They keep cost and quality low because that is what their customers actually want, or at least, that is what they are willing to pay for.
[CITATION NEEDED] You'd have an argument if AT&T was the lowest cost provider, but they aren't. MetroPCS is. Also this doesn't make sense from a market perspective either. You have the leading smart device on arguably the worst national network, yet AT&T continues to get subscribers almost exclusively due to iPhone sells. This makes a scarce resource -- AT&T's network -- even more scarce. Supply and Demand tells us that customers would be willing to pay more to access that network, especially given that demand isn't just steady, but steadily growing.
To quote Red from Shawshank Redemption, "I do believe you're talking out your ass."
You're completely out of sync with what most libertarians believe. Many libertarians would abolish corporations completely, as the government does not have the power to grant any "rights" to a non person entity. Given that a libertarian would likely take the argument that far, the idea that they *want* corporate feudalism is just absurd on its face. Please stop espousing ideas that are so far from the truth.
Fine. They want Feudalism.
Or as Kim Stanley Robinson put it, "That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves. "
In a free market you'd simply have a cartel freeze out the new would-be competitors through anti-competitive actions, including pressuring common suppliers to not sell to the competitor. That's why we have regulation. It corrects problems in the market.
If you want to know what an unregulated free market looks like, you just have to look at the 19th century America, or modern China. (Spoiler Alert! It sucks for everyone except for the hyperwealthy.)
The corporations are wanting to change the status quo that has brought the innovation to the Internet. They want to lock down the services and throttle traffic unless the sites pay them money. That raises the costs of innovation and thus stifles it.
By coming in and saying, "Hey, doing nothing has been good for all of us. Keep doing nothing," the government is taking the conservative position.
Personally, I don't like to bail on something I have already paid for, but I don't need the Internet "24/7" that much. I can easily deal with "web by mail" and UUCP, or even data transfer via "truck of tapes" again. Strangely enough, if hackers go that route, AND we control the "good stuff" -- that is, the good pirated music/videos and technical information, the "Internet" will go down that path instead.
Won't happen. If it ever became largest enough to become a thread, the big ISPs would simply block the ports and we'd be back to where we started.
I don't even understand why this is political, and why repubics are on the wrong side of this.
Isn't it obvious? The GOP has for over 70 years been the party for of big money and big business. They're not for "small government," they're for concentrated power. Government power over morals. Private power over individuals lives. Not empowerment mind you, but corporate power over all aspects of people's lives. This explains why when they cut taxes, its always on the wealthiest 1%, even though at the rates since 1960 you spur little or no investment by cutting it further. (Cutting the rate in 1960s was a good idea, and helped spur the Kennedy expansion.) This is why they rail against government spending, but continue to rack deficits. They claim they're for the free market, but shout about how if medicare -- the largest insurer in the nation -- negotiates prices thats "government price controls" instead of "a volume discount."
In short, they promote local optimum for the smallest group, while sacrificing the global optimum
Except that our current politiscum like to take otherwise innocuous laws and twist them to their own advantage. Remember TARP? It was supposed to help keep the banks stable and encourage lending. Except that it has now been used to give money to businesses (and control their salaries),
1. Banks are businesses. 2. TARP is government buying shares in the bank. Since when does the owner of a company not allowed to set compensation policy at his/her own business? You can whine all about how this is big government intrusion in the the free market, but it should be obvious by now that we don't have a free market. In a free market, Citi, AIG, and all the rest would be bankrupt and and their parts sold off. Instead they took government investment, and so we the tax payers, the owners get to set policy. That's the way it's done. If they don't like it, they shouldn't have screwed themselves like they did.
bail-out automakers and violate bond laws, and the banks are in even worse shape than before.
Funny, Wall Street says other wise. They're all about "green shoots" and the DJIA at 10k. Oh yeah, and paying out bonuses for taking the big risks and wanting to hold on to that "top talent" brain trust that tanked the world economy. I mean my god! If we don't have these guys who knows what could have happened? Maybe banks wouldn't have created a no-income-no-assets standard loan product, then where would we be?
If it works out to only prevent ISPs from blocking and/or throttling sites and services that they don't like (or don't pay them money), then I'm all for it. It's the large potential for abuse that concerns us libertarians, and makes us think that maybe we'd prefer Comcast to throttle our Bittorrent than for the government to block/throttle sites or services that they don't like (such as Wikileaks or Bittorrent).
