In rare cases where there is actually a close race, then voting for the lesser of two evils may make sense.
Right, but that's what I'm saying.
If you're voting for President in California, you might as well vote for whoever you damn well please, because the Democrat is going to win the state. But if you're voting in Florida or Ohio, for the love of math, don't vote for a third party. And if you're a third party, don't run for office unless it's on a major party ticket.
I do, but the system is just as stacked against them as it is against the third parties.
I don't know about that. I mean sure, it's the same 'money buys votes' problem, but that's a different problem than 'third parties can't win' -- if Ross Perot had run against Bush in the Republican primary in '88 instead of the general election in '92, he probably would have been president.
If everyone continues to be 'smart' about such voting, it may well end up in some elections that 75% of the public would have supported a 3rd candidate but just vote for the same pair of idiots as always:-)
You're doing it wrong.
If there is a candidate that 75% of the population would prefer, and everyone voted in primaries, that candidate would win by running in either the Democratic or Republican primary. Having done that, the same candidate would win in the general election. Problem solved.
Trying to run as a third party causes you to lose and causes the candidate most like you to lose in the large majority of cases. It is not physically impossible for an independent candidate to win -- Ross Perot came close, Joe Lieberman (the incumbent who lost a primary) subsequently won as an independent in Connecticut, etc. That is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that in close elections, third parties screw over their own ideals by splitting the vote and causing the candidate least like them to win.
If it is genuinely the case that 40% of people prefer Ralph Nader, 15% prefer Al Gore, and 45% prefer George W. Bush, but 55% prefer either left-leaning candidate to George W. Bush given the choice between the two, Nader should run in the Democratic primary, beat Gore there, and then run as the sole alternative to Bush, thereby winning. And if Gore wins the primary, same deal -- of the two left-leaning candidates, you get the one most people like. Then, of the left-leaning candidate the most people like and the right-leaning candidate the most people like, you choose between them. That is the best way to do it with first past the post.
The alternative, if you want viable third parties, is to change the voting system. Range voting or approval voting would fix all of this. But until that has actually happened, fuck third parties in general elections and have their candidates run in the major parties' primaries. Because otherwise you're just making it worse.
Voting independent is worse than perpetuating the system. It's perpetuating the system while allowing the greater of two evils to win.
You can't have third parties with first past the post voting. It doesn't work. It isn't politics, it's math. Two similar candidates that together have 51%+ of the vote when one alone doesn't will always do better to combine forces, and they always will, unless one of them is being irrational (like Ralph Nader), in which case that candidate becomes a pariah for handing the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush. "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" is not a slogan, it's a mathematical fact.
If you want to change the system, vote in the primaries (and I mean for Congress, not just for President), before all the candidates worth voting for get eliminated.
OK, so you go out and vote for Ron Paul in the primaries. He doesn't win. Maybe Santorum is the nominee. Now who do you vote for in the general election?
Though, there may soon be an Android LA (similar to MPEG-LA) to handle all the patent licensing stuff - pay a per-unit royalty to A-LA and get access to Microsoft's, Apple's, Oracle's, and the rest of the ETSI's patents.
Heck, I'm surprised there's no ETSI-LA for handling all the FRAND patent licensing stuff instead of having to negotiate individually with Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung, Microsoft, Motorola, and all the other patent licenseholders.
That stuff generally only happens when the standard is created by a group of companies who want the patents to read on it so that they, themselves, can collect royalties from everybody else. If the standard (or technology) is maintained by a third party (like Google), creating a patent pool is like putting up a billboard saying, "hey Google, here is a list of specific patents you can set your army of lawyers and engineers to work invalidating or designing around." And then most of them get invalidated and the next version Android doesn't infringe any of the others.
Why do you think Microsoft's patent trolling is all done under non-disclosure agreements?
No there wouldn't be any. There are numerous examples of "open standards" hitting the market immediately evolving in 10 new standards that are completely exclusive to each other.
And that is what will happen in every case no matter what, am I right? I mean look at TCP/IP. Or DNS. Or HTTP. There is clearly no possible way that you can use a Microsoft web browser with any Linux web server, and that is why Mozilla does not exist and/or has a 0% browser market share (because they don't make their own server operating system with its own TCP stack and HTTP implementation to use it with).
