The freedom that it gives you, as I said... is irrelevant if you can't afford to pay for the service in the first place because you are trying to pay off your new smart phone.
And as I said, you could purchase the phone with a credit card and simply pay it off over time at a similar (if not lower) rate. (Among many other financing options).
The difference in price between providers that offer lower rate plans for fully owned phones and those that subsidize is less than what the typical monthly payments would have to be on owning your own phone through a separate installment plan.
I disagree. You can usually get a phone for a much lower price yourself than through a service provider. Even if you put the phone on a credit card with 20% interest (i.e. not the best option), and you bought a $400 phone, after 2 years you would have paid $594.77 pretty much exactly what you would have paid for the phone via subsidies (e.g. $100 up front + $20X24 months in subsidies = $580).
I'm saying, however, that until the phone is finished being paid for, the month-to-month expenses are almost always going to be more affordable with a subsidized phone.
Except if you sign up with T-mobile, which most people can do. So yes subsidized phones are cheaper for most people because most people aren't choosing providers where bringing your own phone phones is cheaper. The question isn't whether subsidized phones are cheaper on verizon. The question is why people arent switching to T-Mobile. Saying "bringing your own phone does not save you money at Verizon" one more time won't make it any more relevant to this conversation.
What good is the freedom to change services anytime you want if for the first few months of service that you would otherwise get, you are spending more money than what you can reasonably afford to budget in the first place because you need to pay off the phone?
Separating your phone contract from your phone financing means that switching services does not effect when/how you pay off your phone. You don't need to pay it off any slower or faster if you switch services. You can buy it up front, or you can have a payment plan. You could even buy a phone on a credit card and pay about the same monthly payments as if you had a subsidized phone.
It frees you from having 1 possibility to many, and of those many possibilities, it is likely one will be cheaper than paying an extra $20/month for 2 years on top of whatever the up front cost of the phone was.
I agree that no one currently in power would be willing to support it, however there are probably a bunch of new people who would like to be in power that might support it if it meant they would be elected (even if only for a term).
There are other benefits to providing your own phone even in the case where the price is the same.
1. You can choose an unlocked phone (one that is not tied to a particular provider, allowing you the option to keep the same phone if you switch providers.
2. If you sign up for a monthly plan (like those offered from T-Mobile), you can switch services and continue to pay for your phone. You are not obligated to stay with the same service while you are paying off your phone.
My counter to this argument was that it doesn't matter if most cell phone providers do not have a plan where buying your own phone has a real benefit, because some (i.e. 25% or 1/4 of them) do. If this is a service you want, you can switch to a company that provides it, and it doesn't matter how many don't provide it.
This is when you changed/elaborated your argument to "T-Mobile is not available for me" with the implication that it is not on option for people. I am pretty sure T-Mobile is an option for most people in this country. So while it may explain your situation, this is not common.
But let's say for a moment that it was the case that like 90% of people lived in areas where T-Mobile did not provide service. In this case it still doesn't really make sense to say "People don't sign up for service X because most companies don't provide it." It would make sense to say "People might want to sign up for service X but they can't because it isn't available to 90% of the people.
It doesn't make sense to say. "I don't want to buy a Kia, because most dealers don't sell Kia cars (e.g. maybe Toyota has the biggest dealership)", especially if my town does in fact have a Kia dealership. Then elaborating your reason to be "There is no Kia dealership in my town.", changes the argument in my opinion. Maybe you feel this is just elaborating it.
I agree that it doesn't make sense for people who do not have the option for T-Mobile to buy their own phone under a verizon contract. I am saying your explanation doesn't make sense for people who do have T-Mobile as an option.
It would require a constitutional amendment. 2/3s of both houses of congress and approval by at least 38/50 states. The president is not involved. We don't even need 3rd parties to accomplish this. We can even do this with individual people rather than partisans. But most importantly we need the people to actually want this. Nothing is going to happen with that.
The internet is getting consolidated. Perhaps one day Verizon will be rewarded with a monopoly as they have the most money. Then they can just refuse to let the average internet user access to web pages they don't agree with.
