I agree that this is true, but it does seem rather arbitrary to me. I am a proponent of the free market, but I do accept that people are often irrational. That said, I think the "solutions" to the problem of the irationality of people are often poorly thought out and often just make things worse.
The federal and California governments have a *general* policy that they want most workers to be employees, especially low level workers, because being a proper individual contractor is actually fairly complicated tax wise, and low level workers are the most likely to not realize things like the increased social security cost, meaning they're making less money than they thought they would, in addition to extra expenses like insurance.
Uber will probably be able to change this designation by changing up their terms of service a bit - giving more freedom to the drivers.
I agree with the judge on one point: if they were independent contractors, they would be free to pickup passengers not using Uber.
I've heard of drivers keeping 3 phones and having Uber, lyft, and sidecar all up and running at the same time. With a driver doing that you would indeed have a good argument that he's a contractor.
No, humans don't need meat to remain healthy. What we need is animal products, short of some genetically engineered yeasts used to make some supplements.
An egg or glass of milk(for those who are lactose tolerant) is perfectly sufficient.
On the other hand, a balanced diet of 'all' plant products is fairly hard. If you don't turn your nose up at organ meats, one based off of meat is easy.
Note that I said 'Europe' and not Britain or England or anything like that. As you mention, they were re-imported from western Europe, where they still have healthy populations.
Sounds like somebody's played Paranoia - a Game where you're given a number of clones of your character. And there have been numerous games where all clones have died BEFORE leaving the starting room...
This isn't entirely true, I remember a study where they found that processing hemp into paper is more expensive than wood, and the savings from 'quickly growing doesn't counter weigh the ability to just leave trees alone for the requisite time.
IE yeah, you can harvest every year, but you have to harvest every year to get the biomass - the extra harvesting, for less useful mass, ends up being more expensive than planting trees and coming back for harvest 15 years later.
Now when a fire gets started it burns decades of pent up fuel, it burns hotter and higher, it spreads over larger areas and kills EVERYTHING.
Alaska and Yellowstone both show that even that doesn't last very long in the scale of things. When most of yellowstone burned, some scientists were predicting that they figured that the soil itself must have been so scorched that nothing would grow in it for decades. A couple decades later you had trees shooting up like weeds.
I'm not saying to abandon all firefighting efforts, but instead they should let 'as much burn as practical'. Yes, that means that they should probably update building codes and encourage renovations to make homes that can survive such blazes. Clear out trees and foilage that's too close, plant the fire-resistant stuff, etc...
We'll have smokey summers for a while until the excess is burnt away, but we'll be the better for it.
Wow. Only way they'd be getting away with that is if the $135 also includes a pretty good cable package. Or they're like me, my phone company doesn't want to offer me DSL, so cable was my only choice.
Capitalism can't "work itself out" when consumer selection isn't the driving force, and muscley corporates are.
The answer is basically what we see here - upstart companies providing more competition. And yes, local government can be competition, and my only requirement is that I'd prefer it to be approved by a majority vote by residents. You should absolutely NOT restrict competition.
Suing to drive said small town's efforts bankrupt? Dismissed with prejudice with x3 lawyer's fees awarded. It's effectively a SLAPP. (lawsuits suppressing speech).
When it comes to utilities I prefer cooperatives anyways.
My guess is that a lot of them would rather see the species extinct than reduced to domestic cattle.
Then they're asshats. Seriously. Right now there's not enough Rhinos period for healthy genetic diversity.
Anyways, the ranchers mentioned don't keep their animals tightly confined, and horn harvest is about once a year, not monthly.
Besides, if you can fulfill enough of the demand with legal product, the economic motive to poach is decreased, meaning less pressure on the herds, leaving population growth and land takeover as the biggest threats. Get Africans up to even 2nd world standards and their birth rate should drop like the others, they'll become concerned about the environment like we did, etc...
So you can end up with a situation like in Europe - plenty of wild boars still exist, even though pig farms do as well. Heck, USA and it's feral populations of pigs and horses.
Oregon's done a lot since the "plant three for every one you take" rule came into effect; we now have forest fires instead of clear cuts. I am assuming the ecoterrorists like Tre Arrow actually prefer fires.
