Because the military in the middle of a war (even if cold) would immediately scrap all of their older planes as soon as the first new model rolls off the assembly line right? Especially if you're trying to keep the new model a secret from your enemy.
Not that I know any more about early cold war Soviet spy planes than the next guy, but the fact that they still used older planes as well doesn't prove or even really suggest anything.
He gets it from the TFS being kind of misleading and making it sound like the police are scanning everyone's computers.
Which may of course be authorized if the government is shitty enough.. and not implausible in the UK these days as there's been a push there for full-on surveillance state for 5 or so years now.
Generally speaking they're not going to be trying to distinguish a 17 year old from an 18 year old. They're going to be trying to distinguish a 10 year old from an 18 year old. And there's definitely some obvious physiological differences there (in most instances.)
Everybody can eat an apple a day and on top of that drink some orange juice or a glass of milk.
Which helps a bit, but in itself is not sufficient to be a "healthy diet."
earing a salad once a weak or having a small salad before every warm dish
Where exactly are these salads coming from? Oh right. Someone has to make them. While that's certainly less complex than making a fancy chicken cordon bleu or whatever (so passing my first mark,) it still takes time to purchase, wash and cut all the vegetables. In addition to whatever time spent preparing said warm dish.
Yes you could claim that people who are that pressed for time need to relax and/or learn some time management skills.. and you'd probably be right.. but that's even more complexity added to the problem.
If there's a pill that viably compensates for all that shit and takes 2 seconds to pop.. why would anyone go to the trouble of changing their lifestyle as much as you're suggesting -- even if they probably should?
Always forget how pedantic/. is. To clarify, he's cleared of enough wrong-doing that he'd still be able to run for the next election. There's almost certainly ties to Russia within Trump's campaign (and probably himself as well) but unless it can be shown that those ties directly impacted the election results (or their actions since taking office,) it likely won't amount to more than a slap on the wrist. Having business dealings with Russia is not a problem. Lying about it when you're running for office is a problem but I doubt its a big enough problem that Trump couldn't bluster his way out of it. Actual treasonous actions on the other hand.. that's a whole different ball game.
you're focusing your attention on the White House, but neglecting Congress
Mostly because the GP was talking about Trump and well, in American politics the president is the face of things.
But if we want to talk about Congress.. I doubt much will change there, especially if Trump gets himself reelected. Sure the odd seat might switch here and there but the house is very republican right now and would have to lose a LOT of seats to swing that.. and the senate hasn't managed to get much done (other than tax cuts for the rich that everyone in congress loves regardless of party,) so switching from a slight republican lean toward a slight democratic lean (especially with republicans controlling both the house and the White House) will probably still leave them just unable to do anything.
Even if Trump doesn't run in 2020, I don't see much change though. Voters are just way too partisan at this point. I mean look at Alabama. Roy Moore damned near won on a platform of "I promise I don't touch little girls!" If a democrat wins the presidency then its likely they'll also take the senate. The house of representatives is still pretty questionable and I doubt they'd get the supermajority (and the ability to start doing things without republican interference) so likely still not much would get done.
A decision in Gill v. Whitford
Even if it does, I'm not sure how much difference it would make. Gerrymandering has been going on for decades by both parties and while it would likely hurt the republicans more at this point, again they have a pretty large lead in the house and killing gerrymandering would hurt many of the democratic seats just as much. We'd hopefully end up with a lot closer and fairer elections on a seat-by-seat basis but looking at it from the higher level view of simple "#dems/#reps" I don't know that it would change things significantly.
Without another superstar on the presidential ticket, I just don't really see things changing that much in the "nobody can get anything done" context. Whether its a republican unable to do anything or a democrat unable to do anything, the end result is the same.
Of course Trump is the superstar right now.. and he had lots of promise to get things done (whether good things or bad is not the point.) But he and his congress just got too greedy on things like healthcare and instead of being able to pass a 90% measure, they repeatedly failed to pass a 120% measure purely because the bills were so unpalatable that even some of their own senators couldn't bring themselves to vote for the things. It takes a lot of screwing over the little guy to make a republican turn down a money grab bill.
Because there was absolutely no abuse happening before the ACA was introduced, of course. Obama just arbitrarily decided to stake his reputation on regulating an industry that was perfectly functional before he got involved. Makes perfect sense! Just like Net Neutrality where regulations were introduced for the sole purpose of breaking a perfectly functional ISP market!
I really don't get how people can be that dumb. Politicians don't just pick a perfectly functional market one day and introduce legislation to fuck it up for no reason. They introduce legislation to try and fix a problem they identify. Now you might not agree with their fix, and their fix may not even work, but claiming that there was no problem at all and they were just breaking the market.. out of spite I guess..? takes stupidity to an unusual degree. Or at least it would have been an unusual degree before Trump started using exactly that argument as his rhetoric. Now its just common place stupidity I guess.
The various health organizations around the world explicitly do NOT maintain equivalent standards for (mostly political) reasons. Or in other words, the FDA would explicitly ban that practice because it would potentially allow for the import of unapproved (by them) drugs.
But even if you ignore that, most of the major drug makers take out patents for their drugs in all major market countries, so they'd just jack the price up to US levels if they saw you were purchasing the drug from a US address -- and then charge you international shipping as well. And if you had them shipped to a cheaper country and brought them back to the US yourself well.. you can already do that (as long as you have a valid prescription for the drug, the border agents aren't going to question whether you brought the bottle with you both ways or just one..)
This may have been a decent argument in 1760 when nearly the entirety of human knowledge could be summarized in a few dozen volumes and a well-read person could be expected to have a reasonably good grasp of most fields of scientific research of the time.
In 2017 when English Wikipedia alone has over 5 million articles. If you take that as a roughly equivalent summary as with the above, that would take thousands upon thousands of volumes.
Basically, there's just no way a person can be expected to know everything about everything anymore. In addition to our lives being generally busier and thus less time to study even the things we care to.
I mean there's definitely a line to be drawn. If you come in with a sore ankle and the doctor wants to xray your chest, most people should be expected to call bullshit. Asking them if there's an OTC alternative to a medication is probably within a reasonable expectation as well (though generally this would be regarded purely as trying to save money rather than an actual detailed inquiry.) Expecting them to ask the doctor for details on each medication though? Even if the doctor was willing to spend the time explaining everything most people wouldn't understand 3/4 of it anyway.
