> Dor example, suppose you google "How do I get rid of a mole?" Are you worried about a skin condition or a small burrowing mammal?
No, Google would already know that neither of those interpretations is correct. Google tracks your search history, it knows who is asking. So when the CIA asks how to get rid of a mole, Google knows they are talking about a https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... mole.
You think when a little baby is finally asleep the parents are going to *watch tv*? You don't have kids, do you?
Little ones have to be fed every couple hours, meaning the parents have to get up and feed them every couple hours. When the baby finally falls asleep, most parents want to do one thing - go to sleep, for a couple hours until they have to get up again.
A perfectly healthy mom, with a perfectly healthy, properly positioned baby, would be better off not having a C-section. Any of a number of complications make C-section safer than vaginal delivery.
Countries with C-section rates below 7% have significantly higher mortality than countries with higher rates. This is probably because breech babies and other complications. Mortality rates continue to improve until C-sections account for about 19% of deliveries.
Above 19% c-sections (here's looking at you, California), mortality rates increase. This is probably because such a high rate indicates c-sections are being performed when there is no medical reason to do so, with perfectly healthy moms and infants.
There was a study about this in JAMA in 2015 if you'd like more details.
Quoting American Academy of Pediatrics: "It is important to note that a large percentage of infants who die of SIDS are found with their head covered by bedding. Therefore, no pillows, sheets, *blankets*, or any other items that could *obstruct infant breathing* or cause overheating should be in the bed."
"Soft objects,19,20,55â"58 such as pillows and pillow-like toys, quilts, comforters, sheepskins, and loose bedding,4,7,59â"64 such as blankets and nonfitted sheets, can obstruct an infantâ(TM)s nose and mouth. An obstructed airway can pose a risk of suffocation, entrapment, or SIDS."
AAP cites: Hauck FR, Herman SM, Donovan M, et al. Sleep environment and the risk of sudden infant death syndrome in an urban population: the Chicago Infant Mortality Study. Pediatrics. 2003;111(5 pt 2):1207â"1214pmid:12728140
Fleming PJ, Blair PS, Bacon C, et al; Confidential Enquiry into Stillbirths and Deaths Regional Coordinators and Researchers. Environment of infants during sleep and risk of the sudden infant death syndrome: results of 1993-5 case-control study for confidential inquiry into stillbirths and deaths in infancy. BMJ. 1996;313(7051):191â"195pmid:8696193
Brooke H, Gibson A, Tappin D, Brown H. Case-control study of sudden infant death syndrome in Scotland, 1992-5. BMJ. 1997;314(7093):1516â"1520pmid:9169398
Kemp JS, Nelson VE, Thach BT. Physical properties of bedding that may increase risk of sudden infant death syndrome in prone-sleeping infants. Pediatr Res. 1994;36(1 pt 1):7â"11pmid:7936840
Kemp JS, Livne M, White DK, Arfken CL. Softness and potential to cause rebreathing: differences in bedding used by infants at high and low risk for sudden infant death syndrome. J Pediatr. 1998;132(2):234â"239pmid:9506633
Wtf phone, "anti-American argument"? I said anti-argument!
Maybe I should use the Preview feature.
Anyway, "people did it this way until modern times" is used to sell parents on a bunch of really bad ideas. Whenever you hear that, it's wise to remember the second half of the sentence, "people used to do it THIS way - and half of them died". Now most people do it this other way, and don't die.
> like humans and pre-humans have done for literally millions of years right
Up through the 16th century, about half of all children died before reaching 16 years of age. You mentioned "pre-humans": gorillas have an infant mortality rate of about 50%. Today, developer nations have infant mortality rates well under 1%.
Unless you're cool with a 50-50 chance of killing your kid, "the way it was done for millions of years" is a TERRIBLE argument.
In fact, it's an anti-American argument. Whatever we've started doing differently in the last couple hundred years has reduced infant mortality from 50% to 0.5%, so doing whatever people used to do is putting your kid's life at risk.
> For most healthy babies there is not a role for home monitoring at all
Even if the actual odds that there will be a problem for the monitor to catch are low, there is some value for an anxious new parent in being able to fall asleep easier, knowing that at least the new baby is breathing normally, etc.
