Except Telstra has now been divided into separate retail and wholesale companies. Not to mention you have a National Broadband Plan to bring super-fast FTTH to nearly every Australian in the country.
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 issue is how the rich's share of income tax intersects with their share of the national income, and how those two have diverged over the past 30 years as progressive taxation was reduced, and "trickle down" (deregulatory) politics increased.
When the top tenth of 1% of the population receives half of every available dollar of income (almost as much as the bottom 50%) you'd expect them to pay more in income taxes. 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."
Those who enjoy happiness (even to excess) depend upon the existence of this society for their ability to enjoy that state, and preserve it.
Things don't exist in a vacuum. It exists through "consent of the governed." And that's why we consider things such as "essentials" of living, and ensuring all Americans have at least a basic level of "the Dream."
If you want to see how it works under your ideal system (where each individual has what they have in opposition to everyone else), look no further than Mexico. Disparity of wealth has led to widespread corruption, a population that doesn't feel society benefits them, and the wealthy immigrating here because they can't trust their own society to protect what they have.
That's why the "it's mine, you can't have it" attitude is a Pyrrhic victory. What good is it if you have it, and are able to keep it, but the society (social norms) you depend upon break down and you lose everything?
The last time we reduced the progressivity of income-tax rates we were told "we'll all benefit." I.e., "trickle-down" economics. The result has been vastly different.
The top 10% of income earners have increased their share of every dollar of taxable income from 34% to 46%. Within that 10%, the results are even more startling. The increase went largely to the top 1% who doubled their share from 9% to 19%. And, the gain was even more greatly concentrated with the top one-tenth of 1% who tripled their income to about 9%.
The top 100th of 1% (about 15,000 individuals) quadrupled their share of the national income to 3.6%.
Of each dollar people earned in 2005, the top 10 percent got 48.5 cents. That was the top tent's greatest share of the income pie since 1929, just before the Roaring Twenties collapsed into the Great Depression. In 2005, the 300,000 men, women and children who comprised the top tenth of 1% had nearly as much income as all 150 million Americans who make up the economic lower half of our population.
I would be very cautious that further reduction in progressive taxation would lead to even greater wealth disparity, causing us to have even more in common with countries like Mexico, Brazil and Russia -- countries that are democratic, but real political power is wielded by a privileged elite who have nothing in common with 99% of the population.
Indeed. HP bought Palm to differentiate itself from all the other vendors using Android. Its own original efforts failed, so it was their only choice to create a significantly profitable platform and not become yet another Android commodity vendor.
Given the increasing evidence that at least some portions of the "Global Warming" theory are based on spurious or manufactured evidence
What the DEVIL are you talking about? I wish there were pro-stupid people discrimination laws on the books: no voting if you can't be bothered to fact-check the most basic of assertions.
All you need to do is look at Western Europe to support his point, or the US government before 1980. It's not the size of government that lends itself to being corrupted, it's the ever-burgeoning size of international corporations that is the real problem.
If your entire analysis of history is binary ("government is characterized by failure", "only an incorruptible government can protect us"), then your understanding of reality will be warped and inexorably wrong. Corporations were only successful because of government protection- ie consent of the governed. Now corporations want to have their cake and eat it too: protection by government without consent of the governed.
You simply fall for their FUD by believing government is unsuccessful. In fact, the claim itself is so ridiculously incorrect it often stumps me how any literate human being could come to such a conclusion.
The broadband industry took off after the passage of the '96 Telecom Act. It came to a screeching halt after the first 5 years, when a Republican FCC and Congress gutted the Act and the FCC's regulatory powers.
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.
The problem is they already *have* bought off Congress. AT&T has on occasion trotted out a bevy of Congressmen, both Democrat and Republican, to the FCC's compounds to emphasize their point that Congress has the telecom incumbent's back. Julius will need a very strong backbone and a willingness to plunge his career into uncertainty if he's to use his current powers to reclassify broadband under Title II and forcibly regulate telecom. I just don't think Julius is that kind of person.
When your entire viewpoint of the world is binary, "regulation is bad! regulation is good!", then yes you would only be able to see regulating the internet as being a negative thing.
The healthcare bill in its current form was severely watered down by special interests lobbying Congress. The '96 Telecom Act was severely watered down over the years by Republican FCC's and special interest groups.
