The real story is that top US schools are giving rapid paths to Master's and MBA's with a strong focus on data science. These are shortcut degrees and their purpose is to allow those with diploma mill degrees from overseas to come on student visas. Just knock out your micromasters on the cheap online and it knocks out about 25-30% of the requirements for a masters or PhD.
Why the push for these programs? Because the adjustments to the H1B program emphasize people who hold high US degrees such as a Masters or PhD. Why do the universities go for it? First the programs do require some courses in probability, statistics, python, R, and depend on at least multi-variable calculus and Algebra. Second they get their highest rate of tuition on every student.
Of course they don't emphasize these programs here in the US even though you can use them. Instead they disparage online verified university courses that give certificates as not being the same as the same course taken online when registered as a student. That said you can knock out a quick degree from a foreign diploma mill as well but it will cost you more than it does overseas students, you'll have to pay extra to get it certified for acceptance in the US, and you'll have to explain why you got that foreign degree.
There is plenty of money. Hell, you can dillute it out by requiring new shares to equal any layoffs, voluntary separation, new immigrant jobs, and automations and stash them into the UBI fund. The UBI fund will operate much like a bank borrowing against the stock that forms it deposit at the fed inflation rate.
The UBI income ensures few if any people qualify for income based social programs slashing their cost without needing to dismantle them. It will boost tax costs. It will increase wealth and drastically increase the number of tax payers. In one fell swoop you will also get a massive increase in the number of people who can afford to repay loans. This will boost housing and lending. You will also get a huge boost in investment funds being stashed in retirement funds. The tax cuts should help balance any increased risk that needs to be assumed to beat inflation on investments.
You'll also see improved job stability and wages as employees have a safety net to bargain from.
"Yeah, I guess... where does government get the money from then?"
The federal reserve tap is one option. Money is already being pumped out to banks for lending, just pump it via UBI instead. Ideally don't give the new money away directly though, give the task of investing it and keeping it solvent to the Fed. Since the Fed will be investing that money it will boost the economy. It'll do wonderful things to tax revenues. I wouldn't tax the UBI but I'd count it toward SS tax and your tax bracket. Probably add additional brackets as some have suggested.
The additional funds will mean wealth and investment growth in the middle class which will also boost the economy. The idea here is that as automation increases and jobs disappear without replacements they replaced with an income stream derived from the growth and profits of the companies which cut the jobs.
"We can't just generalize "people" because there are some which have virtually no chance of getting a job."
No but we can generalize currently unemployed people and know they have a higher probability of having a disadvantage in job seeking. A more useful test might have been to give a decent UBI to a group that makes a sum on par with that UBI. In 5-10 years are they living on the UBI, continuing to earn twice the income (and probably reach a higher tax bracket even if you don't tax the UBI itself but only count it for that purpose. Have they increased their wealth and earnings at a greater rate than the control group who doesn't have the UBI?
It's the same clueless problem again and again a UBI might organically eliminate the need for many social programs (it should be high enough that nobody qualifies for them) but it isn't charity or a gift to the poor.A UBI is to provide a stronger position for workers to negotiate. Lower the risk of opportunity exploitation and ultimately to provide a means to ensure workers have a fallback when the jobs go away. If you match the UBI dollar per dollar to earned income you provide double incentive to upward advancement and move millions of people into a taxable range. That will make taxation less top heavy and you'll be enabling the growth of massive investment wealth, the returns will generate more taxes, provide for retirement and stimulate the economy. That also leads to a substantially more solvent social retirement program like social security.
Well yes and it was given to people who are unable or unwilling to work now. Make it a decent sum and give it to working class people who are at least 25 and make a similar amount now. See if their investments, wealth, and income increase across the group over five years.
I think you meant that for guy above me. But honestly if you don't make six figures and still have issues finding the money for the hard drives it takes to store a few thousand blu-ray remuxes you probably aren't who is really being discussed.
"Differences like "unlimited* (*see small print) and "data caps". Any company which uses unlimited can fuck right off. Not a single one of them are clean from abusing that "small print" clause. I rather a company straight up says, "hey, you know what, you have a data cap, here's our plans, pick the best for you:"."
There is a grey area here. There are a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't have used the service up to the cap who will now that you've highlighted it. There are some providers with a fixed secret cap but there are a lot of providers who really don't have a fixed cap. They take efforts on their end to spread the higher bandwidth users across different ports and so forth. There are also some who start throttling certain types of traffic after a cap.
On my FIOS link I've more or less maxed it out for most of the month without seeing a slowdown or getting any hassle.
"When he says the UK abolished slavery decades earlier, you did not answer his point only attacked his European citizenship."