In other words, the value isn't only in the monitor alarming, the reassurance of the steady pulsing of the monitor showing that breathing and heart rate are fine has some value. I didn't *buy* something like this for my baby, but I would have used it if I got one as a gift. I would also keep in mind that the monitor can only tell me "go check on your baby", no need to panic if the sensor slips off or whatever.
If you process less than $300/month, Paypal probably makes sense. You don't want to pay $35/month plus a percentage for a merchant account at that level.
If you process $3,000 / month, a merchant account makes sense.
If you're Amazon and you do $8 billion / month, you negotiate. Normal published fees don't apply. Buying a merchant bank might make sense.
Square fits in their somewhere, as does CCBill. It all depends on what you do and how much you do.
I'm Cockney (a particular London accent that's fast and loose with silly things like consonants in words - sorted becomes "saw-id").... > when I say "Cancel Route" in my car, which basically has no fucking idea what I'm saying
So you said "assel rat" and it said "what the hell did you just say?!" ?;)
I don't suppose that place managed to become, and remain, a large company, given their idiocy? Of so I'd love to know the name, so I can avoid them. I wouldn't want to bother interviewing there, and it would probably be best to avoid buying their products if their coders are rewarded for creating the biggest pile of garbage.
> Or in another field: mortality rates for surgeons.
So the most reliable, and most obvious way for a doctor to increase their rating is to try to avoid treating patients the who are in poor health - exactly the opposite of what we want doctors to do. A doctor who aims to reduce their mortality rate should if spend their time with althletes and college students, maybe handing out steroids and stimulants. Again, if the doctor doesn't *know* anyone is looking at the mortality rate of patients, it can be a very crude but marginally useful number. As soon as you tie doctor pay to mortality rates, you're paying them to avoid sick people.
Musk had to lay off most of his legislators, due to the economy. It's been a bad year for House reps, 13% of them have lost their jobs and become unemployed in just the last six months.
I've put some thought into metrics for programmers / software jobs and have come up with damn little that's useful *if the programmers know what the metrics are*. If management looks at different metrics each month or quarter, and nobody knows ahead of time what they'll be looking at, you might get some semi-useful numbers. The metric doesn't become the goal when you don't know what the metrics is.
Whenever the people doing the work know what the metric is, and have motivation to increase it, most focus more increasing the metric than doing the job well, in my experience. Obviously *some* jobs can be measured with a simple number, though even most of those fail to capture quality of work, when you just measure quantity. If you have some ideas that you've seen work long term I'd love to hear about it.
In software programming, my most productive work often involves deleting superfluous and redundant code, and deleting code that's based on assumptions, in order to make it work in more general cases. That makes the code more useful, faster, more maintainable, and most importantly more reliable - it's impossible to have bugs in code that isn't there. Bso anyway that's my *most* productive work, for the time spent. (Deleting is fast.) Some morons have tried to measure programmer productivity by "lines of code added". Well that's exactly wrong. It rates the most productive work as having negative productivity. Other measurements are slightly better in that they don't measure the exact OPPOSITE of what they are supposed to measure, but none I've seen is particularly useful.
That's true, it's only been a week. Many of his actions, such as putting pending regulations on hold until they can be reviewed, are in fact the same things that Obama and Clinton did. So indeed those aren't different.
Futhermore, Obama managed to add $850 billion in spending in his first month, so a big first month isn't new. (ARRA)
The primary author of the Middle East study which inspired the CNN story you linked to says the CNN story is bunk. 8N other words, their own source says they are full of shit.
The study's actual conclusion, the author says, is that once every 30 years there may be one six-hour period in which people shouldn't be outside. If they can't go inside, they should get wet (wade in a stream, hose off, whatever).
Currently, normal highs in the southern region of the gulf are around 50C (122F). It's always been pretty damn hot there. People know to either go inside or wet their clothing when it's extremely hot.
In my experience, which is mostly much smaller organizations, is more like family game night competing than "family infighting, where siblings can be ruthless with each other". Many race car drivers and other sports competitors are friends - the fact that they are all members of small group, professional race drivers, means they have something important in common, which brings them together. yet what they have in common is that they compete with each other.:) How many people can really relate to Google Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella? Only a few people understand what it's like to be in that position, it's a small club of people who understand each other's daily experience.