As we're figuring out, the occasional fire is actually good for the environment. I'd still rather harvest a lot of the trees up here rather than suffer through the fires. Even if the result is simply burning them in a clean power plant(compared to uncontrolled forest fire combustion), that's a lot of green energy right there.
That being said, farmers are idiots a lot of the time because there's lots and lots of monocultures out there. They seem to do mostly fine.
Salisbury's solution to this problem is on the right track but it's not the correct solution. If companies sue for unfair competition, they'll win. Governments should not be ISPs or content providers.
On the other hand, if businesses are so unwilling to provide decent service, the local community standing up a local ISP through the government is a logical choice, though yes, I'd prefer if they formed a cooperative or something. Maybe they can 'spin off' the ISP services in a few more years. But consider that the government is also providing the water & sewer services - somebody else posted the city's audit/budget page, and water/sewer is literally the next page up. They also run a bus system.
In short, it depends on how you view internet connectivity today - do you look at it as a utility or not? If you do, government action, especially when the market isn't responding satisfactory, makes sense.
As for unbundling layer 2 & 3 service*, most areas don't do that - I get ALL my phone service, including long distance, from the local phone company. I don't rent the pipes then pay to have water delivered from a different company, nor with the electric company. I view it as an efficiency thing - is the added competition over layer 3 providers going to improve provision of service more than the efficiency of the local cooperative providing everything? Personally, my thought is that the latter will be more efficient.
*I'm using terminology seen elsewhere in the thread, even though this isn't a very correct way to refer to the split between getting a connection on the MAN and actually getting on the internet.
Capitalism will keep all the private providers in check. There's no way Comcast and it's ilk would behave the way they do if they had to compete for your business.
For the record, I'm a 'practical minarchist', IE 'moderate libertarian', and I agree with you, mostly.
Here's my thought: If Comcast and their sort were providing satisfactory service in these areas, the local communities wouldn't feel the need to create their own networks.
If you manage to so piss off the locals that they, by stint of majority vote, approve the creation of a 'public utility', cooperative, or whatever to provide internet services, I think you should face the consequences. If you sue them because they'd be 'competing', well, tough shit, odds are you were an effective monopoly in the area and you done screwed up. In which case I think that you should not only owe court costs, but a portion of the construction costs for their new system.
Don't want that happening? Actually provide adequate service at adequate prices.
Okay, so they 'lost' $144k in 2014. The service is isn't even years old, and it takes a few years to start making a profit on this stuff. Per the article, they have 3.3k users, and 25% penetration in homes in their allowed service area. They made $4.4M from subscribers, or $1,342 each, or an average of $112/month.
That would work out to 108 more customers to break even, assuming zero marginal cost. Going by operating expenses of $2.96M, that's $897 of cost per customer, per year. Leaving marginal revenue of $445, or 324 new customers needed to break even, or right around 10% more people.
Shouldn't actually be that difficult. Looking at previous 2 years - they were losing closer to $4M/year, but looking at the expense lines, they were still expanding their network, spending more money to get service to customers than they were bringing in.
That's without considering that they paid down $400k of principle and $1.3M in interest. If you figure that they're paying something around 5% on that debt, that $400k will save them ~$20k in interest next year. Or - in less than 12 years they'd be breaking even from debt repayment alone.
BTW 'infrastructure depreciation' tends to be weird - I know that when I was in federal service we operated a LOT of equipment that had a technical value of $0, IE fully depreciated, but it was still usable, so we did. For example, you might fully depreciate a car over 5 years, but keep using it for 10.
Technically speaking, you'd only need 1 10gig connection - into a router that feeds multiple 1G computers. And a family large enough to use enough of the computers to make it make a difference.
Still, keep in mind that 'business' is a subset of their planned users. I know plenty that would be more than happy to pay $400/month for 10gig. Dad's company pays far more for far less.
One of the things that we've seen in the USA is that there's a very positive correlation between competition amount and service provided.
Areas where there's no competition tend to languish and suffer slow speeds for high amounts of money. Areas with competition tend to get lots of bandwidth at very reasonable prices in comparison.
I'll note that the 'competition' has to be competitive - sometimes you get the Cable & DSL companies essentially colluding so they're more or less the same level of mediocre.
An interesting point but hopefully the answer isn't to put it all "under the plow" for the sake of poachers.