No I attacked his naive assumption that the grounds on which the UK abolished slavery had any relation to the reason those in power actually acted. Granted, I assumed nationalism was at fault for this blind faith. Pride in accomplishments and actions which have no relation to you beyond having happened on the same piece broad stretch of dirt. It's a form of fanboism I don't particularly understand or partake of. A bit like doing the same with the accomplishments of a sports team or even pretending a sports team is the same team after a change in players just because they play under the same label.
From the rest of your post I see you share the same logical failure. I deserve no blame or credit for anything that is happening or has happened in the US beyond my own actions and you Europeans are entitled to the same with regard to Europe. There are plenty of faults in EU policies just as there are in the US. There are also character flaws which tend to be more common in one versus the other while both have plenty of them.
He failed to address the key element of my argument and his statement with regard to the UK was nothing but bragging about irrelevant factoid. It didn't speak Lincoln's hidden motives for his actions surrounding the civil war whatsoever. Further his attempt to educate an American on their own history was pompous and rude to the extreme. People rarely act for their stated reasons and politicians in any nation never do so. No matter what their intentions it would weaken their strategic position to overtly reveal them. The civil war reference was nothing but a famous example to which I drew a parallel. That example could be entirely without merit without actually weakening my argument.
Telcos are massive entities. Parts of them sell wholesale services and other parts of them sell retail services which are purchased from the wholesale services piece. The retail services piece competes with third parties. Both funnel profits up to the mother company. The wholesale division does the building out when it thinks it would be the smart move for its division not when the mother company gets a windfall or directly in response to the retail service having greater profits. The wholesale division would build out if there is enough profit to be had from its clients be they the internal or third party.
"You do realise that the British Empire had outlawed slavery decades earlier, on moral grounds?"
You Europeans really do love to drink the nationalism kool-aid don't you?
"Apparently treating people as property is so repugnant it's a cause worth fighting for."
Indeed and many of our ancestors did. But that only makes it an effective justification it says nothing of the actual motivations of Lincoln. Obama centralized federal power, and Regan centralized wealth, and Lincoln did both to a degree that would make both blush.
What our ancestors did not for was for their decedents to put at a disadvantage for hiring, job retention, and education opportunities. Somehow I suspect they were dying horrible deaths fighting their own brothers with the intention of freeing men to make what they can of the hand they are dealt like the rest of us rather the cause of outright reducing the opportunities of their blameless children.
"The historiography of causes of the American civil war fills several very large libraries."
On this point I would agree. There is no one cause or motivation, there are simply far too many people. My statements regarded Lincoln who drove the choices that forced the hand of the South but even Lincoln will have had more complex reasons for his actions. Lincoln certainly perused power or he wouldn't have ended up with so much of it relative to others who were actively pursuing it but he also could have sought wealth and power siding with southern channels as well. The man was not the saint some would have you believe but that doesn't mean he didn't avoid things he himself believed were monstrous.
20 years ago all the democrats would have been republicans and vice versa. Hell, 10 years ago nobody but a foaming at the mouth die commie scum republican would have been anti-russia. They switch it up every now and then.
"Nobody will criticize democracy so lets call our power play democracy and we will win"
People who don't make power plays don't typically end up in power. If nothing else the fact that there are plenty of people who are willing to make power plays assure that.
Nope sadly the best you can hope for is a sociopath, read between the lines and you might find one who is using a strategy that will work out okay for most people. I doubt any of them "mean to harm" the public, it is more of a disregard. Doing something that does more visible good than harm is sound politics if you are neutral. The real issue is that if you think there a political position that good vs the other which is evil you are snowed. Pretty much everything is grey and will do about as much overall harm as good. The few best answers aren't politically sound solutions such as taxing wealth rather than income, crushing degree requirements and funding and supporting independent study, supporting non-government non-profit based healthcare with startup costs supported by long term loans from the fed tap at the fed rate cutting the finance industry profits and existing players out of the loop. Real solutions like that conflict with the false dichotomies the major parties have established on these issues.
"How about avoiding politicians who clearly mean to harm the public? How about it?"
During my lifetime I've seen good evidence of four possibilities.
Obama, although long before the end of his first campaign the smoke cleared enough to know I was projecting what I wanted onto him and he wasn't the real thing.
Trump was a possibility, it wasn't certain for a bit whether he was misguiding people but meant well. Similarly it was clear enough before the end of his campaign that i could never support him but he might at least have turned out to be sincere. He still could be. Many of his statements during the separation of immigrant families basically amount to a demand for congress to take away his authority to do it and in so doing deny future presidents that power. That remains the first and only time I've seen a U.S. President demand congress take powers from their office. Other powers he's threatened to abuse could be much the same with a token nod that the method at least gives something to those he convinced to vote for him.
Sanders, the only politician who has a strong and longstanding record of actual integrity. I'd still vote for Sanders if given the opportunity. People who don't make power plays don't typically end up in power. The only reason he got to the senate in the first place is a little bit of politics with gun companies early in his career and there hasn't been so much as a whiff of it since.
