You Republicans are so insane that you'll look for an comma to quibble with, try to use it to justify spilling nuke chemicals and covering it up, or torturing random people and covering it up.
The rotting corpse you sick bastards have made of your Republican Party is going to have to take quite a few more kicks to get it out of the way of cleaning up the mess you've made. Just shut up already - you're just making it worse with your bullshit noise. Stupid cunt.
There's a good point in there, though it's mixed up with one that misses the mark.
It's true that everyone graduating on time, not just those at risk of dropping out and going to jail, would get the bonus. But the numbers are basically the same. Preventing 1 from dropping out saves the state at least $250K, enough to pay for at least 250 kids who wouldn't have gone to jail even without the bonus. But that's still 0.25% being prevented saving the cost of the other 99.75%. Since 0.773% of Americans are incarcerated, there's at least a 3:1 savings rate. And that's just based on a single incarceration per person; the average length of total incarceration is longer than the 5 year baseline.
And of course there's extra benefits: some kids who were close to dropping out but would have made it will be motivated to try harder, getting all the benefits of performing better. That investment in their education will return more to our society, even just in increased taxes from their increased productivity.
There might be a case for calibrating the bonuses to dropout risk. For example, give everyone graduating on time $1000, and those who repeat a final year to graduate $500 anyway. Or calibrate everyone's risk 1-2 years out, and give them their bonus for exceeding their projections, at any point on the scale. Perhaps even weighting the bonus for bigger increases and higher final performance. But keeping it simple enough for everyone to understand and compete equally will be the biggest gain in the main solution: keeping kids in school to keep them out of jail.
So you'd drop out anyway, and you wouldn't cost anything. Same as today.
But you're not a dropout who went to jail (AFAICT). But if even 0.1% of those would stay in school and stay out of jail, then this program pays for itself.
This program doesn't promise to solve every problem. But it does promise to solve more than what we're doing now, at a good return on the investment.
Where are your stats that more than (literally) 99.9% of dropouts do so to deal drugs or get pregnant?
I'm not trying to solve all problems with the bonus. I'm just trying to get at least 0.1% of dropouts to finish HS on time and not go to jail.
I'd say that most kids drop out not for any specific reason, but because they aren't inspired, and have too many family problems to internalize the graduation goal. They're distracted by people who the realistic dream of $1000 can easily overpower. Just giving them that specific dream, on top of all the other known benefits of staying in school, should push at least 0.1% of them over the line. And that's worth the money.
Parents aren't solving the problem. Maybe if we gave parents $1000, too, when their kids graduate on time, we'd get more than 0.2% to do it. And then we'd break even.
What's important is to get over the impulse to moralize. These HS grads are going to get an opportunity to make a bonus for meeting quotas in a job soon after graduating. For the most successful, that bonus will become their greatest motivation, as the largest part of their income. Getting them on the bonus track early enough to get them on it permanently is the right thing to do. Dreaming that parents will just become better, especially when we don't even increase parents' graduation rate, is a recipe for the unacceptable status quo.
But that way isn't working. And you'll have to convince me that paying HS grads a bonus is wrong, but paying them a bonus the next year for meeting their quotas in a private job is still OK.
If you can accurately predict what will go wrong with paying kids a bonus, then we might have a real discussion. If you can design an alternative based on your orientation towards "better parenting" that will work better than the status quo without the problems you predict for bonuses, then you might prevail.
I don't know where you go to school (or jail), but $1000 is still quite a lot to most kids in highschool. I'd bet that most people go to jail for the first time with a lot less than $1000 to gain if their crime had gone off without a hitch.
That would indeed be better. How do you propose we do it?
Government is not the solution to every problem. But it is one of the best solutions we have for problems like educating and keeping out of jail millions of people a year.
Or we can just demand parents start parenting - including all the parents who failed to even graduate from highschool, and those who already spent much of their lives in jail. That's not working.
No, as I pointed out, if only 0.1% of the new graduates would have gone to jail because they didn't graduate on time, then this program breaks even. Those are damn good odds, better than practically any other program for reducing crime.
How about the government just gives everyone who graduates highschool on time $1000 cash, no questions asked? To use for college tuition, buying a car, a year of free cheeseburgers, or anything else they want, no strings attached.
