Because Comcast felt the need to create a separate[ish] entity called "Broadband for America" for the express purpose that the name "Comcast" wouldn't be directly attached to the goddamn speech!
No, they did it for the express purpose of being able to speak jointly with a lot of other individuals and groups holding the same opinion.
You know, for the same reason Barack Obama created "Organizing for Action".
You want to sit back, allow the public to be misinformed (and lulled into inaction)
Yes, I do want to do exactly that. I want to sit and allow the public to be misinformed by Democrats, by Republicans, by unions, by corporations, by teachers, but mobsters, by prostitutes, and anybody else. That's what free speech means. And although people may be tricked into believing something incorrect, that is far better than any of the alternatives. I don't know whether you have experienced the alternatives, I have, first hand.
Nobody has to buy GM products. They'll just get one bailout after another, from Republicans and Democrats alike, because neither wants to have to deal with the wrath of unions and special interest groups.
The corporate view is given far greater weight than the views of the public at large in political discourse.
"Is given greater weight" by who? What does that even mean?
Since corporations have far more money than the public to spend on lobbying and advertising, and throw on for added measure campaign contributions in an effort to sway politicians to the corporate view, the result is quite predictable in that laws get passed and regulations written that favor corporations over the public interest.
So, what you want is what we might call a "people's republic", a democratic system in which mainly "the people" have a voice, not corporations or other special interest groups that might advocate views counter to the interests of "the people".
There have been several attempts to create democracies that; I suggest you look up what happened to them.
How about defending an article exposing said misinformation? (Yes, The Fucking Article)
You would defend an incorrect accusation? Vice is accusing BFA of astroturfing when BFA in fact did not astroturf; their accusation of astroturfing is based on an incorrect statement in SFGate's article.
Whether that SFGate, BfA or a combination of those two drives the misinformation is irrelevant.
I see. So because Vice picks up an incorrect accusation of astroturfing by SFGate, BFA becomes an astroturfer. Well, thanks for clearing that up. I think we had that sort of reasoning in the McCarthy era.
It's really quite easy - ban money from politics. No politician can ever earn money privately.
We live in a representative democracy. Why would I want people like that representing me?
The media has to actually engage in journalism and cover issues with the minimum possible level of bias - any failures result in censure or worse
I think you have just perfectly characterized how the Soviet Union worked.
The world weeps for the US - other developed countries have their issues with their political systems, but most seem to be able to keep this separation far better than in the US.
Well, thankfully I don't have to live in those "other developed countries".
They exist to sway your opinion through appeals to fear and emotion (You'll pay more! You'll lose your freedom!).
I don't understand what you're trying to say. The question of whether we want or don't want net neutrality is about how much we pay and how much freedom we have, on both sides of the argument.
It's a matter of interested parties trying to got people to think a certain way, using deception, obfuscation and half-truths to do it.
And which of the two sides is using "deception, obfuscation, and half-truths" is determined by who? You? The courts?
Your retirement savings should be about 8x of your final salary. A Porsche is about $80000. Developers easily make $100000. So, yeah, it's about like you or I going out and buying a Porsche.
Here's one that's easy: outright lying. Unless you're arguing that fraud shouldn't be illegal, because it's just an expression of free speech. Astroturfing is a form of fraud: you're trying to present views as coming from someone else.
Broadband for America is quite clear about who their backers are: http://www.broadbandforamerica... And they didn't present themselves as a grassroots organization, SFGate (Hearst Corporation) did.
But the trouble with demanding truth in free speech is that somebody needs to determine what "truth" is. Either the executive or the courts have to adjudicate. Who do you think will be at the receiving end of determinations of untruth? What do you think the government position would have been on the truth of such statements like "Blacks and whites are equally capable", "Women and men are equally capable", or "Homosexuality is not a disease"? It's minority views that benefit most from being able to speak up against the majority opinion; tolerating lies and deception is the price we pay for that.
Attaching the former is disingenuous, as it mischaracterizes the organisation as being some kind of collective of consumer-oriented institutes
Yes, it's "disingenuous", but it's not Broadband for America's disingenuity because they didn't write that; that's how the SFGate byline characterizes BFA, so you should blame SFGate.
What do you suggest we do to fix this misinformation?
Shut down SFGate or the Hearst Corporation? Nuke all of SF from orbit ("it's the only way to be sure")? Create a politburo or a Minitruth? I dunno, you tell me what you're willing to do in the name of "fixing misinformation".