And last Elizabeth Warren but there has been a lot to suggest Warren has taken the "if you can't beat them, join them" approach. I don't know that she can trusted at this point but I'd support her in a VP role.
There are a handful of young and naive millennials in new house seats that are probably sincere. By the time they grow up enough they'll be the same as the rest.
Nope sadly the best you can hope for is a sociopath, read between the lines and you might find one who is using a strategy that will work out okay for most people. I doubt any of them "mean to harm" the public, it is more of a disregard.
"Cancelling elections because you're unpopular in peacetime and don't want to give up power for personal dynastic reasons, that's a dictator move. TOTALLY DIFFERENT, go figure you blur them."
It seems like you don't fully understand what these terms mean. Nothing about "dictator" and "benevolent" is contradictory. There are a lot of reasons having a dictator is a bad practice but for quite some time roman dictators chose the person they believed best qualified to be their successor and also had temporary dictators. One can have absolute authority and be a dictator for a term without ever using that power at all let alone using it maliciously and giving it up at the end will not mean they weren't a dictator.
"I am not understanding your position beyond "big telco bad. Pai bad"."
That's clear since your response ignores most of what I actually said and oversimplifies the issue to suit your argument.
Money coming into the company from just any source doesn't magically translate to the same result as money from another source. It might in some mom and pop but not in a massive enterprise. A massive enterprise is more like a government. In a nutshell your argument is comparable to claiming a windfall for federal transportation department will result in higher capacity and shorter wait times at your local MVD office. Except of course you are simplifying it to more funding for the transport wing of government reducing wait times for transportation services. That argument might well seem sensible to someone on the outside like the EU.
Just within Verizon you have Verizon Wireless, Verizon Wireline, Verizon Enterprise, to name a few off the top of my head and each of those is further made up of about 4-8 major distinct divisions. All of those divisions are in many ways distinct companies and many of them are yet further divided into distinct and largely independent pieces. If Verizon Enterprise, Terremark, needs cell phones for workers they take bids and while Verizon Wireless will be part of the bidding they don't automatically get the deal if they aren't the option that makes the most sense from the business profitability of. Do you think Verizon Wireless only takes orders from other verizon divisions? Nope. Internal or External, customers are just customers and they charge what they need to cover the cost of the services they are providing and make the profits they can within the market.
It's the old school "We have the best relationship you can have in business, I pay him and he pays me." Verizon doesn't build more infrastructure just because Verizon Enterprise Services Terremark makes more money, they only build more infrastructure if the wireline division determines that investing in more infrastructure will make them more money. They don't sell their services more cheaply to Verizon's ISP business except as a function of scale. If anything due to scale third parties pay higher rates and are likely more profitable for that division.
Operating the company this way makes the accounting work better, allows for better efficiencies of scale, and means that profits seen by other divisions reflect the actual costs of using other services within the company. It also means that where it would be more profitable to use third party services than internal the individual divisions have the flexibility to do that instead.
Verizon isn't a unique snowflake in this regard. Any company i've been at which has been around for at least 20 years and revenues in the billions is pretty much the same deal.
The wireline division isn't going to build out infrastructure just for the sake of doing it, they are going to build out infrastructure when their own revenue and needs result in the belief they'd be more profitable doing it and only then. No amount of money to some other division or the parent company is going to change that.
"Required to sell means that even if it isn't profitable."
Of course it is profitable. That's the whole point, wireline isn't going to charge their broadband services prices that won't cover services and generate a profit. Why would they sell at a loss? The broadband services piece gets to deduct whatever they have to pay to the wireline division at full rate and most of those expenses the wireless division gets to deduct as well. The other clients they sell to are subsidizing that cost and at some point could grow more profitable for them than their own broadband service.
Right. I'd contend you optimize both as best you reasonably can. If that would make SF victory a given, so be it. You just benchmark your progress over time against SF. There is no need to rig contests and generate all sorts of bogus claims about being the undisputed champion of all things.
If anything that is just going to hamper AZ's development and progress. Now there is no incentive to work on whatever deficits might lead to AZ failing against SF and any improvements that would have been gained trying will be lost.
"He was thrown into a unique situation where the nation had come apart at its seams and the constitution didn't really spell out any contingency plans for dealing with a civil war."
It was his war. He had to fight hard and arguably broke the Constitution to make it happen. Afterward he definitely violated the Constitution and outright reshaped citizenship and government. All of it happened in a way that made him more powerful of course.
But the whole thing worked. They looked the other way afterward long enough to support the transition and those northern factories began cranking out machinery to support that agriculture business soon afterward. Lincoln and the Republicans got their ultra-powerful central government and the northern states got a piece of the southern economic pie.