It costs the government something like $30K a year to keep a person in jail. Not to mention how much it costs to run the rest of the judicial system, to build the jails, the damage caused by their crimes, or the taxes they could have paid if they were free to work. By the time we're done with the difference between a free person and a jailed person, it's probably over $50K a year. The average Federal jailtime is over 5 years per sentence, or well over $250K per prisoner (many get multiple sentences per lifetime).
People graduating HS on time are less likely to commit crimes and go to jail. So every person who the bonus spares from jail is worth over 250 people who get it, but still go to jail. In other words, if the increased on-time graduations reduce the crime rate even as little as 0.25%, they're worth it. It's probably closer to needing only 0.1% or less to "break even". And that's not counting other benefits, like increased productivity, reduced teen pregnancy, and all the other benefits of on-time graduation.
We can afford a lot more investment in Americans' education. Some targeting high performers who need more money for even higher performance. Some targeting low performers at risk of creating more damage than it costs to prevent. Education is always the investment with the best return. Investing more will pay off quickly, creating more money to invest, and improving the country across the board as a "byproduct".
I just can't resist slapping you again, because you're like a Republican voodoo doll.
You are such an extremist that you think that just because you happen to be totally wrong, and I'm around to point it out, that somehow no one can be right about anything. You Republicans are so self absorbed, so schizophrenic, so caught up in your own self-serving delusions of persecution, that you will hide like cowards in any herd you hear referenced whenever any one of you gets called out individually.
So let's talk about your Republicans. I am not "demonizing" Republicans, nor just for affiliating with Republicans. I am just pointing out that Republicans don't trust members of Congress with the exact info that Congress is supposed to have in order to represent us as a republic, as I said in my original post. You Republicans "demonize" yourselves by acting like that: by voting in (twice) a tyrant like Bush who treats Congress, the superior in power of the two elected branches, like at best a nuisance, at worst calling them traitors. Even when it's a Republican Congress, those Republicans don't bother asking questions to keep themselves informed, because they are slaves to your Party. That is the sinister groupthink that is destroying the republic.
The kind of Republican groupthink that has rounded up people into Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and countless torture gulags across the world, without respect to their human rights - or respect for anything at all. You sick Republican fascists are running concentration camps for torture. You are using your power to demonize groups of people, round them up, torture and kill them.
That has reduced you Republicans to being evil - by your own actions, not just because people like me point you out.
And then you are so insane as to somehow accuse me of something like that. You are exactly the sick, evil bastard that you are describing in your insane, circular posts.
You can tell from my - that you're a Republican apologist, as I amply explained in my last post - that I'm not a "democrat"? That I don't support and defend the power of the people to make our own government? Because I'm not interested in your formula of promoting a "role model" for people to tell to follow, but rather to let people decide for themselves. Just like a Republican who hates the republic to also get exactly backwards the proper behavior of a democrat.
You're talking nonsense, literal absurdity. Pounding you again will just make the rubble bounce. And certainly not inject any sense into you. I propose ceasing to waste any more time humoring your blather.
Because to the fake "Conservative" fascists who support an unlimited government spying on us, tracking our every move, and leaving the info unprotected for anyone to use against us however they wish (if their campaign or other bribe is high enough), privacy and its 4th Amendment guarantee is for "liberals".
Because to those fake "Conservatives", the duly-elected Congress that got an 11.6 point majority vote margin last November shutting down that tyrannical spying operation is just "whining".
Fake "Conservatives" are exactly the slaves our founders fought to free this country from in our Revolution. There were plenty of British monarchy loyalists back then, and even enough of them left today to form their own "Loyalist Party" that is completely consistent with all the other idiocy we expect from fake "Conservatives". A party dedicated to conservativewhining, and to destroying the Consitution.
No, you're just a typical Republican apologist - even though I'm not a Democrat. Democrats, BTW, did not appear in my post at all, but are all you can whine about - even though it's Republicans who are hiding the facts about this nuclear spill that their administration, and its crony contracts, produced.
First you kick off a rant with some Republican denial projection, that "Democrats are detached from reality" (complete with a stupid Republican slander word). Then you wallow in some extreme strawman you made up that reveals what is in your mind - but claim someone actually accused you of it; more denial projection. You get to jerk off to your sick fantasies while blaming them on someone else.
Then you quote Lenin, and say "so what are you going to do about it?"