Regarding "even face off against each other in court", going to court is dramatic for most individuals. It's been said that Alphabet (Google) gets sued about every 20 minutes. That might not be right, it might only be a few hundred times per year, but it's a normal thing, part of business operations. Two companies disagree, they let a judge decide the disagreement. Disagreements happen, courts resolve disagreements, there's often no animosity.
When one talks about how "big" a company is, that's normally measured by market cap (stock value). That's a good measurement between older, stable companies, but overstates size of growing companies - it's really a measure of how big they are expected to become.
Amazon, Alphabet (Google), and Intel are the top 3 for R&D spending, Facebook is #17.
The same is true of wireless phones - it's redundant to have three or four companies put up towers covering the same area, but we do, and there's competion. Every year phone networks get faster and companies like Sprint, Cricket, T-Mobile, and Boost compete for business. Redundant towers is an inefficiency, but that's better than a monopoly.
In many parts of Texas, including where I live, we have electric power providers to choose from, offering different plans. Some offer free nights and weekends, etc. In some areas of Texas, we have four or five internet service providers to choose from. Yes, there is some inefficiency, and there's competition.
Actually there's redundancy and inefficiency to having more than one airline, more than one bank, etc, too, but that seems to have worked better than the government-controlled providers they tried in Cuba, the USSR, etc. Almost all the countries that tried that approach of government-controlled businesses rather than competition have given up on the idea, because it didn't work well.
I misspoke. TVA defined the service area of EPB. The state of Tennessee passed a law saying municipal power providers such as EPB could provide internet service within their service areas.
The FCC purported to rewrite Tennessee law on the matter. Pai pointed put that the FCC has no lawful power to do so. The court agreed, the FCC has no such power.
He was appointed to the commission by Obama in 2012, so we know what his positions on municipal broadband are. Basically, he thinks the FCC should get out of the way and let states and cities do muni broadband if they wish - Congress has made no law requiring states to deploy it, allow it, or disalow it. The FCC should enforce the law, not make the law, and there is no federal law on the subject pf muni broadband for the FCC to endorce.
The Tennessee case is instructive. The state, under their Constitutional authority, empowered TVA to provide broadband *within their service area*. That's cool, he said. He made it a point to be clear that he neither opposed nor supported the project - Tennessee could have muni broadband if they want, up to them.
The FCC, then controlled by Democrats, decided they were going to override the law passed by the (Democrat) legislature and say that TVA was to provide broadband service *outside* of their designated service area.
Pai pointed to two issues -the courts had already ruled that the FCC doesn't have the power to override state law
without a clear mandate from Congress to do so in the particular subject at issue. That is, FCC can't make law on it's own, Congress makes law and Congress had not authorized the FCC to do what they were doing.
Secondly, the courts had also ruled that even if Congress did decide to override Tennessee law, there would have to be a careful Constitutional balance. The Constitutional grants a specific list of powers to the federal government, and reserves all other powers to the states. In fact, the Constitution repeats itself on that last point - all other powers are reserved to the states (including the power to deploy, fund, or regulate municipal broadband). Unless and until Congress passed on a law on the matter which courts could review for Constitutionality, the FCC had no legal power to interfere with municipal broadband either way.
Pai was appointed to the commission by Obama in 2012, so we can answer that based on what he's supported and opposed over the last five years.
In his dissents, Pai has repeatedly expressed his frustration with the commission setting minimums with no reference to changing technology and consumer expectations. He supports looking at the speeds actually ordered by consumers who *do* have the choice, and setting new rules based on that, rather than picking a number out of a bureaucrat's ass - and using completely different numbers from month to month.
Available speeds have increased in the last couple of years, so by the chairman's preferred methodology standards should be higher now than in 2015, but in 2015 he said the commission's standard of 10 Mbps in rural areas was too slow, arguing that 25 Mbps would be better: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...
Before that, he reasoned that since Netflix customers stream at 3.2 Mbps on average, a true 10 Mbps connection would allow 3 concurrent streams - so here we see his idea of "broadband" gets faster over time.
The new chairman argued strenuously that the FCC should not adopt regulations that discouraged gigabit - the rule enacted by the Democrat majority encouraged 10Mbps and 25Mbps connections in lieu of gigabit, he argued.
