Seriously. Sarcasm off. More available education is one of the best things we can do for the country.
True, more available education is one of the best things for the country. But public funding for education reduces available education and causes prices to rise as a simple glance at actual educational reality shows you.
I mean, most of our secondary school system and much of our tertiary educational system is publicly financed, we have some of the highest per-student K-12 spending in the world (second only to Switzerland), and it's been growing faster than inflation. Is our public education system delivering world-leading results? Have educational outcomes been rapidly improving nationwide? No, obviously not. Therefore, the idea that we can improve education by throwing even more public funding at it is clearly completely at odds with reality.
Of course it helps the students. The best thing in the world to improve the odds for success in life is more education.
Absolutely. Which is precisely why we should abolish the broken public educational system and why we should certainly not railroad students for another two years in useless and ineffective institutions.
People ending up with high student loan debts and an inability to pay it back are a small number of people who made a series of bad choices, like going to Harvard or Brown, majoring in Women's Studies or Journalism, and paying for it with student loans. If you do something that stupid, you should have to suffer the financial consequences yourself.
"Most of us" could afford it much easier if we didn't have to pay the taxes for it and could instead save the money, and if education was a competitive market place instead of the underperforming public-sector-union hellhole that it is.
That's two years out of the workforce, two years of not paying into retirement, and no benefit, since those students will simply be competing against each other for the same jobs anyway.
And why is he doing it? Not because it helps students, but because it appears to lower youth unemployment and reduces the need for corporations to train people themselves slightly.
It's a gigantic ripoff, both of students and tax payers.
By shifting the competition from infrastructure to service. Infrastructure can't have competition. It costs too much per customer,
That's pure fiction and fabrication.
without regulations that mandate full coverage, nobody will serve anyone except in higher-density areas.
So you're saying that regulations currently force people to subsidize a suburban and low density lifestyle and we should have even more of those subsidies. In different words, progressives and liberals who keep whining and complaining about the suburban lifestyle, the lack of public transportation, environmental destruction, lack of high speed Internet, are, in fact, subsidizing the very things they criticize, and the very problems they use to then justify even more subsidies. Thank you for pointing that out so clearly.
Allowing competition is not more government 'restrictions'.
Stop abusing language. Government isn't "allowing competition" through net neutrality regulations; after imposing net neutrality regulations, the set of things that companies are allowed to do is smaller than the set of things they can do now. Companies are already allowed to compete in the way net neutrality envisions, they simply (for various practical reasons) choose not to.
And the municipalities should also be allowed to compete with the private players.
Municipalities are not in a position to "compete" because they aren't businesses; they use taxes and public property to subsidize infrastructure, and property owners end up paying for those subsidies. That looks swell to you when you rent a tiny little delapidated apartment, but it doesn't make any sense for people who actually live and invest in a community.
You're not making any sense. Back to school with you!
I'm sure I'm not making any sense to you. The problem there is entirely with you.
Nope, those are all addressable with the city code enforcement.
You appear to live in a fantasy world where city codes magically let you do exactly what you want and HOAs don't. What that really tells me is that you have a knee jerk reaction against any kind of private voluntary contractual agreements (HOAs) but love government-imposed restrictions, up to the point where they actually restrict what you do, when you start whining and complaining about how incompetents, jerks, or corporations have hijacked government.
In reality, city codes vary as widely as CC&Rs, and it's your responsibility to make sure you can live with both the city codes and the CC&Rs before you spend your money. If you don't, you only have yourself to blame.
In Europe Internet access is heavily regulated but FTTH is everywhere and much cheaper than in the US.
I've lived in one of those European FTTH areas. There was a lot of government spending on FTTH. For years, it couldn't be hooked up because the necessary hardware was too expensive, and when it could get hooked up, it wasn't any faster than other Internet access either. The whole thing was a gigantic boondoggle for unions, telecoms manufacturers, and the telecoms industry.
If you're talking about "cheaper" you have to ask "cheaper for who". For the average tax payer, no it isn't cheaper, because they pay a lot in extra taxes for the government subsidies of the infrastructure. And it gets even more expensive because in many cases, FTTH has been an inefficient solution.
Of course, this sort of deal is very appealing to young, educated folks like students who don't pay a lot of taxes but see the lower ISP bills. That's what makes "European" anything so appealing to that group. But even as far as subsidies for young intellectuals go, this kind of crap is a bad way of doing it, because it mostly transfers money into the hands of big corporations and well paid union workers.
Hmmm - really? Anyone recall the POTS Long Distance war??? Sure drove down pricing there, same thing will happen with Internet providers.
The reason AT&T had a monopoly wasn't because they were unregulated, it was because the government had granted them a monopoly and kept other people out of the market. Long distance and other services opened up because of de-regulation.