What I'm doing is easily exposing your insanity. In public, where others can easily see how far gone you are. You are a lost cause, since you're still hiding in your faithy Republican worship after all everyone has seen. But you're such a good example of Republican character defects that parading you in public is worth the distasteful time spent prodding you into your distinctive screech. Because not just the pure politics that is your sole obsession is at stake. As we're discussing, your Republicans are so demented that when your crony contractors spill nuclear material and lie about it, somehow Democrats are at fault.
Duh, Congress isn't "everyone". The whole point of a republic is to represent the governed people who consent to let those representatives make decisions and hear info on our behalf.
The core hypocrisy of "Republicans" is how they hate the republic, preferring a monarchy whose benign neglect amounts to corporate anarchy.
This kind of Republican fraud goes well beyond the $5 word "hypocrisy". Republicans prefer rulers to be mere actors on a political stage, fed their lines from under the platform, written by their corporate sponsors.
Republicans have studied Ben Franklin's famous reply to a new American's question about what kind of government, "a republic or a monarchy", they'd just created in Independence Hall:
A republic, if you can keep it
Knowing they could steal it best by first stealing its wardrobe. And they studied their Party's first president, Lincoln, especially well his (often attributed) observation that
You can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
So they make sure that when all of the people sometimes aren't fooled, that we're as discouraged as possible from doing something about it. Like scaring us with images of "terrorists and enemy combatants".
Why is the mechanical->chemical/electrical(/photonic) efficiency of those proteins "zero"? I've got to think they would at least produce heat if driven "backwards" rather than ATP-powered motion. And that heat could be collected at low efficiency for powering another process.
Why wouldn't driving them backwards produce energy that could be absorbed in an endothermic chemical reaction, even if the cell's cytokinetics are too complex to actually attach a phosphate to ADP?
_Deadline Hollywood Daily_ is reporting that HD-DVD promoters paid Paramount and Dreamworks $150M to switch. At least $150M: that's just a couple of immediate deals. $150M is enough for those studios to produce at least one or two movies, either of which could return $300-500M even before being released... on HD-DVD.
Imagine if the biggest online marketplace were also a global online banking monopoly and the single largest alternative telco - each one of the largest operators of those essential services.
And then the phones go down for several days.
Because they're vulnerable to a design flaw triggered by a bug in Microsoft's PC platform monopoly.
The whole online economy is so monocultural and monopolistic that a single, inevitable problem will easily bring it to its knees. Leaving (eventually hundreds/thousands of) millions of people disconnected from it.
What is the energy efficiency of the actin/myosin that powers animal muscles?
And what is the efficiency of driving those proteins with mechanical force to produce energy? Can that energy be harvested as electrons or photons, rather than just reversing the ATP hydrolysis that usually powers their mechanics?
And finally, what's the lifecycle efficiency of manufacturing synthetic actin/myosin fibers and the energetics infrastructure to power them, or be powered by them?
Every time telcos (and lately cablecos) want more money and less regulation for their Internet cartel, they whine that bandwidth demand will destroy the Internet. Lately they want to doublecharge popular websites (like Google) to carry their traffic, even when they are not the website's actual ISP. They really want to censor political and other comms that could threaten their power or money control, like AT&T just did to Pearl Jam. So they lie about needing to prioritize their favorite packets (therefore deprioritize or drop the packets they dislike). Rather than just adding more bandwidth, which is what we pay for, which would give them more product to sell (if at a lower price per bps), and which would solve all their routing problems better than more computation on switching ever could.
When people started putting 19.2Kbps modems on our POTS lines to the PSTN, telcos like Verizon (then still NYNEX) would try to charge us for "data modems" on special "data lines" with "data connectors" (like V.32 serial cables). Because otherwise they'd have to ensure the Central Office clocks were properly synced as master/slave, as required by law. Enough geeks (like me, in NYC's photo district) fought their BS with engineering truth, and they stopped lying. Until 56.6Kbps modems came around, and they tried it again.
They will always try it, except when (someday, maybe) there's real competition rather than the industrywide collusion. And real geeks will always stop them.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, what's the count?
You Republicans are so insane that you'll look for an comma to quibble with, try to use it to justify spilling nuke chemicals and covering it up, or torturing random people and covering it up.
The rotting corpse you sick bastards have made of your Republican Party is going to have to take quite a few more kicks to get it out of the way of cleaning up the mess you've made. Just shut up already - you're just making it worse with your bullshit noise. Stupid cunt.