If each cell phone manufacturer and network only used standards which were not patent encumbered, we'd have a much less robust wireless market.
More likely we would just have fewer vague, obvious, overbroad patents. The main impetus behind such patents is that if you can get them included as a necessary part of a standard, you can then run around collecting tolls from everyone in the industry. If no standards are accepted with necessary patents that are not freely licensed to anyone implementing the standard, the coerced market for those patents disappears, and either nobody bothers to file the bad patents in the first place, or the people who do then realize it is better to freely license them to anyone implementing the standard because in no event will they be getting any money from those implementing the standard, and by that point better to freely license it and improve the standard.
I imagine it's probably the same thing as you mean by "neutron trigger/booster." I admit that the last time I really read up on the early designs was several years ago, so I could be misremembering the name.
Plutonium will also go critical in the correct configuration and mass, just like U235. Sure you can shoot a block of it, same goes for U235. Compressing it with explosives is just a way to reduce a hollow sphere into a critical sphere (with a neutron trigger/booster in the middle).
Right, but what I'm saying is that it isn't enough to just compress it somehow. You have to compress it just right. So if you remove the charges but then manage to smash your truck into an overpass, the thing isn't going to go off as a result of the impact.
I would also admit that I probably shouldn't have said "nothing will happen" if you assemble a lot of plutonium in the same place. There is a difference between "critical" and "bye bye city," and I only meant that you don't easily get the latter by accident (unlike uranium). You have criticality in a normally-operating power reactor, for example, but no boom. Which is what you're talking about with criticality accidents -- those people were killed by radiation spikes caused by criticality accidents, not explosions. It would be like standing next to an operating power reactor with no shielding. (I would also point out that when you bring in the neutron reflectors, all bets are off.)
Really? Some unsubstantiated rhetoric about what the world would be like without patents directly addresses the point that a patent is not a natural monopoly and certain common public utilities are? I'll let anyone following this discussion at home make their own decision on that one.
I think you're confusing a couple of things. There are two types of bombs, either uranium or plutonium, and I'm not sure they even make the first kind anymore (not that we could know). With uranium, if you assemble a sufficiently large sphere if near-100% U-235, it will spontaneously explode, bomb-like, without anything more. The original uranium-type bombs used to keep the uranium in to separate, sub-critical masses until the time of detonation, and then had a neutron gun to set it off, the purpose of which was only to make it so you could be assured of detonation at the right time (and thus altitude) rather than randomly at any point after the critical mass is assembled. Which is, I think, why we probably don't make those anymore -- who the hell wants to produce a nuclear bomb in a way that makes it easier for it to go off by accident? (It's also a lot less fuel-efficient to make them that way, because U-235 is only 0.7% of natural uranium, whereas the U-238 that they make Pu-239 out of is 99.3% of natural uranium.)
The plutonium designs don't suffer from the same problem because no amount of plutonium will spontaneously explode. To get a plutonium bomb to explode you have to compress the plutonium with high explosives. If you remove the charges from the core, the plutonium is just a hunk of metal. You can stack them a thousand high and shoot at them with anti-tank rounds and nothing will happen, because to go off they need high explosives to surround them on all sides and all detonate at once.
If changing the topic of discussion to arguing against something I never said and that has nothing to do with the telecommunications market is your way of admitting that you were wrong, I accept your apology.
Billion dollar web advertising company? simply look up their SEC filings and it says in black and white they make more than 96% of their income from ads, and they are a multi-billion dollar company, so check there.
That's more than a little disingenuous, don't you think? By this logic News Corp., Viacom and all newspapers are also "advertising companies" because they make most of their money from advertisers, and Microsoft is a "business-oriented financial services company" because they get most of their money as electronic funds transfers from large corporations.
And Google having a history [redorbit.com] of privacy [washingtonpost.com] violations? [examiner.com] I would say that's a pretty big yes.