This is an issue between China and the United States, it's not a 'Cold War mentality' when you're keeping tabs on threats to you. Every country does it. The fear here is that China is dipping into/forcing a civilian base to partake in information warfare. If we were writing this report about being afraid of China for it's pool of computer science resources, we would be much more afraid of India--the largest pool of information technology.
I seriously doubt that China is "forcing" civilians to participate. There's crazy nationalists willing to whatever it for the "greater good" as they see it in every country. The United Kingdom, Germany, even the United States.Nationalism is on the upswing in China, especially with the youth. Even if the segment of the self-mobilized population is same fraction of any other country, then there still would be more in China.
you can have economic freedom and STILL not be free, i am not arguing you that.
but if you don't have economic freedom, you are not free, at all.
So what? The public goal was never about improving the economy of a rival, let alone improving the rival's economy at the expense of our own. It was political freedom. The promotion of MFN status with China has always been for "promoting democracy," yet continuing the embargos on Cuba, Iran, and other totalitarian regimes have also been to "promote democracy." The only difference has been that Wall Street calls the shots. (Well, them and Miami.)
do you have trouble with the not all rectangles are squares thing too?
Yeah. That's why the bed I fucked your dad on was heart shaped. See? I can be needlessly childish too.
Here's a shocker: we educate foreign students at the cost of displacing domestic students, and then watch as they leave the US and put our industries out of business. Meanwhile, we're left in the cold because domestic students were passed in favor of these foreign students. Who would have thought?
Here's a shocker! Some anonymous coward xenophobe doesn't know what he's talking about! We educate foreign students that out compete domestic students for the spot, yet still have the vast majority of the spots reserved for not only domestic, but in the case of public universities, in-state students. Oh yeah, and until now these students stayed because hell, they already lived here 6 years, want a job, and possibly got married, contribute to the growth of the American economy. Meanwhile the domestic students, that aren't as qualified for graduate studies don't get jobs requiring graduate degrees, bitch about the damn foreigners that are actually qualified for the job! Oh yeah, our brilliant All-American White Anglo Saxon Protestant Harvard MBAs scheme up plan to outsource the job that our immigrant that just got hired and put a downpayment on a house, back to the immigrants home country.
Of course, the people running the graduate programs are from these countries...
Are Americans. Yeah fuck Americans, especially when those damn graduate deans aren't admitting people that don't apply.
sorry, i can figure out what connection you mean by that, but i don't see how that discredits the theory that if you don't have economic freedom, you don't have freedom at all.
Economic freedom not only isn't predicated on, it doesn't necessitate, political freedom.
Let me indulge in a bit of history. Back in the 80s and early 90s when Wall Street was lobbying to remove embargos on investing in China, the argument was that the US was actually opening up a giant market, not promoting trade with the regime that just slaughtered a pro-democracy movement, and by opening trade, the Chinese would see how the West lived, and then would force the dictatorial regime to fall. Then it was about how by deindustrializing and moving all production to China, they would get money in their pockets, start to make economic decisions on their own, and soon would stop wanting to only "vote with their wallets" but want to "vote with their ballots" instead. But that's not what happened, now is it? The standard of living along the coast has rapidly improved, but far from weakening the regime, it's actually strengthened it, because the average person (rightly) says, "We've got a good thing going. My life is better. My child's life will be better than mine. Why would I want to take a chance and mess that up?"
I'm guessing that by better quality they mean materialistically. Being a US citizen I would prefer to live in a place where human rights are championed, personal liberty is maximized and freedom of speech and freedom from government oppression is paramount.
Unless someone is afraid of being randomly assaulted or imprisoned, then no one cares. It's human nature. Bread and circuses you know? I've been to China. It's not Mao's China, not at all.
Yeah, because attracting the best and the brightest from around the world, and having them build the future from here has been such losing proposition from the very beginning of this country.
This is disturbing phenomena. It's not just the the economy marking what would previously be immigrants return home. It's that it is incredibly fucking difficult to get a job if you're not an American. The visa process is notoriously burdensome, and then ties the immigrant to a specific company, essentially indenturing them. Then that doesn't even start the green card and citizenship processes. Canada is super easy. So easy to the point that when you talk to immigrants about immigration, they'll tell you that their friends told them "Why are you going to America? Just go to Canada, it's so much easier, and it's the same!"
Why should we be aid our competition in the international economy, by training and giving all our best ideas to foreign countries, when we used to "steal" their best and have them work for us? The fact that we're no longer a magnet, illustrates just how screwed we are.
Why is this a surprise? Isn't that exactly why they came here in the first place?