Personally, I'd do nothing. Although SFGate writes a lot of nonsense, and lots of people (hello there) seem to be eating up that nonsense, ultimately, I believe in free speech, including the ability of people to counter nonsense spewed by big corporate entities like the Hearst Corporation (SFGate).
forgetting that the corporations are only doing what they're chartered to do: using every resource to increase wealth for their share-holders.
Note that that isn't automatically in conflict with the interests of the rest of society. For example, Uber and Lyft advocate for increasing their own wealth, but in the process they also advocate breaking up taxi cartels and lowering transportation costs.
forgetting that the corporations are only doing what they're chartered to do: using every resource to increase wealth for their share-holders.
Not all corporations are doing that. Corporations are just legal entities by which citizens work together. Many corporations are not-for-profit, and both not-for-profit and for-profit corporations may have goals and priorities other than increasing wealth.
If a bunch of people really don't like some politician's political views, they can form a corporation (not-for-profit usually, but not necessarily), pool their money, and run ads against those political views. Well, they can now, they didn't use to be able to. That's what Citizens United was: a not-for-profit making a film critical of Hillary.
In addition, even when for-profit companies claim to act as "consumer advocates", that isn't automatically wrong. For example, I think when Uber and Lyft try to destroy the taxi cartel, they are also acting as "consumer advocates".
It is justified under Free Speech, but there is no concern for equality: if you have more money, your voice (or the people you pay to spread "your voice") is much more likely affect change. In my opinion, this is wrong.
Who gets to decide then which speech is proper and which speech isn't proper? Should we have a "ministry of truth" that determines "for the people" what speech is astroturfing and what speech is not? Should churches and unions be allowed to spend money to speak nationally on political, moral, or financial matters? Should newspapers and media companies, being wealthy corporations themselves, be allowed to engage in political speech? What about citizens grouping together, pooling their money, and then using the pooled money to speak? What organizational form should that take, if not a corporation (usually not-for-profit)?
I certainly do not want a political system in which only a few kinds of organizations (media companies, churches, unions?) have the right to engage in large scale political speech while everybody else merely has the right to vent in forums, if that. People like you complain a lot, but you don't have a good answer.
Astroturfing is when organizations pretend to be grassroots, community organizations but are clandestinely funded by corporate interests. There is nothing clandestine about the funding for Broadband for America; it's a PR and lobbying organization that consists of a lot of big businesses and some little businesses:
I don't see why people get their panties in a knot about companies presenting their point of view publicly; you can listen to their arguments and either agree with them or disagree with them.
The reason high frequency trading is possible in the first place is because government regulations have created enormous barriers to entry for engaging in such trading. If anybody with a fast PC and fast network connection could make these trades in cheap, open exchanges, "finance" (i.e., rich political donors in New York) wouldn't be able to gain anything more than you would at home. In different words, high frequency trading would become like bitcoin mining, something for a large number of nerds each making a few bucks.
I do hope "finance" will become irrelevant, and by "finance", I mean the group of protected and politically connected rich guys in New York. Let's not use the problems caused by regulation and government intervention to justify even more regulation and government intervention, in a vicious cycle. And don't make the mistake attributing this problem to one party or the other.
The US is socialist and hasn't degenerated into simple tyranny. Or, are your forgetting that we already have a minimum wage, public schools, medicare, etc?
The US isn't "socialist". Socialism is characterized primarily by some kind of common ownership of the means of production and land. US property is firmly in private hand. What we have is a social welfare state: private ownership with public regulation and redistribution of wealth, a concept initially promoted by conservatives and fascists, but eventually co-opted by "democratic socialists" and "social democrats".
And there is a spectrum of choices between a liberal society on the one hand, and a socialist state or social welfare state (ultimately fascism) on the other; the more features of the latter you adopt, the more individual liberties people lose.
Oh, and define authoritarian...
I didn't use the term "authoritarian". I said when realized, these systems in the best case, are a "tyranny of the majority": laws and taxation are determined by the will of the majority, as opposed to by guarantees of individual liberties and inalienable rights.
After a while (usually, a few generations), they simply degrade into a "tyranny" in the general sense: harsh, oppressive government that respects neither individual rights nor the will of the majority.
We don't know. The universe could even be infinitely large. But it is almost certainly much bigger than what we can see. Estimates range from 250x bigger to 10^23 times bigger.
