The measurements have shown that there are very significant, but unquantified, methane leaks.
The uncertainty is whether it's 1.8% or a few percent more. That has some short term warming effects, but it is insignificant relative to the large reduction in greenhouse gas emissions; arguing that shale gas has no net effect or might even have a negative effect on greenhouse gases simply doesn't make sense. Also note that we're talking about switching from coal production, which itself leaks methane.
Note that companies have a strong financial interest not to leak methane: every 1% they leak is profit they are throwing away; you don't think big evil greedy capitalist corporations are going to throw away money like that?
You're saying the US does not treat its friends any better than it treats its (sometimes imaginary) enemies.
Europeans are our allies: we have some shared goals. We aren't militarily hostile to each other. But they certainly also compete with us, and they pull no punches. Their governments engage in anticompetitive behavior and protectionism, make secret agreements, and sell weapons across the globe. European leaders also widely use anti-Americanism for their domestic political gain, and European populations have been predominantly anti-American for most of the past two centuries.
Our enemies, we just bomb. I think we should do less of that, but hey, that's what you get from electing the kind of losers we are electing.
Interestingly, the US's friends have also noticed this.
The NSA is a spy agency. Its job is to spy, which involves secretly doing illegal things in other countries. The problem with the NSA is secretly doing illegal things in this country.
And if you think that's hypocritical, think again I expect European and Asian countries to spy on us too. It's part of international relations, and it's good for countries to be able to check up on each other, instead of having to rely merely on official statements.
Fracking has also been responsible for a very large number of methane leaks. So many that it's reasonable to believe that there has actually been an increase in total greenhouse gas emissions, just a decline in measured ones. Which isn't the same thing.
Fracking operations are subject to environmental regulations and monitoring, and it is not reasonable to believe without strong evidence that there "has actually been an increase in total greenhouse gas emissions". In fact, it is completely unreasonable to believe that.
I didn't say it was the job of the US government to favor competition, I said "government".
Well, what you said was ambiguous. That's why I enumerated all the different ways in which it isn't the job of "government".
Google Fiber needs to go begging for permission if they intend to run fiber in the city, because of rights of way. Allowing anybody to string up anything on the poles, or dig up trenches arbitrarily, is not going to end well.
That's a false dichotomy. There are other choices besides arbitrary government decision making and anarchy. Right now, decisions like who can put in fiber is entirely arbitrary; my city can tell Google's managers to do a tap dance as a condition for putting in fiber (and they do). The right middle ground would probably to set a limit on the number of cables that could be put in the ground and auction them off, with the government staying unable to make special deals for their favorite companies.
Some laws are used for rent seeking, and some aren't. Anti-collusion laws, for example, don't lend themselves to rent-seeking.
Oh, you greatly underestimate the ability of rent seekers to turn laws to their benefit. For example, if products in industry A substitute partially for products in industry B, then passing "anti-collusion laws" for industry B amounts to rent seeking by industry A.
And, yes, there are things like natural monopolies. My water and sewer service is an example: should somebody else come around and create a parallel water and sewer system? Would that be financially practical? What would the benefits be of doing that?
A natural monopoly is a monopoly that exists because it is too expensive or not profitable for a second company to enter the market. Where you have a natural monopoly, government doesn't need to restrict market entrance because companies aren't entering the market at all.
Your arguments regarding Internet service are of a different nature. You admit you don't know whether it is "financially practical". Obviously, at least Google thinks it is, but it has to jump through hoops, so multiple companies would like to enter the market, but government can restrict their entry arbitrarily. There may or may not be valid arguments for such restrictions, but they have nothing to do with "natural monopolies".
More competition isn't always desirable, but it usually is.
Yet, your entire argument is based on limiting competition. You argue for limiting new entrants into the Internet provider market because you think it would be too disruptive to have more and more providers dig up the streets. That means you don't want more competition, you want less of it.
Either we need more competition (so people can find deals they can live with), or more regulation.
I think it's pretty clear what you really want is regulated public utilities; all this talk of "natural monopolies" on your part isn't serious, because you don't even know whether there is a natural monopoly or not and don't have any evidence ("Would that be financially practical? What would the benefits be of doing that?").
But more generally, I think this fear of monopolies is itself a straw man. Markets dominated by a single company and even monopolies are generally harmless. In many cases, demand is elastic and monopoly pricing is not much higher than competitive pricing. Furthermore, monopolies rarely last, and they encourage innovation because any extra profits from a monopoly provide an enormously strong incentive to break the monopoly.