In the past most of them stayed. "America is the land of opportunity," you know? Only now it increasingly isn't. The fact that Chinese are returning home for "a better quality of life" really sticks a fork in that claptrap about how financial freedom brings political freedom doesn't it?
Even if it's true that the Japanese only fought against other countries' militaries and avoided civilian deaths (it's not), it's irrelevant. When you go to war, you go to war completely. Which means you kill every man, woman, and child in your enemy's country.
Absolutely. How health care is paid for is irrelevant compared to that it is paid for.
Government intrusion into health care is what has and is causing the price of health care to go up.
That's odd. I thought it was monopolies, and the bizarre situation where everyone along the chain passes the buck.
Doctors get paid for service, meaning the more tests and operations they perform, the more money they make. These charges get passed on the health insurer that either drops the patient, or passes the costs onto the person paying the patient's insurance premiums, typically the patient's employer. Alternately, the doctor and/or the patient's insurer pass the charges on to medicare, which picks up the tab, because its the government. The patient never gets a bill, and so demands more and more services since according his/her perspective they are free. Bonus Round: Medicare is BY LAW forbidden to negotiate lower prices for the services it pays for because it would be "a government price control." (Funny. When I took economics, this was called "a volume discount.")
You really need to actually learn how healthcare is paid for in this country, and how it's paid for in other countries with their "damn socialist medicine" before deciding on a cause. The fact that the US spends multiples what other OCED countries spend (16% GDP versus 10% GDP) with increases greatly outstripping inflation, while the US is 15th in life expectancy the only metric for effectiveness of healthcare that we should care about. After all, it's about living longer, healthier lives.
Clearly government involvement isn't the problem. In fact, evidence indicates that the lack of government involvement is the problem. Since everyone else has lower costs, and better health, than the US, and that's the common factor between the rest of the OCED that's lacking in the US.
And, while we are at it, fix unfunded mandated benefits of Social Security and Medicaid, which are currently 58 TRILLION in the hole.
[...]
The government *must* not ever be put into a situation where promised benefits are mandated to the point of bankrupting the country.
Wait. I thought you wanted to stop the government from paying anything. Make up your mind!
And dont be so droll as to think that cops are going to be pinning crimes on John Q Innocent because he matches 80%...they are going to investigate just as they would any other crime. Are there going to be some false positives? Of course there will be - just like there is in standard police investigations.
There's nothing wrong with the technology, just the greedy bastards using it.
That's interesting, because all you need to show to defend yourself in a lawsuit is due diligence. "We backed up our stuff off site with Microsoft/Google/Amazon, and they dropped the ball," is a perfectly defensible position.
I know a prominent researcher in storage security, including hard drive forensics. (FYI: That whole "wipe your data 7 times with ones and zeros," has been pointless for at least a decade. With today's servos and magnetic domain sizes, one wipe and it's gone.) He pointed out that many times companies that suffer some hard drive crash and want the whole clean room recovery, actually don't want the recovery to succeed. They just want to be able to say, that they tried. (They law says, you don't have to succeed, you just have to try.) Same thing with backups from seven years ago. The only reason why you have them is in case of a lawsuit, and anyone who has been sued knows, the less records you have the better. If you have the backups, but they've become unreadable in the years hence, it's not destruction of evidence. It's just a loss.
True. But you can just as well keep in the trunk of your car. The point is, that you don't want it in the same physical place as the computer you're backing up.
We've been asleep at the switch for too damn long, and now we're over the cliff.
Times like this, I so identify with the hauntingly beautiful, yet incredibly nihilistic song "Dead Flag Blues," by Goodspeed You Black Emperor.
The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides And a dark wind blows The government is corrupt And we're on so many drugs With the radio on and the curtains drawn
We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine And the machine is bleeding to death
The sun has fallen down And the billboards are all leering And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles
It went like this
The buildings tumbled in on themselves Mothers clutching babies picked through the rubble and pulled out their hair
The skyline was beautiful on fire All twisted metal stretching upwards Everything washed in a thin orange haze
I said, "Kiss me, you're beautiful.. These are truly the last days"
You grabbed my hand and we fell into it Like a daydream or a fever
We woke up one morning and fell a little further down For sure it's the valley of death
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, because newspapers, diaries, and broadsheets have never existed before.
They keep cost and quality low because that is what their customers actually want, or at least, that is what they are willing to pay for.