This may one day happen, but I see absolutely no indication that this is happening now or that it will int he near future.
The same thing with most other media. Those thousands of TV channels are now owned by a few companies who also own the newspapers, the radio stations and access to the internet.
Yes it is true that access to the internet is provided by only a few companies, but this has always been the case, it is not a new phenomenon. The infrastructure required for a large network is not something that mom and pop shops all across the country can implement (at least not yet).
Not only do they have their loud megaphone but can also actively silence opinion that they don't like.
Why don't they? Why don't they block web sites that criticize them right now? Why don't they spoof wikipedia articles to make them more sympathetic to their cause?
Whether people can be educated to ignore propaganda is very questionable. Just notice that advertising is becoming such a big business, something that wouldn't happen if it didn't work.
I agree that it may not happen that people become better educated. I am saying it is the only viable solution. If the rich and powerful have the power to lobby for whatever laws they want because they have eliminated true democracy, then passing laws isn't going to stop them. They will simply pass new laws that undo whatever progress is made. Not only is an informed and engaged electorate the only solution to corruption, it is the only solution to a lot of political problems. Simply making corruption illegal doesn't work, because only the most shallow definitions of corruption can be objectively assessed.
I only know of one provider that offers a discounted plan for owning your own phone, and they don't even service my area.
There are only 4 major providers so that makes it 25%. It only takes one more to offer this service before it becomes 50% of major providers. Also a lot of the smaller providers do not subsidize phones at all forcing you to buy your own whether you want to or not.
If you argument is that people don't use T-Mobile because they can't get T-Mobile service in their area, this is a different argument than the one I was disagreeing with and also this is only an argument for people who are not covered by T-Mobile.
I'm sure by the time we have another democrat president, that administration will be the most corrupt in US history.
I'm not exactly sure what you are saying, but I was actually defending democrats by suggesting that the current democratic administration will always be characterized as the worst in human history according to republicans.
Apple makes the money from the $38 cost of manufacturing, not the service providers. The service providers only make a profit from the the retail price and whatever the wholesale price from Apple is.
I think the 2 year contract is definitely more profitable for the service providers than profit from reselling the phone.
From a consumer point of view, the whole advantage of the long term contract is it allows you to get very expensive models for a much smaller comparative monthly payment
He addresses the part which you claim is the "whole advantage of the long term contract".
It is quite well known that the optimal strategy in a FPP voting system is to form parties. There is an incentive to be large (i.e. larger than your opponents). If every party is trying to be large, than there will be fewer of them that are competitive. If you become so large that there is only 1 party, then you have no opponents and this incentive disappears. The smallest number bigger than 1 is 2.
If you have 3 parties, there is an incentive for the 2 more like minded parties to merge to increase their influence. Obviously this doesn't always happen because there may be other factors, but the incentive is there.
If you have 1 party (e.g. if one implodes), there is an incentive for the existing party to split because there is no cost to doing so (i.e. you are not allowing some worse 3rd option to gain the upperhand).
I don't think participating in the system (voting for the lesser of 2 evils) is the best way to change it in this particular instance. I think attacking the legitimacy of the system itself is the best path forward towards a better substitute.
What could possibly be a more compelling public interest than the integrity of our Democracy?
I agree this is a compelling public interest. I don't think limiting the amount of speech each side can make is an effective step towards that goal.
Not surprisingly, I find most of the other examples you gave to be good examples of measures that were either ineffective or misguided in their goals, or both.
We have no problem regulating either the transfers of money, or even speech, when we feel there is a clear public interest in doing so.
No we don't. My point is that we should. In the best case I feel these regulations are simply ineffective, and in the worst case they end up having negative unintended consequences in addition to being ineffective.
We used to have campaign contribution limits as well.
The company I work for has a PAC. The executives were capped for how much they could donate to political campaigns. They set up a system where employees could donate to the company's PAC and the company would donate 1.5x as much to any charity of their choice.
For example: I could donate $2000 to my company's PAC and my company would donate $3000 to doctors without borders. If you look at the numbers, the executives at my company donated the limit to a political campaign and made a bunch of donations to charity. A bunch of employees also made political contributions they normally wouldn't have.