We do place a lot of trust in professionals. That's why we have professionals. If we could be expected to know everything ourselves, we wouldn't have much need for many of the specialized fields that exist. I mean why would you need an oncologist when any old fool should be able to spot cancer on their xray and know which chemo drugs they should take to try and fight it?
Now I know I'm stretching the point quite a bit from "knows enough to ask questions" into the extreme of "knows everything about the field" but the same point stands -- there's just too much shit in the world to know, and not enough time to learn it all. You need to know about your health and your diet and your car and your computer and your politicians and how to inspect a house when you go to buy one or what the contractors are doing if you build it and on and on and on. Certainly each one of those fields is an entire area of study if you want to go in-depth but even just getting a surface level idea of what's going on is a pretty daunting task when you've just gotten home from working a double and want to do nothing more than turn on Netflix and pass out to the Game of Thrones theme song.
This is a patented drug. There is, by definition, no market or competition. Just a government-granted monopoly.
In this case it sounds like there's an (unpatented) over-the-counter alternative that's not exactly the same drug but close enough for most people. So that's good I guess. Makes the story a little bit more palatable than the Martin Shkreli one from a couple years ago.
- A lot of people don't know how to cook a proper meal. - A lot of those that do don't have the time. - And even then you also need the self-discipline to avoid eating crap -- which is created to intentionally be as flavorful and desirable (and even addictive) as the manufacturers can legally manage. - And pretty much anything you don't cook yourself from raw ingredients is going to be unhealthy in one way or another. - And depending on your view of things like GMO, getting healthy raw ingredients in the first place might additionally require you to grow your own food, adding more time and knowledge required.
Its easy to say "its not hard" when you already know how to cook. Its a lot harder to pick it up if you don't. Especially if you're interested in learning to cook more than one or two different things in order to avoid getting bored with them and reverting to the crap food ways of your past.
I should add a third assumption: 3) We don't have WW3 break out or a Yellowstone eruption or something similarly disastrous that just flat out changes everything and makes all current politics somewhat irrelevant.
Whee! Time for some off-topic speculation! Some initial disclaimers: 1) I'm going to assume Trump isn't impeached, imprisoned, has a stroke and dies or just decides its too much work and that he does indeed run again in 2020. 2) I'm going to assume that there's no amazing superstar Democrat coming out of left field (har har pun) that I've never heard of and therefore of course can't foresee.
With that out of the way we have on the right well.. Trump. Since we've assumed he's not impeached, we'll also assume that Muller finds nothing and his record is cleared of wrongdoing (or at least its buried deep enough that even a special investigation can't find it.)
And on the left we have.. who? Bernie Sanders would be the obvious choice based on his current standings in the polls.. but he's too far left for much of the established Democratic party and they're likely to try their best to keep him off the ticket again. But lets assume they fail and he gets on there and we get two old guys with wild hair battling it out. To be honest, I'd probably still give it to Trump. He's enough of a showman that I think he could bluster his way out of 4 years of screwing the people and essentially out-loudmouth Sanders.
So who else.. there's some talk that Chelsea Clinton might be interested in running. I think she might have a chance if she's very, very careful about stepping out of her parents' shadow while not entirely disowning them. It would be a very fine line to walk but I think its doable if she's got the gumption. I don't really know enough about her to judge whether she's got that gumption or not but even if she does, I don't think its would work in 2020. Maybe by 2028 or even 2032 depending on what happens between now and then. Hillary's downfall is still too fresh in mind.
So she's out. Bernie's pretty questionable. That leaves.. who? There's just not that many big-name democrats right now and the moderately-known dems like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have been getting their names dragged through the mud far too much. They would have to go on a miracle winning streak to gain back enough traction to even have a hope of even getting nominated (and that's already assuming they would want the job and accept the nomination..)
Trouble is, while everyone makes a stink about Trumps ratings right now, a lot of people don't seem to notice or care about the fact that Democrats aren't really doing much better. There is a large amount of the American public who are just disillusioned with the whole mess and don't really like either party. That's a very different and relatively new concept. We're talking about a large percentage of voters who actively dislike politics rather than just being apathetic about it.
Going back to my assumptions, #1 is of course pretty tenuous. Between Muller and Trump's age (and not-especially-healthy lifestyle) and the recent speculation that he may just not want to deal with another 4 years, its entirely possibly we won't see him in 2020. Now the GOP isn't nearly as lacking for candidates as the Dems are. Paul Ryan comes to mind immediately -- he's pretty camera-friendly if nothing else and seems to be held in fairly high esteem (at least by those who like tax cuts for the wealthy.) But he doesn't have Trump's showmanship and definitely would not be as strong.
I could also see Ivanka or maybe even Eric trying their hand at the game (Don Jr's shot himself in the foot too many times.. Eric gets a lot of flak for being less than photogenic but he hasn't actually done anything that would rule him out.. that we know about.. and the few things we have heard about Eric have been grudgingly positive, or at least not explicitly negative. Then again maybe he really is as dense as the liberal media mocks him for being..) But as with Chelsea, I don't see it happening in 2020 for either of them. Would certainly be an interesting time if we get Chelsea vs Ivanka at some point though -- the US would guaranteed have their first female president if tha
Capitalism is by nature unethical. Its entire premise is that people are naturally unethical and it relies on competition to drive unethical practices out and leave only the best of the best.
But in order to do that, capitalist theory relies on: a) competition existing. b) consumers being informed.
Neither of those things exist in many markets. In the specific case of patented drugs, the patent explicitly blocks competition so (a) is immediately off the table.
Luckily, most people are not actually naturally unethical. The reason this kind of thing didn't happen 10 or 20 or 100 years ago is based purely on there not having been a Martin Shkreli with the balls to publicly announce that they were going to let a bunch of people die in order to increase their bottom line a little bit and dare the government to stop them (which would require new legislation since Shkreli and now this asshat are perfectly within their rights, under current US law, to charge whatever the hell they want for their products no matter how immoral it is.)
