Okay, first. The founding fathers were important politicians of their day. They did far more than write and sign the constitution.
Second, even in their day, they knew that vocational training helped. Please note that if you read the links that 'reform' in this case is often more pushed by the desire to do better than the knowledge of how to actually do so. Auburn system - "Whigs favored this system because it promised to rehabilitate criminals by teaching them personal discipline and respect for work, property, and other people.", developed during the 1820s. Benjamin Rush was an advocate for prison reform.
In the old days, the citizens understood that the purpose was to punish people. There was never any change of law where it switched to rehabilitation. That never happened. And yet, people's perception of what exists shifted somehow. But the institutional goals did not.
Actually, rehabilitation was always a design goal. The founding fathers even developed a number of prisons that, religious focus aside, would have been considered progressive even today. We're talking about things like each prisoner being assigned a 'counselor' to work with the prisoner, and each counselor having no more than 3 prisoners assigned to him. There were education opportunities - both basic and occupational.
Much of this was lost in the 70-80s time period as crime rates skyrocketed and subsequently prison populations exploded as not only did we start sending more people to prison, we sent them for longer periods of time. It didn't help that, with the loss of what reform programs we had, that recidivism rates shot up and we got this brain bug that these people couldn't be 'saved', IE reformed.
Well also they're talking about fruit drinks, not fruit juice. Whenever you see something labelled "fruit drink", it should trigger alarm bells and the question, "why aren't they calling it juice?"
It holds true even for many fruit juices. Consider apple juice, at 14 calories per ounce, matches my 12 ounce root beer can. 168 calories for the juice, 170(mandatory FDA rounding) for the root beer. Now yes, it does have less sugar(36 vs 35). Orange Juice has the same number of calories - but less sugar still, and actually has some protein.
I maintain that eating fruit is normally better than drinking just the juice.
It's so easy to justify consuming almost anything, because there are thousands of web pages that say "that is good for you!"
The old standby that almost everything we eat is 'good for you' in limited quantities. A pack of cards sized steak is good for you, a couple times a week. Same with fish, chicken, coffee, wine, etc...
The problem is when you're having 24oz of soda with every meal.
Personally, from what I've read fruit drinks are basically only lacking carbonation to be a 'soda'. Even fruit drinks aren't as good as, well, eating the fruit involved because there's lots of nutrients you're losing out on that was in the pulp of the fruit, and besides, the pulp has carbs and fiber that help you feel 'full', which the juice alone will shoot through your system and not satiate you.
Which is why it's killed hundreds of thousands... Oh wait, it kills and injures fewer people per TWh than wind and rooftop solar?
Radioactive waste from fission accumulates a massive liability for future generations.
Mostly because we're not allowed to reprocess the waste to extract the medium level radioactive stuff that would still be useful in the reactor.
Nuclear energy is out of step with a world that is rapidly converting to clean, inexhaustible energy harnessed from the environment.
Actually, we've been converting to the 'better than coal' but still very much exhaustible natural gas.
According to a growing number of climatologists who are witnessing first-hand the unfolding climate disaster in the Arctic and Antarctic, our existing several hundred nuclear reactors could quite possibly be the direct cause of our extinction in the decades ahead,
The former doesn't lead to the latter. Hell, given that they're predicting apocalypse and the death of billions by starvation, they're end of the world nuts and don't know how nuclear power works.
Nuclear reactors can't be rapidly turned off and made non-radioactive --- the full process of decommissioning takes some 50 to 60 years as an industry average, and it takes a LOT of money.
That's only because of insane greenfield standards. Give them the same standards as shutting off a coal plant and it'd take them about a week.
There will be no money available under conditions of economic collapse, cooling will be interrupted, and many will go into meltdown.
Even countries under economic collapse have some money available, and avoiding meltdown is easy. Cooling even our old lousy reactors long enough to prevent a meltdown costs what amounts to a trivial sum. The times vary, but generally it's about 3 weeks from SCRAMing the reactor before it's generating so little heat that passive cooling would be enough to prevent a meltdown. Reactors that have melted down are more complex because they often have a critical mass that is still generating more heat and radioactive components.
In a condition of economic collapse, you simply mark the area off limits and go about your business. Windmills falling on people will be as large of a problem.