How are three links to the same story on different websites a "history"? On top of that, have you actually looked into what happened? Google configured their services to be able to offer certain features that required cookies to Safari users who hadn't changed the default settings (which fails to block "third party" cookies in certain circumstances even though it says it will, in a way that Google itself had already submitted a fix for in Webkit), and a bunch of media companies butthurt that Google was on the list of companies opposing SOPA (notably News Corp's The Wall Street Journal, who broke the story) decided to blow it all out of proportion.
I mean they're complaining that Google added the +1 feature to ads for users already signed into Google+. This is what passes for a privacy breach now?
In any case, Alcoa came up with a means of refining aluminum that was so efficient you could use it in aircraft airframes, soda cans, food cans, and aluminum foil. That is a natural monopoly.
Of course, once the patient expires anyone can build their own aluminum refinery thus ending the natural monopoly.
What you have with the telecoms is not a natural monopoly because it's government backed. It's a government sponsored monopoly. It is literally illegal to compete with them by law.
What are you talking about? You have it exactly backwards. A patent is not a natural monopoly -- it's a government enforced monopoly.
Natural monopolies are the complete opposite of "very unstable, short lived, and result mostly from a technological innovation" -- they're the result of extremely high capital costs and they exist because they're extremely stable and difficult to challenge. The "best example" (as you can read in the Wikipedia article) is a public utility, like the phone network or the electrical grid.
What makes a natural monopoly is a market with extremely high capital costs (like the cost of laying miles of fiber optic cable). The incumbent in the market long ago paid those costs and recovered them by charging high margins. Once the monopolist has recovered their costs, they can (if required to do so by competition) reduce their margins to very low levels and still turn a profit, because their massive capital investment has already been recovered and any additional margins are pure profit. However, the prospective competitor can't profitably operate at the same margins as the incumbent in that situation, because they need higher margins to apply to the capital cost that the new competitor hasn't recovered but the incumbent has. And all prospective competitors know that, so no one will enter the market and the first incumbent retains the monopoly.
I'm not aware of any comprehensive list, but you're thinking about this at completely the wrong scale anyway. It's not like you're applying for a building permit and if the law says you can't do it then you have to go home sad. If you want to install fiber in some city, you have a hundred million dollars worth of working class jobs that you can bring to the state. You're going to be getting unsolicited calls from the governor's office asking if you need anything. Whatever the law says now is totally irrelevant -- they'll make it say whatever you want to get the jobs.
There already exist regions where the government does not prohibit competing telecommunications companies. It is rarely if ever the case that any actually sprout up.
This sort of tech is all precursor to auto drive cars.
Even before that, you can get excellent features like a heads up display that will tell you how fast to drive to hit all the lights green. "You are driving 43MPH. Accelerate to 47MPH and you will reach the intersection before the other car and the light will be green" etc.
I'm not saying that opening the market to competition would be a bad thing. It just wouldn't have any effect, because there are no small competitors who are willing to enter it. Which you can see as plain as day from the fact that there are already markets where competitors are legally allowed to enter, but nobody does. Look at the Google fiber project -- there were cities falling all over themselves to get them to build there. Topeka officially changed their name to "Google, Kansas." It isn't the law that prevents new competitors from entering the market, it's the incumbents. Google is only doing it because they're in it to do an experiment rather than as a profit-seeking endeavor.
Some will fail because the big companies kill them. But killing a smaller company takes money. You have to lower your prices and you sometimes have to buy them out. You can't do that repeatedly without it showing up on the balance sheet.
Right, but they don't have to do it repeatedly. They don't even have to do it once. All they have to do is establish a credible threat of doing it. Then no one is willing to be the first to call their bluff and they never have to pay a dime.
That's the problem: They wouldn't. Because it works like this: No prospective competitor has enough money to build a nationwide network all at once. The only way to do it is to roll out in one city, then use the profits from operating the network in that city to roll out in the next city, rinse and repeat.