He would in general rather promote competition and then gtf out of the way and let companies offer gigabit or whatever, rather than micro-managing, declaring that they must offer exactly this or that. In constrast, the rules enacted by his colleagues were much more along the lines of "Verizon must offer 10 Mbps DSL in these areas" kinds of rules. (Of course the rule is written as "an incumbent telco carrier operating blah blah blah", a description which describes only Verizon).
Anyway, to answer your question, his position is that 10 Mbps was too slow in 2015, it should have been 25 Mbps back then, and it should get faster with time based on what consumers who have the choice actually select.
I voted against trump, twice, because as I said, he's a jackass.
> Watch what Trump does, who he appoints, and what executive orders he signs.
I'll be watching. So far, his executive actions have been:
Keystone XL & Dakota Access pipelines (with US-made steel). Start undoingTrans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Reduce costs and regulatory burden caused by Obamacare. The border wall.
In other words, he's been doing *exactly what he said he would do*. No matter anyone's personal opinion of TPP or Keystone or whatever, having somebody immediately set to work doing exactly what they said they would do is certainly a change from the professional politicians.
I'm not quite clear - are you saying that the benefits to people other than the student are great enough that it makes sense to pay for 100% of someone else's time in college?
That is, if you pay $50,000 - $150,000 (whether via taxes or any other mechanism) for me to get a degree, it'll be worth it you, because you'll have another more educated member of society around?
If so, I guess you need my address, to send the check? No need to wait for the politicians to force you to pay for my school. You can start today, if you truly think it makes sense to do so.
Any time there's a story that mentions a company doing well, our resident Slashdot socialists are the first to post, saying "that's ridiculous, no company should be allowed make hundreds of millions of dollars. The government should take that money from the company!" (Apparently not realizing "that money" is their 401k).
Where are you guys today, to say "that's ridiculous, no company should be allowed lose hundreds of millions of dollars. The government should take that money from taxpayers and give it back to the company!"
Slashdot Mirror
> Dor example, suppose you google "How do I get rid of a mole?" Are you worried about a skin condition or a small burrowing mammal?
No, Google would already know that neither of those interpretations is correct. Google tracks your search history, it knows who is asking. So when the CIA asks how to get rid of a mole, Google knows they are talking about a https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... mole.
You think when a little baby is finally asleep the parents are going to *watch tv*? You don't have kids, do you?
Little ones have to be fed every couple hours, meaning the parents have to get up and feed them every couple hours. When the baby finally falls asleep, most parents want to do one thing - go to sleep, for a couple hours until they have to get up again.
Indeed, several antennas can be mounted on one tower, and several lines can be mounted on one telephone pole.
A perfectly healthy mom, with a perfectly healthy, properly positioned baby, would be better off not having a C-section. Any of a number of complications make C-section safer than vaginal delivery.
Countries with C-section rates below 7% have significantly higher mortality than countries with higher rates. This is probably because breech babies and other complications. Mortality rates continue to improve until C-sections account for about 19% of deliveries.
Above 19% c-sections (here's looking at you, California), mortality rates increase. This is probably because such a high rate indicates c-sections are being performed when there is no medical reason to do so, with perfectly healthy moms and infants.
There was a study about this in JAMA in 2015 if you'd like more details.
The CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics cite numerous studies showing blankets increase the risk of death.
https://www.cdc.gov/sids/paren...
http://pediatrics.aappublicati...
Quoting American Academy of Pediatrics:
"It is important to note that a large percentage of infants who die of SIDS are found with their head covered by bedding. Therefore, no pillows, sheets, *blankets*, or any other items that could *obstruct infant breathing* or cause overheating should be in the bed."
"Soft objects,19,20,55â"58 such as pillows and pillow-like toys, quilts, comforters, sheepskins, and loose bedding,4,7,59â"64 such as blankets and nonfitted sheets, can obstruct an infantâ(TM)s nose and mouth. An obstructed airway can pose a risk of suffocation, entrapment, or SIDS."