"At least, he didn't cancel the elections of 1864 even though his chances looked bleak leading up to them. Dictators tend to go the other direction with elections."
I said practically a dictator. That you don't dispute he had the power to cancel the elections is an indication you agree with the reality but don't like the term.
"and a sociopath"
Of course he was a sociopath. You don't reach upper ranks of law and politics without being a sociopath. Lincoln was a particularly gifted speaker and writer. I have no doubt if he'd overseen a genocide effort we'd all still be talking about how we saved humanity and the very mention of the group would call up disgust at evil incarnate much like the term Nazi does today.
Do you know the most critical skill you learn as an attorney? Debate. You don't generally pick the topics or your position. You have to be completely morally relative and invent or embrace moralities at random.
"Ajit Pai, he strikes me as the kind of person who does evil or not based on his boss"
Agreed but his real boss isn't Trump. McConnell wouldn't be it either. His real boss is the Telcos he came from. After he leaves his position he'll get his reward in the form of paid speaking engagements and very lucrative consultant or lobbyist position from those same Telcos. And you can quite certain those same Telcos are the ones who pulled McConnell's strings to get his name put on Obama's desk for a recommendation. McConnell probably traded some favor to Obama or Obama's staff to get it done.
Like it or not that is how politics work in this country. Evil isn't the right word. By and large the people at the top aren't evil, they are neutral to the good or ill effects. Even if they didn't start that way I can spin just about anything as good or evil and make a solid argument. Washington is filled with spin masters to put me to shame. Imagine how easy it is to self-justify your actions when surrounded by people making solid and reasoned arguments for their benefits? Nothing is that simple, everything helps some groups and hurts others without any universal good answers that don't stomp on good people.
So whether they start there or not, all of these people effectively end as sociopaths and the corporations start that way. The people they hurt are collateral damage and the people they help are incidental good.
The civil war freed the slaves, incidental good. But the sociopath at the top was centralizing the power of the federal government, which he was practically a dictator of. If you think otherwise you are extremely naive. The only ones you'll find who genuinely fought for or against human freedom on the basis of morality are the common people and soldiers up to and including middle-to-upper ranks.
You are correct. You rarely see a fair representation of conservative positions or an honest one of liberal positions for that matter. Both are spun all to hell and very few people actually understand the underlying issues. But you'd do well to take BOTH with a heavy grain of salt, if you assume both are shady and self-serving with justifications to never be the real motive and both real pro's and con's for normal people (including the 1% but not the 0.01%) to be neutral side-effect everything makes more sense.
"Do you really think the reason for this action from Pai/FCC was to "be cruel to people"? Did you actually read their reasoning for why they did this?"
Well which do you want to talk about the reason they did it or the justification they used to support their actions?
The civil war is a great example. The reason for doing it was to centralize federal power particularly for the Presidency both direct and financial. The justification was freeing slaves.
In this case the reason for the action is that Pai is a puppet for major telecom/broadband interests and this move cuts out competition. Reduced competition isn't exactly a free market cornerstone. Their justification was an argument that more money to the telco would mean increasing build-out. It all falls down when you realize no company the size of a telco is one company or one division of a company. The division which builds out infrastructure charges the division that offers service on those lines. They are required to sell services to third parties as well, in a perfect world, at the same rates (though they play shenanigans on this part).
So either there are enough people wanting the service to make it good business for the infrastructure division to take on the cost of building out or not but their consideration includes all their clients whether internal or external since both are buying services from their division.
That has nothing to do with all the subsidy money going to their internal service, that just benefits mother telco in the form of slurping up all the government subsidy money. It doesn't go back into build-outs anymore than the massive tax cuts they've received has. The division of the telco that does infrastructure build-out won't see either one and they won't build out unless business needs dictate it no matter how much you give mother telco. More likely it will go to fund Pai as a paid consultant after his FCC term and to pay for speaking engagements for him and others like McConnell. Then it will go to bonuses and dividends because telcos still pay dividends.
It's designed to discourage competitors to the telecoms. Nothing is needed to encourage build-out, they've been given billions to build out and pocketed it. They were also given massive tax cuts which were to build out. Instead they've used the funds to re-organize and lay off workers.
Big Tech Big Broadband Big Telco Big Media Big Pharma Big Oil Big Tobacco
And no doubt appointed chairman on recommendation of the same Mitch McConnell. Probably he was the deal or part of the deal that bought the alliance with the Republican party. People forget that despite running on a Republican ticket Trump was definitely not a Republican. The party did every short of Dems vs Sanders to try to block him.
Slashdot Mirror
I wack machine with hammer, machine work. I wack machine with wrench, machine work. You no work, maybe I grab one and wack you, you work.
