In new industries there tends to be big swings in consolidation and divesting. AT&T was lucky enough to get the government to solidify their monopoly when they were at their peak, it's quite an assumption that they would have been able to maintain it on their own.
Standard Oil is a similar tale with the difference being that the government acted more slowly and by the time they got around to doing something Standard has lost most of its monopoly position. It's very likely that the same thing would have happened with AT&T, perhaps they learned from history and knew that they couldn't wait around and had to lobby regulators to give it to them.
Uhh, no. AT&T gobbled up all the competition thru jackassery and then begged the government to regulate it to keep it from having to pay the piper.
The government solidified their shaky monopoly through regulation. Business ebbs and flows, particularly in new industries. AT&T would have broken up naturally had it been given the chance. It's like how Standard Oil had lost most of its market share by the time the government got around to breaking them up.
And do you really think that Cox and T-W and ATT and Verizon are going to negotiate with both government and all the private individuals in the area and then pay millions to lay those cables, then try to recover that investment with competition, when they can all stay in their own little fiefdoms instead and let Comcast stay in its own?
Yes, either them or someone else. Just because you aren't smart enough to figure out how to make money at it doesn't mean everyone is.
Neither telecoms nor railroads are natural monopolies. Both required the government to grant them monopoly status. Read up on the Interstate Commerce Commission to see how the railroads grabbed theirs.
They may have an exclusive monopoly, but if that didn't exist a natural monopoly would form anyway.
That's quite an assumption. It is expensive to cable an area, but competition has this strange effect of bringing down costs through innovation. We don't know what innovations could exist in a more competitive environment. In the early days of telephone there were many companies running lines and while there was consolidation it wasn't all natural. In the US, at least, AT&T lobbied with governments to outlaw their competition.
I'm not aware that there were any areas cabled by both companies.
Because of legal prohibitions. When companies don't have competition they're not going to be very efficient and cost overruns are the order of the day.
It would have been monstrously expensive to anyone to try and compete because they'd have to replicate about 80 years worth of copper laying.
Why would a company need to immediately expand out to the same number of houses in order to compete? Someone could come in and, I don't know, lay fibre and compete quite nicely.
With that much infrastructure at a minimum required to work, it's basically impossible to get into a market that someone else has, and a natural monopoly forms.
Your flawed assumption is "at a minimum required to work." The costs of laying cable is linear, there aren't big economies of scale that can be brought to bear (most of the cost is labour.) Cabling a small neighbourhood has a similar cost per node as cabling an entire country so there's no need to build out a gigantic network just to get started.
A lot of places wouldn't accept this password, the complexity rules are smart enough to know when numbers and symbols are being used as letters. One place I worked it would usually take 10 or so tries of random garbage to get something that the rules would take.
Even with those sites, though, it is still more difficult because you have manually add in the extra fees. It's not impossible, sure, but it's not as drop dead simple as it used to be.
Well said, but I would quibble the the statement that cable companies are natural monopolies. You'd be hard pressed to find a cable company that isn't operated as a utility where they have an exclusive monopoly license from the local government.
With our brilliant free market capitalism in place, a competitor should be here to the rescue to innovate and beat the crap out of these guys
You think that the airline industry is "free market capitalism?" There are some free-ish market-ish aspects, sure, but it certainly isn't free. It's more like croneyism than capitalism.
Cable company, really? You mean the one granted monopoly status by your local government. You're talking about the free market in a government granted monopoly with a straight face?
And banks are probably the second least free industry there is (after medicine.)
PCs are a fairly free market, and I think you can buy a much better PC this year than you could last year, and the year before, and I think if you wait a few more minutes you'll be able to find a better PC.
It's also not fair that big and tall people have to pay more for clothes, or more for petrol because their cars use more, or more for a number of things.
Life isn't fair.
It's not fair that I don't get as much casual sex as an underwear model (but that may be a good thing for everyone involved.)
This could be a really valuable service. I know some companies already do this (door to door luggage) but it's pretty expensive. If the airlines keep raising the fees it will become more attractive and I can see the planes becoming just people movers. But in reality, the availability of these services put a ceiling on the price the airline can charge for baggage. That is, until they lobby regulators to make it illegal.
It could be that they were able to not raise prices by the unbundling. I do know that the public airlines were doing very, very poorly until recently and there have been some bankruptcies, so I can see the possibility that this is true.
trivially easy to predict that increasing CO2 will produce a general temperature increase.
But that's not the global warming we're discussing. We know that for every doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere there will be an increase of about 1.2 degrees C. The climate models, though, are predicting that the rise will be more in the 4-6 degree range (1.2 degree rise over 100 years is not a big concern.) That's the hard part, because it involves attempting to model all of the interactions in the atmosphere and determine what feedbacks there are. That's not any easier than trying to predict the weather.