Now that Shkreli did what he did and got away with it (remember he was arrested for securities fraud not for letting innocent people suffer and die,) we're likely to see more and more patent owners come out and jack their prices through the roof just because they can. Probably not the big manufacturers (too much risk that the US government would change their mind about imposing pricing caps) but plenty of people like these guys who can get their hands on a patent or two for whatever high-demand drug certainly will.
the pointer position is handled by hardware + firmware, not the app
Irrelevant. It doesn't matter where its handled, a finger is fat and imprecise while a mouse cursor is typically very finely positioned. Sure the app may only see a single X,Y coordinate pair for any particular tap, but the difference is with a mouse you know those coordinates is exactly where the user wanted it to be (with a fairly small range of error to compensate for sloppiness) while with a finger, that tap could be anywhere within about a 1/4" by 1/4" square. Predictive text (and all the autocorrect fun that it leads to) exists 100% because they can't fit a keyboard on a cell phone screen and expect you to hit the letters with great accuracy.
iPhones now sport screens with much higher resolutions
The problem isn't the resolution. The problem is the physical screen size. Your finger doesn't scale no matter how impressive the display specs on your phone are.
A point is a fixed unit of size on paper or screen
Open up your favorite word processor. Type in some characters. Hit the zoom button. You notice how the font size physically changes on the screen but the point size is the same? Yeah. That.
You can call it a misnomer if you want, but when we're talking about fonts on a screen a 'point' tends to be scaled based on properties of the display, zoom level, etc. I was of course referring to how computers use the term rather than how physical printers use it.
But lets assume Apple has implemented perfect font scaling so that when you set your system font to 8pt is exactly 1/9" on both the phone and the desktop. So that same font is taking around 2% of your (vertical) lines on a 5.5" phone while only taking ~0.46% of your 24" monitor.
Which ends up amounting to the pretty much the exact same problem just coming at it from the other direction -- you have to adjust to fit more information on the larger screen at the same font size (in points) rather than having to fit less on the smaller screen with a larger font size (in pixels.)
No. But it can control what service it provides to its customers, which is what the GP was referring to. I'm sure you'd have figured that out if you'd actually gone ahead and turned on your brain as I recommended.
that made it into the economic powerhouse it is today
No, being neutral made it into an economic powerhouse. NN rules were imposed specifically because the major ISPs were starting to intentionally break neutrality and the FCC at the time decided that was a bad idea and put a stop to it.
Comcast is now able to run THEIR network as they see fit,
Yeah, and how they see fit is going to be "screw over the customer as much as possible because the only competition is doing the same thing so our customers don't really have a choice." As long as they don't fuck it up so bad that people start cutting off their internet service completely, they're laughing all the way to the bank. In the meantime the rest of society gets to suffer greatly. Or at least go back to 90's AOL-style "curated" internet services which is pretty close to suffering.
If you don't like Comcast service, don't buy it.
And instead.. just don't use the internet? In 2017? What fucking planet do you think this is?
If you don't like the choice of ISPs in your area, move.
To where exactly? Most of the US is served by Comcast, Verizon and/or AT&T and there's precious few places with options besides those three (and even in most of the places with a different brand -- they're also a local monopoly and probably doing the same shit as much as they can manage.) I guess Canada's always available.
And of course that's not counting the fact that its not fucking easy, or even possible, for most people to uproot their entire life and move halfway across the country in the vein hope that Comcast in Arizona is somehow less shitty than Comcast in Delaware.
You have no right to tell another person or a group of people who own a businesses what to do or how to run their business
No, I don't. But the government does. One of the downsides of being a major, close-to-essential service is that you get subject to stronger oversight. Yes that breaks pure capitalist philosophy but who the fuck cares? If its better for society then its worth it for such an important service. You could apply the exact same argument to your phone company, your water company, your gas company, etc. All of those systems are regulated more than simply "do whatever the fuck you want" because modern society simply doesn't function if they're able to fuck people over too much in the name of profit.
Except the report that said Trump won the presidency
What does that have to do with anything?
where he ran on repealing Net Neutrality
No he didn't. He ran on racism and tax cuts for the middle class. At least he's still going strong on one of those.
I can't even find much mention of NN related to Trump prior to the recent bullshit and most of what I have found sounds like if he thought about it at all, it was purely in the context of "anything Obama did needs to be undone," rather than because he cared about the issue to any great degree.
their Democrat weighted polls said Trump would lose too
You mean like those Trump-hating lefties over at Fox News? Nobody expected Trump to win.
That's what believing fake polls from fake news outlets will get you.
Being wrong and being fake is not the same thing. Or at
an industry usually put forth as a "natural monopoly."
Many things we consider "natural monopolies" aren't technically natural monopolies in the same way that say, a river flowing through the town is (you can't just build a second river in most instances, no matter how much time and money you have available. At least not without some major consequences to the flow of the original river, the source you're pulling your new river from, or any number of other issues that go well beyond simply looking ugly.)
But there are still things we call "natural" monopolies simply because the cost (not just monetary but the total cost to environment, aesthetics, quality of life, whatever) is so high that nobody really wants to duplicate the work. Roads are a perfect example: Do you really want 4 people building individual roads in front of your house? So your quiet little street essentially has the capacity of an 8 lane highway with all of the extra land wasted and such that goes with it? Probably not.
Wires are similar. Two sets of wires probably isn't much more noticeable than one set after they're already in place. And maintenance costs after the fact are comparatively small relative to the initial installation costs. But at some point it means two separate companies had to pay for two separate full sets of infrastructure (or a company and the taxpayers.. or hell maybe the taxpayers footed the bill for both sets? I'm assuming at least one company..) And it means the citizens at the time were subjected to having their streets torn up twice in order to plant poles and lay wire.
And if you start getting 5 or 6 or 10 competitors? That's a hell of a lot of wires running everywhere. Two might not be significantly more bothersome than one (I mean most poles will already be carrying two or three wires for power, phone, cable, whatever..) But 10 wires? That's definitely going to start getting noticeable. And I'm just talking about the pole-to-pole runs. The pole-to-house runs means your yard may have to have up to 10 separate lines running across it. It would get very ugly very fast.