Much of the idea of wormholes came from the idea that universe might be spherical in topography --- like a hypersphere --- and a wormhole could poke through the hypersphere to create a shorter distance than even a line segment from Point A to Point B.
The "hypersphere plus hole" is just an illustration for laymen (an "embedding"). It falsely suggests that the FTL travel derives from a shortcut through embedding space, but it does not. If wormholes exist at all, there is no reason to believe that they require such embeddings or are constrained by them.
Imagine space expanded instantly 10% and then stopped. What would happen? A bit of energy would have gotten added to everything, which would need to get released, but then atoms would return to their original size very quickly. They would never "burst apart". You simply have clumps of matter separated by larger and larger distances. That's what "expansion of space" actually means: space is 10% bigger relative to the physical things contained in it.
"Space itself" is just whatever we define it to be. By changing coordinates, we can move things from the past into the future or even into "never". It doesn't matter, it's just math(s), the end result is that we will never see that laser and we will never be able to reach that galaxy either.
Space isn't just what we define it to be; our definitions need to make sense and need to be consistent with what we experience as space.
By changing coordinates, we can move things from the past into the future or even into "never".
No, you can't. For any individual observer, events have either time-like or space-like separation. For time-like separation, one is definitively in the other's past. For space-like separation, neither of them is in the past or future of the other; a change of coordinates can make either time coordinate numerically smaller than the other, but that is only a redundancy in the bookkeeping, without physical meaning.
Coordinate systems are just a bookkeeping device without physical meaning. A choice of coordinate system doesn't affect the events you see or the order you see them in. What you see only depends on your actual position and state of motion relative to the physical objects in the rest of the universe. A lot of what you call "a choice of coordinate system" in your post is actually a choice of observer traveling with the origin of the coordinate system you choose.
This is not a belief, since I wouldn't say that I *believe* that it is the right one, no...
What you "would" say doesn't matter; the term "belief" has a well-established meaning since Plato.
You're trying to argue that knowledge is different from belief, but in fact, knowledge is a subset of belief, namely justified true belief.
The theory of evolution is a true belief, but for most people (you probably included) it is not knowledge because they don't actually have justification.
The existence of the human now known as Jesus of Nazareth is a historical fact.
By itself, that doesn't mean much. The authors of the Bible could simply have picked a vaguely known figure from a couple of centuries ago, a person who was known to have gotten baptized and crucified, and invented all the rest.
I love it when atheists say that Jesus is fictional. It's low hanging fruit to debunk since the existence of a man named Jesus
"Jesus is fictional" doesn't mean that there was no man called "Jesus". There were probably many people called "Jesus" 2000 years ago, and some of them probably were itinerant preachers who got crucified.
What "Jesus is fictional" means is that there is no single man that had the exact biography described in the Bible. The Jesus of the Bible is probably a composite of multiple individuals, plus a lot of entirely fictional accounts.
You're mixing up the uncertainty of beliefs with the uncertainty of a theory of beliefs. Beliefs themselves are uncertain, but scientific theories of beliefs are quite good.
There is no "belief" for evolutionary principles. It is not a system of religious thought.
"Belief" isn't a religious term; it describes a mental state. "Do you believe John is coming tomorrow?" "Do you believe the universe is going to end in a big crunch?" Etc. In psychology and mathematics, belief in any proposition is quantifiable and subject to study, including belief in the proposition that the sun rises tomorrow and belief in the evolutionary origin of man.
Your position, namely denying the validity of applying the concept of "belief" for things you hold true, is totalitarian.
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No, they did it for the express purpose of being able to speak jointly with a lot of other individuals and groups holding the same opinion.
You know, for the same reason Barack Obama created "Organizing for Action".
Yes, I do want to do exactly that. I want to sit and allow the public to be misinformed by Democrats, by Republicans, by unions, by corporations, by teachers, but mobsters, by prostitutes, and anybody else. That's what free speech means. And although people may be tricked into believing something incorrect, that is far better than any of the alternatives. I don't know whether you have experienced the alternatives, I have, first hand.
Nobody has to buy GM products. They'll just get one bailout after another, from Republicans and Democrats alike, because neither wants to have to deal with the wrath of unions and special interest groups.
"Is given greater weight" by who? What does that even mean?
So, what you want is what we might call a "people's republic", a democratic system in which mainly "the people" have a voice, not corporations or other special interest groups that might advocate views counter to the interests of "the people".