The problem comes that whichever city you choose to start with, the incumbents in that city will drop their margins to zero only in that city on the day before you start offering service there. The only way to get customers to use the new network is to match the price cuts and operate with no margins, so the fixed costs (which the incumbents have already paid off and the new competitors haven't) thereby make the new competitor unprofitable and leave no profits to use to expand any further. And because prospective competitors know that will happen (as it has happened in the few instances where new competitors have tried to enter the market in the past, or there has been a municipal fiber roll out), no one is willing to invest in building a competing network.
The fact that there is sometimes both a telephone and cable company that offer internet service in the same area is just a historical accident, because by the time they were actually in competition with each other they were both already big enough that they couldn't drive the other out of business with price competition without severe damage to their own business, so instead they just both operate on the unspoken agreement that neither will be the first to do anything aggressively competitive. But if a small new competitor ever started a build out, have no doubt that they would lower their prices until the competitor got the message that continuing to build a network will be made unprofitable for them.
Realistically, if you want a serious competitor to the incumbents, it needs to be municipal. You pay for the network with tax dollars (or a bond issue) on the assumption that you may not ever make back the money, and if you do, great. And if not, no harm done, you've paid for fiber and now you've got it.
I am reminded of the anti-piratbyran (anti-pirate bureau) terrorizing Sweden, to which the response was for that nation's people to create piratbyran (pirate bureau).
If there is a "serious organized crime agency" terrorizing the UK, perhaps it is time for that nation's people to create an anti serious organized crime agency?
Microsoft bought Hotmail. Then it came out that Hotmail was using *nix servers instead of Windows and much was made of Microsoft not eating their own dog food, so Microsoft made it a big priority to get them on Windows ASAP... and failed miserably, causing service outages etc. and making the original bad PR substantially worse.
People were making fun of them for years after that.
NRC fuel reprocessing rules to prevent proliferation make it nearly impossible.
Does anyone else find it insane that we have anti-proliferation rules that primarily act to prevent countries that already have nuclear weapons from reprocessing spent fuel?
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In rare cases where there is actually a close race, then voting for the lesser of two evils may make sense.
Right, but that's what I'm saying.
If you're voting for President in California, you might as well vote for whoever you damn well please, because the Democrat is going to win the state. But if you're voting in Florida or Ohio, for the love of math, don't vote for a third party. And if you're a third party, don't run for office unless it's on a major party ticket.
I do, but the system is just as stacked against them as it is against the third parties.
I don't know about that. I mean sure, it's the same 'money buys votes' problem, but that's a different problem than 'third parties can't win' -- if Ross Perot had run against Bush in the Republican primary in '88 instead of the general election in '92, he probably would have been president.
If everyone continues to be 'smart' about such voting, it may well end up in some elections that 75% of the public would have supported a 3rd candidate but just vote for the same pair of idiots as always :-)
You're doing it wrong.
If there is a candidate that 75% of the population would prefer, and everyone voted in primaries, that candidate would win by running in either the Democratic or Republican primary. Having done that, the same candidate would win in the general election. Problem solved.
Trying to run as a third party causes you to lose and causes the candidate most like you to lose in the large majority of cases. It is not physically impossible for an independent candidate to win -- Ross Perot came close, Joe Lieberman (the incumbent who lost a primary) subsequently won as an independent in Connecticut, etc. That is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that in close elections, third parties screw over their own ideals by splitting the vote and causing the candidate least like them to win.
If it is genuinely the case that 40% of people prefer Ralph Nader, 15% prefer Al Gore, and 45% prefer George W. Bush, but 55% prefer either left-leaning candidate to George W. Bush given the choice between the two, Nader should run in the Democratic primary, beat Gore there, and then run as the sole alternative to Bush, thereby winning. And if Gore wins the primary, same deal -- of the two left-leaning candidates, you get the one most people like. Then, of the left-leaning candidate the most people like and the right-leaning candidate the most people like, you choose between them. That is the best way to do it with first past the post.
The alternative, if you want viable third parties, is to change the voting system. Range voting or approval voting would fix all of this. But until that has actually happened, fuck third parties in general elections and have their candidates run in the major parties' primaries. Because otherwise you're just making it worse.
Voting independent is worse than perpetuating the system. It's perpetuating the system while allowing the greater of two evils to win.