AAP cites:
Hauck FR, Herman SM, Donovan M, et al. Sleep environment and the risk of sudden infant death syndrome in an urban population: the Chicago Infant Mortality Study. Pediatrics. 2003;111(5 pt 2):1207â"1214pmid:12728140
Fleming PJ, Blair PS, Bacon C, et al; Confidential Enquiry into Stillbirths and Deaths Regional Coordinators and Researchers. Environment of infants during sleep and risk of the sudden infant death syndrome: results of 1993-5 case-control study for confidential inquiry into stillbirths and deaths in infancy. BMJ. 1996;313(7051):191â"195pmid:8696193
Brooke H, Gibson A, Tappin D, Brown H. Case-control study of sudden infant death syndrome in Scotland, 1992-5. BMJ. 1997;314(7093):1516â"1520pmid:9169398
Kemp JS, Nelson VE, Thach BT. Physical properties of bedding that may increase risk of sudden infant death syndrome in prone-sleeping infants. Pediatr Res. 1994;36(1 pt 1):7â"11pmid:7936840
Kemp JS, Livne M, White DK, Arfken CL. Softness and potential to cause rebreathing: differences in bedding used by infants at high and low risk for sudden infant death syndrome. J Pediatr. 1998;132(2):234â"239pmid:9506633
And many more
Wtf phone, "anti-American argument"? I said anti-argument!
Maybe I should use the Preview feature.
Anyway, "people did it this way until modern times" is used to sell parents on a bunch of really bad ideas. Whenever you hear that, it's wise to remember the second half of the sentence, "people used to do it THIS way - and half of them died". Now most people do it this other way, and don't die.
You are of course welcome to parent your own way.
> like humans and pre-humans have done for literally millions of years right
Up through the 16th century, about half of all children died before reaching 16 years of age. You mentioned "pre-humans": gorillas have an infant mortality rate of about 50%. Today, developer nations have infant mortality rates well under 1%.
Unless you're cool with a 50-50 chance of killing your kid, "the way it was done for millions of years" is a TERRIBLE argument.
In fact, it's an anti-American argument. Whatever we've started doing differently in the last couple hundred years has reduced infant mortality from 50% to 0.5%, so doing whatever people used to do is putting your kid's life at risk.
> For most healthy babies there is not a role for home monitoring at all
Even if the actual odds that there will be a problem for the monitor to catch are low, there is some value for an anxious new parent in being able to fall asleep easier, knowing that at least the new baby is breathing normally, etc.
In other words, the value isn't only in the monitor alarming, the reassurance of the steady pulsing of the monitor showing that breathing and heart rate are fine has some value. I didn't *buy* something like this for my baby, but I would have used it if I got one as a gift. I would also keep in mind that the monitor can only tell me "go check on your baby", no need to panic if the sensor slips off or whatever.
If you process less than $300/month, Paypal probably makes sense. You don't want to pay $35/month plus a percentage for a merchant account at that level.
If you process $3,000 / month, a merchant account makes sense.
If you're Amazon and you do $8 billion / month, you negotiate. Normal published fees don't apply. Buying a merchant bank might make sense.
Square fits in their somewhere, as does CCBill. It all depends on what you do and how much you do.
I'm Cockney (a particular London accent that's fast and loose with silly things like consonants in words - sorted becomes "saw-id"). ...
> when I say "Cancel Route" in my car, which basically has no fucking idea what I'm saying
So you said "assel rat" and it said "what the hell did you just say?!" ? ;)
I don't suppose that place managed to become, and remain, a large company, given their idiocy? Of so I'd love to know the name, so I can avoid them. I wouldn't want to bother interviewing there, and it would probably be best to avoid buying their products if their coders are rewarded for creating the biggest pile of garbage.
> Or in another field: mortality rates for surgeons.
So the most reliable, and most obvious way for a doctor to increase their rating is to try to avoid treating patients the who are in poor health - exactly the opposite of what we want doctors to do. A doctor who aims to reduce their mortality rate should if spend their time with althletes and college students, maybe handing out steroids and stimulants. Again, if the doctor doesn't *know* anyone is looking at the mortality rate of patients, it can be a very crude but marginally useful number. As soon as you tie doctor pay to mortality rates, you're paying them to avoid sick people.
Musk had to lay off most of his legislators, due to the economy. It's been a bad year for House reps, 13% of them have lost their jobs and become unemployed in just the last six months.