There have been several attempts to create democracies that; I suggest you look up what happened to them.
You would defend an incorrect accusation? Vice is accusing BFA of astroturfing when BFA in fact did not astroturf; their accusation of astroturfing is based on an incorrect statement in SFGate's article.
I see. So because Vice picks up an incorrect accusation of astroturfing by SFGate, BFA becomes an astroturfer. Well, thanks for clearing that up. I think we had that sort of reasoning in the McCarthy era.
We live in a representative democracy. Why would I want people like that representing me?
I think you have just perfectly characterized how the Soviet Union worked.
Well, thankfully I don't have to live in those "other developed countries".
I don't understand what you're trying to say. The question of whether we want or don't want net neutrality is about how much we pay and how much freedom we have, on both sides of the argument.
And which of the two sides is using "deception, obfuscation, and half-truths" is determined by who? You? The courts?
Your retirement savings should be about 8x of your final salary. A Porsche is about $80000. Developers easily make $100000. So, yeah, it's about like you or I going out and buying a Porsche.
Broadband for America is quite clear about who their backers are: http://www.broadbandforamerica... And they didn't present themselves as a grassroots organization, SFGate (Hearst Corporation) did.
But the trouble with demanding truth in free speech is that somebody needs to determine what "truth" is. Either the executive or the courts have to adjudicate. Who do you think will be at the receiving end of determinations of untruth? What do you think the government position would have been on the truth of such statements like "Blacks and whites are equally capable", "Women and men are equally capable", or "Homosexuality is not a disease"? It's minority views that benefit most from being able to speak up against the majority opinion; tolerating lies and deception is the price we pay for that.
Yes, it's "disingenuous", but it's not Broadband for America's disingenuity because they didn't write that; that's how the SFGate byline characterizes BFA, so you should blame SFGate.
Shut down SFGate or the Hearst Corporation? Nuke all of SF from orbit ("it's the only way to be sure")? Create a politburo or a Minitruth? I dunno, you tell me what you're willing to do in the name of "fixing misinformation".
Personally, I'd do nothing. Although SFGate writes a lot of nonsense, and lots of people (hello there) seem to be eating up that nonsense, ultimately, I believe in free speech, including the ability of people to counter nonsense spewed by big corporate entities like the Hearst Corporation (SFGate).
Note that that isn't automatically in conflict with the interests of the rest of society. For example, Uber and Lyft advocate for increasing their own wealth, but in the process they also advocate breaking up taxi cartels and lowering transportation costs.
Not all corporations are doing that. Corporations are just legal entities by which citizens work together. Many corporations are not-for-profit, and both not-for-profit and for-profit corporations may have goals and priorities other than increasing wealth.
If a bunch of people really don't like some politician's political views, they can form a corporation (not-for-profit usually, but not necessarily), pool their money, and run ads against those political views. Well, they can now, they didn't use to be able to. That's what Citizens United was: a not-for-profit making a film critical of Hillary.
In addition, even when for-profit companies claim to act as "consumer advocates", that isn't automatically wrong. For example, I think when Uber and Lyft try to destroy the taxi cartel, they are also acting as "consumer advocates".
Who gets to decide then which speech is proper and which speech isn't proper? Should we have a "ministry of truth" that determines "for the people" what speech is astroturfing and what speech is not? Should churches and unions be allowed to spend money to speak nationally on political, moral, or financial matters? Should newspapers and media companies, being wealthy corporations themselves, be allowed to engage in political speech? What about citizens grouping together, pooling their money, and then using the pooled money to speak? What organizational form should that take, if not a corporation (usually not-for-profit)?
I certainly do not want a political system in which only a few kinds of organizations (media companies, churches, unions?) have the right to engage in large scale political speech while everybody else merely has the right to vent in forums, if that. People like you complain a lot, but you don't have a good answer.
Astroturfing is when organizations pretend to be grassroots, community organizations but are clandestinely funded by corporate interests. There is nothing clandestine about the funding for Broadband for America; it's a PR and lobbying organization that consists of a lot of big businesses and some little businesses:
http://www.broadbandforamerica...
I don't see why people get their panties in a knot about companies presenting their point of view publicly; you can listen to their arguments and either agree with them or disagree with them.
The reason high frequency trading is possible in the first place is because government regulations have created enormous barriers to entry for engaging in such trading. If anybody with a fast PC and fast network connection could make these trades in cheap, open exchanges, "finance" (i.e., rich political donors in New York) wouldn't be able to gain anything more than you would at home. In different words, high frequency trading would become like bitcoin mining, something for a large number of nerds each making a few bucks.