These laws that try to prevent party A from giving money to party B when both A and B are both willing participants, is really hard to do.
You can make prostitution illegal. Can you really make trophy wives illegal? Can you make the act of giving gifts to the dates that sleep with you illegal?
So now that you've revealed the level of corruption of the Obama administration, please show how a majority of the other administrations that came before were less corrupt.
I don't think you have to exceed the amount of money raised by your opponents. Good messages tend to require less money to be made popular than bad messages.
I actually did a small study on California propositions in the last election cycle and tracked the amount of money each side spent and the election results. It turned out that spending and votes were actually slightly anti-correlated (i.e. a correlation coefficient of -0.15). A naive interpretation of the data would suggest that spending money actually lowers your chances of winning an election. I think a better interpretation is that spending money helps you win an election, but the sides don't start out equal.
It takes more money to convince people to vote for a proposition that's actually bad for them, than to convince them of the opposite.
I think ideally we would switch away from our current election system to one that doesn't inherently reward 2 party politics. There really are a lot of different election systems out there like IRV (instant run-off voting), condorcet systems, etc. If we managed to actually do something like this not only would it remove the tendency to a 2 party system, it might remove the benefit of parties altogether.
The public does not owe the wealthy large chunks of spectrum, airtime or even billboard space just because they have a lot of money on offer.
No one owes rich people anything. That's why they are buying it. If it was owed to them, they would get it for free.
Giving huge sums of money to OTHER people for political speech is poisoning the political process.
What specifically do you propose to make illegal? I know you've said you want caps on political contributions.
For example, let's say each candidate is allowed to spend $1,000,000 per campaign. If I spend $20 of my own money to make a pro Obama sign made to put on my lawn, under your proposed system, should I report this $20 that I spent on supporting Obama so that it can reduce the total his campaign can spend to $999,980?
What if someone gives me $20 to make the sign? What if someone spends their own $20 to make the sign and gives it to me for free? What if someone buys all the art supplies and makes them available for free to people who share the same ideology? Which part of this should be illegal?
I am not saying the world would not be better off if somehow rich people could be prevented from having such a large influence on elections. I just don't see an easy and objective way to make that a reality. It seems there are pretty large loopholes in just about every rule I can conceive of. The formations of PACs and super PACs was a every predictable strategy to exploit loopholes in past campaign finance laws.
My point, however, is that most providers do *NOT* do this. Most will charge exactly the same amount for a service plan whether you buy your phone outright or get it as a "free phone" with a two-year contract.
Given that you are free to use whatever provider you want, the fact that some don't provide service X is not an explanation of why people choose not to use service X.
If I asked "Why don't more people decide to eat indian food?" A good response would not be "Most restaurants don't serve indian food". Obviously if a person decided to eat indian food, they would go to a restaurant that actually served indian food.
Yes she sold us out to big healthcare corporations. I agree with that.
What exactly is the controversy with Benghazi? What was the coverup? Was the coverup that the whitehouse knew it was a terrorist attack but told the press that it was just an angry youtube video mob? How does that help them? Usually coverups are supposed to benefit the people doing the coverup.
Being heard does not equal being agreed with. Would you agree with someone because they had a big enough megaphone?
Also, having a bigger megaphone does not drown anybody else out. There are thousands of television channels and radio stations. The internet is basically limitless. This idea that hearing one idea makes it harder for you to hear another idea is no longer relevant. People are perfectly capable of hearing only what they want to hear, megaphones or not.
As I said, I believe money in politics is a symptom and not the real problem. The real problem is that a significant portion of the public really will just listen to the biggest megaphone. We have the option of trying to make large megaphones illegal, or we can try to foster a society of more informed and intelligent voters.
I think every bit of effort we spend trying to limit campaign contributions is a bit of effort wasted trying to correct a symptom rather than a cause. We should be spending this effort on education. We should be concentrating on making ourselves immune to big money lobbies.
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The freedom that it gives you, as I said... is irrelevant if you can't afford to pay for the service in the first place because you are trying to pay off your new smart phone.