The whole idea of adding more nuclear power is hazardous and ill-considered, and it's also unnecessary.
Actually, adding more nuclear power gives us relatively cheap energy that we can use to stave off the burning more coal, natural gas, and otherwise control the effects of global warming.
I was saying that while a person needs to learn the value of 'money', whether it's physical or digital, understanding digital money is very much not beyond people growing up with smart phones, the internet, etc...
Either that, or you missed the part I was responding to, which I quoted, and thus went off into the woods with your response to me, thinking I was talking about cash.
The idea of keeping alternate methods of payment around is not a bad one. As an old timer, I have a debit card, several credit cards, and I usually have some cash on me, though it's generally not going to pay for more than a few meals or enough gas to get home and back to the gas station tomorrow.
They also don't get to learn the value of a dollar since all they ever see are numbers on a screen.
I disagree. As a small child it took a while for me to realize the value behind those pieces of paper and bits of metal. A little bit of gaming as they grow up and they'll understand those numbers very well indeed.
Not purely, no. But global warming is a numbers game.
True. If you get enough non-carbon power, you can do things to reduce carbon output in areas not traditionally powered by electricity. Hell, enough nuclear and you can yank CO2 out of the air.
I think that the answer is "market saturation". There's only so much call for tablets, period. They're a semi-durable good, so if you introduce it fast enough, it's entirely possible to get one into the hands of 'everybody' wanting and able to afford it relatively quickly. Now that 'everybody' has one, you're reduced to selling replacements, which means that, roughly speaking 20% of current owners will buy a new one each year, with another 5% or so of 'new participants', while you loose 5% or so due to competitors, changing interests, even things like deaths.
That's a pretty much demonstrated fact. Were such systems to be commercially viable, someone would be doing them. Even if it were just the incumbents. But we must have government do it because nobody else will. There's a pretty telling bit of evidence about the commercial viability of such systems.
No, we don't have to have the government do it. There are private companies standing up and doing it. Google, for example. They just aren't doing it fast enough. As for the incumbents, you don't know much about that 'free market' thing, do you? Hint: They don't have to do jack as long as they have a captive market.
No, that implies that AT&T and Comcast have internet service which customers will abandon when the government offers them cheap gigabit service. If you doubt that is a fact, then there is little hope of this discussion being productive. They may change providers because of the technical advantages, or they may change just to give the finger to the big companies they hate, but they are the intended customers for any government gigabit service.
Well, of course customers will abandon the incumbents when somebody offers a better service. The trick is, with an initial infusion of capital, said government founded companies are capable of profitably offering said services. Interesting, right?
This is alot of the reason people are taught to be pissed at them. They are taught that they need gigabit service, when the fact is that most people can get by with 100Mbps or even half that.
Well yes. I'd be ecstatic if I could get over ten meg. Oddly enough though, 'Not available in my area'.
And now we can hate them because they don't have cheap gigabit service. It's not a true need (for most people), it's just a prop.
You need to read closer. Gigabit is nice, yes. But it's not just the speed. It's the cost(cheaper than other company's 10meg services), not oversold to hell(so they actually GET the 10meg, rather than under 1), customer service that can find it's own ass... You know, the stuff I mentioned earlier.
I am as aware that there are a huge number of local governments as are the people who make the claims that they are all being bought off by Comcast or AT&T or TW or whichever cable company they've given the sweetheart exclusive monopolies to, yes.
Odd, I never claimed that they were *all* being bought off. Some are, some aren't. Such is life.
You should be asking them, since I'm just parroting the claims about the inept and fraudulent backgrounds of any local government that has ever given a franchise to a cable company.
Well, then stop parroting them and start having your own thoughts. You're really making this too easy.
You cannot have it both ways. You cannot claim that the local government is corrupt for allowing Comcast into town in the first place, and then claim you trust them to be honest in their intent of creating municipal broadband to compete with Comcast.
Reading comprehension, man. First: They could be completely separate jurisdictions. I mean, Grand Forks vs Lancaster. Second: Most of the time no town 'let' Comcast in, Comacast bought the incumbent cable company that was there long before any of the lawmakers were ever elected. Third: It's entirely possible that NEW government officials have been elected since Comcast came to town, with their own platforms and interests.
That's without getting into my asking where I claimed that a town would be corrupt for 'letting Comcast in'. Corrupt would be handing them a 99 year monopoly on providing services.