There's a good point in there, though it's mixed up with one that misses the mark.
It's true that everyone graduating on time, not just those at risk of dropping out and going to jail, would get the bonus. But the numbers are basically the same. Preventing 1 from dropping out saves the state at least $250K, enough to pay for at least 250 kids who wouldn't have gone to jail even without the bonus. But that's still 0.25% being prevented saving the cost of the other 99.75%. Since 0.773% of Americans are incarcerated, there's at least a 3:1 savings rate. And that's just based on a single incarceration per person; the average length of total incarceration is longer than the 5 year baseline.
And of course there's extra benefits: some kids who were close to dropping out but would have made it will be motivated to try harder, getting all the benefits of performing better. That investment in their education will return more to our society, even just in increased taxes from their increased productivity.
There might be a case for calibrating the bonuses to dropout risk. For example, give everyone graduating on time $1000, and those who repeat a final year to graduate $500 anyway. Or calibrate everyone's risk 1-2 years out, and give them their bonus for exceeding their projections, at any point on the scale. Perhaps even weighting the bonus for bigger increases and higher final performance. But keeping it simple enough for everyone to understand and compete equally will be the biggest gain in the main solution: keeping kids in school to keep them out of jail.
Moderation +2
50% Interesting
50% Insightful
My work here is done. Another Republican coverup's Republican spin drone unplugged from an educated audience.
The correlation only has to continue for 0.1% of the people for the program to break even. Those are pretty good odds.
So you'd drop out anyway, and you wouldn't cost anything. Same as today.
But you're not a dropout who went to jail (AFAICT). But if even 0.1% of those would stay in school and stay out of jail, then this program pays for itself.
This program doesn't promise to solve every problem. But it does promise to solve more than what we're doing now, at a good return on the investment.
Where are your stats that more than (literally) 99.9% of dropouts do so to deal drugs or get pregnant?
I'm not trying to solve all problems with the bonus. I'm just trying to get at least 0.1% of dropouts to finish HS on time and not go to jail.
I'd say that most kids drop out not for any specific reason, but because they aren't inspired, and have too many family problems to internalize the graduation goal. They're distracted by people who the realistic dream of $1000 can easily overpower. Just giving them that specific dream, on top of all the other known benefits of staying in school, should push at least 0.1% of them over the line. And that's worth the money.
Parents aren't solving the problem. Maybe if we gave parents $1000, too, when their kids graduate on time, we'd get more than 0.2% to do it. And then we'd break even.
What's important is to get over the impulse to moralize. These HS grads are going to get an opportunity to make a bonus for meeting quotas in a job soon after graduating. For the most successful, that bonus will become their greatest motivation, as the largest part of their income. Getting them on the bonus track early enough to get them on it permanently is the right thing to do. Dreaming that parents will just become better, especially when we don't even increase parents' graduation rate, is a recipe for the unacceptable status quo.
But that way isn't working. And you'll have to convince me that paying HS grads a bonus is wrong, but paying them a bonus the next year for meeting their quotas in a private job is still OK.
If you can accurately predict what will go wrong with paying kids a bonus, then we might have a real discussion. If you can design an alternative based on your orientation towards "better parenting" that will work better than the status quo without the problems you predict for bonuses, then you might prevail.
I don't know where you go to school (or jail), but $1000 is still quite a lot to most kids in highschool. I'd bet that most people go to jail for the first time with a lot less than $1000 to gain if their crime had gone off without a hitch.
Then there's hope for us all - including for you :).
That would indeed be better. How do you propose we do it?
Government is not the solution to every problem. But it is one of the best solutions we have for problems like educating and keeping out of jail millions of people a year.
Or we can just demand parents start parenting - including all the parents who failed to even graduate from highschool, and those who already spent much of their lives in jail. That's not working.
No, as I pointed out, if only 0.1% of the new graduates would have gone to jail because they didn't graduate on time, then this program breaks even. Those are damn good odds, better than practically any other program for reducing crime.
How about the government just gives everyone who graduates highschool on time $1000 cash, no questions asked? To use for college tuition, buying a car, a year of free cheeseburgers, or anything else they want, no strings attached.