The real story is that top US schools are giving rapid paths to Master's and MBA's with a strong focus on data science. These are shortcut degrees and their purpose is to allow those with diploma mill degrees from overseas to come on student visas. Just knock out your micromasters on the cheap online and it knocks out about 25-30% of the requirements for a masters or PhD.
Why the push for these programs? Because the adjustments to the H1B program emphasize people who hold high US degrees such as a Masters or PhD. Why do the universities go for it? First the programs do require some courses in probability, statistics, python, R, and depend on at least multi-variable calculus and Algebra. Second they get their highest rate of tuition on every student.
Of course they don't emphasize these programs here in the US even though you can use them. Instead they disparage online verified university courses that give certificates as not being the same as the same course taken online when registered as a student. That said you can knock out a quick degree from a foreign diploma mill as well but it will cost you more than it does overseas students, you'll have to pay extra to get it certified for acceptance in the US, and you'll have to explain why you got that foreign degree.
There is plenty of money. Hell, you can dillute it out by requiring new shares to equal any layoffs, voluntary separation, new immigrant jobs, and automations and stash them into the UBI fund. The UBI fund will operate much like a bank borrowing against the stock that forms it deposit at the fed inflation rate.
The UBI income ensures few if any people qualify for income based social programs slashing their cost without needing to dismantle them. It will boost tax costs. It will increase wealth and drastically increase the number of tax payers. In one fell swoop you will also get a massive increase in the number of people who can afford to repay loans. This will boost housing and lending. You will also get a huge boost in investment funds being stashed in retirement funds. The tax cuts should help balance any increased risk that needs to be assumed to beat inflation on investments.
You'll also see improved job stability and wages as employees have a safety net to bargain from.
"Yeah, I guess ... where does government get the money from then?"
The federal reserve tap is one option. Money is already being pumped out to banks for lending, just pump it via UBI instead. Ideally don't give the new money away directly though, give the task of investing it and keeping it solvent to the Fed. Since the Fed will be investing that money it will boost the economy. It'll do wonderful things to tax revenues. I wouldn't tax the UBI but I'd count it toward SS tax and your tax bracket. Probably add additional brackets as some have suggested.
The additional funds will mean wealth and investment growth in the middle class which will also boost the economy. The idea here is that as automation increases and jobs disappear without replacements they replaced with an income stream derived from the growth and profits of the companies which cut the jobs.
"We can't just generalize "people" because there are some which have virtually no chance of getting a job."
No but we can generalize currently unemployed people and know they have a higher probability of having a disadvantage in job seeking. A more useful test might have been to give a decent UBI to a group that makes a sum on par with that UBI. In 5-10 years are they living on the UBI, continuing to earn twice the income (and probably reach a higher tax bracket even if you don't tax the UBI itself but only count it for that purpose. Have they increased their wealth and earnings at a greater rate than the control group who doesn't have the UBI?
It's the same clueless problem again and again a UBI might organically eliminate the need for many social programs (it should be high enough that nobody qualifies for them) but it isn't charity or a gift to the poor.A UBI is to provide a stronger position for workers to negotiate. Lower the risk of opportunity exploitation and ultimately to provide a means to ensure workers have a fallback when the jobs go away. If you match the UBI dollar per dollar to earned income you provide double incentive to upward advancement and move millions of people into a taxable range. That will make taxation less top heavy and you'll be enabling the growth of massive investment wealth, the returns will generate more taxes, provide for retirement and stimulate the economy. That also leads to a substantially more solvent social retirement program like social security.
Well yes and it was given to people who are unable or unwilling to work now. Make it a decent sum and give it to working class people who are at least 25 and make a similar amount now. See if their investments, wealth, and income increase across the group over five years.
I think you meant that for guy above me. But honestly if you don't make six figures and still have issues finding the money for the hard drives it takes to store a few thousand blu-ray remuxes you probably aren't who is really being discussed.
"Differences like "unlimited* (*see small print) and "data caps". Any company which uses unlimited can fuck right off. Not a single one of them are clean from abusing that "small print" clause.
I rather a company straight up says, "hey, you know what, you have a data cap, here's our plans, pick the best for you:"."
There is a grey area here. There are a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't have used the service up to the cap who will now that you've highlighted it. There are some providers with a fixed secret cap but there are a lot of providers who really don't have a fixed cap. They take efforts on their end to spread the higher bandwidth users across different ports and so forth. There are also some who start throttling certain types of traffic after a cap.
On my FIOS link I've more or less maxed it out for most of the month without seeing a slowdown or getting any hassle.
sarcasm tag?
"When he says the UK abolished slavery decades earlier, you did not answer his point only attacked his European citizenship."