And as I said, you could purchase the phone with a credit card and simply pay it off over time at a similar (if not lower) rate. (Among many other financing options).
The difference in price between providers that offer lower rate plans for fully owned phones and those that subsidize is less than what the typical monthly payments would have to be on owning your own phone through a separate installment plan.
I disagree. You can usually get a phone for a much lower price yourself than through a service provider. Even if you put the phone on a credit card with 20% interest (i.e. not the best option), and you bought a $400 phone, after 2 years you would have paid $594.77 pretty much exactly what you would have paid for the phone via subsidies (e.g. $100 up front + $20X24 months in subsidies = $580).
I'm saying, however, that until the phone is finished being paid for, the month-to-month expenses are almost always going to be more affordable with a subsidized phone.
Except if you sign up with T-mobile, which most people can do. So yes subsidized phones are cheaper for most people because most people aren't choosing providers where bringing your own phone phones is cheaper. The question isn't whether subsidized phones are cheaper on verizon. The question is why people arent switching to T-Mobile. Saying "bringing your own phone does not save you money at Verizon" one more time won't make it any more relevant to this conversation.
What good is the freedom to change services anytime you want if for the first few months of service that you would otherwise get, you are spending more money than what you can reasonably afford to budget in the first place because you need to pay off the phone?
Separating your phone contract from your phone financing means that switching services does not effect when/how you pay off your phone. You don't need to pay it off any slower or faster if you switch services. You can buy it up front, or you can have a payment plan. You could even buy a phone on a credit card and pay about the same monthly payments as if you had a subsidized phone.
It frees you from having 1 possibility to many, and of those many possibilities, it is likely one will be cheaper than paying an extra $20/month for 2 years on top of whatever the up front cost of the phone was.
I agree that no one currently in power would be willing to support it, however there are probably a bunch of new people who would like to be in power that might support it if it meant they would be elected (even if only for a term).
There are other benefits to providing your own phone even in the case where the price is the same.
1. You can choose an unlocked phone (one that is not tied to a particular provider, allowing you the option to keep the same phone if you switch providers.
2. If you sign up for a monthly plan (like those offered from T-Mobile), you can switch services and continue to pay for your phone. You are not obligated to stay with the same service while you are paying off your phone.
I agree this was your original argument.
My counter to this argument was that it doesn't matter if most cell phone providers do not have a plan where buying your own phone has a real benefit, because some (i.e. 25% or 1/4 of them) do. If this is a service you want, you can switch to a company that provides it, and it doesn't matter how many don't provide it.
This is when you changed/elaborated your argument to "T-Mobile is not available for me" with the implication that it is not on option for people. I am pretty sure T-Mobile is an option for most people in this country. So while it may explain your situation, this is not common.
But let's say for a moment that it was the case that like 90% of people lived in areas where T-Mobile did not provide service. In this case it still doesn't really make sense to say "People don't sign up for service X because most companies don't provide it." It would make sense to say "People might want to sign up for service X but they can't because it isn't available to 90% of the people.
It doesn't make sense to say. "I don't want to buy a Kia, because most dealers don't sell Kia cars (e.g. maybe Toyota has the biggest dealership)", especially if my town does in fact have a Kia dealership. Then elaborating your reason to be "There is no Kia dealership in my town.", changes the argument in my opinion. Maybe you feel this is just elaborating it.
I agree that it doesn't make sense for people who do not have the option for T-Mobile to buy their own phone under a verizon contract. I am saying your explanation doesn't make sense for people who do have T-Mobile as an option.
It would require a constitutional amendment. 2/3s of both houses of congress and approval by at least 38/50 states. The president is not involved. We don't even need 3rd parties to accomplish this. We can even do this with individual people rather than partisans. But most importantly we need the people to actually want this. Nothing is going to happen with that.
I don't think I misinterpreted anything. What position did you have that you think I am mistaken about?
The internet is getting consolidated. Perhaps one day Verizon will be rewarded with a monopoly as they have the most money. Then they can just refuse to let the average internet user access to web pages they don't agree with.
This may one day happen, but I see absolutely no indication that this is happening now or that it will int he near future.
