Great. Then like me you don't support free markets. You support certain market regulations. That's nice, me too.
I prefer not only labeling but safety regulations. What I mean is, I don't just want landlords to warn tenants about lead paint, I want to actually remove lead from paint. And we did that two generations ago and have benefitted greatly from that regulation. I'm also quite glad that elevators are regulated for functional safety, not merely warned with a sign saying "Use elevator at your own risk". These kinds of safety regulations can be difficult because if you go too far you create a problem that's even worse, but luckily we have a robust process for reviewing regulations and changing them.
You must live in a gun-hating state. In all the gun-friendly states the Constitutional Carry people have made sure there are literally no restrictions whatsoever for carrying around guns. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, but my guess is it will be the law in 45 states by the end of the decade, like it's already the law in many states, and it undermines your point about licenses.
The current political ideology of the gun rights movement is zero restrictions, zero rules of any kind. Those people are honest about their goals so I credit them with that honesty. I don't think they are hoodwinking anyone, they are implementing plain policy based on honestly convincing a plurality to support their goals.
Mmm hmm. And we license drivers. I think that would be a reasonable step for gun ownership.
Chain saws aren't an existential problem. There are very few instances or murder or negligent death by chain saw. If that number increases then we can consider doing something about it at that point.
Yeah I might be. And if I were I would complain about that regulation, not about the entire concept of regulation.
People who make reasoned, informed arguments against specific regulations -- I'll listen to those people. People who make unreasonable, ignorant arguments against the notion of improving life with market regulations -- those people are kooks who deserve to be ignored.
How about markets in lawless places? In places like, say, America before Europeans arrived. If there was no government in the modern sense then that would be a free market.
And a market being "subverted by corporations" or "uncompetitive" doesn't make it non-free. A free market is a market with zero regulations, including taxes. Such markets are inherently uncompetitive and opaque which is why we use regulations to make them more transparent and competitive -- because we think competitive transparent markets are good.
Right. And that's why nobody has tracked down criminals using fingerprints for over a hundred years, since about a year after someone first was caught because of fingerprints. Nowadays, no crimes are ever committed by ungloved hands.
Also, no stolen cars are ever identified by license plate number, because all car thieves swap out plates, every single time.
Right? That's what you are saying, right? That all police tactics are useless as long as there is some possible workaround to the tactic?
That's true, more or less. The average murder sentence is for a lot less than life in prison, but the average sentence for killing a cop is longer.
Personally I don't normally use the "self defense" phrase for police officers. We normal folks use "self defense" but I would say that a police officer killed someone "in the line of duty".
The rhetoric of "deserves to die" is irrelevant. The question isn't did he "deserve" to die but was killing him reasonable given the circumstances? This is a judgement call. As a participant in the democracy which sets rules for stuff like this, in my opinion yes it was reasonable.
I don't know about all the god nonsense, but I can definitely join you in celebrating the death of a societal leech. The best outcome is for him to not be a leech, the second best outcome is for him to get himself killed doing something stupid (as in this story), and lesser options include paying to arrest, prosecute, and imprison him.
I'm very happy on my no-contract pre-paid plan. I'm a customer of a local retain phone-and-service shop in Madison, Wisconsin. They are an independent retailer of a half-dozen different pre-paid service providers. I pay $30 a month, which I consider to be super cheap. I get way more voice and text than I need, and I get 500MB of data. That's enough for my lifestyle because I'm near wifi 98% of the time so I only need to use that 500MB when I'm lost in my car or when I want to check email while I'm out doing errands. If you want or need unlimited data you can get plans like that too.
On my former contract plan (AT&T) I paid something like $70 a month, so yeah my savings are similar to what you calculated. I just paid $430 for a new smartphone, though, so factor that into the overall cost.
By far the greatest thing about pre-paid is that I no longer worry about my usage. It is literally impossible for my provider to send me a big bill. I travel to California and Arizona semi-regularly and just use my phone like normal, no worries.
Good luck. I'm a pre-paid prosthelytizer so I hope you use it and like it.
I've been watching for years and I don't know of any $59 smart phones today much less five years ago. The only way to get a price like that is to pay the rest of the full price over time with a contract.
I just paid cash for a new cell phone, the top-end model from a year ago, and it was a lot more than $59. I could have gotten a crappy older one for, oh, maybe just shy of $200.
Bandwidth should be metered just like all finite resources are metered. My electricity doesn't cut off when I use a certain amount (that would be a "cap") and neither should my internet. Instead, my utility should just charge me for one more unit.
Meter it by the megabyte and be done with it. Let people use as much as they want to pay for.
"After the 08 banking crash and bailout what do you trust more a golden parachuted banking executive, or strong cryptography and backups?"
/shrug/ Well, I hold 100% of my liquid cash in dollars and 0% bitcoins, so I guess on a sliding scale of trust I trust banks more than croptocurrency. You can assert that you trust cryptocoins more if you have more than 50% of your liquid currency in them. And I wouldn't blame you, I sure wish I'd bough some bitcoin two years ago.
Are you saying you keep your life savings in your house? Wow I don't do that. I don't think most people would do that. Most of us trust financial institutions to safeguard our large amounts of money.