If you put your name to something unpopular in public, people may hate you for it. That's never been any different. That's why we have had anonymous pamphleteering and pseudonyms for as long as we have had free speech, and we protect them. This is not a women's issue or a feminist issue. And it's not a "civil rights" issue either. People like Sierra and Citron are not fighting for civil rights, they are a privileged and entitled elite who think that if they speak, the masses should listen in awed silence, no matter how offensive their speech may be. They want the same status that Catholic priests used to have: unquestioned respect and authority.
Fortunately, it's not going to happen. Use your head before you speak in public. And if your entire life is based on publicity and notoriety, realize that that the benefits you received from that can quickly turn into a liability when you fall from favor.
Lacking that, I'm just going to assume that your are making stuff up. The "logic" of "Fracking has been responsible for a big decline in US greenhouse gas emissions" seems to be lacking. How could the conclusion follow from the premise?
For the same amount of energy, natural gas results in about half the CO2 emissions compared to coal (the two major fossil fuel sources for electricity in the US).
Shale gas production has increased greatly in the US and led to an overall strong increase in the use of gas for energy production, substituting more carbon-intensive sources:
IMHO, universities have an implicit moral obligation (including "in loco parentis")
Graduate students are adults. There are no "parents" involved anymore. In addition, even if we accepted your premise, it wouldn't matter. Parents sacrifice for their children not out of some abstract sense of duty but because they have a biological bond and love them. University professors and administrators have neither an economic incentive nor a parental bond that would cause them to sacrifice. You can preach "in loco parentis" all you want, it's not going to cause people to behave differently.
[universities have] to be candid and as accurate as possible with their students about things like career prospects;
See what you're doing? You're deflecting responsibility from the people who actually have contact with students (academic staff) to the impersonal institution. It seems like you don't like blaming intellectuals and academics. Let's be clear: whatever blame there is on influencing students to make bad career choices, it falls squarely on the shoulders of professors.
What do they have to be candid about? Not job prospects; the fact that those are lousy is obvious, because the underpaid grad students and elderly postdocs are everywhere, as are the dozens of aspiring faculty that tour the university, talk to student representatives, and get rejected. What they need to be candid about is the value of intellectualism. Right now, they are glorifying academic and intellectual pursuits to the point that students are indoctrinated to consider any other career literally a failure. As a result, students embark on risky career choices, knowing full well that their chances are small. This is no different from kids throwing away their lives in hope of becoming a major league sports start.
Universities are full of people who are smart in narrow fields but poor at making real-world decisions. And when people actually make it, they find that the money and life isn't as good as they hoped. They suffer cognitive dissonance, and instead of admitting that they made poor career choices, they continue to praise intellectualism and blame everybody else for their unfulfilled ambitions.
Now, unlike you, I don't think there are any policy interventions we can make. Professors aren't going to stop behaving that way because you tell them to or because the university adopts different policies. The only way to address these issues is for students to become more critical of professors and to stop idolizing intellectualism and academics.
But the "economic literacy" you imply IMHO is getting to be more and more a historical thing related to the 20th century, and will be less and less applicable as the 21st century unfolds.
That's because your understanding of, and reasoning about, economics and wealth itself seems largely rooted in materialistic and 20th century views. You erroneously think that scarcity is all about stuff, when in fact it is all about people.
Socialists used to say "workers are exploited by the markets, so the state needs to take them over", and fascists used to say "markets harm people, therefore the state needs to control them". Some people still believe such nonsense, but to most it is obviously false. So, you come up with a new justification for your favorite policies "in a post-scarcity world, markets don't matter so the state might already start taking them over now".
You start with your desired policy and your paternalistic and anti-liberal views of society, and then invent justifications for it. And the reason you espouse paternalistic and anti-liberal views is the same intellectuals have done for millennia: they feel short-changed and want more power.
If you look at other countries like in Western Europe, there is not as much of a conflict between being reasonable "successful" in a field and having a family and hobbies and such. "Germany's w
is meant as a call to stop looking at fracking as the main culprit (i.e. "zoom out" from it) for the release of methane?
Exactly. Which implies that fracking is still considered a culprit, when in fact, it has been responsible for a large decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.
You're engaging in the same stupidity as the authors.