[CITATION NEEDED] You'd have an argument if AT&T was the lowest cost provider, but they aren't. MetroPCS is. Also this doesn't make sense from a market perspective either. You have the leading smart device on arguably the worst national network, yet AT&T continues to get subscribers almost exclusively due to iPhone sells. This makes a scarce resource -- AT&T's network -- even more scarce. Supply and Demand tells us that customers would be willing to pay more to access that network, especially given that demand isn't just steady, but steadily growing.
To quote Red from Shawshank Redemption, "I do believe you're talking out your ass."
You're completely out of sync with what most libertarians believe. Many libertarians would abolish corporations completely, as the government does not have the power to grant any "rights" to a non person entity. Given that a libertarian would likely take the argument that far, the idea that they *want* corporate feudalism is just absurd on its face. Please stop espousing ideas that are so far from the truth.
Fine. They want Feudalism.
Or as Kim Stanley Robinson put it, "That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves. "
In a free market you'd simply have a cartel freeze out the new would-be competitors through anti-competitive actions, including pressuring common suppliers to not sell to the competitor. That's why we have regulation. It corrects problems in the market.
If you want to know what an unregulated free market looks like, you just have to look at the 19th century America, or modern China. (Spoiler Alert! It sucks for everyone except for the hyperwealthy.)
The corporations are wanting to change the status quo that has brought the innovation to the Internet. They want to lock down the services and throttle traffic unless the sites pay them money. That raises the costs of innovation and thus stifles it.
By coming in and saying, "Hey, doing nothing has been good for all of us. Keep doing nothing," the government is taking the conservative position.
Personally, I don't like to bail on something I have already paid for, but I don't need the Internet "24/7" that much. I can easily deal with "web by mail" and UUCP, or even data transfer via "truck of tapes" again. Strangely enough, if hackers go that route, AND we control the "good stuff" -- that is, the good pirated music/videos and technical information, the "Internet" will go down that path instead.
Won't happen. If it ever became largest enough to become a thread, the big ISPs would simply block the ports and we'd be back to where we started.
I don't even understand why this is political, and why repubics are on the wrong side of this.
Isn't it obvious? The GOP has for over 70 years been the party for of big money and big business. They're not for "small government," they're for concentrated power. Government power over morals. Private power over individuals lives. Not empowerment mind you, but corporate power over all aspects of people's lives. This explains why when they cut taxes, its always on the wealthiest 1%, even though at the rates since 1960 you spur little or no investment by cutting it further. (Cutting the rate in 1960s was a good idea, and helped spur the Kennedy expansion.) This is why they rail against government spending, but continue to rack deficits. They claim they're for the free market, but shout about how if medicare -- the largest insurer in the nation -- negotiates prices thats "government price controls" instead of "a volume discount."
In short, they promote local optimum for the smallest group, while sacrificing the global optimum
Except that our current politiscum like to take otherwise innocuous laws and twist them to their own advantage. Remember TARP? It was supposed to help keep the banks stable and encourage lending. Except that it has now been used to give money to businesses (and control their salaries),
1. Banks are businesses.
2. TARP is government buying shares in the bank. Since when does the owner of a company not allowed to set compensation policy at his/her own business? You can whine all about how this is big government intrusion in the the free market, but it should be obvious by now that we don't have a free market. In a free market, Citi, AIG, and all the rest would be bankrupt and and their parts sold off. Instead they took government investment, and so we the tax payers, the owners get to set policy. That's the way it's done. If they don't like it, they shouldn't have screwed themselves like they did.
bail-out automakers and violate bond laws, and the banks are in even worse shape than before.
Funny, Wall Street says other wise. They're all about "green shoots" and the DJIA at 10k. Oh yeah, and paying out bonuses for taking the big risks and wanting to hold on to that "top talent" brain trust that tanked the world economy. I mean my god! If we don't have these guys who knows what could have happened? Maybe banks wouldn't have created a no-income-no-assets standard loan product, then where would we be?
If it works out to only prevent ISPs from blocking and/or throttling sites and services that they don't like (or don't pay them money), then I'm all for it. It's the large potential for abuse that concerns us libertarians, and makes us think that maybe we'd prefer Comcast to throttle our Bittorrent than for the government to block/throttle sites or services that they don't like (such as Wikileaks or Bittorrent).
This is an issue between China and the United States, it's not a 'Cold War mentality' when you're keeping tabs on threats to you. Every country does it. The fear here is that China is dipping into/forcing a civilian base to partake in information warfare. If we were writing this report about being afraid of China for it's pool of computer science resources, we would be much more afraid of India--the largest pool of information technology.