What the FCC is proposing is to regulate internet providers more. It's exactly the opposite direction of what happened with the phone system.
By that time, going back on the deal could cause you to lose thousands of dollars in earnest money.
Your approval of the CC&Rs is a contingency that you need to remove. If you don't remove that contingency, it's no different than if the house fails inspection. It's in the seller's interest to get you the CC&Rs ASAP so that you remove that contingency ASAP.
The agents know that if you have access to the bylaws, it lowers your chance of wanting to buy in that subdivision
Maybe you need to find a better agent. A reasonable agent wants to see a smooth sale and wants to see their customers happy.
as no one wants to have the largest investment in their life subject to the desires of some nosy neighbor who has no investment in your property.
Yes, right up to the point where your neighbor has a bunch of junk cars in their front yard, their dogs bark all night, and their weeds invade your landscaping. HOAs are a necessary evil in many circumstances.
How come that you can't put a wooden box on your front yard in the "land of the free"?
You can, if you buy private land. If you buy in an HOA, you cannot.
As a European, I find this "if you don't want to conform, don't buy a home there" stance - why, indeed the very notion of these so-called "homeowner associations" - as yet another proof that Americans are crazy.
This works exactly the same way in Europe: you can buy private land, and there are a variety of restrictions, easements, and rules depending on where you buy.
Learn something about the world around you before spouting such nonsense.
So, what you say is NOT always true. They often do change the rules AFTER the fact
They often do. But the rules by which they do that are also spelled out. When you buy property inside an association, you agree to abide both by current restrictions and by future restrictions instituted according to the rules.
Realtors often gloss over the HOA's authority except to tell you if there are any dues.
It's really not the realtor's function to make sure you understand what you're buying.
Besides, the REAL details of the HOA are in the deed restrictions and in the 5+ closings in two separate states I've attended in my lifetime I've NEVER seen them in the stack of paperwork.
You ask the seller to provide them or to state in writing that there are none. If he isn't willing to do that, you don't buy. Simple as that. In addition, you can insure against unexpected restrictions and easements.
Personally, I think HOA's are an OK idea that has been made into a really bad one by the builders who use them. My primary problem with them is that they NEVER ever end.
For developments with shared private common areas, HOAs necessarily cannot end. For others, they frequently end when building has been completed.
Ultimately, it's entirely up to you. If you don't like an HOA, just buy private land and build on it yourself. It's not rocket science.
If you don't get the bylaws before you buy, and sign them before you buy, then you aren't bound by them
That's wrong. It's the seller's responsibility to ensure that the buyer is aware of the CC&Rs. If the seller fails in that responsibility, he may be liable to the buyer because the buyer didn't get what he thought he was paying for. But the CC&Rs still apply.
Not in my case. I didn't see the bylaws of my HOA until I had been it's president for 18 months.
You should have asked for the CC&Rs when you bought the place. If you didn't, it's your fault. If you did and the seller put in writing that they were none, it's his fault and he is liable.
HOAs are evil, in that they are perfectly constructed to set neighbor against neighbor. We would be better off without them.
Well, if they'd stop forcing NASA to get hijacked by other interests, and just do makes sense for space exploration, then they wouldn't have this problem.
And if pigs could fly...
NASA did great back in the 60s when they were given a single, simple mission, land men on the moon, and given the proper funding to do so
Landing men on the moon was a useless stunt and has held space exploration back by decades.
NASA had no choice but to be wasteful and inefficient. The military forced them to. The only reason the Space Shuttle happened is because the military wanted a way to not only launch secret spy satellites, but to be able to recapture them and bring them back intact.
Oh, the military. Plus congressional boondoggles. Plus the public, who wanted to see "American heroes in space". Who cares what the reasons were and are, the fact remains that public funding for NASA does not give us a good return on investment in terms of space exploration because agencies like NASA will always get hijacked by other interests.
A completely different approach would be, for example, to hold those who make statements accountable for them. And this should apply to advertisements as well. And even to "indirect" statements like (publicly) pointing to a research paper.
Yes, that's been tried: putting government in charge of deciding what is correct and what is incorrect, having government make sure that corporations act in the public interest. The problem is that in order to do that, you end up giving huge amounts of power to a fairly small number of people in government, and they invariably abuse it. It's not hard to see why either: a population that has trouble making good nutritional decisions for themselves has an even harder time figuring out whether their government is working in their interest.
The technical term for having the means of production in private hands but under strong government regulation in the public interest is "fascism", and it's no accident that it has such negative connotations because among the forms of government that have been tried, it is pretty much the worst, because it combines unlimited private greed with unlimited government power. Even socialism is a better system because although it has unlimited and unchecked government power, at least the ability of individuals to enrich themselves is somewhat limited.
The good news is that funding for the space agency is not likely to be slashed below its current $18 billion a year.