The scientists say the finding is reason enough to zoom out from fracking, and take stock of the operations of the entire established fossil fuel industry.
Fracking has been responsible for a big decline in US greenhouse gas emissions. Lumping the "entire established fossil fuel industry" together as if coal, oil, and gas were all the same is just idiotic.
Holonyak didn't invent the LED, he created the first visible light LED. As such, his contribution is of the same kind as the inventors of the blue LED: he changed the emission frequency of an existing device.
Going from infrared to yellow was also a much simpler step than going from yellow to blue; the latter required different and more complex physics. Since the price is for contributions to physics, I think it makes sense that they honored this. From a practical standpoint, before blue LEDs, LEDs were just instrument lights; afterwards, they became a usable light source and display technology, so that was really the critical step.
I am referring to how the Internet should work to fulfill at least a small part of its potential, and the vision of the people who created and developed it.
You mean the Internet should be a non-commercial network for defense related research? Because that was the "vision of the people who created and developed it". It turned into what it is today only through massive private investment.
Furthermore, the creators and developers of the Internet no more get to tell people how to use it than the people who built my care get to tell me where to drive it.
In Europe, you're not going to have multiple lines to the house, either. (This is evidence that the limited options are not due to government, but that the last mile is a natural monopoly.)
Are you kidding? What goes in the ground is even more tightly regulated in Europe than in the US. It is due to the same stupid regulations as in the US. Europe deregulated telecoms service only after the US led the way, before that Internet in Europe was dead. We may have to lead the way again.
However, lots of people have said they can select multiple ISPs through their connection, which isn't at the whim of a content provider.
Most of those are just resellers, and even the ones that have some equipment still connect through the same ISPs to providers like Netflix and YouTube, so, no, that's wrong. Furthermore, since there is effectively no free market in content in Europe anyway, "network neutrality" in Europe amounts to simply shuffling around subsidies between different interest groups.
It is the job of government to enforce laws favoring competition
That's wrong on several counts. (1) It simply isn't the job of the US government, it has no Constitutional authority for it. (2) More competition isn't automatically desirable; it doesn't necessarily produce better outcomes, lower prices, or more efficiencies. (Ironically, many of the people advocating "more competition" then add "or just turn it into a public utility", showing that they really don't care about competition.) (3) Laws nominally intended to "favor competition" are usually actually used for rent seeking, accomplishing the opposite. (4) Such enforcement actions frequently end up being regressive, that is, they make the poor pay to provide free government services for the rich, services that the rich could very well pay for themselves.
You may think that it is the purpose of government to subsidize the rich and destroy market efficiency, I prefer government not to do either of those things.
Finally, running copper or fiber or whatever all over has "natural monopoly" written all over it. How many cable companies would a city have if competition was legal? Power companies? Gas companies? Telephone companies?
Power companies and gas companies could easily become ISPs (they all have wires already), giving you four providers for phone and entertainment with the same number of wires in the ground as we have now. Google Fiber wouldn't have to go begging for permission to cities.
Much of what you call a "natural monopoly" is actually quite artificial: in many places, running new wires is easy, along existing poles or through existing tunnels, and the link between wires and service is rooted in laws and a history of regulation, not the market.
"Need" in the sense of keeping the Internet functioning more or less as it should.
"Should" according to who? You?
There *is* a problem with lack of competitiveness. Most places in the US have two choices of companies to use for last mile, if they're lucky. A lot have only one.
That's not substantially different from Europe in my experience.
WTF do you mean that it's not the job of government to ensure non-monopolistic practices in anything,
It's not the job of government to ensure non-monopolistic practices in luxury goods. Sorry, I don't want police, judges, or politicians who I pay for to waste their time and my money on ensuring that you get your Cartier watches or 4K TV at competitive prices. Furthermore, any attempts at monopolization by private actors is usually unstable, so there is little reason to intervene.
In addition, the monopolistic practices we are talking about when talking about broadband providers are monopolistic practices of the government. I.e., the reason we don't have more broadband providers in many communities is because the communities chose to make exclusive deals with providers.
If they can't hire someone and make a bigger return then their pay then there isn't a shortage is there?
That's sort of like saying that even if toilet paper costs $1000/roll, there isn't a shortage because, hey, if you really want to wipe your ass, you could pay $1000/roll.
You're making an argument that monopolistic corporations are more efficient and provide a better cheaper service to the consumer.