And then you would becomes just another one of the greedy corrupt bastards who is kissing the feet of Comcast or AT&T because Comcast or AT&T has been granted a franchise to rape the
Yes, and the "fittest" does not include a taxpayer subsidized, non-profit government department trying to take customers away from existing companies. If the government didn't have the taxpayer funds to prop them up, they wouldn't succeed, and so they cannot be "the fittest" in any sense of the word.
Again, you're assuming that they can't be commercial successes on their own. Absent lawsuits, they generally succeed. I'm waiting to see how the natural gas utility my local community is setting up will fair.
It's also a matter of fairness, not just fitness.
Indeed. If the local for-profit monopoly insists on not treating it's customers fairly, it deserves what happens when said customers say they aren't going to play that game anymore. (Of course, at this point I'm having fun with my responses).
And I already discussed the numbers when it comes to most bond measure votes. Twelve percent of the voters are "voluntary", which makes 82% of them involuntary, as will be anyone who moves into the area.
Moves into the area, sure. Remember Home Owner's Associations? You agree to the existing rules when you move into the area. Also, you are aware that voter turnouts have been trending up for years, right? So it's probably a higher percentage than 12% voting for it, especially if the vote is held during a presidential election. Also, the 82% aren't involuntary, they're going to be a split between "supportive", "unsupportive", and "completely uncaring".
Yes, and the fact that none, or at best very few, have done that tells us all that there is no burning need for the service that will pay the costs of providing it. Thus the government has to do it -- and you pointed out I assume it will be at a loss, because of this very reason.
A government forming a utility cooperative is actually a fairly normal event. Like I said, one is currently occuring for natural gas in my area. Government funding has been minimal, mostly enough to pay for the studies and people to run the program, the actually construction costs were raised by getting commercial(non-government backed) loans.
And we know why they won't come in, and they have even less reason to try when they know the government is competing against them.
Actually, you don't know this. Like I said - it's happened. Hell, the proposals have died when the current service provider, upon hearing about the possibility of competition, stepped up it's game and provided better service. It's only when they don't care even in the face of the threat that it goes through and a municipal system is set up. On average, said municipal systems are able to do what they're supposed to: provide internet access(or gas) at a reasonable rate while paying off all the expenses of setting up the system at a reasonable rate.
We're talking about government provided gigabit broadband. The government (and the taxpayers, all of them) ARE the company. How can you claim that another bond measure would not attach to the government?
Do you need me to explain how a LLC works? Hell, look up how Trump operates, it's a virtually ideal example. Trump's companies declare bankruptcy 'all the time', he's not held financially responsible for them.
How many fire trucks should a city sell off to get the money to pay for gigabit broadband for the relative few who use it?
'relative few'? And you're a slashdotter? As for fire trucks, those are a lousy thing to sell. I was thinking about stuff like a municiple building that they're not using any more, land held in reserve, etc... Hell, first thing you'd do is sell any assets that the cooperative purchased that turn out to not be necessary.
You deliberately left off the modifier in that statement. "To spend tax money the way they promised to."
What better way to help them survive, then by ending a captive breeding program?!?
That might not matter, as no Orca raised in captivity has survived release into the wild. Ergo, you can't repopulate a wild population with them. Maybe techniques to do it successfully could be done, maybe not.
As a secondary thing, the '40 years without a capture' made me wonder if there might not be a secondary reason that they're not talking about - specifically inbreeding. How many generations in are they? Do they have enough lines to keep genetic diversity up?
Personally, I've always found that the best utilities are cooperatives. Ergo, if the locals become pissed off enough that they vote to create a local cooperative, more power on them.
They are moving into a new venture, which makes them a new competitor. The "moving into the area" part of the "dumping" issue is irrelevant. I'm sorry you fixated on that.
Okay, fine. I'll broaden my scope: Competition is good. Companies are not guaranteed a profit, are not to be granted a guarantee that they will break even. Survival of the fittest.
Involuntary investors.
I did specify a vote, remember? One might as well complain about losing the vote about funding parks, schools, fire departments, police departments, and other public services. Actually, no. Most people get LESS of a vote on that stuff.