No I attacked his naive assumption that the grounds on which the UK abolished slavery had any relation to the reason those in power actually acted. Granted, I assumed nationalism was at fault for this blind faith. Pride in accomplishments and actions which have no relation to you beyond having happened on the same piece broad stretch of dirt. It's a form of fanboism I don't particularly understand or partake of. A bit like doing the same with the accomplishments of a sports team or even pretending a sports team is the same team after a change in players just because they play under the same label.
From the rest of your post I see you share the same logical failure. I deserve no blame or credit for anything that is happening or has happened in the US beyond my own actions and you Europeans are entitled to the same with regard to Europe. There are plenty of faults in EU policies just as there are in the US. There are also character flaws which tend to be more common in one versus the other while both have plenty of them.
He failed to address the key element of my argument and his statement with regard to the UK was nothing but bragging about irrelevant factoid. It didn't speak Lincoln's hidden motives for his actions surrounding the civil war whatsoever. Further his attempt to educate an American on their own history was pompous and rude to the extreme. People rarely act for their stated reasons and politicians in any nation never do so. No matter what their intentions it would weaken their strategic position to overtly reveal them. The civil war reference was nothing but a famous example to which I drew a parallel. That example could be entirely without merit without actually weakening my argument.
Telcos are massive entities. Parts of them sell wholesale services and other parts of them sell retail services which are purchased from the wholesale services piece. The retail services piece competes with third parties. Both funnel profits up to the mother company. The wholesale division does the building out when it thinks it would be the smart move for its division not when the mother company gets a windfall or directly in response to the retail service having greater profits. The wholesale division would build out if there is enough profit to be had from its clients be they the internal or third party.
That and you never know if dictator is actually benevolent until after they are a dictator and can do what they really want.
"You do realise that the British Empire had outlawed slavery decades earlier, on moral grounds?"
You Europeans really do love to drink the nationalism kool-aid don't you?
"Apparently treating people as property is so repugnant it's a cause worth fighting for."
Indeed and many of our ancestors did. But that only makes it an effective justification it says nothing of the actual motivations of Lincoln. Obama centralized federal power, and Regan centralized wealth, and Lincoln did both to a degree that would make both blush.
What our ancestors did not for was for their decedents to put at a disadvantage for hiring, job retention, and education opportunities. Somehow I suspect they were dying horrible deaths fighting their own brothers with the intention of freeing men to make what they can of the hand they are dealt like the rest of us rather the cause of outright reducing the opportunities of their blameless children.
"The historiography of causes of the American civil war fills several very large libraries."
On this point I would agree. There is no one cause or motivation, there are simply far too many people. My statements regarded Lincoln who drove the choices that forced the hand of the South but even Lincoln will have had more complex reasons for his actions. Lincoln certainly perused power or he wouldn't have ended up with so much of it relative to others who were actively pursuing it but he also could have sought wealth and power siding with southern channels as well. The man was not the saint some would have you believe but that doesn't mean he didn't avoid things he himself believed were monstrous.
20 years ago all the democrats would have been republicans and vice versa. Hell, 10 years ago nobody but a foaming at the mouth die commie scum republican would have been anti-russia. They switch it up every now and then.
WOW from +5 Insightful to a +1 I don't like what he is saying in under an hour.
"Nobody will criticize democracy so lets call our power play democracy and we will win"
People who don't make power plays don't typically end up in power. If nothing else the fact that there are plenty of people who are willing to make power plays assure that.
Nope sadly the best you can hope for is a sociopath, read between the lines and you might find one who is using a strategy that will work out okay for most people. I doubt any of them "mean to harm" the public, it is more of a disregard. Doing something that does more visible good than harm is sound politics if you are neutral. The real issue is that if you think there a political position that good vs the other which is evil you are snowed. Pretty much everything is grey and will do about as much overall harm as good. The few best answers aren't politically sound solutions such as taxing wealth rather than income, crushing degree requirements and funding and supporting independent study, supporting non-government non-profit based healthcare with startup costs supported by long term loans from the fed tap at the fed rate cutting the finance industry profits and existing players out of the loop. Real solutions like that conflict with the false dichotomies the major parties have established on these issues.
"How about avoiding politicians who clearly mean to harm the public? How about it?"
During my lifetime I've seen good evidence of four possibilities.
Obama, although long before the end of his first campaign the smoke cleared enough to know I was projecting what I wanted onto him and he wasn't the real thing.
Trump was a possibility, it wasn't certain for a bit whether he was misguiding people but meant well. Similarly it was clear enough before the end of his campaign that i could never support him but he might at least have turned out to be sincere. He still could be. Many of his statements during the separation of immigrant families basically amount to a demand for congress to take away his authority to do it and in so doing deny future presidents that power. That remains the first and only time I've seen a U.S. President demand congress take powers from their office. Other powers he's threatened to abuse could be much the same with a token nod that the method at least gives something to those he convinced to vote for him.