Now that we once again have a Democratic FCC, it's Genachowski's obligation to reclassify broadband under Title II and force open access on both DSL and cable carriers. In fact since Verizon has officially given up its expansion of FIOS, forcing open access on FTTH would make a lot of sense as well.
The problem is Julius doesn't want his "career" to be occupied with incumbent lawsuits against his agency's authority, and he's no doubt looking out for his own future. It's a serious problem we have in the current US political system right now.
That would be called the 1996 Telecommunications Act, who if you were to ask Clinton the point of which was the give the FCC the authority to tightly regulate the internet. That's why most of these ISPs were originally under Title II regulation before a Republican FCC reclassified them to Title I in its now-failed deregulatory experiment with the broadband industry.
OEMs and chip manufacturers have a large incentive to raise the price of netbooks with quality hardware. Releasing a $100 netbook with dirt cheap hardware and super-low specs would cannabalize their sales and ultimately eat into their profits.
I'm sure we've already discussed this before on Slashdot. What I'm interested in is what happens after this next generation, which will be capable of flawless 1080P playback.
I think the real issue is that the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction, and certainly no precedent, in treading the waters they did. The most insulting aspect of their decision was declaring it a one-time, unique situation that could not be used in the future as precedent.
They used an injunction to prevent the completion of the Florida recount, and after 2 days of "deliberation" declared the recount a failure because it had gone past its original stated deadline. The disingenuity of the SCOTUS's tactics was evident in its vote being split along party lines, with the criticism from the dissenters mainly being about the Court stepping far outside its intended boundaries.
In other words they had no right to interfere, and by all accounts I've read Gore would have won had a full recount been completed.
That's actually an often misattributed quote. From Bill Gates's wiki article:
Often attributed to Gates in 1981. Gates considered the IBM PC's 640kB program memory a significant breakthrough over 8-bit systems that were typically limited to 64kB, but he has denied making this remark. Also see the 1989 and 1993 remarks above.
I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again.
Gates (19 January 1996), "Career Opportunities in Computing—and More". Bloomberg Business News
Do you realize the pain the industry went through while the IBM PC was limited to 640K? The machine was going to be 512K at one point, and we kept pushing it up. I never said that statement — I said the opposite of that.
"Gates talks" (20 August 2001) U.S. News & World Report
To be honest I'm rather surprised it's taken this long for Adobe to release a portable version of Flash for smartphones. I think this speaks to how cozy and lazy Adobe had become with their control of the market. Jobs's remarks were indeed hypocritical, but if he is to praised for anything it's for lighting a fire under Adobe's cushion.
I also think Jobs's "letter about Flash" was far from coincidental. Now that his competitors will have a defining feature that makes their smartphone experience significantly more enjoyable, Jobs either had to relent or push on with an self-inflicted platform deficiency. The letter was just him setting down the battle lines.
Competition is great, but Apple's use of their control of the iPhone hardware to control the iPhone software market is anti-competitive, and I for one am happy to see Google stick it to them.
I think the vast majority of people realized how corrupt the Supreme Court was after the 2000 Bush vs. Gore decision that essentially gave the presidential election to Bush. The subsequent fallout of that disastrously political decision will be felt for decades due to Bush's abuse of his position.
This is just another example of the poison of Corporatism spreading its infection throughout American politics. I wish Obama's calls for campaign finance reform were much more progressive. Perhaps he doesn't want to step on anyone's toes in an election year where a slow-moving Congress obstructed by Republicans simply can't act on finance reform until next year.
I just hope that if Democrats maintain a majority in both legislatures after November that Obama will go full-speed ahead on reform (abolition of corporate personhood, super-strict limits on corporate donations, perhaps even government financing of campaigns).
Middle class pays less in federal taxes than it has in the last 50 years. The top 1% hold more of the national wealth than at any time since 1929, just before the Great Depression.
And fascism is by definition an extreme right-wing political philosophy.
What bothers me about all the Apple defenders citing civil law here is that Apple is NOT a person. Them losing an iPhone is not the same as you or I losing an iPhone, or even a passport. Apple is a corporation, an arbitrary entity bound by laws that don`t apply to human beings. They had no right to ask the police for a warrant to smash into someone`s house and take their property.
Yeah seriously. Our efforts to blow stuff up in Iraq and Afghanistan have only worsened our image in the Middle East and created even more rabid terrorists. On the other hand, the development of super-advanced conventional weaponry is a great way to warn off any prospective enemies who might be thinking of attacking. Just as long as you don't start stockpiling them.