Most bond measures pass with a plurality that consists of a minority of the voters. Getting one more than half of a 25% turnout means that you only had approval from 12% of the registered voters, and since there are people who are not registered you've got a lot less than 12% of the taxpayers.
As somebody who votes every election, even if it has to be absentee, let me get my violin out.
And if there are that many pissed off subscribers (not just voters in general), that area is ripe for competition -- from private companies.
True, but said private companies have to identify target locations, gather funds of their own, be able to expect a reasonable profit, and all that.
And guess what? Even the private investors still have to be worried about being sued into bankruptcy by the major telecoms, which will dump money into killing any potential competition between lawsuits and only offering discounts and upgrading infrastructure where there's competition, making them actual dumpers. Well, unless you're lucky enough to be a 'test city' for google fiber or such.
And, it appears, no sympathy for any potential private companies that might come in to provide the competition you seek.
If a private company comes in, provides competition, superior service than the incumbent, then the proposals to set up a municipal system tend to die on the vine. It's only when this fails to occur, when they fail to be able to attract any new competition, that this happens.
But when the costs exceed income, it has to come from somewhere.
You treat this as an inevitability when it's not. Sure, it 'has' to come from somewhere. You're neglecting other possible sources: Increased fees, borrowing more money(attached to the company, not the government), selling stock or assets, hell, even declaring the venture a bust and shutting down.
And because the city realized how easy it was to add taxes to the water bill, we now have taxes on the water bill to pay for sidewalk repairs and tree trimming and free bus service.
Run for office. That being said, they're still pikers. One of the taxes on phone lines is a line item to pay for the last US-Mexico war.
It's amazing to see the dichotomy between those who have absolutely zero trust in government, and those who have unlimited trust in government to spend tax money the way they promised to.
You think I have 'unlimited trust in government'? BWAHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHAHHAHA *THUD* (oww...)
nd when you consider that these are the same local governments who have allegedly been bought off and giving megacorporate cable companies dejure monopolies, to suddenly trust them with a bottomless bucket of money to do the same thing... it boggles the mind.
Actually they're NOT the same local governments. Some local governments are in the pockets, some are not. What you do is if they're in the pocket is that you run for office, get OUT of the pocket, and screw said corporations that are screwing your constituents as hard as possible.
In business-land, large companies who move into an area and drive their competition out of business by charging below cost are guilty of dumping. Should government be allowed to that?
1. The local government isn't "moving into the area". It's already there. Also, in this case the "taxpayer's general fund" is coming out of the investor's pockets, IE the same citizens that started up the cooperative. 2. If, like I said, you manage to piss off the locals enough that they willingly vote for a bond issuance to fund the startup of a competing cooperative, that means that you done screwed up(to put it politely), and I have no sympathy for you. Because it usually means that you've been raping the area for decades using your monopoly to provide lousy service at high prices. 3. Most of the time it's not structured to come out of the general fund, but is done via special bond issuance. Payback terms vary.
Local democracy is preferable to federal because it's less corrupt right?
No, because it's more responsive to local demands and conditions. For example, imagine the feds imposing the same water restrictions whether you live in Washington State with water running out it's ears, and Nevada or California with critical shortages.
Indeed. If I lived in one of the affected states it'd be something I'd be pushing my local congress on.
It's one thing to drive a competitor bankrupt via being better at it. It's quite another to use regulations to ban competition at all.
And, as far as I'm concerned, if you manage to piss off the locals enough that a majority votes to form a cooperative* or such to compete with you, you've done screwed up so bad that I don't have an ounce of sympathy for you.
I think the problem that you're having with finding such a device is that it's simply not necessary at this point. People use their phones and such for the time. If they're buying an alarm clock, it's generally accurate enough as is, and if they're putting a wall clock up they're doing it for the ambiance as much as having the time available.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, first. The founding fathers were important politicians of their day. They did far more than write and sign the constitution.
Second, even in their day, they knew that vocational training helped. Please note that if you read the links that 'reform' in this case is often more pushed by the desire to do better than the knowledge of how to actually do so.
Auburn system - "Whigs favored this system because it promised to rehabilitate criminals by teaching them personal discipline and respect for work, property, and other people.", developed during the 1820s.
Benjamin Rush was an advocate for prison reform.