You claimed that lowering barriers to entry will increase competition. I'm saying you're wrong. You being wrong doesn't mean that the opposite is true, it means there is just no relationship: lowering barriers to entry may or may not increase competition.
I'm sorry if this is all a little too complex for you to understand. Reflect on it a little, and maybe you can figure it out.
MERS (not banks) tried to initiate foreclosures. I don't see how that is "corporations acting like governments". All MERS was doing is ask the government for a particular action. In some states the government agreed, in others it disagreed. Where the government disagreed, MERS had no recourse. Therefore, your example shows that MERS (or banks) cannot "act like governments", because if they could, they wouldn't have to go to court.
The bottom line is that, increasingly, many people are not being given accurate information about career expectations when they pursue PhDs.
People embarking on Ph.D.'s are adults. Furthermore, they have been around universities usually for half a dozen years, they have all the information they need.
But that sort of life is far from the expectations most people have when they pursue a PhD -- especially for people who hope to raise a family. As Greenspun points out, is it any winder that most smart women avoid science as a profession given the financial reality?
If you want to be successful in science, you are going to have a hard time having a family life. That's no different from other demanding professions: sports, CEO, etc.
It comes down to the question of what sort of society do we want to have of all the possibilities?... Personally, I feel part of the solution is a "basic income" for all.
I think a basic income would be great. But that's not going to happen. It's not Facebook, Gates, or the Koch brothers who are going to sabotage it. They doubtlessly are rent seeking when lobbying on copyright reform or drilling rights (respectively), but as far as welfare reform is concerned, they are largely disinterested third parties.
The people who have skin in that game are the people who would lose their jobs when we replace means-tested welfare with basic income, and they are politically powerful and numerous; they are also darlings of progressives and intellectuals, a symbiotic political relationship.
You'll find that free market types and classical liberals, the very people you demonize and whose ideas you reject, are much more in favor of such a system than Democrats and progressives.
I don't see a short term solution. Boomers are still bamboozled by nonsense like "human-scale ideas to build a happier healthier world than the ideas being produced by big money". Hopefully, the next generation will be economically and politically more literate than that. And fiscal realities plus corporations and jobs leaving the country are sooner or later going to force change.
You're not getting how cheap it is to run a tower. Serving a seven square mile area could cost less then 10 grand just in equipment. And that is a price that is falling along with everything else.
Lower barriers to entry also mean more risk of getting undercut by competition and lower profits, and falling capital costs make that even worse. People go into business to make a profit, not just because they can.
Lowering barriers to entry does generally improve market efficiency and that's a good thing; but prices in the mobile market have been decreasing so rapidly that that doesn't seem to be a real problem right now. I think we should lower barriers to entry in wireless and mobile on principle and because it may spur innovation down the road, but it wouldn't actually change much for the existing mobile market.
Look at banks foreclosing on people that didn't actually have a mortgage through them.
Banks can only foreclose mortgages they own and only if you don't fulfill your contractual obligations.
Or recording companies in Canada getting a tax on blank CDs that you never used as a recording media. Or my personal favorite, power companies with a low monthly rate "guaranteed" for 12 months, who then get special written permission from the government to charge more during that period
Both are rent seeking, i.e. failures of government, not private businesses.
These companies act like governments.
No, your government acts like government, and it seems like a bad one. You don't like that? Get involved in politics.
The fact our constitution did not mention powerful private entities who would stifle our rights is an oversight the Founders did not anticipate, not a feature.
In fact, the drafters of the Constitution explicitly discussed "powerful private entities" and reached the opposite conclusions from you. Madison, for example, wrote that "the minority of the opulent should be protected against the majority".
In fact, this leads to a fascinating discussion: does the concept of inalienable only pertain to governments? and thus corporate towns, like the Domino's pizza guy's town in Florida, can override and nullify all your rights simply because they arent government?
He cannot "override and nullify" any of your rights. What he can do is use his private property as he sees fit, even if you don't like it.
Slashdot Mirror
The uncertainty is whether it's 1.8% or a few percent more. That has some short term warming effects, but it is insignificant relative to the large reduction in greenhouse gas emissions; arguing that shale gas has no net effect or might even have a negative effect on greenhouse gases simply doesn't make sense. Also note that we're talking about switching from coal production, which itself leaks methane.
Note that companies have a strong financial interest not to leak methane: every 1% they leak is profit they are throwing away; you don't think big evil greedy capitalist corporations are going to throw away money like that?