I mean its great for Lubbock and all.. but unless those economists think they can figure out a way to scale it to the entire country, there's really not much to see there beyond a happy quirk of history that wouldn't be easy (or at least not cheap) to repeat.
One leads to the other. Once you've decided on your point of view then you need to figure out how to frame it in order to sell it to others.. unless you happen to be one of the very few folk capable of implementing major changes unilaterally.
And if your modem could do 1gbps but you only pay for 100mbps connection, they're also not going to give you 10x speed you didn't pay for even if the equipment technically supports it.
And yes, them sending you gigabit data because Netflix pays for a "fast lane" is exactly the system they want to set up. That's the whole point of the scheme. Most people don't really notice much of a difference between 20 and 50mbps, nor do they notice much difference between the 720p and 1080p those speeds support (or whatever mbps makes that difference) -- and even if they notice it they certainly don't care enough to pay an extra $10 or $20/mo.
But Netflix definitely will notice if they can push 1080p while their competitors can only push 720p over the same end-user connection. So since you won't pay more on your end, this gives the ISPs a way to convince Netflix to pay themselves to essentially subsidize your bandwidth (at least for the bits coming from Netflix' servers.) And as long as the ISPs keep the cost to Netflix below what Netflix thinks they'd otherwise lose to their competition, it works out in the ISPs favor. It even works out in your favor -- if you're satisfied using Netflix and only Netflix for your streaming needs.
Hell in that aspect, it even kind of works out in Netflix' favor by killing their competition for them, though they're the ones paying through the teeth for it with money they could otherwise be using to actually out-compete their rivals via investment and innovation rather than by having an artificial barrier thrown in that makes it harder for competition to enter the market in the first place.
So then who does it hurt? Why are people getting their panties in a bunch? 1) It hurts everyone except Netflix. All those companies that aren't big enough to afford a fast lane. Any entrepreneur who might have a good idea for a Netflix competitor but ends up spending more paying off Verizon and Comcast and AT&T than actual development on their product.
2) It hurts anyone who likes a free market. Sure canning NN removes one barrier to entry for new ISPs, but they have lots and lots of other ones to fall back on. At the same time though its also adding a significant barrier to entry for any company that wants to use (rather than supply) an internet connection. So trading a near-irrelevant benefit in a single market against a massive benefit in many other markets.
3) It hurts innovation in general. This is pure capitalist theory now: Less competition means less need for innovation. Improving a service is expensive. If there's no competition to beat then there's really no need to bother improving and therefore companies just won't. Or at least any "improvements" they make will be geared explicitly to lowering cost rather than improving actual service in a way that benefits the customer to any great degree.
Now of course I'm not saying all dietary supplements are fraudulent. I'm just saying its not always easy to tell which ones are fraudulent and which ones are not since they aren't regulated by anything beyond the amount of dollars they can convince you to spend.
And of course that's not even considering that many of the not-technically-fraudulent ones may simply be doing little or nothing for you and are effectively just an expensive placebo.
And even then many of the ones that might be theoretically useful are only beneficial if you have a bad diet to start with and actually need to supplement whatever chemicals your body isn't getting enough of -- but you claim to be eating well so that also shouldn't apply to you. For example if you're getting sufficient vitamin C and you take a vitamin C tablet.. its basically just going to go straight from your mouth to your bladder and out again without doing you any good whatsoever (but also no real bad in that case.. too much of some vitamins and minerals are as bad or worse than not enough so even more things to be careful of!)
I believe you forgot to engage your brain on that one.
"Regulated by Comcast" doesn't imply Comcast is suddenly a government entity. GP was being tongue-in-cheek and implying that Comcast now has control over your usage where the FCC did before (at least in that one specific form of usage anyway.)
That works.. if there is any real competition in the market. And there simply isn't, much as Comcast and Verizon love to tote out that one neighborhood in New York where you legitimately have the choice between like 8 ISPs instead of just 2 (or even one.)
But hey.. whether you'd prefer to trust Comcast who's entire purpose for existing is to take as much of your money as possible while providing as little service as possible (ie: maximize income and minimize costs,) or you'd prefer to trust the FCC who's purpose for existing is to make sure Comcast (and others) don't break too much shit in their quest to take your money.. is up to you I guess.
Not that it seems to matter what you prefer anyway. According to all reports, NN is supported by a large majority of the American people, and yet Ajit Pai was installed specifically to revoke it and did so with the full support of the Republican congress who at this point seem to have just given up any pretense of working for their constituents.
What company just rolls over and lets the competition come in unfettered?
None. But the proper capitalist way to deal with competition is by beating them, not by crying to the government and having the competition banned via regulation (while at the same time decrying all of the regulation in your industry because hypocrisy.)
a new competitor that did everything they could to avoid all those laws
Who said the new competitors were avoiding any laws? Obviously not counting any laws that give you a monopoly while you're claiming you need more freedom to fleece your customers due to the "highly competitive" market. Because hypocrisy.
explicitly trying to poach your most profitable services?
Yes. That's how capitalism works. If you don't like it, then out-compete them. If you can't out-compete them then its time to GTFO and let the better company try their hand at the game. The fact that our government props up these failing monopolies rather than letting competition thrive should be a rallying point for both the right and the left. But unfortunately rhetoric and feelings outweighs facts and reality these days so as long as the Verizon guy gets the most air time to tell his sob story about not being able to afford a fourth private jet, his opinion stands and everyone else gets screwed.
Why would economists spend much time studying that? Other than for some self-congratulatory theory masturbation? It sounds like a free market doing what a free market is supposed to do.
The trouble with that sort of free market is that it means you have to run (and maintain) two sets of wires everywhere. That's a trade-off most places aren't willing to make because its expensive and ugly. And if you want even more competition.. say 10 or 20 competing grids.. you'd have more wires running down your streets than you'd have street..
Slashdot Mirror
Because the military in the middle of a war (even if cold) would immediately scrap all of their older planes as soon as the first new model rolls off the assembly line right? Especially if you're trying to keep the new model a secret from your enemy.
Not that I know any more about early cold war Soviet spy planes than the next guy, but the fact that they still used older planes as well doesn't prove or even really suggest anything.
He gets it from the TFS being kind of misleading and making it sound like the police are scanning everyone's computers.