I seriously doubt that China is "forcing" civilians to participate. There's crazy nationalists willing to whatever it for the "greater good" as they see it in every country. The United Kingdom, Germany, even the United States.Nationalism is on the upswing in China, especially with the youth. Even if the segment of the self-mobilized population is same fraction of any other country, then there still would be more in China.
Never underestimate the will of some crazy to try to take matters into his own hands.
you can have economic freedom and STILL not be free, i am not arguing you that.
but if you don't have economic freedom, you are not free, at all.
So what? The public goal was never about improving the economy of a rival, let alone improving the rival's economy at the expense of our own. It was political freedom. The promotion of MFN status with China has always been for "promoting democracy," yet continuing the embargos on Cuba, Iran, and other totalitarian regimes have also been to "promote democracy." The only difference has been that Wall Street calls the shots. (Well, them and Miami.)
do you have trouble with the not all rectangles are squares thing too?
Yeah. That's why the bed I fucked your dad on was heart shaped. See? I can be needlessly childish too.
Here's a shocker: we educate foreign students at the cost of displacing domestic students, and then watch as they leave the US and put our industries out of business. Meanwhile, we're left in the cold because domestic students were passed in favor of these foreign students. Who would have thought?
Here's a shocker! Some anonymous coward xenophobe doesn't know what he's talking about! We educate foreign students that out compete domestic students for the spot, yet still have the vast majority of the spots reserved for not only domestic, but in the case of public universities, in-state students. Oh yeah, and until now these students stayed because hell, they already lived here 6 years, want a job, and possibly got married, contribute to the growth of the American economy. Meanwhile the domestic students, that aren't as qualified for graduate studies don't get jobs requiring graduate degrees, bitch about the damn foreigners that are actually qualified for the job! Oh yeah, our brilliant All-American White Anglo Saxon Protestant Harvard MBAs scheme up plan to outsource the job that our immigrant that just got hired and put a downpayment on a house, back to the immigrants home country.
Of course, the people running the graduate programs are from these countries...
Are Americans. Yeah fuck Americans, especially when those damn graduate deans aren't admitting people that don't apply.
sorry, i can figure out what connection you mean by that, but i don't see how that discredits the theory that if you don't have economic freedom, you don't have freedom at all.
Economic freedom not only isn't predicated on, it doesn't necessitate, political freedom.
Let me indulge in a bit of history. Back in the 80s and early 90s when Wall Street was lobbying to remove embargos on investing in China, the argument was that the US was actually opening up a giant market, not promoting trade with the regime that just slaughtered a pro-democracy movement, and by opening trade, the Chinese would see how the West lived, and then would force the dictatorial regime to fall. Then it was about how by deindustrializing and moving all production to China, they would get money in their pockets, start to make economic decisions on their own, and soon would stop wanting to only "vote with their wallets" but want to "vote with their ballots" instead. But that's not what happened, now is it? The standard of living along the coast has rapidly improved, but far from weakening the regime, it's actually strengthened it, because the average person (rightly) says, "We've got a good thing going. My life is better. My child's life will be better than mine. Why would I want to take a chance and mess that up?"
Ironically though, China is the perfect lab for what would happen in an unregulated market that libertarians argue for when they want to eliminate the EPA, FDA, and every other regulatory industry.
Sure, those Chinese and Indian companies will compete with the U.S. firms...but competition is a good thing for humanity as a whole.
Fuck that shit. It's zero sum.
I'm guessing that by better quality they mean materialistically. Being a US citizen I would prefer to live in a place where human rights are championed, personal liberty is maximized and freedom of speech and freedom from government oppression is paramount.
Unless someone is afraid of being randomly assaulted or imprisoned, then no one cares. It's human nature. Bread and circuses you know? I've been to China. It's not Mao's China, not at all.
So, I guess I'm saying where should I move to?
Canada?
More jobs for the rest of us.
Yeah, because attracting the best and the brightest from around the world, and having them build the future from here has been such losing proposition from the very beginning of this country.
This is disturbing phenomena. It's not just the the economy marking what would previously be immigrants return home. It's that it is incredibly fucking difficult to get a job if you're not an American. The visa process is notoriously burdensome, and then ties the immigrant to a specific company, essentially indenturing them. Then that doesn't even start the green card and citizenship processes. Canada is super easy. So easy to the point that when you talk to immigrants about immigration, they'll tell you that their friends told them "Why are you going to America? Just go to Canada, it's so much easier, and it's the same!"