I'm not "regarding" them that way, I'm telling you: they have never been anything more than tactical allies.
Europeans call us their "friends" when they want something; it's propaganda, nothing more. Stop falling for it.
Europeans are our allies: we have some shared goals. We aren't militarily hostile to each other. But they certainly also compete with us, and they pull no punches. Their governments engage in anticompetitive behavior and protectionism, make secret agreements, and sell weapons across the globe. European leaders also widely use anti-Americanism for their domestic political gain, and European populations have been predominantly anti-American for most of the past two centuries.
Our enemies, we just bomb. I think we should do less of that, but hey, that's what you get from electing the kind of losers we are electing.
They'd be stupid not to, and they aren't stupid.
The NSA is a spy agency. Its job is to spy, which involves secretly doing illegal things in other countries. The problem with the NSA is secretly doing illegal things in this country.
And if you think that's hypocritical, think again I expect European and Asian countries to spy on us too. It's part of international relations, and it's good for countries to be able to check up on each other, instead of having to rely merely on official statements.
Fracking operations are subject to environmental regulations and monitoring, and it is not reasonable to believe without strong evidence that there "has actually been an increase in total greenhouse gas emissions". In fact, it is completely unreasonable to believe that.
Well, what you said was ambiguous. That's why I enumerated all the different ways in which it isn't the job of "government".
That's a false dichotomy. There are other choices besides arbitrary government decision making and anarchy. Right now, decisions like who can put in fiber is entirely arbitrary; my city can tell Google's managers to do a tap dance as a condition for putting in fiber (and they do). The right middle ground would probably to set a limit on the number of cables that could be put in the ground and auction them off, with the government staying unable to make special deals for their favorite companies.
Oh, you greatly underestimate the ability of rent seekers to turn laws to their benefit. For example, if products in industry A substitute partially for products in industry B, then passing "anti-collusion laws" for industry B amounts to rent seeking by industry A.
A natural monopoly is a monopoly that exists because it is too expensive or not profitable for a second company to enter the market. Where you have a natural monopoly, government doesn't need to restrict market entrance because companies aren't entering the market at all.
Your arguments regarding Internet service are of a different nature. You admit you don't know whether it is "financially practical". Obviously, at least Google thinks it is, but it has to jump through hoops, so multiple companies would like to enter the market, but government can restrict their entry arbitrarily. There may or may not be valid arguments for such restrictions, but they have nothing to do with "natural monopolies".
Yet, your entire argument is based on limiting competition. You argue for limiting new entrants into the Internet provider market because you think it would be too disruptive to have more and more providers dig up the streets. That means you don't want more competition, you want less of it.
I think it's pretty clear what you really want is regulated public utilities; all this talk of "natural monopolies" on your part isn't serious, because you don't even know whether there is a natural monopoly or not and don't have any evidence ("Would that be financially practical? What would the benefits be of doing that?").
But more generally, I think this fear of monopolies is itself a straw man. Markets dominated by a single company and even monopolies are generally harmless. In many cases, demand is elastic and monopoly pricing is not much higher than competitive pricing. Furthermore, monopolies rarely last, and they encourage innovation because any extra profits from a monopoly provide an enormously strong incentive to break the monopoly.
It's the only way to be sure.
Oh, you're not my enemy. But unfortunately, Slashdot only has a "foe" button, not a "so stupid I don't want to see their stuff anymore" button.
Anybody I considered an actual enemy, I would listen to.
If you put your name to something unpopular in public, people may hate you for it. That's never been any different. That's why we have had anonymous pamphleteering and pseudonyms for as long as we have had free speech, and we protect them. This is not a women's issue or a feminist issue. And it's not a "civil rights" issue either. People like Sierra and Citron are not fighting for civil rights, they are a privileged and entitled elite who think that if they speak, the masses should listen in awed silence, no matter how offensive their speech may be. They want the same status that Catholic priests used to have: unquestioned respect and authority.
Fortunately, it's not going to happen. Use your head before you speak in public. And if your entire life is based on publicity and notoriety, realize that that the benefits you received from that can quickly turn into a liability when you fall from favor.
No, it's simple chemistry: we're substituting gas for coal, and gas releases much less carbon for the same energy yield.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
For the same amount of energy, natural gas results in about half the CO2 emissions compared to coal (the two major fossil fuel sources for electricity in the US).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Shale gas production has increased greatly in the US and led to an overall strong increase in the use of gas for energy production, substituting more carbon-intensive sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.eia.gov/todayinener...