Hell no. But there are already ranchers in Africa that are raising Rhinos and humanely cutting the horn regularly, storing the currently illegal to sell product. Allow them to profit from it and the practice would relatively explode, even if still confined to said ranches. Meanwhile, they make enough money from their operations to hire sufficient security that poachers would find getting the limited amounts of horn from Rhinos on the ranch which have their horns regularly trimmed too little return for the risk - besides the whole idea that it'd crash the rhino horn market at least a bit.
As for costs of harvesting from a tree farm - that's complicated. You can grow trees further north, for example, than bamboo. Even then, we know how to make products from wood that we don't have experience with for bamboo. I'm sure substitute processes can be developed, and should probably be explored, but you can end up with a sugar cane/sugar bean split where 'both' is the ultimate answer.
would translate into a smaller footprint required to produce.
This brings up an important point that detracts from the article. Toilet paper and timber today are overwhelmingly produced from farmed trees. Timber is, generally speaking, sequestering the wood. Discounting the costs of processing and shipping, toilet paper is actually renewable. After all, after you harvest a field to make into TP, you simply plant more trees.
Remove them, and you might run into the problem seen by African Rhinos - where complete bans on their horns actually increases their vulnerability to poachers, because you've removed much of the economics of having them, thus reducing money available to protect them and even breed more of them.
Lions aren't easy to farm either, but at least the Chinese are doing it.
On the other hand, the factory has the ability to 'control the course' much better and shouldn't have to worry about drunk workers on the floor doing stupid tricks. They can also do things like embed direction lines in the floor(or even the ceiling), so the pathing is simpler.
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I agree that this is true, but it does seem rather arbitrary to me. I am a proponent of the free market, but I do accept that people are often irrational. That said, I think the "solutions" to the problem of the irationality of people are often poorly thought out and often just make things worse.
The federal and California governments have a *general* policy that they want most workers to be employees, especially low level workers, because being a proper individual contractor is actually fairly complicated tax wise, and low level workers are the most likely to not realize things like the increased social security cost, meaning they're making less money than they thought they would, in addition to extra expenses like insurance.
Uber will probably be able to change this designation by changing up their terms of service a bit - giving more freedom to the drivers.
I agree with the judge on one point: if they were independent contractors, they would be free to pickup passengers not using Uber.
I've heard of drivers keeping 3 phones and having Uber, lyft, and sidecar all up and running at the same time. With a driver doing that you would indeed have a good argument that he's a contractor.
But many/most don't do that.
You're forgetting the Europeans and other nations, which the Chinese do just as much work for.
It was a university study, I don't remember any sponsors other than that.
No, humans don't need meat to remain healthy. What we need is animal products, short of some genetically engineered yeasts used to make some supplements.
An egg or glass of milk(for those who are lactose tolerant) is perfectly sufficient.
On the other hand, a balanced diet of 'all' plant products is fairly hard. If you don't turn your nose up at organ meats, one based off of meat is easy.
Note that I said 'Europe' and not Britain or England or anything like that. As you mention, they were re-imported from western Europe, where they still have healthy populations.
Sounds like somebody's played Paranoia - a Game where you're given a number of clones of your character. And there have been numerous games where all clones have died BEFORE leaving the starting room...
This isn't entirely true, I remember a study where they found that processing hemp into paper is more expensive than wood, and the savings from 'quickly growing doesn't counter weigh the ability to just leave trees alone for the requisite time.
IE yeah, you can harvest every year, but you have to harvest every year to get the biomass - the extra harvesting, for less useful mass, ends up being more expensive than planting trees and coming back for harvest 15 years later.
I'm sorry, I misstated - the trees actually sprouted within 2 years. After 20 years they were too tall to be used as christmas trees.
"below the waist" was probably cut in editing.
My grandfather's legs are partially paralyzed, he can still walk, but it's pretty obvious if you watch him that he doesn't have full control.
Now when a fire gets started it burns decades of pent up fuel, it burns hotter and higher, it spreads over larger areas and kills EVERYTHING.
Alaska and Yellowstone both show that even that doesn't last very long in the scale of things. When most of yellowstone burned, some scientists were predicting that they figured that the soil itself must have been so scorched that nothing would grow in it for decades. A couple decades later you had trees shooting up like weeds.