Which may of course be authorized if the government is shitty enough.. and not implausible in the UK these days as there's been a push there for full-on surveillance state for 5 or so years now.
Generally speaking they're not going to be trying to distinguish a 17 year old from an 18 year old. They're going to be trying to distinguish a 10 year old from an 18 year old. And there's definitely some obvious physiological differences there (in most instances.)
Everybody can eat an apple a day and on top of that drink some orange juice or a glass of milk.
Which helps a bit, but in itself is not sufficient to be a "healthy diet."
earing a salad once a weak or having a small salad before every warm dish
Where exactly are these salads coming from? Oh right. Someone has to make them. While that's certainly less complex than making a fancy chicken cordon bleu or whatever (so passing my first mark,) it still takes time to purchase, wash and cut all the vegetables. In addition to whatever time spent preparing said warm dish.
Yes you could claim that people who are that pressed for time need to relax and/or learn some time management skills.. and you'd probably be right.. but that's even more complexity added to the problem.
If there's a pill that viably compensates for all that shit and takes 2 seconds to pop.. why would anyone go to the trouble of changing their lifestyle as much as you're suggesting -- even if they probably should?
impossible to clear Trump of wrong-doing
Always forget how pedantic /. is. To clarify, he's cleared of enough wrong-doing that he'd still be able to run for the next election. There's almost certainly ties to Russia within Trump's campaign (and probably himself as well) but unless it can be shown that those ties directly impacted the election results (or their actions since taking office,) it likely won't amount to more than a slap on the wrist. Having business dealings with Russia is not a problem. Lying about it when you're running for office is a problem but I doubt its a big enough problem that Trump couldn't bluster his way out of it. Actual treasonous actions on the other hand.. that's a whole different ball game.
you're focusing your attention on the White House, but neglecting Congress
Mostly because the GP was talking about Trump and well, in American politics the president is the face of things.
But if we want to talk about Congress.. I doubt much will change there, especially if Trump gets himself reelected. Sure the odd seat might switch here and there but the house is very republican right now and would have to lose a LOT of seats to swing that.. and the senate hasn't managed to get much done (other than tax cuts for the rich that everyone in congress loves regardless of party,) so switching from a slight republican lean toward a slight democratic lean (especially with republicans controlling both the house and the White House) will probably still leave them just unable to do anything.
Even if Trump doesn't run in 2020, I don't see much change though. Voters are just way too partisan at this point. I mean look at Alabama. Roy Moore damned near won on a platform of "I promise I don't touch little girls!" If a democrat wins the presidency then its likely they'll also take the senate. The house of representatives is still pretty questionable and I doubt they'd get the supermajority (and the ability to start doing things without republican interference) so likely still not much would get done.
A decision in Gill v. Whitford
Even if it does, I'm not sure how much difference it would make. Gerrymandering has been going on for decades by both parties and while it would likely hurt the republicans more at this point, again they have a pretty large lead in the house and killing gerrymandering would hurt many of the democratic seats just as much. We'd hopefully end up with a lot closer and fairer elections on a seat-by-seat basis but looking at it from the higher level view of simple "#dems/#reps" I don't know that it would change things significantly.
Without another superstar on the presidential ticket, I just don't really see things changing that much in the "nobody can get anything done" context. Whether its a republican unable to do anything or a democrat unable to do anything, the end result is the same.
Of course Trump is the superstar right now.. and he had lots of promise to get things done (whether good things or bad is not the point.) But he and his congress just got too greedy on things like healthcare and instead of being able to pass a 90% measure, they repeatedly failed to pass a 120% measure purely because the bills were so unpalatable that even some of their own senators couldn't bring themselves to vote for the things. It takes a lot of screwing over the little guy to make a republican turn down a money grab bill.
Because there was absolutely no abuse happening before the ACA was introduced, of course. Obama just arbitrarily decided to stake his reputation on regulating an industry that was perfectly functional before he got involved. Makes perfect sense! Just like Net Neutrality where regulations were introduced for the sole purpose of breaking a perfectly functional ISP market!
I really don't get how people can be that dumb. Politicians don't just pick a perfectly functional market one day and introduce legislation to fuck it up for no reason. They introduce legislation to try and fix a problem they identify. Now you might not agree with their fix, and their fix may not even work, but claiming that there was no problem at all and they were just breaking the market.. out of spite I guess..? takes stupidity to an unusual degree. Or at least it would have been an unusual degree before Trump started using exactly that argument as his rhetoric. Now its just common place stupidity I guess.
The various health organizations around the world explicitly do NOT maintain equivalent standards for (mostly political) reasons. Or in other words, the FDA would explicitly ban that practice because it would potentially allow for the import of unapproved (by them) drugs.
But even if you ignore that, most of the major drug makers take out patents for their drugs in all major market countries, so they'd just jack the price up to US levels if they saw you were purchasing the drug from a US address -- and then charge you international shipping as well. And if you had them shipped to a cheaper country and brought them back to the US yourself well.. you can already do that (as long as you have a valid prescription for the drug, the border agents aren't going to question whether you brought the bottle with you both ways or just one..)
Damned commies thinking that lives should be worth more than money.
This may have been a decent argument in 1760 when nearly the entirety of human knowledge could be summarized in a few dozen volumes and a well-read person could be expected to have a reasonably good grasp of most fields of scientific research of the time.
In 2017 when English Wikipedia alone has over 5 million articles. If you take that as a roughly equivalent summary as with the above, that would take thousands upon thousands of volumes.
Basically, there's just no way a person can be expected to know everything about everything anymore. In addition to our lives being generally busier and thus less time to study even the things we care to.
I mean there's definitely a line to be drawn. If you come in with a sore ankle and the doctor wants to xray your chest, most people should be expected to call bullshit. Asking them if there's an OTC alternative to a medication is probably within a reasonable expectation as well (though generally this would be regarded purely as trying to save money rather than an actual detailed inquiry.) Expecting them to ask the doctor for details on each medication though? Even if the doctor was willing to spend the time explaining everything most people wouldn't understand 3/4 of it anyway.