Sanders, the only politician who has a strong and longstanding record of actual integrity. I'd still vote for Sanders if given the opportunity. People who don't make power plays don't typically end up in power. The only reason he got to the senate in the first place is a little bit of politics with gun companies early in his career and there hasn't been so much as a whiff of it since.
And last Elizabeth Warren but there has been a lot to suggest Warren has taken the "if you can't beat them, join them" approach. I don't know that she can trusted at this point but I'd support her in a VP role.
There are a handful of young and naive millennials in new house seats that are probably sincere. By the time they grow up enough they'll be the same as the rest.
Nope sadly the best you can hope for is a sociopath, read between the lines and you might find one who is using a strategy that will work out okay for most people. I doubt any of them "mean to harm" the public, it is more of a disregard.
"Cancelling elections because you're unpopular in peacetime and don't want to give up power for personal dynastic reasons, that's a dictator move. TOTALLY DIFFERENT, go figure you blur them."
It seems like you don't fully understand what these terms mean. Nothing about "dictator" and "benevolent" is contradictory. There are a lot of reasons having a dictator is a bad practice but for quite some time roman dictators chose the person they believed best qualified to be their successor and also had temporary dictators. One can have absolute authority and be a dictator for a term without ever using that power at all let alone using it maliciously and giving it up at the end will not mean they weren't a dictator.
"I am not understanding your position beyond "big telco bad. Pai bad"."
That's clear since your response ignores most of what I actually said and oversimplifies the issue to suit your argument.
Money coming into the company from just any source doesn't magically translate to the same result as money from another source. It might in some mom and pop but not in a massive enterprise. A massive enterprise is more like a government. In a nutshell your argument is comparable to claiming a windfall for federal transportation department will result in higher capacity and shorter wait times at your local MVD office. Except of course you are simplifying it to more funding for the transport wing of government reducing wait times for transportation services. That argument might well seem sensible to someone on the outside like the EU.
Just within Verizon you have Verizon Wireless, Verizon Wireline, Verizon Enterprise, to name a few off the top of my head and each of those is further made up of about 4-8 major distinct divisions. All of those divisions are in many ways distinct companies and many of them are yet further divided into distinct and largely independent pieces. If Verizon Enterprise, Terremark, needs cell phones for workers they take bids and while Verizon Wireless will be part of the bidding they don't automatically get the deal if they aren't the option that makes the most sense from the business profitability of. Do you think Verizon Wireless only takes orders from other verizon divisions? Nope. Internal or External, customers are just customers and they charge what they need to cover the cost of the services they are providing and make the profits they can within the market.
It's the old school "We have the best relationship you can have in business, I pay him and he pays me." Verizon doesn't build more infrastructure just because Verizon Enterprise Services Terremark makes more money, they only build more infrastructure if the wireline division determines that investing in more infrastructure will make them more money. They don't sell their services more cheaply to Verizon's ISP business except as a function of scale. If anything due to scale third parties pay higher rates and are likely more profitable for that division.
Operating the company this way makes the accounting work better, allows for better efficiencies of scale, and means that profits seen by other divisions reflect the actual costs of using other services within the company. It also means that where it would be more profitable to use third party services than internal the individual divisions have the flexibility to do that instead.
Verizon isn't a unique snowflake in this regard. Any company i've been at which has been around for at least 20 years and revenues in the billions is pretty much the same deal.
The wireline division isn't going to build out infrastructure just for the sake of doing it, they are going to build out infrastructure when their own revenue and needs result in the belief they'd be more profitable doing it and only then. No amount of money to some other division or the parent company is going to change that.
"Required to sell means that even if it isn't profitable."
Of course it is profitable. That's the whole point, wireline isn't going to charge their broadband services prices that won't cover services and generate a profit. Why would they sell at a loss? The broadband services piece gets to deduct whatever they have to pay to the wireline division at full rate and most of those expenses the wireless division gets to deduct as well. The other clients they sell to are subsidizing that cost and at some point could grow more profitable for them than their own broadband service.
Right. I'd contend you optimize both as best you reasonably can. If that would make SF victory a given, so be it. You just benchmark your progress over time against SF. There is no need to rig contests and generate all sorts of bogus claims about being the undisputed champion of all things.
If anything that is just going to hamper AZ's development and progress. Now there is no incentive to work on whatever deficits might lead to AZ failing against SF and any improvements that would have been gained trying will be lost.
"He was thrown into a unique situation where the nation had come apart at its seams and the constitution didn't really spell out any contingency plans for dealing with a civil war."
It was his war. He had to fight hard and arguably broke the Constitution to make it happen. Afterward he definitely violated the Constitution and outright reshaped citizenship and government. All of it happened in a way that made him more powerful of course.