Why should we be aid our competition in the international economy, by training and giving all our best ideas to foreign countries, when we used to "steal" their best and have them work for us? The fact that we're no longer a magnet, illustrates just how screwed we are.
Why is this a surprise? Isn't that exactly why they came here in the first place?
In the past most of them stayed. "America is the land of opportunity," you know? Only now it increasingly isn't. The fact that Chinese are returning home for "a better quality of life" really sticks a fork in that claptrap about how financial freedom brings political freedom doesn't it?
Even if it's true that the Japanese only fought against other countries' militaries and avoided civilian deaths (it's not), it's irrelevant. When you go to war, you go to war completely. Which means you kill every man, woman, and child in your enemy's country.
That's bullshit. Even in the ancient world, that was considered what today we call a war crime.
I believe I speak for all of civilized humanity when I say that I'm glad that the only wars you will ever fight and lead are in video games.
Affording health care services *is* the problem.
Absolutely. How health care is paid for is irrelevant compared to that it is paid for.
Government intrusion into health care is what has and is causing the price of health care to go up.
That's odd. I thought it was monopolies, and the bizarre situation where everyone along the chain passes the buck.
Doctors get paid for service, meaning the more tests and operations they perform, the more money they make. These charges get passed on the health insurer that either drops the patient, or passes the costs onto the person paying the patient's insurance premiums, typically the patient's employer. Alternately, the doctor and/or the patient's insurer pass the charges on to medicare, which picks up the tab, because its the government. The patient never gets a bill, and so demands more and more services since according his/her perspective they are free.
Bonus Round: Medicare is BY LAW forbidden to negotiate lower prices for the services it pays for because it would be "a government price control." (Funny. When I took economics, this was called "a volume discount.")
You really need to actually learn how healthcare is paid for in this country, and how it's paid for in other countries with their "damn socialist medicine" before deciding on a cause. The fact that the US spends multiples what other OCED countries spend (16% GDP versus 10% GDP) with increases greatly outstripping inflation, while the US is 15th in life expectancy the only metric for effectiveness of healthcare that we should care about. After all, it's about living longer, healthier lives.
Clearly government involvement isn't the problem. In fact, evidence indicates that the lack of government involvement is the problem. Since everyone else has lower costs, and better health, than the US, and that's the common factor between the rest of the OCED that's lacking in the US.
And, while we are at it, fix unfunded mandated benefits of Social Security and Medicaid, which are currently 58 TRILLION in the hole.
[...]
The government *must* not ever be put into a situation where promised benefits are mandated to the point of bankrupting the country.
Wait. I thought you wanted to stop the government from paying anything. Make up your mind!
And dont be so droll as to think that cops are going to be pinning crimes on John Q Innocent because he matches 80%...they are going to investigate just as they would any other crime. Are there going to be some false positives? Of course there will be - just like there is in standard police investigations.
Yeah, that's exactly what happens.
Have you heard the pop charts recently ?
Get off my lawn old man!
There's nothing wrong with the technology, just the greedy bastards using it.
That's interesting, because all you need to show to defend yourself in a lawsuit is due diligence. "We backed up our stuff off site with Microsoft/Google/Amazon, and they dropped the ball," is a perfectly defensible position.
I know a prominent researcher in storage security, including hard drive forensics. (FYI: That whole "wipe your data 7 times with ones and zeros," has been pointless for at least a decade. With today's servos and magnetic domain sizes, one wipe and it's gone.) He pointed out that many times companies that suffer some hard drive crash and want the whole clean room recovery, actually don't want the recovery to succeed. They just want to be able to say, that they tried. (They law says, you don't have to succeed, you just have to try.) Same thing with backups from seven years ago. The only reason why you have them is in case of a lawsuit, and anyone who has been sued knows, the less records you have the better. If you have the backups, but they've become unreadable in the years hence, it's not destruction of evidence. It's just a loss.
There's nothing wrong with the technology, just the greedy bastards using it.
Well that's a ringing endorsement of cloud computing if I've ever heard one.
True. But you can just as well keep in the trunk of your car. The point is, that you don't want it in the same physical place as the computer you're backing up.
Just buy an 2TB drive and stick in a drawer at work.
I have a friend that signed up for some cloud storage backup and spent months backing up his less than a terabyte. Such a sucker.
We've been asleep at the switch for too damn long, and now we're over the cliff.
Times like this, I so identify with the hauntingly beautiful, yet incredibly nihilistic song "Dead Flag Blues," by Goodspeed You Black Emperor.