We do place a lot of trust in professionals. That's why we have professionals. If we could be expected to know everything ourselves, we wouldn't have much need for many of the specialized fields that exist. I mean why would you need an oncologist when any old fool should be able to spot cancer on their xray and know which chemo drugs they should take to try and fight it?
Now I know I'm stretching the point quite a bit from "knows enough to ask questions" into the extreme of "knows everything about the field" but the same point stands -- there's just too much shit in the world to know, and not enough time to learn it all. You need to know about your health and your diet and your car and your computer and your politicians and how to inspect a house when you go to buy one or what the contractors are doing if you build it and on and on and on. Certainly each one of those fields is an entire area of study if you want to go in-depth but even just getting a surface level idea of what's going on is a pretty daunting task when you've just gotten home from working a double and want to do nothing more than turn on Netflix and pass out to the Game of Thrones theme song.
This is a patented drug. There is, by definition, no market or competition. Just a government-granted monopoly.
In this case it sounds like there's an (unpatented) over-the-counter alternative that's not exactly the same drug but close enough for most people. So that's good I guess. Makes the story a little bit more palatable than the Martin Shkreli one from a couple years ago.
What is wrong with just eating healthy?
- A lot of people don't know how to cook a proper meal.
- A lot of those that do don't have the time.
- And even then you also need the self-discipline to avoid eating crap -- which is created to intentionally be as flavorful and desirable (and even addictive) as the manufacturers can legally manage.
- And pretty much anything you don't cook yourself from raw ingredients is going to be unhealthy in one way or another.
- And depending on your view of things like GMO, getting healthy raw ingredients in the first place might additionally require you to grow your own food, adding more time and knowledge required.
Its easy to say "its not hard" when you already know how to cook. Its a lot harder to pick it up if you don't. Especially if you're interested in learning to cook more than one or two different things in order to avoid getting bored with them and reverting to the crap food ways of your past.
I should add a third assumption:
3) We don't have WW3 break out or a Yellowstone eruption or something similarly disastrous that just flat out changes everything and makes all current politics somewhat irrelevant.
Whee! Time for some off-topic speculation!
Some initial disclaimers:
1) I'm going to assume Trump isn't impeached, imprisoned, has a stroke and dies or just decides its too much work and that he does indeed run again in 2020.
2) I'm going to assume that there's no amazing superstar Democrat coming out of left field (har har pun) that I've never heard of and therefore of course can't foresee.
With that out of the way we have on the right well.. Trump. Since we've assumed he's not impeached, we'll also assume that Muller finds nothing and his record is cleared of wrongdoing (or at least its buried deep enough that even a special investigation can't find it.)
And on the left we have.. who? Bernie Sanders would be the obvious choice based on his current standings in the polls.. but he's too far left for much of the established Democratic party and they're likely to try their best to keep him off the ticket again. But lets assume they fail and he gets on there and we get two old guys with wild hair battling it out. To be honest, I'd probably still give it to Trump. He's enough of a showman that I think he could bluster his way out of 4 years of screwing the people and essentially out-loudmouth Sanders.
So who else.. there's some talk that Chelsea Clinton might be interested in running. I think she might have a chance if she's very, very careful about stepping out of her parents' shadow while not entirely disowning them. It would be a very fine line to walk but I think its doable if she's got the gumption. I don't really know enough about her to judge whether she's got that gumption or not but even if she does, I don't think its would work in 2020. Maybe by 2028 or even 2032 depending on what happens between now and then. Hillary's downfall is still too fresh in mind.
So she's out. Bernie's pretty questionable. That leaves.. who? There's just not that many big-name democrats right now and the moderately-known dems like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have been getting their names dragged through the mud far too much. They would have to go on a miracle winning streak to gain back enough traction to even have a hope of even getting nominated (and that's already assuming they would want the job and accept the nomination..)
Trouble is, while everyone makes a stink about Trumps ratings right now, a lot of people don't seem to notice or care about the fact that Democrats aren't really doing much better. There is a large amount of the American public who are just disillusioned with the whole mess and don't really like either party. That's a very different and relatively new concept. We're talking about a large percentage of voters who actively dislike politics rather than just being apathetic about it.
Going back to my assumptions, #1 is of course pretty tenuous. Between Muller and Trump's age (and not-especially-healthy lifestyle) and the recent speculation that he may just not want to deal with another 4 years, its entirely possibly we won't see him in 2020. Now the GOP isn't nearly as lacking for candidates as the Dems are. Paul Ryan comes to mind immediately -- he's pretty camera-friendly if nothing else and seems to be held in fairly high esteem (at least by those who like tax cuts for the wealthy.) But he doesn't have Trump's showmanship and definitely would not be as strong.
I could also see Ivanka or maybe even Eric trying their hand at the game (Don Jr's shot himself in the foot too many times.. Eric gets a lot of flak for being less than photogenic but he hasn't actually done anything that would rule him out.. that we know about.. and the few things we have heard about Eric have been grudgingly positive, or at least not explicitly negative. Then again maybe he really is as dense as the liberal media mocks him for being..) But as with Chelsea, I don't see it happening in 2020 for either of them. Would certainly be an interesting time if we get Chelsea vs Ivanka at some point though -- the US would guaranteed have their first female president if tha
Any response will be defecated upon.
You might want to rethink that. Unless you really dislike your screen.
Capitalism is by nature unethical. Its entire premise is that people are naturally unethical and it relies on competition to drive unethical practices out and leave only the best of the best.
But in order to do that, capitalist theory relies on:
a) competition existing.
b) consumers being informed.
Neither of those things exist in many markets. In the specific case of patented drugs, the patent explicitly blocks competition so (a) is immediately off the table.
Luckily, most people are not actually naturally unethical. The reason this kind of thing didn't happen 10 or 20 or 100 years ago is based purely on there not having been a Martin Shkreli with the balls to publicly announce that they were going to let a bunch of people die in order to increase their bottom line a little bit and dare the government to stop them (which would require new legislation since Shkreli and now this asshat are perfectly within their rights, under current US law, to charge whatever the hell they want for their products no matter how immoral it is.)