I'm not saying to abandon all firefighting efforts, but instead they should let 'as much burn as practical'. Yes, that means that they should probably update building codes and encourage renovations to make homes that can survive such blazes. Clear out trees and foilage that's too close, plant the fire-resistant stuff, etc...
We'll have smokey summers for a while until the excess is burnt away, but we'll be the better for it.
Wow. Only way they'd be getting away with that is if the $135 also includes a pretty good cable package. Or they're like me, my phone company doesn't want to offer me DSL, so cable was my only choice.
Capitalism can't "work itself out" when consumer selection isn't the driving force, and muscley corporates are.
The answer is basically what we see here - upstart companies providing more competition. And yes, local government can be competition, and my only requirement is that I'd prefer it to be approved by a majority vote by residents. You should absolutely NOT restrict competition.
Suing to drive said small town's efforts bankrupt? Dismissed with prejudice with x3 lawyer's fees awarded. It's effectively a SLAPP. (lawsuits suppressing speech).
When it comes to utilities I prefer cooperatives anyways.
My guess is that a lot of them would rather see the species extinct than reduced to domestic cattle.
Then they're asshats. Seriously. Right now there's not enough Rhinos period for healthy genetic diversity.
Anyways, the ranchers mentioned don't keep their animals tightly confined, and horn harvest is about once a year, not monthly.
Besides, if you can fulfill enough of the demand with legal product, the economic motive to poach is decreased, meaning less pressure on the herds, leaving population growth and land takeover as the biggest threats. Get Africans up to even 2nd world standards and their birth rate should drop like the others, they'll become concerned about the environment like we did, etc...
So you can end up with a situation like in Europe - plenty of wild boars still exist, even though pig farms do as well. Heck, USA and it's feral populations of pigs and horses.
Not every tree farm is located where there used to be old growth forest.
Every tree in North Dakota, for example, was either planted by a human or descended from a tree planted by a human.
Oregon's done a lot since the "plant three for every one you take" rule came into effect; we now have forest fires instead of clear cuts. I am assuming the ecoterrorists like Tre Arrow actually prefer fires.
As we're figuring out, the occasional fire is actually good for the environment. I'd still rather harvest a lot of the trees up here rather than suffer through the fires. Even if the result is simply burning them in a clean power plant(compared to uncontrolled forest fire combustion), that's a lot of green energy right there.
That being said, farmers are idiots a lot of the time because there's lots and lots of monocultures out there. They seem to do mostly fine.
Salisbury's solution to this problem is on the right track but it's not the correct solution. If companies sue for unfair competition, they'll win. Governments should not be ISPs or content providers.
On the other hand, if businesses are so unwilling to provide decent service, the local community standing up a local ISP through the government is a logical choice, though yes, I'd prefer if they formed a cooperative or something. Maybe they can 'spin off' the ISP services in a few more years. But consider that the government is also providing the water & sewer services - somebody else posted the city's audit/budget page, and water/sewer is literally the next page up. They also run a bus system.
In short, it depends on how you view internet connectivity today - do you look at it as a utility or not? If you do, government action, especially when the market isn't responding satisfactory, makes sense.
As for unbundling layer 2 & 3 service*, most areas don't do that - I get ALL my phone service, including long distance, from the local phone company. I don't rent the pipes then pay to have water delivered from a different company, nor with the electric company. I view it as an efficiency thing - is the added competition over layer 3 providers going to improve provision of service more than the efficiency of the local cooperative providing everything? Personally, my thought is that the latter will be more efficient.
*I'm using terminology seen elsewhere in the thread, even though this isn't a very correct way to refer to the split between getting a connection on the MAN and actually getting on the internet.
Capitalism will keep all the private providers in check. There's no way Comcast and it's ilk would behave the way they do if they had to compete for your business.
For the record, I'm a 'practical minarchist', IE 'moderate libertarian', and I agree with you, mostly.
Here's my thought: If Comcast and their sort were providing satisfactory service in these areas, the local communities wouldn't feel the need to create their own networks.
If you manage to so piss off the locals that they, by stint of majority vote, approve the creation of a 'public utility', cooperative, or whatever to provide internet services, I think you should face the consequences. If you sue them because they'd be 'competing', well, tough shit, odds are you were an effective monopoly in the area and you done screwed up. In which case I think that you should not only owe court costs, but a portion of the construction costs for their new system.