I've put some thought into metrics for programmers / software jobs and have come up with damn little that's useful *if the programmers know what the metrics are*. If management looks at different metrics each month or quarter, and nobody knows ahead of time what they'll be looking at, you might get some semi-useful numbers. The metric doesn't become the goal when you don't know what the metrics is.
Whenever the people doing the work know what the metric is, and have motivation to increase it, most focus more increasing the metric than doing the job well, in my experience. Obviously *some* jobs can be measured with a simple number, though even most of those fail to capture quality of work, when you just measure quantity. If you have some ideas that you've seen work long term I'd love to hear about it.
In software programming, my most productive work often involves deleting superfluous and redundant code, and deleting code that's based on assumptions, in order to make it work in more general cases. That makes the code more useful, faster, more maintainable, and most importantly more reliable - it's impossible to have bugs in code that isn't there. Bso anyway that's my *most* productive work, for the time spent. (Deleting is fast.) Some morons have tried to measure programmer productivity by "lines of code added". Well that's exactly wrong. It rates the most productive work as having negative productivity. Other measurements are slightly better in that they don't measure the exact OPPOSITE of what they are supposed to measure, but none I've seen is particularly useful.
That's true, it's only been a week. Many of his actions, such as putting pending regulations on hold until they can be reviewed, are in fact the same things that Obama and Clinton did. So indeed those aren't different.
Futhermore, Obama managed to add $850 billion in spending in his first month, so a big first month isn't new.
(ARRA)
The primary author of the Middle East study which inspired the CNN story you linked to says the CNN story is bunk. 8N other words, their own source says they are full of shit.
The study's actual conclusion, the author says, is that once every 30 years there may be one six-hour period in which people shouldn't be outside. If they can't go inside, they should get wet (wade in a stream, hose off, whatever).
Currently, normal highs in the southern region of the gulf are around 50C (122F). It's always been pretty damn hot there. People know to either go inside or wet their clothing when it's extremely hot.
In my experience, which is mostly much smaller organizations, is more like family game night competing than "family infighting, where siblings can be ruthless with each other". Many race car drivers and other sports competitors are friends - the fact that they are all members of small group, professional race drivers, means they have something important in common, which brings them together. yet what they have in common is that they compete with each other. :) How many people can really relate to Google Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella? Only a few people understand what it's like to be in that position, it's a small club of people who understand each other's daily experience.
Regarding "even face off against each other in court", going to court is dramatic for most individuals. It's been said that Alphabet (Google) gets sued about every 20 minutes. That might not be right, it might only be a few hundred times per year, but it's a normal thing, part of business operations. Two companies disagree, they let a judge decide the disagreement. Disagreements happen, courts resolve disagreements, there's often no animosity.
When one talks about how "big" a company is, that's normally measured by market cap (stock value). That's a good measurement between older, stable companies, but overstates size of growing companies - it's really a measure of how big they are expected to become.
Amazon, Alphabet (Google), and Intel are the top 3 for R&D spending, Facebook is #17.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view...
The same is true of wireless phones - it's redundant to have three or four companies put up towers covering the same area, but we do, and there's competion. Every year phone networks get faster and companies like Sprint, Cricket, T-Mobile, and Boost compete for business. Redundant towers is an inefficiency, but that's better than a monopoly.
In many parts of Texas, including where I live, we have electric power providers to choose from, offering different plans. Some offer free nights and weekends, etc. In some areas of Texas, we have four or five internet service providers to choose from. Yes, there is some inefficiency, and there's competition.
Actually there's redundancy and inefficiency to having more than one airline, more than one bank, etc, too, but that seems to have worked better than the government-controlled providers they tried in Cuba, the USSR, etc. Almost all the countries that tried that approach of government-controlled businesses rather than competition have given up on the idea, because it didn't work well.
I misspoke. TVA defined the service area of EPB. The state of Tennessee passed a law saying municipal power providers such as EPB could provide internet service within their service areas.
The FCC purported to rewrite Tennessee law on the matter. Pai pointed put that the FCC has no lawful power to do so. The court agreed, the FCC has no such power.
He was appointed to the commission by Obama in 2012, so we know what his positions on municipal broadband are. Basically, he thinks the FCC should get out of the way and let states and cities do muni broadband if they wish - Congress has made no law requiring states to deploy it, allow it, or disalow it. The FCC should enforce the law, not make the law, and there is no federal law on the subject pf muni broadband for the FCC to endorce.