Now that Shkreli did what he did and got away with it (remember he was arrested for securities fraud not for letting innocent people suffer and die,) we're likely to see more and more patent owners come out and jack their prices through the roof just because they can. Probably not the big manufacturers (too much risk that the US government would change their mind about imposing pricing caps) but plenty of people like these guys who can get their hands on a patent or two for whatever high-demand drug certainly will.
the pointer position is handled by hardware + firmware, not the app
Irrelevant. It doesn't matter where its handled, a finger is fat and imprecise while a mouse cursor is typically very finely positioned. Sure the app may only see a single X,Y coordinate pair for any particular tap, but the difference is with a mouse you know those coordinates is exactly where the user wanted it to be (with a fairly small range of error to compensate for sloppiness) while with a finger, that tap could be anywhere within about a 1/4" by 1/4" square. Predictive text (and all the autocorrect fun that it leads to) exists 100% because they can't fit a keyboard on a cell phone screen and expect you to hit the letters with great accuracy.
iPhones now sport screens with much higher resolutions
The problem isn't the resolution. The problem is the physical screen size. Your finger doesn't scale no matter how impressive the display specs on your phone are.
A point is a fixed unit of size on paper or screen
Open up your favorite word processor. Type in some characters. Hit the zoom button. You notice how the font size physically changes on the screen but the point size is the same? Yeah. That.
You can call it a misnomer if you want, but when we're talking about fonts on a screen a 'point' tends to be scaled based on properties of the display, zoom level, etc. I was of course referring to how computers use the term rather than how physical printers use it.
But lets assume Apple has implemented perfect font scaling so that when you set your system font to 8pt is exactly 1/9" on both the phone and the desktop. So that same font is taking around 2% of your (vertical) lines on a 5.5" phone while only taking ~0.46% of your 24" monitor.
Which ends up amounting to the pretty much the exact same problem just coming at it from the other direction -- you have to adjust to fit more information on the larger screen at the same font size (in points) rather than having to fit less on the smaller screen with a larger font size (in pixels.)
Regulation comes from government.
Hence why its tongue-in-cheek and not literal.
A business can't regulate itself
No. But it can control what service it provides to its customers, which is what the GP was referring to. I'm sure you'd have figured that out if you'd actually gone ahead and turned on your brain as I recommended.
that made it into the economic powerhouse it is today
No, being neutral made it into an economic powerhouse. NN rules were imposed specifically because the major ISPs were starting to intentionally break neutrality and the FCC at the time decided that was a bad idea and put a stop to it.
Comcast is now able to run THEIR network as they see fit,
Yeah, and how they see fit is going to be "screw over the customer as much as possible because the only competition is doing the same thing so our customers don't really have a choice." As long as they don't fuck it up so bad that people start cutting off their internet service completely, they're laughing all the way to the bank. In the meantime the rest of society gets to suffer greatly. Or at least go back to 90's AOL-style "curated" internet services which is pretty close to suffering.
If you don't like Comcast service, don't buy it.
And instead.. just don't use the internet? In 2017? What fucking planet do you think this is?
If you don't like the choice of ISPs in your area, move.
To where exactly? Most of the US is served by Comcast, Verizon and/or AT&T and there's precious few places with options besides those three (and even in most of the places with a different brand -- they're also a local monopoly and probably doing the same shit as much as they can manage.) I guess Canada's always available.
And of course that's not counting the fact that its not fucking easy, or even possible, for most people to uproot their entire life and move halfway across the country in the vein hope that Comcast in Arizona is somehow less shitty than Comcast in Delaware.
You have no right to tell another person or a group of people who own a businesses what to do or how to run their business
No, I don't. But the government does. One of the downsides of being a major, close-to-essential service is that you get subject to stronger oversight. Yes that breaks pure capitalist philosophy but who the fuck cares? If its better for society then its worth it for such an important service. You could apply the exact same argument to your phone company, your water company, your gas company, etc. All of those systems are regulated more than simply "do whatever the fuck you want" because modern society simply doesn't function if they're able to fuck people over too much in the name of profit.
Except the report that said Trump won the presidency
What does that have to do with anything?
where he ran on repealing Net Neutrality
No he didn't. He ran on racism and tax cuts for the middle class. At least he's still going strong on one of those.
I can't even find much mention of NN related to Trump prior to the recent bullshit and most of what I have found sounds like if he thought about it at all, it was purely in the context of "anything Obama did needs to be undone," rather than because he cared about the issue to any great degree.
their Democrat weighted polls said Trump would lose too
You mean like those Trump-hating lefties over at Fox News? Nobody expected Trump to win.
That's what believing fake polls from fake news outlets will get you.
Being wrong and being fake is not the same thing. Or at
an industry usually put forth as a "natural monopoly."
Many things we consider "natural monopolies" aren't technically natural monopolies in the same way that say, a river flowing through the town is (you can't just build a second river in most instances, no matter how much time and money you have available. At least not without some major consequences to the flow of the original river, the source you're pulling your new river from, or any number of other issues that go well beyond simply looking ugly.)
But there are still things we call "natural" monopolies simply because the cost (not just monetary but the total cost to environment, aesthetics, quality of life, whatever) is so high that nobody really wants to duplicate the work. Roads are a perfect example: Do you really want 4 people building individual roads in front of your house? So your quiet little street essentially has the capacity of an 8 lane highway with all of the extra land wasted and such that goes with it? Probably not.
Wires are similar. Two sets of wires probably isn't much more noticeable than one set after they're already in place. And maintenance costs after the fact are comparatively small relative to the initial installation costs. But at some point it means two separate companies had to pay for two separate full sets of infrastructure (or a company and the taxpayers.. or hell maybe the taxpayers footed the bill for both sets? I'm assuming at least one company..) And it means the citizens at the time were subjected to having their streets torn up twice in order to plant poles and lay wire.
And if you start getting 5 or 6 or 10 competitors? That's a hell of a lot of wires running everywhere. Two might not be significantly more bothersome than one (I mean most poles will already be carrying two or three wires for power, phone, cable, whatever..) But 10 wires? That's definitely going to start getting noticeable. And I'm just talking about the pole-to-pole runs. The pole-to-house runs means your yard may have to have up to 10 separate lines running across it. It would get very ugly very fast.
I mean its great for Lubbock and all.. but unless those economists think they can figure out a way to scale it to the entire country, there's really not much to see there beyond a happy quirk of history that wouldn't be easy (or at least not cheap) to repeat.