Don't want that happening? Actually provide adequate service at adequate prices.
Okay, so they 'lost' $144k in 2014. The service is isn't even years old, and it takes a few years to start making a profit on this stuff. Per the article, they have 3.3k users, and 25% penetration in homes in their allowed service area. They made $4.4M from subscribers, or $1,342 each, or an average of $112/month.
That would work out to 108 more customers to break even, assuming zero marginal cost. Going by operating expenses of $2.96M, that's $897 of cost per customer, per year. Leaving marginal revenue of $445, or 324 new customers needed to break even, or right around 10% more people.
Shouldn't actually be that difficult. Looking at previous 2 years - they were losing closer to $4M/year, but looking at the expense lines, they were still expanding their network, spending more money to get service to customers than they were bringing in.
That's without considering that they paid down $400k of principle and $1.3M in interest. If you figure that they're paying something around 5% on that debt, that $400k will save them ~$20k in interest next year. Or - in less than 12 years they'd be breaking even from debt repayment alone.
BTW 'infrastructure depreciation' tends to be weird - I know that when I was in federal service we operated a LOT of equipment that had a technical value of $0, IE fully depreciated, but it was still usable, so we did. For example, you might fully depreciate a car over 5 years, but keep using it for 10.
Technically speaking, you'd only need 1 10gig connection - into a router that feeds multiple 1G computers. And a family large enough to use enough of the computers to make it make a difference.
Still, keep in mind that 'business' is a subset of their planned users. I know plenty that would be more than happy to pay $400/month for 10gig. Dad's company pays far more for far less.
One of the things that we've seen in the USA is that there's a very positive correlation between competition amount and service provided.
Areas where there's no competition tend to languish and suffer slow speeds for high amounts of money. Areas with competition tend to get lots of bandwidth at very reasonable prices in comparison.
I'll note that the 'competition' has to be competitive - sometimes you get the Cable & DSL companies essentially colluding so they're more or less the same level of mediocre.
An interesting point but hopefully the answer isn't to put it all "under the plow" for the sake of poachers.
Hell no. But there are already ranchers in Africa that are raising Rhinos and humanely cutting the horn regularly, storing the currently illegal to sell product. Allow them to profit from it and the practice would relatively explode, even if still confined to said ranches. Meanwhile, they make enough money from their operations to hire sufficient security that poachers would find getting the limited amounts of horn from Rhinos on the ranch which have their horns regularly trimmed too little return for the risk - besides the whole idea that it'd crash the rhino horn market at least a bit.
As for costs of harvesting from a tree farm - that's complicated. You can grow trees further north, for example, than bamboo. Even then, we know how to make products from wood that we don't have experience with for bamboo. I'm sure substitute processes can be developed, and should probably be explored, but you can end up with a sugar cane/sugar bean split where 'both' is the ultimate answer.
Wildfires in Alaska 'cost' us tens of millions even in a low-fire year.
Trick is, it's like Yellowstone. You get 2-3 years of opportunistic plants (fireweed), then the forests start regrowing.
If I don't mow my yard regularly the trees around my house would spread TO my house within 2 years. As is I'm trying to push them back a bit.
would translate into a smaller footprint required to produce.
This brings up an important point that detracts from the article. Toilet paper and timber today are overwhelmingly produced from farmed trees. Timber is, generally speaking, sequestering the wood. Discounting the costs of processing and shipping, toilet paper is actually renewable. After all, after you harvest a field to make into TP, you simply plant more trees.
Remove them, and you might run into the problem seen by African Rhinos - where complete bans on their horns actually increases their vulnerability to poachers, because you've removed much of the economics of having them, thus reducing money available to protect them and even breed more of them.
Lions aren't easy to farm either, but at least the Chinese are doing it.
Any golf course that can afford lidar controlled golf carts can afford security guards to stop the riff raff from getting in too.
You're assuming that the golf team isn't also coming from an exclusive private high school.
On the other hand, the factory has the ability to 'control the course' much better and shouldn't have to worry about drunk workers on the floor doing stupid tricks. They can also do things like embed direction lines in the floor(or even the ceiling), so the pathing is simpler.