I'm just saying, these currencies are all different whilst all similar. It's a mistake to map one currency metaphorically onto another.
Sure it is. If a hacker gets my CC info and makes charges, my loss is limited to hassle and frustration. If a hacker gets my BTC info, I lose my BTC forever. That makes BTC like cash, which sure can be stolen, but to steal my cash you have to walk up to me and get my wallet away from me. A wallet thief can only rob a handful of people per day, whereas a BTC thief can take a hundred million dollars from ten thousand people in one night.
There are lots of tradeoffs for all these different systems. None of them are exactly perfect but none of them are worse than all the others in every way. Each has different strengths.
Agreed. That's sensible, moderate regulation. It transforms the bad free market into a good regulated market, but not a bad regulated market. That is the kind of sensible, moderate regulation that all thinking people should embrace, and reject the "free market" nonsense, while also rejecting the outstretched hands of those seeking protection from competition.
I totally agree. This is the opposite of a leak. This is called "sharing". If you don't want your private documents put on the internet then don't put your private documents on the internet. If you don't want Google to know about your secret links then don't tell Google about your secret links.
I'm having a hard time figuring out how this got onto Slashdot... oh, Soulskill, well that explains it.
Most people on Slashdot know what 'feature phone' means because we've all used telecommunications in the first world during the last two decades. What time or place are you from? Do you use the terms "rotary phone" and "corded phone" and "cell phone" and "smart phone" in your placetime?
A feature phone is like an intermediary step just before full-blown smart phones, capable of a much more limited set of operations, but more functional than a cell phone which merely does talk and text.
In the future when you don't know a term used in an online forum you can often find it on Wikipedia.
I was in the early rounds of recipients for the Republic Phone. I returned it during the evaluation period because it dropped about 30-40% of my calls. Has your experience been better than that? (I've ended up with prepaid service for a cash-bought cell phone.)
When I sit down and wonder why cell phones work the way they do, or why certain features on products get named and promoted the way they do, I think it's because of American business schools. I think they teach a specific religion of how to conduct business which taints the brains of the people who go on to lead our economy.
Slashdot Mirror
Great. Then like me you don't support free markets. You support certain market regulations. That's nice, me too.
I prefer not only labeling but safety regulations. What I mean is, I don't just want landlords to warn tenants about lead paint, I want to actually remove lead from paint. And we did that two generations ago and have benefitted greatly from that regulation. I'm also quite glad that elevators are regulated for functional safety, not merely warned with a sign saying "Use elevator at your own risk". These kinds of safety regulations can be difficult because if you go too far you create a problem that's even worse, but luckily we have a robust process for reviewing regulations and changing them.
You must live in a gun-hating state. In all the gun-friendly states the Constitutional Carry people have made sure there are literally no restrictions whatsoever for carrying around guns. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, but my guess is it will be the law in 45 states by the end of the decade, like it's already the law in many states, and it undermines your point about licenses.
The current political ideology of the gun rights movement is zero restrictions, zero rules of any kind. Those people are honest about their goals so I credit them with that honesty. I don't think they are hoodwinking anyone, they are implementing plain policy based on honestly convincing a plurality to support their goals.
Mmm hmm. And we license drivers. I think that would be a reasonable step for gun ownership.
Chain saws aren't an existential problem. There are very few instances or murder or negligent death by chain saw. If that number increases then we can consider doing something about it at that point.
Yeah I might be. And if I were I would complain about that regulation, not about the entire concept of regulation.
People who make reasoned, informed arguments against specific regulations -- I'll listen to those people. People who make unreasonable, ignorant arguments against the notion of improving life with market regulations -- those people are kooks who deserve to be ignored.
How about markets in lawless places? In places like, say, America before Europeans arrived. If there was no government in the modern sense then that would be a free market.
And a market being "subverted by corporations" or "uncompetitive" doesn't make it non-free. A free market is a market with zero regulations, including taxes. Such markets are inherently uncompetitive and opaque which is why we use regulations to make them more transparent and competitive -- because we think competitive transparent markets are good.
It's bullshit that you got modded as a troll for plainly stating the libertarian ideology that underlies the kook groups like the one in this story.
Markets are good. Free markets are bad. We use regulations to turn bad markets into good ones but we have to be careful not to have bad regulations.
Right. And that's why nobody has tracked down criminals using fingerprints for over a hundred years, since about a year after someone first was caught because of fingerprints. Nowadays, no crimes are ever committed by ungloved hands.
Also, no stolen cars are ever identified by license plate number, because all car thieves swap out plates, every single time.
Right? That's what you are saying, right? That all police tactics are useless as long as there is some possible workaround to the tactic?
Was this the title you are complaining about?
"Robbery Suspect Tracked By GPS and Killed"
What part of that do you object to? It's a plainly worded summary of the facts of the case. What's the problem?
You sound as if you are responding to a headline reading "Robbery Suspect Killed Because He Was Tracked Down By GPS" which doesn't even make sense.
That's true, more or less. The average murder sentence is for a lot less than life in prison, but the average sentence for killing a cop is longer.