The same thing with most other media. Those thousands of TV channels are now owned by a few companies who also own the newspapers, the radio stations and access to the internet.
Yes it is true that access to the internet is provided by only a few companies, but this has always been the case, it is not a new phenomenon. The infrastructure required for a large network is not something that mom and pop shops all across the country can implement (at least not yet).
Not only do they have their loud megaphone but can also actively silence opinion that they don't like.
Why don't they? Why don't they block web sites that criticize them right now? Why don't they spoof wikipedia articles to make them more sympathetic to their cause?
Whether people can be educated to ignore propaganda is very questionable. Just notice that advertising is becoming such a big business, something that wouldn't happen if it didn't work.
I agree that it may not happen that people become better educated. I am saying it is the only viable solution. If the rich and powerful have the power to lobby for whatever laws they want because they have eliminated true democracy, then passing laws isn't going to stop them. They will simply pass new laws that undo whatever progress is made. Not only is an informed and engaged electorate the only solution to corruption, it is the only solution to a lot of political problems. Simply making corruption illegal doesn't work, because only the most shallow definitions of corruption can be objectively assessed.
I am disagreeing with the argument you originally made, not the one you changed it to.
I only know of one provider that offers a discounted plan for owning your own phone, and they don't even service my area.
There are only 4 major providers so that makes it 25%. It only takes one more to offer this service before it becomes 50% of major providers. Also a lot of the smaller providers do not subsidize phones at all forcing you to buy your own whether you want to or not.
If you argument is that people don't use T-Mobile because they can't get T-Mobile service in their area, this is a different argument than the one I was disagreeing with and also this is only an argument for people who are not covered by T-Mobile.
I'm sure by the time we have another democrat president, that administration will be the most corrupt in US history.
I'm not exactly sure what you are saying, but I was actually defending democrats by suggesting that the current democratic administration will always be characterized as the worst in human history according to republicans.
Apple makes the money from the $38 cost of manufacturing, not the service providers. The service providers only make a profit from the the retail price and whatever the wholesale price from Apple is.
I think the 2 year contract is definitely more profitable for the service providers than profit from reselling the phone.
From a consumer point of view, the whole advantage of the long term contract is it allows you to get very expensive models for a much smaller comparative monthly payment
He addresses the part which you claim is the "whole advantage of the long term contract".
It is quite well known that the optimal strategy in a FPP voting system is to form parties. There is an incentive to be large (i.e. larger than your opponents). If every party is trying to be large, than there will be fewer of them that are competitive. If you become so large that there is only 1 party, then you have no opponents and this incentive disappears. The smallest number bigger than 1 is 2.
If you have 3 parties, there is an incentive for the 2 more like minded parties to merge to increase their influence. Obviously this doesn't always happen because there may be other factors, but the incentive is there.
If you have 1 party (e.g. if one implodes), there is an incentive for the existing party to split because there is no cost to doing so (i.e. you are not allowing some worse 3rd option to gain the upperhand).
I don't think participating in the system (voting for the lesser of 2 evils) is the best way to change it in this particular instance. I think attacking the legitimacy of the system itself is the best path forward towards a better substitute.
What could possibly be a more compelling public interest than the integrity of our Democracy?
I agree this is a compelling public interest. I don't think limiting the amount of speech each side can make is an effective step towards that goal.
Not surprisingly, I find most of the other examples you gave to be good examples of measures that were either ineffective or misguided in their goals, or both.
We have no problem regulating either the transfers of money, or even speech, when we feel there is a clear public interest in doing so.
No we don't. My point is that we should. In the best case I feel these regulations are simply ineffective, and in the worst case they end up having negative unintended consequences in addition to being ineffective.
We used to have campaign contribution limits as well.
The company I work for has a PAC. The executives were capped for how much they could donate to political campaigns. They set up a system where employees could donate to the company's PAC and the company would donate 1.5x as much to any charity of their choice.
For example: I could donate $2000 to my company's PAC and my company would donate $3000 to doctors without borders. If you look at the numbers, the executives at my company donated the limit to a political campaign and made a bunch of donations to charity. A bunch of employees also made political contributions they normally wouldn't have.