To be most truthful, there was a small sliver on the South that was green. It's been "mostly ice" for all of human history. Still, that little green sliver is way more green than today.
I think he's referring to a rumour started by Rush Limbaugh that there is as much forest in America as there was "when the Constitution was signed." This is false. Actually there are more forests today than there were in the min 1920s (Rush extrapolated that back to the 1780s.) The truth is that forests in the US dropped from the 1700s to about 1920 when they started to rebound. So, it is safe to say that there are "almost as many trees now as there were *a* century ago" but not much more.
It's so annoying when ignorant people spout "ZOMG, it's snowing, that means global warming is a sham!!!", get a clue about how climate works before spouting out nonsense.
How is this really any different than "ZOMG, it's hot, that means global warming is all real!!!"?
It's not. Weather isn't climate and that applies to *all* weather. I'm talking to everyone here. Weather has been so abused lately I'm starting to wonder why it hasn't been on COPS.
Essentially what has happened since the industrial revolution is something like a continuous ever-increasing volcanic eruption spewing long-stored gasses into the atmosphere (*). This upsets the equilibrium which has developed over time. Therefore the climate changes, as it seeks a new equilibrium. And yes, the climate change is caused by humans.
This isn't in question. We know that the direct effect of additional CO2 in the atmosphere is ~1.2 degrees C per doubling of CO2. It's the feedbacks that are in question. Will these feedbacks really mean an additional 3-5 degrees C per doubling of CO2? If you don't realise that this is the question, then you haven't been paying enough attention. There is very little empirical evidence behind these feedbacks, they exist almost exclusively in computer models.
We "deniers" (most of us) disagree that this additional warming proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Actually, it's more like 1,000 years, worst case. 20 ft under water would require that Greenland and/or Antarctica melt completely. Not even the worst of worse case scenarios predict that in 200 years.
For the same reason that it's desirable to protect the free speech of cranks. Certainly cranks shouldn't be wasting the time of researchers, that's why a system needs to be put into place so all researchers can meet the data disclosure needs objectively and get on with their work.
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I agree, let's get big government to strangle it first.
Which is, unfortunately, always just a little bit bigger than it needs to be to take on your interests on corporations' behalf.
In new industries there tends to be big swings in consolidation and divesting. AT&T was lucky enough to get the government to solidify their monopoly when they were at their peak, it's quite an assumption that they would have been able to maintain it on their own.
Standard Oil is a similar tale with the difference being that the government acted more slowly and by the time they got around to doing something Standard has lost most of its monopoly position. It's very likely that the same thing would have happened with AT&T, perhaps they learned from history and knew that they couldn't wait around and had to lobby regulators to give it to them.
Uhh, no. AT&T gobbled up all the competition thru jackassery and then begged the government to regulate it to keep it from having to pay the piper.
The government solidified their shaky monopoly through regulation. Business ebbs and flows, particularly in new industries. AT&T would have broken up naturally had it been given the chance. It's like how Standard Oil had lost most of its market share by the time the government got around to breaking them up.
And do you really think that Cox and T-W and ATT and Verizon are going to negotiate with both government and all the private individuals in the area and then pay millions to lay those cables, then try to recover that investment with competition, when they can all stay in their own little fiefdoms instead and let Comcast stay in its own?
Yes, either them or someone else. Just because you aren't smart enough to figure out how to make money at it doesn't mean everyone is.
Neither telecoms nor railroads are natural monopolies. Both required the government to grant them monopoly status. Read up on the Interstate Commerce Commission to see how the railroads grabbed theirs.
I'm pretty sure technology has advanced in the meantime.
They may have an exclusive monopoly, but if that didn't exist a natural monopoly would form anyway.
That's quite an assumption. It is expensive to cable an area, but competition has this strange effect of bringing down costs through innovation. We don't know what innovations could exist in a more competitive environment. In the early days of telephone there were many companies running lines and while there was consolidation it wasn't all natural. In the US, at least, AT&T lobbied with governments to outlaw their competition.
I'm not aware that there were any areas cabled by both companies.
Because of legal prohibitions. When companies don't have competition they're not going to be very efficient and cost overruns are the order of the day.
It would have been monstrously expensive to anyone to try and compete because they'd have to replicate about 80 years worth of copper laying.
Why would a company need to immediately expand out to the same number of houses in order to compete? Someone could come in and, I don't know, lay fibre and compete quite nicely.
With that much infrastructure at a minimum required to work, it's basically impossible to get into a market that someone else has, and a natural monopoly forms.
