded to make income taxation less progressive. The result has been as described above.
But, if the average American asks the same question Reagan did, he's accused of being a "deadbeat," "wanting something for nothing."
I won't go into details on the massive deficits Reagen wracked up, the destruction of environment, the elimination of a great deal of government funded basic scientific research, etc.
What a troll you are. First the graph only goes back to '95, which is just plain disingenuous. Second it doesn't take into account Bush keeping the cost of the wars "off the books". Obama simply added them back on. You *know* Republicans generated far more deficits than Democrats did. You know this because you've been told over and over, and been shown an endless amount of evidence. Yet your mind is so screwed up, so backwards and twisted, that you will do everything in your power to lie to yourself, and lie to others, just so that you don't have to face the truth. It's fascinating and yet disturbing watching you lead a life in a tiny bubble of fake reality.
Deregulation of the Telecommunications Act occurred under Republican Administrations. Indeed, the first 4 or 5 years after the Act was passed was characterized by budding competition in the broadband industry as line sharing was forced on the incumbents. It was a Republican FCC that reclassified broadband under Title I, essentially destroying their powers, and refused to take any sort of action to increase competition.
While Clinton made a mistake allowing the repeal of Glass-Steagal, it needs to be noted it was the Republicans in Congress who created the bill and pushed it through.
Why were you modded flamebait? Everything you said is true. I hate right wingers who mod people down just because they can't come up with an intelligent rebuttal. And then they criticize Democrats for being "intellectual elites". Sigh... America is doomed at this rate.
No matter how much evidence you provide for the innocence of these researchers, the paranoid will simply decry the people conducting the investigation as "part of the conspiracy".
That's the major problem with the anti-AGW group. If they could point to any legitimate research that was submitted to peer review and survived dissection by experts which punched holes in AGW, they would have done so by now. Instead they rely on simply muddying the waters with screams of deceit and conspiracies, essentially propaganda to confuse the laymen. And unfortunately those who are simply inclined to not want to spend any more money, whether it be to save the environment or provide for the health of the poor, will lap up the lies and spit them out as if they were gospel.
I see the same ridiculous, already debunked arguments used by anti-AGW people on this forum every time one of these articles comes up. They don't read for information. They post and run away. There are many moderators who simply mod informative posts down just because the science completely disagrees with what they want reality to be. There's no pleasing them.
I think this speaks more to how meaningless these "debates" are, when speakers argue primarily on party lines.
To be fair though, I doodle and surf the web all the time during lecture. I'm just not stupid enough to surf porn in a room full of other people.
It's a shame that our evidence for water turned out to likely be false, but that shouldn't stop us from continuing to look. We're not going to be travelling to Mars until at the earliest the '30s, so there's no real rush.