In the old days, the citizens understood that the purpose was to punish people. There was never any change of law where it switched to rehabilitation. That never happened. And yet, people's perception of what exists shifted somehow. But the institutional goals did not.
Actually, rehabilitation was always a design goal. The founding fathers even developed a number of prisons that, religious focus aside, would have been considered progressive even today. We're talking about things like each prisoner being assigned a 'counselor' to work with the prisoner, and each counselor having no more than 3 prisoners assigned to him. There were education opportunities - both basic and occupational.
Much of this was lost in the 70-80s time period as crime rates skyrocketed and subsequently prison populations exploded as not only did we start sending more people to prison, we sent them for longer periods of time. It didn't help that, with the loss of what reform programs we had, that recidivism rates shot up and we got this brain bug that these people couldn't be 'saved', IE reformed.
Well also they're talking about fruit drinks, not fruit juice. Whenever you see something labelled "fruit drink", it should trigger alarm bells and the question, "why aren't they calling it juice?"
It holds true even for many fruit juices. Consider apple juice, at 14 calories per ounce, matches my 12 ounce root beer can. 168 calories for the juice, 170(mandatory FDA rounding) for the root beer. Now yes, it does have less sugar(36 vs 35). Orange Juice has the same number of calories - but less sugar still, and actually has some protein.
I maintain that eating fruit is normally better than drinking just the juice.
It's so easy to justify consuming almost anything, because there are thousands of web pages that say "that is good for you!"
The old standby that almost everything we eat is 'good for you' in limited quantities. A pack of cards sized steak is good for you, a couple times a week. Same with fish, chicken, coffee, wine, etc...
The problem is when you're having 24oz of soda with every meal.
Personally, from what I've read fruit drinks are basically only lacking carbonation to be a 'soda'. Even fruit drinks aren't as good as, well, eating the fruit involved because there's lots of nutrients you're losing out on that was in the pulp of the fruit, and besides, the pulp has carbs and fiber that help you feel 'full', which the juice alone will shoot through your system and not satiate you.
It's inherently and obviously risky
Which is why it's killed hundreds of thousands... Oh wait, it kills and injures fewer people per TWh than wind and rooftop solar?
Radioactive waste from fission accumulates a massive liability for future generations.
Mostly because we're not allowed to reprocess the waste to extract the medium level radioactive stuff that would still be useful in the reactor.
Nuclear energy is out of step with a world that is rapidly converting to clean, inexhaustible energy harnessed from the environment.
Actually, we've been converting to the 'better than coal' but still very much exhaustible natural gas.
According to a growing number of climatologists who are witnessing first-hand the unfolding climate disaster in the Arctic and Antarctic, our existing several hundred nuclear reactors could quite possibly be the direct cause of our extinction in the decades ahead,
The former doesn't lead to the latter. Hell, given that they're predicting apocalypse and the death of billions by starvation, they're end of the world nuts and don't know how nuclear power works.
Nuclear reactors can't be rapidly turned off and made non-radioactive --- the full process of decommissioning takes some 50 to 60 years as an industry average, and it takes a LOT of money.
That's only because of insane greenfield standards. Give them the same standards as shutting off a coal plant and it'd take them about a week.
There will be no money available under conditions of economic collapse, cooling will be interrupted, and many will go into meltdown.
Even countries under economic collapse have some money available, and avoiding meltdown is easy. Cooling even our old lousy reactors long enough to prevent a meltdown costs what amounts to a trivial sum. The times vary, but generally it's about 3 weeks from SCRAMing the reactor before it's generating so little heat that passive cooling would be enough to prevent a meltdown. Reactors that have melted down are more complex because they often have a critical mass that is still generating more heat and radioactive components.
In a condition of economic collapse, you simply mark the area off limits and go about your business. Windmills falling on people will be as large of a problem.
The whole idea of adding more nuclear power is hazardous and ill-considered, and it's also unnecessary.
Actually, adding more nuclear power gives us relatively cheap energy that we can use to stave off the burning more coal, natural gas, and otherwise control the effects of global warming.
... I think that you responded to the wrong post.
I was saying that while a person needs to learn the value of 'money', whether it's physical or digital, understanding digital money is very much not beyond people growing up with smart phones, the internet, etc...
Either that, or you missed the part I was responding to, which I quoted, and thus went off into the woods with your response to me, thinking I was talking about cash.