You can't have third parties with first past the post voting. It doesn't work. It isn't politics, it's math. Two similar candidates that together have 51%+ of the vote when one alone doesn't will always do better to combine forces, and they always will, unless one of them is being irrational (like Ralph Nader), in which case that candidate becomes a pariah for handing the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush. "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" is not a slogan, it's a mathematical fact.
If you want to change the system, vote in the primaries (and I mean for Congress, not just for President), before all the candidates worth voting for get eliminated.
OK, so you go out and vote for Ron Paul in the primaries. He doesn't win. Maybe Santorum is the nominee. Now who do you vote for in the general election?
Though, there may soon be an Android LA (similar to MPEG-LA) to handle all the patent licensing stuff - pay a per-unit royalty to A-LA and get access to Microsoft's, Apple's, Oracle's, and the rest of the ETSI's patents.
Heck, I'm surprised there's no ETSI-LA for handling all the FRAND patent licensing stuff instead of having to negotiate individually with Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung, Microsoft, Motorola, and all the other patent licenseholders.
That stuff generally only happens when the standard is created by a group of companies who want the patents to read on it so that they, themselves, can collect royalties from everybody else. If the standard (or technology) is maintained by a third party (like Google), creating a patent pool is like putting up a billboard saying, "hey Google, here is a list of specific patents you can set your army of lawyers and engineers to work invalidating or designing around." And then most of them get invalidated and the next version Android doesn't infringe any of the others.
Why do you think Microsoft's patent trolling is all done under non-disclosure agreements?
No there wouldn't be any. There are numerous examples of "open standards" hitting the market immediately evolving in 10 new standards that are completely exclusive to each other.
And that is what will happen in every case no matter what, am I right? I mean look at TCP/IP. Or DNS. Or HTTP. There is clearly no possible way that you can use a Microsoft web browser with any Linux web server, and that is why Mozilla does not exist and/or has a 0% browser market share (because they don't make their own server operating system with its own TCP stack and HTTP implementation to use it with).
If each cell phone manufacturer and network only used standards which were not patent encumbered, we'd have a much less robust wireless market.
More likely we would just have fewer vague, obvious, overbroad patents. The main impetus behind such patents is that if you can get them included as a necessary part of a standard, you can then run around collecting tolls from everyone in the industry. If no standards are accepted with necessary patents that are not freely licensed to anyone implementing the standard, the coerced market for those patents disappears, and either nobody bothers to file the bad patents in the first place, or the people who do then realize it is better to freely license them to anyone implementing the standard because in no event will they be getting any money from those implementing the standard, and by that point better to freely license it and improve the standard.
not sure what you mean by "neutron gun"
I imagine it's probably the same thing as you mean by "neutron trigger/booster." I admit that the last time I really read up on the early designs was several years ago, so I could be misremembering the name.
Plutonium will also go critical in the correct configuration and mass, just like U235. Sure you can shoot a block of it, same goes for U235. Compressing it with explosives is just a way to reduce a hollow sphere into a critical sphere (with a neutron trigger/booster in the middle).
Right, but what I'm saying is that it isn't enough to just compress it somehow. You have to compress it just right. So if you remove the charges but then manage to smash your truck into an overpass, the thing isn't going to go off as a result of the impact.
I would also admit that I probably shouldn't have said "nothing will happen" if you assemble a lot of plutonium in the same place. There is a difference between "critical" and "bye bye city," and I only meant that you don't easily get the latter by accident (unlike uranium). You have criticality in a normally-operating power reactor, for example, but no boom. Which is what you're talking about with criticality accidents -- those people were killed by radiation spikes caused by criticality accidents, not explosions. It would be like standing next to an operating power reactor with no shielding. (I would also point out that when you bring in the neutron reflectors, all bets are off.)
I addressed your argument directly.
Really? Some unsubstantiated rhetoric about what the world would be like without patents directly addresses the point that a patent is not a natural monopoly and certain common public utilities are? I'll let anyone following this discussion at home make their own decision on that one.