Personally I don't normally use the "self defense" phrase for police officers. We normal folks use "self defense" but I would say that a police officer killed someone "in the line of duty".
The rhetoric of "deserves to die" is irrelevant. The question isn't did he "deserve" to die but was killing him reasonable given the circumstances? This is a judgement call. As a participant in the democracy which sets rules for stuff like this, in my opinion yes it was reasonable.
I don't know about all the god nonsense, but I can definitely join you in celebrating the death of a societal leech. The best outcome is for him to not be a leech, the second best outcome is for him to get himself killed doing something stupid (as in this story), and lesser options include paying to arrest, prosecute, and imprison him.
I'm very happy on my no-contract pre-paid plan. I'm a customer of a local retain phone-and-service shop in Madison, Wisconsin. They are an independent retailer of a half-dozen different pre-paid service providers. I pay $30 a month, which I consider to be super cheap. I get way more voice and text than I need, and I get 500MB of data. That's enough for my lifestyle because I'm near wifi 98% of the time so I only need to use that 500MB when I'm lost in my car or when I want to check email while I'm out doing errands. If you want or need unlimited data you can get plans like that too.
On my former contract plan (AT&T) I paid something like $70 a month, so yeah my savings are similar to what you calculated. I just paid $430 for a new smartphone, though, so factor that into the overall cost.
By far the greatest thing about pre-paid is that I no longer worry about my usage. It is literally impossible for my provider to send me a big bill. I travel to California and Arizona semi-regularly and just use my phone like normal, no worries.
Good luck. I'm a pre-paid prosthelytizer so I hope you use it and like it.
I've been watching for years and I don't know of any $59 smart phones today much less five years ago. The only way to get a price like that is to pay the rest of the full price over time with a contract.
I just paid cash for a new cell phone, the top-end model from a year ago, and it was a lot more than $59. I could have gotten a crappy older one for, oh, maybe just shy of $200.
Bandwidth should be metered just like all finite resources are metered. My electricity doesn't cut off when I use a certain amount (that would be a "cap") and neither should my internet. Instead, my utility should just charge me for one more unit.
Meter it by the megabyte and be done with it. Let people use as much as they want to pay for.
cf. pseudoscience
Yeah. You could do that... for fifteen years. And then your patent would expire and you'd be just another company making all the same batteries.
"After the 08 banking crash and bailout what do you trust more a golden parachuted banking executive, or strong cryptography and backups?"
/shrug/ Well, I hold 100% of my liquid cash in dollars and 0% bitcoins, so I guess on a sliding scale of trust I trust banks more than croptocurrency. You can assert that you trust cryptocoins more if you have more than 50% of your liquid currency in them. And I wouldn't blame you, I sure wish I'd bough some bitcoin two years ago.
Are you saying you keep your life savings in your house? Wow I don't do that. I don't think most people would do that. Most of us trust financial institutions to safeguard our large amounts of money.
I'm just saying, these currencies are all different whilst all similar. It's a mistake to map one currency metaphorically onto another.
Sure it is. If a hacker gets my CC info and makes charges, my loss is limited to hassle and frustration. If a hacker gets my BTC info, I lose my BTC forever. That makes BTC like cash, which sure can be stolen, but to steal my cash you have to walk up to me and get my wallet away from me. A wallet thief can only rob a handful of people per day, whereas a BTC thief can take a hundred million dollars from ten thousand people in one night.
There are lots of tradeoffs for all these different systems. None of them are exactly perfect but none of them are worse than all the others in every way. Each has different strengths.
Agreed. That's sensible, moderate regulation. It transforms the bad free market into a good regulated market, but not a bad regulated market. That is the kind of sensible, moderate regulation that all thinking people should embrace, and reject the "free market" nonsense, while also rejecting the outstretched hands of those seeking protection from competition.
I totally agree. This is the opposite of a leak. This is called "sharing". If you don't want your private documents put on the internet then don't put your private documents on the internet. If you don't want Google to know about your secret links then don't tell Google about your secret links.
I'm having a hard time figuring out how this got onto Slashdot... oh, Soulskill, well that explains it.
Oops! Wow that was fast but apparently Google has announced that Classroom will be discontinued.
Most people on Slashdot know what 'feature phone' means because we've all used telecommunications in the first world during the last two decades. What time or place are you from? Do you use the terms "rotary phone" and "corded phone" and "cell phone" and "smart phone" in your placetime?
A feature phone is like an intermediary step just before full-blown smart phones, capable of a much more limited set of operations, but more functional than a cell phone which merely does talk and text.
In the future when you don't know a term used in an online forum you can often find it on Wikipedia.
I was in the early rounds of recipients for the Republic Phone. I returned it during the evaluation period because it dropped about 30-40% of my calls. Has your experience been better than that? (I've ended up with prepaid service for a cash-bought cell phone.)
THIS! I totally think it is this.
When I sit down and wonder why cell phones work the way they do, or why certain features on products get named and promoted the way they do, I think it's because of American business schools. I think they teach a specific religion of how to conduct business which taints the brains of the people who go on to lead our economy.