The idea of keeping alternate methods of payment around is not a bad one. As an old timer, I have a debit card, several credit cards, and I usually have some cash on me, though it's generally not going to pay for more than a few meals or enough gas to get home and back to the gas station tomorrow.
They also don't get to learn the value of a dollar since all they ever see are numbers on a screen.
I disagree. As a small child it took a while for me to realize the value behind those pieces of paper and bits of metal. A little bit of gaming as they grow up and they'll understand those numbers very well indeed.
charcoal is ultimately a source of solar power. So yeah. Hell, just bury the wood/charcoal and you have carbon sequestration!
Not purely, no. But global warming is a numbers game.
True. If you get enough non-carbon power, you can do things to reduce carbon output in areas not traditionally powered by electricity. Hell, enough nuclear and you can yank CO2 out of the air.
They're building lots of new infrastructure. Demand can't be met purely via steel melting.
Economics it based on a theory of endless growth.
Only with very basic economics. Market saturation is a step above that. It can also cover contracting markets right now.
Good question. I also know that China is an an 'epic': Coal power binge, Gas power binge, nuclear power binge, hydro power binge, etc...
I think that the answer is "market saturation". There's only so much call for tablets, period. They're a semi-durable good, so if you introduce it fast enough, it's entirely possible to get one into the hands of 'everybody' wanting and able to afford it relatively quickly. Now that 'everybody' has one, you're reduced to selling replacements, which means that, roughly speaking 20% of current owners will buy a new one each year, with another 5% or so of 'new participants', while you loose 5% or so due to competitors, changing interests, even things like deaths.
I suspect it would be millions of dollars for every real terrorist we stop.
Indeed. Same as for drug lords and such. Is it worth it? Depends on the terrorist leader.
That being said, for the burner phones - it seems to me that extra monitoring on newly activated phones might be the solution.
I get some social interaction at work and while running errands, but I don't seek it out, and if anything, I get more than I want.
Then you're an introvert like me. Not necessarily autistic. Now what happens if you have an extrovert autistic person?
That's a pretty much demonstrated fact. Were such systems to be commercially viable, someone would be doing them. Even if it were just the incumbents. But we must have government do it because nobody else will. There's a pretty telling bit of evidence about the commercial viability of such systems.
No, we don't have to have the government do it. There are private companies standing up and doing it. Google, for example. They just aren't doing it fast enough. As for the incumbents, you don't know much about that 'free market' thing, do you? Hint: They don't have to do jack as long as they have a captive market.
No, that implies that AT&T and Comcast have internet service which customers will abandon when the government offers them cheap gigabit service. If you doubt that is a fact, then there is little hope of this discussion being productive. They may change providers because of the technical advantages, or they may change just to give the finger to the big companies they hate, but they are the intended customers for any government gigabit service.
Well, of course customers will abandon the incumbents when somebody offers a better service. The trick is, with an initial infusion of capital, said government founded companies are capable of profitably offering said services. Interesting, right?
This is alot of the reason people are taught to be pissed at them. They are taught that they need gigabit service, when the fact is that most people can get by with 100Mbps or even half that.
Well yes. I'd be ecstatic if I could get over ten meg. Oddly enough though, 'Not available in my area'.
And now we can hate them because they don't have cheap gigabit service. It's not a true need (for most people), it's just a prop.
You need to read closer. Gigabit is nice, yes. But it's not just the speed. It's the cost(cheaper than other company's 10meg services), not oversold to hell(so they actually GET the 10meg, rather than under 1), customer service that can find it's own ass... You know, the stuff I mentioned earlier.
I am as aware that there are a huge number of local governments as are the people who make the claims that they are all being bought off by Comcast or AT&T or TW or whichever cable company they've given the sweetheart exclusive monopolies to, yes.
Odd, I never claimed that they were *all* being bought off. Some are, some aren't. Such is life.
You should be asking them, since I'm just parroting the claims about the inept and fraudulent backgrounds of any local government that has ever given a franchise to a cable company.
Well, then stop parroting them and start having your own thoughts. You're really making this too easy.
You cannot have it both ways. You cannot claim that the local government is corrupt for allowing Comcast into town in the first place, and then claim you trust them to be honest in their intent of creating municipal broadband to compete with Comcast.