Graduate students are adults. There are no "parents" involved anymore. In addition, even if we accepted your premise, it wouldn't matter. Parents sacrifice for their children not out of some abstract sense of duty but because they have a biological bond and love them. University professors and administrators have neither an economic incentive nor a parental bond that would cause them to sacrifice. You can preach "in loco parentis" all you want, it's not going to cause people to behave differently.
See what you're doing? You're deflecting responsibility from the people who actually have contact with students (academic staff) to the impersonal institution. It seems like you don't like blaming intellectuals and academics. Let's be clear: whatever blame there is on influencing students to make bad career choices, it falls squarely on the shoulders of professors.
What do they have to be candid about? Not job prospects; the fact that those are lousy is obvious, because the underpaid grad students and elderly postdocs are everywhere, as are the dozens of aspiring faculty that tour the university, talk to student representatives, and get rejected. What they need to be candid about is the value of intellectualism. Right now, they are glorifying academic and intellectual pursuits to the point that students are indoctrinated to consider any other career literally a failure. As a result, students embark on risky career choices, knowing full well that their chances are small. This is no different from kids throwing away their lives in hope of becoming a major league sports start.
Universities are full of people who are smart in narrow fields but poor at making real-world decisions. And when people actually make it, they find that the money and life isn't as good as they hoped. They suffer cognitive dissonance, and instead of admitting that they made poor career choices, they continue to praise intellectualism and blame everybody else for their unfulfilled ambitions.
Now, unlike you, I don't think there are any policy interventions we can make. Professors aren't going to stop behaving that way because you tell them to or because the university adopts different policies. The only way to address these issues is for students to become more critical of professors and to stop idolizing intellectualism and academics.
That's because your understanding of, and reasoning about, economics and wealth itself seems largely rooted in materialistic and 20th century views. You erroneously think that scarcity is all about stuff, when in fact it is all about people.
Socialists used to say "workers are exploited by the markets, so the state needs to take them over", and fascists used to say "markets harm people, therefore the state needs to control them". Some people still believe such nonsense, but to most it is obviously false. So, you come up with a new justification for your favorite policies "in a post-scarcity world, markets don't matter so the state might already start taking them over now".
You start with your desired policy and your paternalistic and anti-liberal views of society, and then invent justifications for it. And the reason you espouse paternalistic and anti-liberal views is the same intellectuals have done for millennia: they feel short-changed and want more power.
Exactly. Which implies that fracking is still considered a culprit, when in fact, it has been responsible for a large decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.
You're engaging in the same stupidity as the authors.
Fracking has been responsible for a big decline in US greenhouse gas emissions. Lumping the "entire established fossil fuel industry" together as if coal, oil, and gas were all the same is just idiotic.
Holonyak didn't invent the LED, he created the first visible light LED. As such, his contribution is of the same kind as the inventors of the blue LED: he changed the emission frequency of an existing device.
Going from infrared to yellow was also a much simpler step than going from yellow to blue; the latter required different and more complex physics. Since the price is for contributions to physics, I think it makes sense that they honored this. From a practical standpoint, before blue LEDs, LEDs were just instrument lights; afterwards, they became a usable light source and display technology, so that was really the critical step.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
You mean the Internet should be a non-commercial network for defense related research? Because that was the "vision of the people who created and developed it". It turned into what it is today only through massive private investment.
Furthermore, the creators and developers of the Internet no more get to tell people how to use it than the people who built my care get to tell me where to drive it.
Are you kidding? What goes in the ground is even more tightly regulated in Europe than in the US. It is due to the same stupid regulations as in the US. Europe deregulated telecoms service only after the US led the way, before that Internet in Europe was dead. We may have to lead the way again.
Most of those are just resellers, and even the ones that have some equipment still connect through the same ISPs to providers like Netflix and YouTube, so, no, that's wrong. Furthermore, since there is effectively no free market in content in Europe anyway, "network neutrality" in Europe amounts to simply shuffling around subsidies between different interest groups.