I do hope "finance" will become irrelevant, and by "finance", I mean the group of protected and politically connected rich guys in New York. Let's not use the problems caused by regulation and government intervention to justify even more regulation and government intervention, in a vicious cycle. And don't make the mistake attributing this problem to one party or the other.
The US isn't "socialist". Socialism is characterized primarily by some kind of common ownership of the means of production and land. US property is firmly in private hand. What we have is a social welfare state: private ownership with public regulation and redistribution of wealth, a concept initially promoted by conservatives and fascists, but eventually co-opted by "democratic socialists" and "social democrats".
And there is a spectrum of choices between a liberal society on the one hand, and a socialist state or social welfare state (ultimately fascism) on the other; the more features of the latter you adopt, the more individual liberties people lose.
I didn't use the term "authoritarian". I said when realized, these systems in the best case, are a "tyranny of the majority": laws and taxation are determined by the will of the majority, as opposed to by guarantees of individual liberties and inalienable rights.
After a while (usually, a few generations), they simply degrade into a "tyranny" in the general sense: harsh, oppressive government that respects neither individual rights nor the will of the majority.
We don't know. The universe could even be infinitely large. But it is almost certainly much bigger than what we can see. Estimates range from 250x bigger to 10^23 times bigger.
http://www.technologyreview.co...
Most of that stuff disappeared from sight almost right away, right after the big bang, long before galaxies even formed.
The "hypersphere plus hole" is just an illustration for laymen (an "embedding"). It falsely suggests that the FTL travel derives from a shortcut through embedding space, but it does not. If wormholes exist at all, there is no reason to believe that they require such embeddings or are constrained by them.
Imagine space expanded instantly 10% and then stopped. What would happen? A bit of energy would have gotten added to everything, which would need to get released, but then atoms would return to their original size very quickly. They would never "burst apart". You simply have clumps of matter separated by larger and larger distances. That's what "expansion of space" actually means: space is 10% bigger relative to the physical things contained in it.
Space isn't just what we define it to be; our definitions need to make sense and need to be consistent with what we experience as space.
No, you can't. For any individual observer, events have either time-like or space-like separation. For time-like separation, one is definitively in the other's past. For space-like separation, neither of them is in the past or future of the other; a change of coordinates can make either time coordinate numerically smaller than the other, but that is only a redundancy in the bookkeeping, without physical meaning.
Coordinate systems are just a bookkeeping device without physical meaning. A choice of coordinate system doesn't affect the events you see or the order you see them in. What you see only depends on your actual position and state of motion relative to the physical objects in the rest of the universe. A lot of what you call "a choice of coordinate system" in your post is actually a choice of observer traveling with the origin of the coordinate system you choose.
What you "would" say doesn't matter; the term "belief" has a well-established meaning since Plato.
You're trying to argue that knowledge is different from belief, but in fact, knowledge is a subset of belief, namely justified true belief.
The theory of evolution is a true belief, but for most people (you probably included) it is not knowledge because they don't actually have justification.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
By itself, that doesn't mean much. The authors of the Bible could simply have picked a vaguely known figure from a couple of centuries ago, a person who was known to have gotten baptized and crucified, and invented all the rest.
"Jesus is fictional" doesn't mean that there was no man called "Jesus". There were probably many people called "Jesus" 2000 years ago, and some of them probably were itinerant preachers who got crucified.
What "Jesus is fictional" means is that there is no single man that had the exact biography described in the Bible. The Jesus of the Bible is probably a composite of multiple individuals, plus a lot of entirely fictional accounts.
Feel free to debunk: with data and facts.
The study of belief, namely the mental state reflecting the truth of a proposition, is one of the oldest parts of science and mathematics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
You're mixing up the uncertainty of beliefs with the uncertainty of a theory of beliefs. Beliefs themselves are uncertain, but scientific theories of beliefs are quite good.
"Belief" isn't a religious term; it describes a mental state. "Do you believe John is coming tomorrow?" "Do you believe the universe is going to end in a big crunch?" Etc. In psychology and mathematics, belief in any proposition is quantifiable and subject to study, including belief in the proposition that the sun rises tomorrow and belief in the evolutionary origin of man.
Your position, namely denying the validity of applying the concept of "belief" for things you hold true, is totalitarian.