It costs the government something like $30K a year to keep a person in jail. Not to mention how much it costs to run the rest of the judicial system, to build the jails, the damage caused by their crimes, or the taxes they could have paid if they were free to work. By the time we're done with the difference between a free person and a jailed person, it's probably over $50K a year. The average Federal jailtime is over 5 years per sentence, or well over $250K per prisoner (many get multiple sentences per lifetime).
People graduating HS on time are less likely to commit crimes and go to jail. So every person who the bonus spares from jail is worth over 250 people who get it, but still go to jail. In other words, if the increased on-time graduations reduce the crime rate even as little as 0.25%, they're worth it. It's probably closer to needing only 0.1% or less to "break even". And that's not counting other benefits, like increased productivity, reduced teen pregnancy, and all the other benefits of on-time graduation.
We can afford a lot more investment in Americans' education. Some targeting high performers who need more money for even higher performance. Some targeting low performers at risk of creating more damage than it costs to prevent. Education is always the investment with the best return. Investing more will pay off quickly, creating more money to invest, and improving the country across the board as a "byproduct".
I just can't resist slapping you again, because you're like a Republican voodoo doll.
You are such an extremist that you think that just because you happen to be totally wrong, and I'm around to point it out, that somehow no one can be right about anything. You Republicans are so self absorbed, so schizophrenic, so caught up in your own self-serving delusions of persecution, that you will hide like cowards in any herd you hear referenced whenever any one of you gets called out individually.
So let's talk about your Republicans. I am not "demonizing" Republicans, nor just for affiliating with Republicans. I am just pointing out that Republicans don't trust members of Congress with the exact info that Congress is supposed to have in order to represent us as a republic, as I said in my original post. You Republicans "demonize" yourselves by acting like that: by voting in (twice) a tyrant like Bush who treats Congress, the superior in power of the two elected branches, like at best a nuisance, at worst calling them traitors. Even when it's a Republican Congress, those Republicans don't bother asking questions to keep themselves informed, because they are slaves to your Party. That is the sinister groupthink that is destroying the republic.
The kind of Republican groupthink that has rounded up people into Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and countless torture gulags across the world, without respect to their human rights - or respect for anything at all. You sick Republican fascists are running concentration camps for torture. You are using your power to demonize groups of people, round them up, torture and kill them.
That has reduced you Republicans to being evil - by your own actions, not just because people like me point you out.
And then you are so insane as to somehow accuse me of something like that. You are exactly the sick, evil bastard that you are describing in your insane, circular posts.
You can tell from my - that you're a Republican apologist, as I amply explained in my last post - that I'm not a "democrat"? That I don't support and defend the power of the people to make our own government? Because I'm not interested in your formula of promoting a "role model" for people to tell to follow, but rather to let people decide for themselves. Just like a Republican who hates the republic to also get exactly backwards the proper behavior of a democrat.
You're talking nonsense, literal absurdity. Pounding you again will just make the rubble bounce. And certainly not inject any sense into you. I propose ceasing to waste any more time humoring your blather.
Goodbye.
This story is tagged "slashdotliberalwhining".
Because to the fake "Conservative" fascists who support an unlimited government spying on us, tracking our every move, and leaving the info unprotected for anyone to use against us however they wish (if their campaign or other bribe is high enough), privacy and its 4th Amendment guarantee is for "liberals".
Because to those fake "Conservatives", the duly-elected Congress that got an 11.6 point majority vote margin last November shutting down that tyrannical spying operation is just "whining".
Fake "Conservatives" are exactly the slaves our founders fought to free this country from in our Revolution. There were plenty of British monarchy loyalists back then, and even enough of them left today to form their own "Loyalist Party" that is completely consistent with all the other idiocy we expect from fake "Conservatives". A party dedicated to conservativewhining, and to destroying the Consitution.
No, you're just a typical Republican apologist - even though I'm not a Democrat. Democrats, BTW, did not appear in my post at all, but are all you can whine about - even though it's Republicans who are hiding the facts about this nuclear spill that their administration, and its crony contracts, produced.
First you kick off a rant with some Republican denial projection, that "Democrats are detached from reality" (complete with a stupid Republican slander word). Then you wallow in some extreme strawman you made up that reveals what is in your mind - but claim someone actually accused you of it; more denial projection. You get to jerk off to your sick fantasies while blaming them on someone else.
Then you quote Lenin, and say "so what are you going to do about it?"