One leads to the other. Once you've decided on your point of view then you need to figure out how to frame it in order to sell it to others.. unless you happen to be one of the very few folk capable of implementing major changes unilaterally.
And if your modem could do 1gbps but you only pay for 100mbps connection, they're also not going to give you 10x speed you didn't pay for even if the equipment technically supports it.
And yes, them sending you gigabit data because Netflix pays for a "fast lane" is exactly the system they want to set up. That's the whole point of the scheme. Most people don't really notice much of a difference between 20 and 50mbps, nor do they notice much difference between the 720p and 1080p those speeds support (or whatever mbps makes that difference) -- and even if they notice it they certainly don't care enough to pay an extra $10 or $20/mo.
But Netflix definitely will notice if they can push 1080p while their competitors can only push 720p over the same end-user connection. So since you won't pay more on your end, this gives the ISPs a way to convince Netflix to pay themselves to essentially subsidize your bandwidth (at least for the bits coming from Netflix' servers.) And as long as the ISPs keep the cost to Netflix below what Netflix thinks they'd otherwise lose to their competition, it works out in the ISPs favor. It even works out in your favor -- if you're satisfied using Netflix and only Netflix for your streaming needs.
Hell in that aspect, it even kind of works out in Netflix' favor by killing their competition for them, though they're the ones paying through the teeth for it with money they could otherwise be using to actually out-compete their rivals via investment and innovation rather than by having an artificial barrier thrown in that makes it harder for competition to enter the market in the first place.
So then who does it hurt? Why are people getting their panties in a bunch?
1) It hurts everyone except Netflix. All those companies that aren't big enough to afford a fast lane. Any entrepreneur who might have a good idea for a Netflix competitor but ends up spending more paying off Verizon and Comcast and AT&T than actual development on their product.
2) It hurts anyone who likes a free market. Sure canning NN removes one barrier to entry for new ISPs, but they have lots and lots of other ones to fall back on. At the same time though its also adding a significant barrier to entry for any company that wants to use (rather than supply) an internet connection. So trading a near-irrelevant benefit in a single market against a massive benefit in many other markets.
3) It hurts innovation in general. This is pure capitalist theory now: Less competition means less need for innovation. Improving a service is expensive. If there's no competition to beat then there's really no need to bother improving and therefore companies just won't. Or at least any "improvements" they make will be geared explicitly to lowering cost rather than improving actual service in a way that benefits the customer to any great degree.
Buy their "special" (aka more expensive) development version. We've already seen Microsoft start down that path with Windows 10S.
The FDA doesn't have legal authority to regulate or certify supplements
And the supplement industry spends lots of money to ensure it stays that way. I wonder why?
https://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm153239.htm
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0261-dietary-supplements#supplementssafe?
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dietary-supplements-a-37-billion-a-year-boondoggle-2016-01-22
https://www.webmd.com/diet/features/truth-behind-top-10-dietary-supplements#1
Now of course I'm not saying all dietary supplements are fraudulent. I'm just saying its not always easy to tell which ones are fraudulent and which ones are not since they aren't regulated by anything beyond the amount of dollars they can convince you to spend.
And of course that's not even considering that many of the not-technically-fraudulent ones may simply be doing little or nothing for you and are effectively just an expensive placebo.
And even then many of the ones that might be theoretically useful are only beneficial if you have a bad diet to start with and actually need to supplement whatever chemicals your body isn't getting enough of -- but you claim to be eating well so that also shouldn't apply to you. For example if you're getting sufficient vitamin C and you take a vitamin C tablet.. its basically just going to go straight from your mouth to your bladder and out again without doing you any good whatsoever (but also no real bad in that case.. too much of some vitamins and minerals are as bad or worse than not enough so even more things to be careful of!)
I believe you forgot to engage your brain on that one.
"Regulated by Comcast" doesn't imply Comcast is suddenly a government entity. GP was being tongue-in-cheek and implying that Comcast now has control over your usage where the FCC did before (at least in that one specific form of usage anyway.)
That works.. if there is any real competition in the market. And there simply isn't, much as Comcast and Verizon love to tote out that one neighborhood in New York where you legitimately have the choice between like 8 ISPs instead of just 2 (or even one.)
But hey.. whether you'd prefer to trust Comcast who's entire purpose for existing is to take as much of your money as possible while providing as little service as possible (ie: maximize income and minimize costs,) or you'd prefer to trust the FCC who's purpose for existing is to make sure Comcast (and others) don't break too much shit in their quest to take your money.. is up to you I guess.
Not that it seems to matter what you prefer anyway. According to all reports, NN is supported by a large majority of the American people, and yet Ajit Pai was installed specifically to revoke it and did so with the full support of the Republican congress who at this point seem to have just given up any pretense of working for their constituents.
What company just rolls over and lets the competition come in unfettered?
None. But the proper capitalist way to deal with competition is by beating them, not by crying to the government and having the competition banned via regulation (while at the same time decrying all of the regulation in your industry because hypocrisy.)
a new competitor that did everything they could to avoid all those laws
Who said the new competitors were avoiding any laws? Obviously not counting any laws that give you a monopoly while you're claiming you need more freedom to fleece your customers due to the "highly competitive" market. Because hypocrisy.
explicitly trying to poach your most profitable services?
Yes. That's how capitalism works. If you don't like it, then out-compete them. If you can't out-compete them then its time to GTFO and let the better company try their hand at the game. The fact that our government props up these failing monopolies rather than letting competition thrive should be a rallying point for both the right and the left. But unfortunately rhetoric and feelings outweighs facts and reality these days so as long as the Verizon guy gets the most air time to tell his sob story about not being able to afford a fourth private jet, his opinion stands and everyone else gets screwed.
Why would economists spend much time studying that? Other than for some self-congratulatory theory masturbation? It sounds like a free market doing what a free market is supposed to do.
The trouble with that sort of free market is that it means you have to run (and maintain) two sets of wires everywhere. That's a trade-off most places aren't willing to make because its expensive and ugly. And if you want even more competition.. say 10 or 20 competing grids.. you'd have more wires running down your streets than you'd have street..