Reading comprehension, man. First: They could be completely separate jurisdictions. I mean, Grand Forks vs Lancaster. Second: Most of the time no town 'let' Comcast in, Comacast bought the incumbent cable company that was there long before any of the lawmakers were ever elected. Third: It's entirely possible that NEW government officials have been elected since Comcast came to town, with their own platforms and interests.
That's without getting into my asking where I claimed that a town would be corrupt for 'letting Comcast in'. Corrupt would be handing them a 99 year monopoly on providing services.
And then you would becomes just another one of the greedy corrupt bastards who is kissing the feet of Comcast or AT&T because Comcast or AT&T has been granted a franchise to rape the
Yes, and the "fittest" does not include a taxpayer subsidized, non-profit government department trying to take customers away from existing companies. If the government didn't have the taxpayer funds to prop them up, they wouldn't succeed, and so they cannot be "the fittest" in any sense of the word.
Again, you're assuming that they can't be commercial successes on their own. Absent lawsuits, they generally succeed. I'm waiting to see how the natural gas utility my local community is setting up will fair.
It's also a matter of fairness, not just fitness.
Indeed. If the local for-profit monopoly insists on not treating it's customers fairly, it deserves what happens when said customers say they aren't going to play that game anymore. (Of course, at this point I'm having fun with my responses).
And I already discussed the numbers when it comes to most bond measure votes. Twelve percent of the voters are "voluntary", which makes 82% of them involuntary, as will be anyone who moves into the area.
Moves into the area, sure. Remember Home Owner's Associations? You agree to the existing rules when you move into the area. Also, you are aware that voter turnouts have been trending up for years, right? So it's probably a higher percentage than 12% voting for it, especially if the vote is held during a presidential election. Also, the 82% aren't involuntary, they're going to be a split between "supportive", "unsupportive", and "completely uncaring".
Yes, and the fact that none, or at best very few, have done that tells us all that there is no burning need for the service that will pay the costs of providing it. Thus the government has to do it -- and you pointed out I assume it will be at a loss, because of this very reason.
A government forming a utility cooperative is actually a fairly normal event. Like I said, one is currently occuring for natural gas in my area. Government funding has been minimal, mostly enough to pay for the studies and people to run the program, the actually construction costs were raised by getting commercial(non-government backed) loans.
And we know why they won't come in, and they have even less reason to try when they know the government is competing against them.
Actually, you don't know this. Like I said - it's happened. Hell, the proposals have died when the current service provider, upon hearing about the possibility of competition, stepped up it's game and provided better service. It's only when they don't care even in the face of the threat that it goes through and a municipal system is set up. On average, said municipal systems are able to do what they're supposed to: provide internet access(or gas) at a reasonable rate while paying off all the expenses of setting up the system at a reasonable rate.
We're talking about government provided gigabit broadband. The government (and the taxpayers, all of them) ARE the company. How can you claim that another bond measure would not attach to the government?
Do you need me to explain how a LLC works? Hell, look up how Trump operates, it's a virtually ideal example. Trump's companies declare bankruptcy 'all the time', he's not held financially responsible for them.
How many fire trucks should a city sell off to get the money to pay for gigabit broadband for the relative few who use it?
'relative few'? And you're a slashdotter? As for fire trucks, those are a lousy thing to sell. I was thinking about stuff like a municiple building that they're not using any more, land held in reserve, etc... Hell, first thing you'd do is sell any assets that the cooperative purchased that turn out to not be necessary.
You deliberately left off the modifier in that statement. "To spend tax money the way they promised to."
What better way to help them survive, then by ending a captive breeding program?!?
That might not matter, as no Orca raised in captivity has survived release into the wild. Ergo, you can't repopulate a wild population with them. Maybe techniques to do it successfully could be done, maybe not.
As a secondary thing, the '40 years without a capture' made me wonder if there might not be a secondary reason that they're not talking about - specifically inbreeding. How many generations in are they? Do they have enough lines to keep genetic diversity up?
Correct.
Personally, I've always found that the best utilities are cooperatives. Ergo, if the locals become pissed off enough that they vote to create a local cooperative, more power on them.
They are moving into a new venture, which makes them a new competitor. The "moving into the area" part of the "dumping" issue is irrelevant. I'm sorry you fixated on that.