That's wrong on several counts. (1) It simply isn't the job of the US government, it has no Constitutional authority for it. (2) More competition isn't automatically desirable; it doesn't necessarily produce better outcomes, lower prices, or more efficiencies. (Ironically, many of the people advocating "more competition" then add "or just turn it into a public utility", showing that they really don't care about competition.) (3) Laws nominally intended to "favor competition" are usually actually used for rent seeking, accomplishing the opposite. (4) Such enforcement actions frequently end up being regressive, that is, they make the poor pay to provide free government services for the rich, services that the rich could very well pay for themselves.
You may think that it is the purpose of government to subsidize the rich and destroy market efficiency, I prefer government not to do either of those things.
Power companies and gas companies could easily become ISPs (they all have wires already), giving you four providers for phone and entertainment with the same number of wires in the ground as we have now. Google Fiber wouldn't have to go begging for permission to cities.
Much of what you call a "natural monopoly" is actually quite artificial: in many places, running new wires is easy, along existing poles or through existing tunnels, and the link between wires and service is rooted in laws and a history of regulation, not the market.
"Should" according to who? You?
That's not substantially different from Europe in my experience.
It's not the job of government to ensure non-monopolistic practices in luxury goods. Sorry, I don't want police, judges, or politicians who I pay for to waste their time and my money on ensuring that you get your Cartier watches or 4K TV at competitive prices. Furthermore, any attempts at monopolization by private actors is usually unstable, so there is little reason to intervene.
In addition, the monopolistic practices we are talking about when talking about broadband providers are monopolistic practices of the government. I.e., the reason we don't have more broadband providers in many communities is because the communities chose to make exclusive deals with providers.
That's sort of like saying that even if toilet paper costs $1000/roll, there isn't a shortage because, hey, if you really want to wipe your ass, you could pay $1000/roll.
You claimed that lowering barriers to entry will increase competition. I'm saying you're wrong. You being wrong doesn't mean that the opposite is true, it means there is just no relationship: lowering barriers to entry may or may not increase competition.
I'm sorry if this is all a little too complex for you to understand. Reflect on it a little, and maybe you can figure it out.
MERS (not banks) tried to initiate foreclosures. I don't see how that is "corporations acting like governments". All MERS was doing is ask the government for a particular action. In some states the government agreed, in others it disagreed. Where the government disagreed, MERS had no recourse. Therefore, your example shows that MERS (or banks) cannot "act like governments", because if they could, they wouldn't have to go to court.
People embarking on Ph.D.'s are adults. Furthermore, they have been around universities usually for half a dozen years, they have all the information they need.
If you want to be successful in science, you are going to have a hard time having a family life. That's no different from other demanding professions: sports, CEO, etc.
I think a basic income would be great. But that's not going to happen. It's not Facebook, Gates, or the Koch brothers who are going to sabotage it. They doubtlessly are rent seeking when lobbying on copyright reform or drilling rights (respectively), but as far as welfare reform is concerned, they are largely disinterested third parties.
The people who have skin in that game are the people who would lose their jobs when we replace means-tested welfare with basic income, and they are politically powerful and numerous; they are also darlings of progressives and intellectuals, a symbiotic political relationship.
You'll find that free market types and classical liberals, the very people you demonize and whose ideas you reject, are much more in favor of such a system than Democrats and progressives.
I don't see a short term solution. Boomers are still bamboozled by nonsense like "human-scale ideas to build a happier healthier world than the ideas being produced by big money". Hopefully, the next generation will be economically and politically more literate than that. And fiscal realities plus corporations and jobs leaving the country are sooner or later going to force change.
Lower barriers to entry also mean more risk of getting undercut by competition and lower profits, and falling capital costs make that even worse. People go into business to make a profit, not just because they can.
Lowering barriers to entry does generally improve market efficiency and that's a good thing; but prices in the mobile market have been decreasing so rapidly that that doesn't seem to be a real problem right now. I think we should lower barriers to entry in wireless and mobile on principle and because it may spur innovation down the road, but it wouldn't actually change much for the existing mobile market.
Banks can only foreclose mortgages they own and only if you don't fulfill your contractual obligations.
Both are rent seeking, i.e. failures of government, not private businesses.
No, your government acts like government, and it seems like a bad one. You don't like that? Get involved in politics.
In fact, the drafters of the Constitution explicitly discussed "powerful private entities" and reached the opposite conclusions from you. Madison, for example, wrote that "the minority of the opulent should be protected against the majority".
He cannot "override and nullify" any of your rights. What he can do is use his private property as he sees fit, even if you don't like it.