Slashdot Mirror
Except Telstra has now been divided into separate retail and wholesale companies. Not to mention you have a National Broadband Plan to bring super-fast FTTH to nearly every Australian in the country.
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 issue is how the rich's share of income tax intersects with their share of the national income, and how those two have diverged over the past 30 years as progressive taxation was reduced, and "trickle down" (deregulatory) politics increased.
When the top tenth of 1% of the population receives half of every available dollar of income (almost as much as the bottom 50%) you'd expect them to pay more in income taxes. 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."
Those who enjoy happiness (even to excess) depend upon the existence of this society for their ability to enjoy that state, and preserve it.
Things don't exist in a vacuum. It exists through "consent of the governed." And that's why we consider things such as "essentials" of living, and ensuring all Americans have at least a basic level of "the Dream."
If you want to see how it works under your ideal system (where each individual has what they have in opposition to everyone else), look no further than Mexico. Disparity of wealth has led to widespread corruption, a population that doesn't feel society benefits them, and the wealthy immigrating here because they can't trust their own society to protect what they have.
That's why the "it's mine, you can't have it" attitude is a Pyrrhic victory. What good is it if you have it, and are able to keep it, but the society (social norms) you depend upon break down and you lose everything?
The last time we reduced the progressivity of income-tax rates we were told "we'll all benefit." I.e., "trickle-down" economics. The result has been vastly different.
The top 10% of income earners have increased their share of every dollar of taxable income from 34% to 46%. Within that 10%, the results are even more startling. The increase went largely to the top 1% who doubled their share from 9% to 19%. And, the gain was even more greatly concentrated with the top one-tenth of 1% who tripled their income to about 9%.
The top 100th of 1% (about 15,000 individuals) quadrupled their share of the national income to 3.6%.
Of each dollar people earned in 2005, the top 10 percent got 48.5 cents. That was the top tent's greatest share of the income pie since 1929, just before the Roaring Twenties collapsed into the Great Depression. In 2005, the 300,000 men, women and children who comprised the top tenth of 1% had nearly as much income as all 150 million Americans who make up the economic lower half of our population.
I would be very cautious that further reduction in progressive taxation would lead to even greater wealth disparity, causing us to have even more in common with countries like Mexico, Brazil and Russia -- countries that are democratic, but real political power is wielded by a privileged elite who have nothing in common with 99% of the population.
Indeed. HP bought Palm to differentiate itself from all the other vendors using Android. Its own original efforts failed, so it was their only choice to create a significantly profitable platform and not become yet another Android commodity vendor.
Given the increasing evidence that at least some portions of the "Global Warming" theory are based on spurious or manufactured evidence
What the DEVIL are you talking about? I wish there were pro-stupid people discrimination laws on the books: no voting if you can't be bothered to fact-check the most basic of assertions.
All you need to do is look at Western Europe to support his point, or the US government before 1980. It's not the size of government that lends itself to being corrupted, it's the ever-burgeoning size of international corporations that is the real problem.
If your entire analysis of history is binary ("government is characterized by failure", "only an incorruptible government can protect us"), then your understanding of reality will be warped and inexorably wrong. Corporations were only successful because of government protection- ie consent of the governed. Now corporations want to have their cake and eat it too: protection by government without consent of the governed.
You simply fall for their FUD by believing government is unsuccessful. In fact, the claim itself is so ridiculously incorrect it often stumps me how any literate human being could come to such a conclusion.
The broadband industry took off after the passage of the '96 Telecom Act. It came to a screeching halt after the first 5 years, when a Republican FCC and Congress gutted the Act and the FCC's regulatory powers.
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.
The problem is they already *have* bought off Congress. AT&T has on occasion trotted out a bevy of Congressmen, both Democrat and Republican, to the FCC's compounds to emphasize their point that Congress has the telecom incumbent's back. Julius will need a very strong backbone and a willingness to plunge his career into uncertainty if he's to use his current powers to reclassify broadband under Title II and forcibly regulate telecom. I just don't think Julius is that kind of person.
When your entire viewpoint of the world is binary, "regulation is bad! regulation is good!", then yes you would only be able to see regulating the internet as being a negative thing.
The healthcare bill in its current form was severely watered down by special interests lobbying Congress. The '96 Telecom Act was severely watered down over the years by Republican FCC's and special interest groups.