But the whole thing worked. They looked the other way afterward long enough to support the transition and those northern factories began cranking out machinery to support that agriculture business soon afterward. Lincoln and the Republicans got their ultra-powerful central government and the northern states got a piece of the southern economic pie.
"At least, he didn't cancel the elections of 1864 even though his chances looked bleak leading up to them. Dictators tend to go the other direction with elections."
I said practically a dictator. That you don't dispute he had the power to cancel the elections is an indication you agree with the reality but don't like the term.
"and a sociopath"
Of course he was a sociopath. You don't reach upper ranks of law and politics without being a sociopath. Lincoln was a particularly gifted speaker and writer. I have no doubt if he'd overseen a genocide effort we'd all still be talking about how we saved humanity and the very mention of the group would call up disgust at evil incarnate much like the term Nazi does today.
Do you know the most critical skill you learn as an attorney? Debate. You don't generally pick the topics or your position. You have to be completely morally relative and invent or embrace moralities at random.
"Ajit Pai, he strikes me as the kind of person who does evil or not based on his boss"
Agreed but his real boss isn't Trump. McConnell wouldn't be it either. His real boss is the Telcos he came from. After he leaves his position he'll get his reward in the form of paid speaking engagements and very lucrative consultant or lobbyist position from those same Telcos. And you can quite certain those same Telcos are the ones who pulled McConnell's strings to get his name put on Obama's desk for a recommendation. McConnell probably traded some favor to Obama or Obama's staff to get it done.
Like it or not that is how politics work in this country. Evil isn't the right word. By and large the people at the top aren't evil, they are neutral to the good or ill effects. Even if they didn't start that way I can spin just about anything as good or evil and make a solid argument. Washington is filled with spin masters to put me to shame. Imagine how easy it is to self-justify your actions when surrounded by people making solid and reasoned arguments for their benefits? Nothing is that simple, everything helps some groups and hurts others without any universal good answers that don't stomp on good people.
So whether they start there or not, all of these people effectively end as sociopaths and the corporations start that way. The people they hurt are collateral damage and the people they help are incidental good.
The civil war freed the slaves, incidental good. But the sociopath at the top was centralizing the power of the federal government, which he was practically a dictator of. If you think otherwise you are extremely naive. The only ones you'll find who genuinely fought for or against human freedom on the basis of morality are the common people and soldiers up to and including middle-to-upper ranks.
You are correct. You rarely see a fair representation of conservative positions or an honest one of liberal positions for that matter. Both are spun all to hell and very few people actually understand the underlying issues. But you'd do well to take BOTH with a heavy grain of salt, if you assume both are shady and self-serving with justifications to never be the real motive and both real pro's and con's for normal people (including the 1% but not the 0.01%) to be neutral side-effect everything makes more sense.
"Do you really think the reason for this action from Pai/FCC was to "be cruel to people"? Did you actually read their reasoning for why they did this?"
Well which do you want to talk about the reason they did it or the justification they used to support their actions?
The civil war is a great example. The reason for doing it was to centralize federal power particularly for the Presidency both direct and financial. The justification was freeing slaves.
In this case the reason for the action is that Pai is a puppet for major telecom/broadband interests and this move cuts out competition. Reduced competition isn't exactly a free market cornerstone. Their justification was an argument that more money to the telco would mean increasing build-out. It all falls down when you realize no company the size of a telco is one company or one division of a company. The division which builds out infrastructure charges the division that offers service on those lines. They are required to sell services to third parties as well, in a perfect world, at the same rates (though they play shenanigans on this part).
So either there are enough people wanting the service to make it good business for the infrastructure division to take on the cost of building out or not but their consideration includes all their clients whether internal or external since both are buying services from their division.
That has nothing to do with all the subsidy money going to their internal service, that just benefits mother telco in the form of slurping up all the government subsidy money. It doesn't go back into build-outs anymore than the massive tax cuts they've received has. The division of the telco that does infrastructure build-out won't see either one and they won't build out unless business needs dictate it no matter how much you give mother telco. More likely it will go to fund Pai as a paid consultant after his FCC term and to pay for speaking engagements for him and others like McConnell. Then it will go to bonuses and dividends because telcos still pay dividends.
Food
Water
Shelter
Internet
Yup, it is on the essentials list.
It's designed to discourage competitors to the telecoms. Nothing is needed to encourage build-out, they've been given billions to build out and pocketed it. They were also given massive tax cuts which were to build out. Instead they've used the funds to re-organize and lay off workers.
Big Tech
Big Broadband
Big Telco
Big Media
Big Pharma
Big Oil
Big Tobacco
These industries are not our friends.
And no doubt appointed chairman on recommendation of the same Mitch McConnell. Probably he was the deal or part of the deal that bought the alliance with the Republican party. People forget that despite running on a Republican ticket Trump was definitely not a Republican. The party did every short of Dems vs Sanders to try to block him.