These laws that try to prevent party A from giving money to party B when both A and B are both willing participants, is really hard to do.
You can make prostitution illegal. Can you really make trophy wives illegal? Can you make the act of giving gifts to the dates that sleep with you illegal?
So now that you've revealed the level of corruption of the Obama administration, please show how a majority of the other administrations that came before were less corrupt.
I don't think you have to exceed the amount of money raised by your opponents. Good messages tend to require less money to be made popular than bad messages.
I actually did a small study on California propositions in the last election cycle and tracked the amount of money each side spent and the election results. It turned out that spending and votes were actually slightly anti-correlated (i.e. a correlation coefficient of -0.15). A naive interpretation of the data would suggest that spending money actually lowers your chances of winning an election. I think a better interpretation is that spending money helps you win an election, but the sides don't start out equal.
It takes more money to convince people to vote for a proposition that's actually bad for them, than to convince them of the opposite.
I think ideally we would switch away from our current election system to one that doesn't inherently reward 2 party politics. There really are a lot of different election systems out there like IRV (instant run-off voting), condorcet systems, etc. If we managed to actually do something like this not only would it remove the tendency to a 2 party system, it might remove the benefit of parties altogether.
The public does not owe the wealthy large chunks of spectrum, airtime or even billboard space just because they have a lot of money on offer.
No one owes rich people anything. That's why they are buying it. If it was owed to them, they would get it for free.
Giving huge sums of money to OTHER people for political speech is poisoning the political process.
What specifically do you propose to make illegal? I know you've said you want caps on political contributions.
For example, let's say each candidate is allowed to spend $1,000,000 per campaign. If I spend $20 of my own money to make a pro Obama sign made to put on my lawn, under your proposed system, should I report this $20 that I spent on supporting Obama so that it can reduce the total his campaign can spend to $999,980?
What if someone gives me $20 to make the sign? What if someone spends their own $20 to make the sign and gives it to me for free? What if someone buys all the art supplies and makes them available for free to people who share the same ideology? Which part of this should be illegal?
I am not saying the world would not be better off if somehow rich people could be prevented from having such a large influence on elections. I just don't see an easy and objective way to make that a reality. It seems there are pretty large loopholes in just about every rule I can conceive of. The formations of PACs and super PACs was a every predictable strategy to exploit loopholes in past campaign finance laws.
My point, however, is that most providers do *NOT* do this. Most will charge exactly the same amount for a service plan whether you buy your phone outright or get it as a "free phone" with a two-year contract.
Given that you are free to use whatever provider you want, the fact that some don't provide service X is not an explanation of why people choose not to use service X.
If I asked "Why don't more people decide to eat indian food?" A good response would not be "Most restaurants don't serve indian food". Obviously if a person decided to eat indian food, they would go to a restaurant that actually served indian food.
Yes she sold us out to big healthcare corporations. I agree with that.
What exactly is the controversy with Benghazi? What was the coverup? Was the coverup that the whitehouse knew it was a terrorist attack but told the press that it was just an angry youtube video mob? How does that help them? Usually coverups are supposed to benefit the people doing the coverup.
Being heard does not equal being agreed with. Would you agree with someone because they had a big enough megaphone?
Also, having a bigger megaphone does not drown anybody else out. There are thousands of television channels and radio stations. The internet is basically limitless. This idea that hearing one idea makes it harder for you to hear another idea is no longer relevant. People are perfectly capable of hearing only what they want to hear, megaphones or not.
As I said, I believe money in politics is a symptom and not the real problem. The real problem is that a significant portion of the public really will just listen to the biggest megaphone. We have the option of trying to make large megaphones illegal, or we can try to foster a society of more informed and intelligent voters.
I think every bit of effort we spend trying to limit campaign contributions is a bit of effort wasted trying to correct a symptom rather than a cause. We should be spending this effort on education. We should be concentrating on making ourselves immune to big money lobbies.
If we fail to do this, we are doomed anyway.
So because I advocate not voting for the lesser of 2 evils, you assume this is where my action stops?