What I'm doing is easily exposing your insanity. In public, where others can easily see how far gone you are. You are a lost cause, since you're still hiding in your faithy Republican worship after all everyone has seen. But you're such a good example of Republican character defects that parading you in public is worth the distasteful time spent prodding you into your distinctive screech. Because not just the pure politics that is your sole obsession is at stake. As we're discussing, your Republicans are so demented that when your crony contractors spill nuclear material and lie about it, somehow Democrats are at fault.
Anonymous Republican Coward can't read because they were "home schooled" ("babysat") for Jesus.
The core hypocrisy of "Republicans" is how they hate the republic, preferring a monarchy whose benign neglect amounts to corporate anarchy.
This kind of Republican fraud goes well beyond the $5 word "hypocrisy". Republicans prefer rulers to be mere actors on a political stage, fed their lines from under the platform, written by their corporate sponsors.
Republicans have studied Ben Franklin's famous reply to a new American's question about what kind of government, "a republic or a monarchy", they'd just created in Independence Hall:
Knowing they could steal it best by first stealing its wardrobe. And they studied their Party's first president, Lincoln, especially well his (often attributed) observation that
So they make sure that when all of the people sometimes aren't fooled, that we're as discouraged as possible from doing something about it. Like scaring us with images of "terrorists and enemy combatants".
It's not going to work this time.
Why is the mechanical->chemical/electrical(/photonic) efficiency of those proteins "zero"? I've got to think they would at least produce heat if driven "backwards" rather than ATP-powered motion. And that heat could be collected at low efficiency for powering another process.
Why wouldn't driving them backwards produce energy that could be absorbed in an endothermic chemical reaction, even if the cell's cytokinetics are too complex to actually attach a phosphate to ADP?
_Deadline Hollywood Daily_ is reporting that HD-DVD promoters paid Paramount and Dreamworks $150M to switch. At least $150M: that's just a couple of immediate deals. $150M is enough for those studios to produce at least one or two movies, either of which could return $300-500M even before being released... on HD-DVD.
Imagine if the biggest online marketplace were also a global online banking monopoly and the single largest alternative telco - each one of the largest operators of those essential services.
And then the phones go down for several days.
Because they're vulnerable to a design flaw triggered by a bug in Microsoft's PC platform monopoly.
The whole online economy is so monocultural and monopolistic that a single, inevitable problem will easily bring it to its knees. Leaving (eventually hundreds/thousands of) millions of people disconnected from it.
The problem with oil is that it will last forever, it's healthy, and the nicest people in the world want us to have as much as we want.
You people screwed up Iraq, and Vietnam, too. Now you're worshipping a cartoon bully. Who cares what you say?
Sick bitches or the sickest bitches? Who cares.
Goodbye. I only wish I could add "good riddance", but you people are herpes. At least we're not letting you be AIDS.
What is the energy efficiency of the actin/myosin that powers animal muscles?
And what is the efficiency of driving those proteins with mechanical force to produce energy? Can that energy be harvested as electrons or photons, rather than just reversing the ATP hydrolysis that usually powers their mechanics?
And finally, what's the lifecycle efficiency of manufacturing synthetic actin/myosin fibers and the energetics infrastructure to power them, or be powered by them?
Every time telcos (and lately cablecos) want more money and less regulation for their Internet cartel, they whine that bandwidth demand will destroy the Internet. Lately they want to doublecharge popular websites (like Google) to carry their traffic, even when they are not the website's actual ISP. They really want to censor political and other comms that could threaten their power or money control, like AT&T just did to Pearl Jam. So they lie about needing to prioritize their favorite packets (therefore deprioritize or drop the packets they dislike). Rather than just adding more bandwidth, which is what we pay for, which would give them more product to sell (if at a lower price per bps), and which would solve all their routing problems better than more computation on switching ever could.
When people started putting 19.2Kbps modems on our POTS lines to the PSTN, telcos like Verizon (then still NYNEX) would try to charge us for "data modems" on special "data lines" with "data connectors" (like V.32 serial cables). Because otherwise they'd have to ensure the Central Office clocks were properly synced as master/slave, as required by law. Enough geeks (like me, in NYC's photo district) fought their BS with engineering truth, and they stopped lying. Until 56.6Kbps modems came around, and they tried it again.
They will always try it, except when (someday, maybe) there's real competition rather than the industrywide collusion. And real geeks will always stop them.