I think you're confusing a couple of things. There are two types of bombs, either uranium or plutonium, and I'm not sure they even make the first kind anymore (not that we could know). With uranium, if you assemble a sufficiently large sphere if near-100% U-235, it will spontaneously explode, bomb-like, without anything more. The original uranium-type bombs used to keep the uranium in to separate, sub-critical masses until the time of detonation, and then had a neutron gun to set it off, the purpose of which was only to make it so you could be assured of detonation at the right time (and thus altitude) rather than randomly at any point after the critical mass is assembled. Which is, I think, why we probably don't make those anymore -- who the hell wants to produce a nuclear bomb in a way that makes it easier for it to go off by accident? (It's also a lot less fuel-efficient to make them that way, because U-235 is only 0.7% of natural uranium, whereas the U-238 that they make Pu-239 out of is 99.3% of natural uranium.)
The plutonium designs don't suffer from the same problem because no amount of plutonium will spontaneously explode. To get a plutonium bomb to explode you have to compress the plutonium with high explosives. If you remove the charges from the core, the plutonium is just a hunk of metal. You can stack them a thousand high and shoot at them with anti-tank rounds and nothing will happen, because to go off they need high explosives to surround them on all sides and all detonate at once.
If changing the topic of discussion to arguing against something I never said and that has nothing to do with the telecommunications market is your way of admitting that you were wrong, I accept your apology.
Billion dollar web advertising company? simply look up their SEC filings and it says in black and white they make more than 96% of their income from ads, and they are a multi-billion dollar company, so check there.
That's more than a little disingenuous, don't you think? By this logic News Corp., Viacom and all newspapers are also "advertising companies" because they make most of their money from advertisers, and Microsoft is a "business-oriented financial services company" because they get most of their money as electronic funds transfers from large corporations.
And Google having a history [redorbit.com] of privacy [washingtonpost.com] violations? [examiner.com] I would say that's a pretty big yes.
How are three links to the same story on different websites a "history"? On top of that, have you actually looked into what happened? Google configured their services to be able to offer certain features that required cookies to Safari users who hadn't changed the default settings (which fails to block "third party" cookies in certain circumstances even though it says it will, in a way that Google itself had already submitted a fix for in Webkit), and a bunch of media companies butthurt that Google was on the list of companies opposing SOPA (notably News Corp's The Wall Street Journal, who broke the story) decided to blow it all out of proportion.
I mean they're complaining that Google added the +1 feature to ads for users already signed into Google+. This is what passes for a privacy breach now?
In any case, Alcoa came up with a means of refining aluminum that was so efficient you could use it in aircraft airframes, soda cans, food cans, and aluminum foil. That is a natural monopoly.
Of course, once the patient expires anyone can build their own aluminum refinery thus ending the natural monopoly.
What you have with the telecoms is not a natural monopoly because it's government backed. It's a government sponsored monopoly. It is literally illegal to compete with them by law.
What are you talking about? You have it exactly backwards. A patent is not a natural monopoly -- it's a government enforced monopoly.
Natural monopolies are the complete opposite of "very unstable, short lived, and result mostly from a technological innovation" -- they're the result of extremely high capital costs and they exist because they're extremely stable and difficult to challenge. The "best example" (as you can read in the Wikipedia article) is a public utility, like the phone network or the electrical grid.
What makes a natural monopoly is a market with extremely high capital costs (like the cost of laying miles of fiber optic cable). The incumbent in the market long ago paid those costs and recovered them by charging high margins. Once the monopolist has recovered their costs, they can (if required to do so by competition) reduce their margins to very low levels and still turn a profit, because their massive capital investment has already been recovered and any additional margins are pure profit. However, the prospective competitor can't profitably operate at the same margins as the incumbent in that situation, because they need higher margins to apply to the capital cost that the new competitor hasn't recovered but the incumbent has. And all prospective competitors know that, so no one will enter the market and the first incumbent retains the monopoly.
Do you not understand what a natural monopoly is?
What laptop running Windows is competitive in speed, weight, and battery life with a MacBook Air and substantially cheaper?
Basically anything with an AMD E-series. The amount they are slower is more than made up for by the amount they are cheaper.