Okay, fine. I'll broaden my scope: Competition is good. Companies are not guaranteed a profit, are not to be granted a guarantee that they will break even. Survival of the fittest.
Involuntary investors.
I did specify a vote, remember? One might as well complain about losing the vote about funding parks, schools, fire departments, police departments, and other public services. Actually, no. Most people get LESS of a vote on that stuff.
Most bond measures pass with a plurality that consists of a minority of the voters. Getting one more than half of a 25% turnout means that you only had approval from 12% of the registered voters, and since there are people who are not registered you've got a lot less than 12% of the taxpayers.
As somebody who votes every election, even if it has to be absentee, let me get my violin out.
And if there are that many pissed off subscribers (not just voters in general), that area is ripe for competition -- from private companies.
True, but said private companies have to identify target locations, gather funds of their own, be able to expect a reasonable profit, and all that.
And guess what? Even the private investors still have to be worried about being sued into bankruptcy by the major telecoms, which will dump money into killing any potential competition between lawsuits and only offering discounts and upgrading infrastructure where there's competition, making them actual dumpers. Well, unless you're lucky enough to be a 'test city' for google fiber or such.
And, it appears, no sympathy for any potential private companies that might come in to provide the competition you seek.
If a private company comes in, provides competition, superior service than the incumbent, then the proposals to set up a municipal system tend to die on the vine. It's only when this fails to occur, when they fail to be able to attract any new competition, that this happens.
But when the costs exceed income, it has to come from somewhere.
You treat this as an inevitability when it's not. Sure, it 'has' to come from somewhere. You're neglecting other possible sources: Increased fees, borrowing more money(attached to the company, not the government), selling stock or assets, hell, even declaring the venture a bust and shutting down.
And because the city realized how easy it was to add taxes to the water bill, we now have taxes on the water bill to pay for sidewalk repairs and tree trimming and free bus service.
Run for office. That being said, they're still pikers. One of the taxes on phone lines is a line item to pay for the last US-Mexico war.
It's amazing to see the dichotomy between those who have absolutely zero trust in government, and those who have unlimited trust in government to spend tax money the way they promised to.
You think I have 'unlimited trust in government'? BWAHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHAHHAHA *THUD* (oww...)
nd when you consider that these are the same local governments who have allegedly been bought off and giving megacorporate cable companies dejure monopolies, to suddenly trust them with a bottomless bucket of money to do the same thing ... it boggles the mind.
Actually they're NOT the same local governments. Some local governments are in the pockets, some are not. What you do is if they're in the pocket is that you run for office, get OUT of the pocket, and screw said corporations that are screwing your constituents as hard as possible.
In business-land, large companies who move into an area and drive their competition out of business by charging below cost are guilty of dumping. Should government be allowed to that?
1. The local government isn't "moving into the area". It's already there. Also, in this case the "taxpayer's general fund" is coming out of the investor's pockets, IE the same citizens that started up the cooperative.
2. If, like I said, you manage to piss off the locals enough that they willingly vote for a bond issuance to fund the startup of a competing cooperative, that means that you done screwed up(to put it politely), and I have no sympathy for you. Because it usually means that you've been raping the area for decades using your monopoly to provide lousy service at high prices.
3. Most of the time it's not structured to come out of the general fund, but is done via special bond issuance. Payback terms vary.
Local democracy is preferable to federal because it's less corrupt right?
No, because it's more responsive to local demands and conditions. For example, imagine the feds imposing the same water restrictions whether you live in Washington State with water running out it's ears, and Nevada or California with critical shortages.
Indeed. If I lived in one of the affected states it'd be something I'd be pushing my local congress on.
It's one thing to drive a competitor bankrupt via being better at it. It's quite another to use regulations to ban competition at all.
And, as far as I'm concerned, if you manage to piss off the locals enough that a majority votes to form a cooperative* or such to compete with you, you've done screwed up so bad that I don't have an ounce of sympathy for you.
and tesla happens to be the biggest name in EVs right now.
Nissan actually sells more EVs though.
I think the problem that you're having with finding such a device is that it's simply not necessary at this point. People use their phones and such for the time. If they're buying an alarm clock, it's generally accurate enough as is, and if they're putting a wall clock up they're doing it for the ambiance as much as having the time available.
GPS indoors is iffy anyways.