The Tennessee case is instructive. The state, under their Constitutional authority, empowered TVA to provide broadband *within their service area*. That's cool, he said. He made it a point to be clear that he neither opposed nor supported the project - Tennessee could have muni broadband if they want, up to them.
The FCC, then controlled by Democrats, decided they were going to override the law passed by the (Democrat) legislature and say that TVA was to provide broadband service *outside* of their designated service area.
Pai pointed to two issues -the courts had already ruled that the FCC doesn't have the power to override state law
without a clear mandate from Congress to do so in the particular subject at issue. That is, FCC can't make law on it's own, Congress makes law and Congress had not authorized the FCC to do what they were doing.
Secondly, the courts had also ruled that even if Congress did decide to override Tennessee law, there would have to be a careful Constitutional balance. The Constitutional grants a specific list of powers to the federal government, and reserves all other powers to the states. In fact, the Constitution repeats itself on that last point - all other powers are reserved to the states (including the power to deploy, fund, or regulate municipal broadband). Unless and until Congress passed on a law on the matter which courts could review for Constitutionality, the FCC had no legal power to interfere with municipal broadband either way.
Pai was appointed to the commission by Obama in 2012, so we can answer that based on what he's supported and opposed over the last five years.
In his dissents, Pai has repeatedly expressed his frustration with the commission setting minimums with no reference to changing technology and consumer expectations. He supports looking at the speeds actually ordered by consumers who *do* have the choice, and setting new rules based on that, rather than picking a number out of a bureaucrat's ass - and using completely different numbers from month to month.
Available speeds have increased in the last couple of years, so by the chairman's preferred methodology standards should be higher now than in 2015, but in 2015 he said the commission's standard of 10 Mbps in rural areas was too slow, arguing that 25 Mbps would be better:
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...
Before that, he reasoned that since Netflix customers stream at 3.2 Mbps on average, a true 10 Mbps connection would allow 3 concurrent streams - so here we see his idea of "broadband" gets faster over time.
The new chairman argued strenuously that the FCC should not adopt regulations that discouraged gigabit - the rule enacted by the Democrat majority encouraged 10Mbps and 25Mbps connections in lieu of gigabit, he argued.
He would in general rather promote competition and then gtf out of the way and let companies offer gigabit or whatever, rather than micro-managing, declaring that they must offer exactly this or that. In constrast, the rules enacted by his colleagues were much more along the lines of "Verizon must offer 10 Mbps DSL in these areas" kinds of rules. (Of course the rule is written as "an incumbent telco carrier operating blah blah blah", a description which describes only Verizon).
Anyway, to answer your question, his position is that 10 Mbps was too slow in 2015, it should have been 25 Mbps back then, and it should get faster with time based on what consumers who have the choice actually select.
I voted against trump, twice, because as I said, he's a jackass.
> Watch what Trump does, who he appoints, and what executive orders he signs.
I'll be watching. So far, his executive actions have been:
Keystone XL & Dakota Access pipelines (with US-made steel).
Start undoingTrans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Reduce costs and regulatory burden caused by Obamacare.
The border wall.
In other words, he's been doing *exactly what he said he would do*. No matter anyone's personal opinion of TPP or Keystone or whatever, having somebody immediately set to work doing exactly what they said they would do is certainly a change from the professional politicians.
I'm not quite clear - are you saying that the benefits to people other than the student are great enough that it makes sense to pay for 100% of someone else's time in college?
That is, if you pay $50,000 - $150,000 (whether via taxes or any other mechanism) for me to get a degree, it'll be worth it you, because you'll have another more educated member of society around?
If so, I guess you need my address, to send the check? No need to wait for the politicians to force you to pay for my school. You can start today, if you truly think it makes sense to do so.
Any time there's a story that mentions a company doing well, our resident Slashdot socialists are the first to post, saying "that's ridiculous, no company should be allowed make hundreds of millions of dollars. The government should take that money from the company!" (Apparently not realizing "that money" is their 401k).
Where are you guys today, to say "that's ridiculous, no company should be allowed lose hundreds of millions of dollars. The government should take that money from taxpayers and give it back to the company!"