Your flawed assumption is "at a minimum required to work." The costs of laying cable is linear, there aren't big economies of scale that can be brought to bear (most of the cost is labour.) Cabling a small neighbourhood has a similar cost per node as cabling an entire country so there's no need to build out a gigantic network just to get started.
A lot of places wouldn't accept this password, the complexity rules are smart enough to know when numbers and symbols are being used as letters. One place I worked it would usually take 10 or so tries of random garbage to get something that the rules would take.
Even with those sites, though, it is still more difficult because you have manually add in the extra fees. It's not impossible, sure, but it's not as drop dead simple as it used to be.
We need more regulation to lower these, what do you call them, "barriers to entry." That should fix the problem.
Well said, but I would quibble the the statement that cable companies are natural monopolies. You'd be hard pressed to find a cable company that isn't operated as a utility where they have an exclusive monopoly license from the local government.
With our brilliant free market capitalism in place, a competitor should be here to the rescue to innovate and beat the crap out of these guys
You think that the airline industry is "free market capitalism?" There are some free-ish market-ish aspects, sure, but it certainly isn't free. It's more like croneyism than capitalism.
Cable company, really? You mean the one granted monopoly status by your local government. You're talking about the free market in a government granted monopoly with a straight face?
And banks are probably the second least free industry there is (after medicine.)
PCs are a fairly free market, and I think you can buy a much better PC this year than you could last year, and the year before, and I think if you wait a few more minutes you'll be able to find a better PC.
It's also not fair that big and tall people have to pay more for clothes, or more for petrol because their cars use more, or more for a number of things.
Life isn't fair.
It's not fair that I don't get as much casual sex as an underwear model (but that may be a good thing for everyone involved.)
This could be a really valuable service. I know some companies already do this (door to door luggage) but it's pretty expensive. If the airlines keep raising the fees it will become more attractive and I can see the planes becoming just people movers. But in reality, the availability of these services put a ceiling on the price the airline can charge for baggage. That is, until they lobby regulators to make it illegal.
It could be that they were able to not raise prices by the unbundling. I do know that the public airlines were doing very, very poorly until recently and there have been some bankruptcies, so I can see the possibility that this is true.
But without real data we won't really know.
trivially easy to predict that increasing CO2 will produce a general temperature increase.
But that's not the global warming we're discussing. We know that for every doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere there will be an increase of about 1.2 degrees C. The climate models, though, are predicting that the rise will be more in the 4-6 degree range (1.2 degree rise over 100 years is not a big concern.) That's the hard part, because it involves attempting to model all of the interactions in the atmosphere and determine what feedbacks there are. That's not any easier than trying to predict the weather.
Classy.
To be most truthful, there was a small sliver on the South that was green. It's been "mostly ice" for all of human history. Still, that little green sliver is way more green than today.
I think he's referring to a rumour started by Rush Limbaugh that there is as much forest in America as there was "when the Constitution was signed." This is false. Actually there are more forests today than there were in the min 1920s (Rush extrapolated that back to the 1780s.) The truth is that forests in the US dropped from the 1700s to about 1920 when they started to rebound. So, it is safe to say that there are "almost as many trees now as there were *a* century ago" but not much more.
Paper is bad - trees are cut to produce it
What do you think, paper grows on trees? Oh, wait...
It's so annoying when ignorant people spout "ZOMG, it's snowing, that means global warming is a sham!!!", get a clue about how climate works before spouting out nonsense.
How is this really any different than "ZOMG, it's hot, that means global warming is all real!!!"?
It's not. Weather isn't climate and that applies to *all* weather. I'm talking to everyone here. Weather has been so abused lately I'm starting to wonder why it hasn't been on COPS.
Essentially what has happened since the industrial revolution is something like a continuous ever-increasing volcanic eruption spewing long-stored gasses into the atmosphere (*). This upsets the equilibrium which has developed over time. Therefore the climate changes, as it seeks a new equilibrium. And yes, the climate change is caused by humans.
This isn't in question. We know that the direct effect of additional CO2 in the atmosphere is ~1.2 degrees C per doubling of CO2. It's the feedbacks that are in question. Will these feedbacks really mean an additional 3-5 degrees C per doubling of CO2? If you don't realise that this is the question, then you haven't been paying enough attention. There is very little empirical evidence behind these feedbacks, they exist almost exclusively in computer models.
We "deniers" (most of us) disagree that this additional warming proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Actually, it's more like 1,000 years, worst case. 20 ft under water would require that Greenland and/or Antarctica melt completely. Not even the worst of worse case scenarios predict that in 200 years.
Why is it desirable?
For the same reason that it's desirable to protect the free speech of cranks. Certainly cranks shouldn't be wasting the time of researchers, that's why a system needs to be put into place so all researchers can meet the data disclosure needs objectively and get on with their work.