I'm not aware of any comprehensive list, but you're thinking about this at completely the wrong scale anyway. It's not like you're applying for a building permit and if the law says you can't do it then you have to go home sad. If you want to install fiber in some city, you have a hundred million dollars worth of working class jobs that you can bring to the state. You're going to be getting unsolicited calls from the governor's office asking if you need anything. Whatever the law says now is totally irrelevant -- they'll make it say whatever you want to get the jobs.
There already exist regions where the government does not prohibit competing telecommunications companies. It is rarely if ever the case that any actually sprout up.
This sort of tech is all precursor to auto drive cars.
Even before that, you can get excellent features like a heads up display that will tell you how fast to drive to hit all the lights green. "You are driving 43MPH. Accelerate to 47MPH and you will reach the intersection before the other car and the light will be green" etc.
I'm not saying that opening the market to competition would be a bad thing. It just wouldn't have any effect, because there are no small competitors who are willing to enter it. Which you can see as plain as day from the fact that there are already markets where competitors are legally allowed to enter, but nobody does. Look at the Google fiber project -- there were cities falling all over themselves to get them to build there. Topeka officially changed their name to "Google, Kansas." It isn't the law that prevents new competitors from entering the market, it's the incumbents. Google is only doing it because they're in it to do an experiment rather than as a profit-seeking endeavor.
Some will fail because the big companies kill them. But killing a smaller company takes money. You have to lower your prices and you sometimes have to buy them out. You can't do that repeatedly without it showing up on the balance sheet.
Right, but they don't have to do it repeatedly. They don't even have to do it once. All they have to do is establish a credible threat of doing it. Then no one is willing to be the first to call their bluff and they never have to pay a dime.
You didn't even read the entire first paragraph, did you?
Their competitors would eat them alive
That's the problem: They wouldn't. Because it works like this: No prospective competitor has enough money to build a nationwide network all at once. The only way to do it is to roll out in one city, then use the profits from operating the network in that city to roll out in the next city, rinse and repeat.
The problem comes that whichever city you choose to start with, the incumbents in that city will drop their margins to zero only in that city on the day before you start offering service there. The only way to get customers to use the new network is to match the price cuts and operate with no margins, so the fixed costs (which the incumbents have already paid off and the new competitors haven't) thereby make the new competitor unprofitable and leave no profits to use to expand any further. And because prospective competitors know that will happen (as it has happened in the few instances where new competitors have tried to enter the market in the past, or there has been a municipal fiber roll out), no one is willing to invest in building a competing network.
The fact that there is sometimes both a telephone and cable company that offer internet service in the same area is just a historical accident, because by the time they were actually in competition with each other they were both already big enough that they couldn't drive the other out of business with price competition without severe damage to their own business, so instead they just both operate on the unspoken agreement that neither will be the first to do anything aggressively competitive. But if a small new competitor ever started a build out, have no doubt that they would lower their prices until the competitor got the message that continuing to build a network will be made unprofitable for them.
Realistically, if you want a serious competitor to the incumbents, it needs to be municipal. You pay for the network with tax dollars (or a bond issue) on the assumption that you may not ever make back the money, and if you do, great. And if not, no harm done, you've paid for fiber and now you've got it.
It's the UK, not Spain... what about the Jolly Organized Crime Agency (JOCA)?
I am reminded of the anti-piratbyran (anti-pirate bureau) terrorizing Sweden, to which the response was for that nation's people to create piratbyran (pirate bureau).
If there is a "serious organized crime agency" terrorizing the UK, perhaps it is time for that nation's people to create an anti serious organized crime agency?
I remember that story.
Microsoft bought Hotmail. Then it came out that Hotmail was using *nix servers instead of Windows and much was made of Microsoft not eating their own dog food, so Microsoft made it a big priority to get them on Windows ASAP... and failed miserably, causing service outages etc. and making the original bad PR substantially worse.
People were making fun of them for years after that.
NRC fuel reprocessing rules to prevent proliferation make it nearly impossible.
Does anyone else find it insane that we have anti-proliferation rules that primarily act to prevent countries that already have nuclear weapons from reprocessing spent fuel?