Now that we once again have a Democratic FCC, it's Genachowski's obligation to reclassify broadband under Title II and force open access on both DSL and cable carriers. In fact since Verizon has officially given up its expansion of FIOS, forcing open access on FTTH would make a lot of sense as well.
The problem is Julius doesn't want his "career" to be occupied with incumbent lawsuits against his agency's authority, and he's no doubt looking out for his own future. It's a serious problem we have in the current US political system right now.
That would be called the 1996 Telecommunications Act, who if you were to ask Clinton the point of which was the give the FCC the authority to tightly regulate the internet. That's why most of these ISPs were originally under Title II regulation before a Republican FCC reclassified them to Title I in its now-failed deregulatory experiment with the broadband industry.
OEMs and chip manufacturers have a large incentive to raise the price of netbooks with quality hardware. Releasing a $100 netbook with dirt cheap hardware and super-low specs would cannabalize their sales and ultimately eat into their profits.
I'm sure we've already discussed this before on Slashdot. What I'm interested in is what happens after this next generation, which will be capable of flawless 1080P playback.
I think the real issue is that the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction, and certainly no precedent, in treading the waters they did. The most insulting aspect of their decision was declaring it a one-time, unique situation that could not be used in the future as precedent.
They used an injunction to prevent the completion of the Florida recount, and after 2 days of "deliberation" declared the recount a failure because it had gone past its original stated deadline. The disingenuity of the SCOTUS's tactics was evident in its vote being split along party lines, with the criticism from the dissenters mainly being about the Court stepping far outside its intended boundaries.
In other words they had no right to interfere, and by all accounts I've read Gore would have won had a full recount been completed.
That's actually an often misattributed quote. From Bill Gates's wiki article:
Often attributed to Gates in 1981. Gates considered the IBM PC's 640kB program memory a significant breakthrough over 8-bit systems that were typically limited to 64kB, but he has denied making this remark. Also see the 1989 and 1993 remarks above.
I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again. Gates (19 January 1996), "Career Opportunities in Computing—and More". Bloomberg Business News
Do you realize the pain the industry went through while the IBM PC was limited to 640K? The machine was going to be 512K at one point, and we kept pushing it up. I never said that statement — I said the opposite of that. "Gates talks" (20 August 2001) U.S. News & World Report
To be honest I'm rather surprised it's taken this long for Adobe to release a portable version of Flash for smartphones. I think this speaks to how cozy and lazy Adobe had become with their control of the market. Jobs's remarks were indeed hypocritical, but if he is to praised for anything it's for lighting a fire under Adobe's cushion.
I also think Jobs's "letter about Flash" was far from coincidental. Now that his competitors will have a defining feature that makes their smartphone experience significantly more enjoyable, Jobs either had to relent or push on with an self-inflicted platform deficiency. The letter was just him setting down the battle lines.
Competition is great, but Apple's use of their control of the iPhone hardware to control the iPhone software market is anti-competitive, and I for one am happy to see Google stick it to them.
I think the vast majority of people realized how corrupt the Supreme Court was after the 2000 Bush vs. Gore decision that essentially gave the presidential election to Bush. The subsequent fallout of that disastrously political decision will be felt for decades due to Bush's abuse of his position.
I recommend you read arstechnica's rebuttal of Steve Jobs's claims. Pot, meet kettle indeed. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/pot-meet-kettle-a-response-to-steve-jobs-letter-on-flash.ars
I just hope that if Democrats maintain a majority in both legislatures after November that Obama will go full-speed ahead on reform (abolition of corporate personhood, super-strict limits on corporate donations, perhaps even government financing of campaigns).
Middle class pays less in federal taxes than it has in the last 50 years. The top 1% hold more of the national wealth than at any time since 1929, just before the Great Depression. And fascism is by definition an extreme right-wing political philosophy.
Actually, yes it is.
What bothers me about all the Apple defenders citing civil law here is that Apple is NOT a person. Them losing an iPhone is not the same as you or I losing an iPhone, or even a passport. Apple is a corporation, an arbitrary entity bound by laws that don`t apply to human beings. They had no right to ask the police for a warrant to smash into someone`s house and take their property.
Yeah seriously. Our efforts to blow stuff up in Iraq and Afghanistan have only worsened our image in the Middle East and created even more rabid terrorists. On the other hand, the development of super-advanced conventional weaponry is a great way to warn off any prospective enemies who might be thinking of attacking. Just as long as you don't start stockpiling them.