I don't see how that is good news. NASA has been incredibly wasteful and inefficient in their use of funding (just look at the space shuttle program). The well run programs NASA runs don't excuse the crap they are doing.
I think the whole point was that, with this so-called "research", even the smart people buy crap.
True, lots of smart people buy crap based on erroneous information put out by corporations. But how do you propose to fix that? If you let the government sort out what is good information and bad information, you are relying on a bunch of "smart people" in government. Sometimes they will make good decisions for the entire country. But generally, a few government experts will be much easier to mislead and corrupt for corporations and special interests than an entire free market. So, it's not that the free market is all roses, it's actually pretty bad, but all the alternatives to it are even worse.
A free market is predicated on the lie that people will have open information
No, a free market is only predicated on the idea that economic transactions are voluntary.
People don't just "have" information, they need to get it. Getting information is difficult. It is so difficult that 300 million highly motivated Americans can't do it particularly well, which is why people make lots of bad decisions. But if 300 million highly motivated Americans can't do it, a few thousand government employees in DC are going to be even worse at it. Lack of information is, in fact, precisely why regulation and centralization do not work.
, and that people will not be gaming the system by buying laws and science.
In a free market, there is no "system" to game and no market-relevant "laws" to buy.
and cannot exist -- simply because it ignores the fact that humans will do anything to "win" the game, including cheating.
Yes, humans will always lie and cheat. That includes the humans running government. By advocating a regulated market, therefore, you don't make the lying and cheating go away, you make it much easier for corporations and people to corrupt the system, because instead of pulling the wool over the eyes of 300 million people, all they need to do is corrupt or mislead a few dozen people at the FDA and other agencies. And those people don't just spread bad information to the public, they can and o make bad and harmful policy mandatory.
then you desire the worst possible form of anarcho-capitalism there is.
Yes, I do, because "the worst possible form of anarcho-capitalism there is" is still better than the kind of world you promote, in which corporations run the government in order to force-feed their poisonous crap to everybody.
Electing a strong executive in order to put corporations in their place was exactly the premise that fascist Germany was built on: corporations working for the benefit of the people and the state. That is the form of government you advocate: fascism.
"Free market" also means companies can and should lie to benefit their bottom line and increase profits.
In fact, free speech means that people can lie, including people who happen to run businesses. That's the nature of free speech; apparently, you don't like free speech.
And sue the hell out of anyone who calls them on their lies.
Stupid lawsuits aren't a problem with the free market, they are a problem with a broken legal system.
And that, kids, is precisely why there is not, and never will be, a free market. Because buying your own science is so much more lucrative, and the populace is so damned gullible.
You seem to be a bit confused about the meaning of "free market". In a free market, people are free to choose who to listen to and what to buy. Yes, that means that gullible people buy crap. It also means that smart people aren't forced to buy crap.
Slashdot Mirror
True, more available education is one of the best things for the country. But public funding for education reduces available education and causes prices to rise as a simple glance at actual educational reality shows you.
I mean, most of our secondary school system and much of our tertiary educational system is publicly financed, we have some of the highest per-student K-12 spending in the world (second only to Switzerland), and it's been growing faster than inflation. Is our public education system delivering world-leading results? Have educational outcomes been rapidly improving nationwide? No, obviously not. Therefore, the idea that we can improve education by throwing even more public funding at it is clearly completely at odds with reality.
Absolutely. Which is precisely why we should abolish the broken public educational system and why we should certainly not railroad students for another two years in useless and ineffective institutions.
The vast majority of people have no problem affording a college degree in the US.
http://www.brookings.edu/resea...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/je...
People ending up with high student loan debts and an inability to pay it back are a small number of people who made a series of bad choices, like going to Harvard or Brown, majoring in Women's Studies or Journalism, and paying for it with student loans. If you do something that stupid, you should have to suffer the financial consequences yourself.
"Most of us" could afford it much easier if we didn't have to pay the taxes for it and could instead save the money, and if education was a competitive market place instead of the underperforming public-sector-union hellhole that it is.
That's two years out of the workforce, two years of not paying into retirement, and no benefit, since those students will simply be competing against each other for the same jobs anyway.
And why is he doing it? Not because it helps students, but because it appears to lower youth unemployment and reduces the need for corporations to train people themselves slightly.
It's a gigantic ripoff, both of students and tax payers.
That's pure fiction and fabrication.
So you're saying that regulations currently force people to subsidize a suburban and low density lifestyle and we should have even more of those subsidies. In different words, progressives and liberals who keep whining and complaining about the suburban lifestyle, the lack of public transportation, environmental destruction, lack of high speed Internet, are, in fact, subsidizing the very things they criticize, and the very problems they use to then justify even more subsidies. Thank you for pointing that out so clearly.
Stop abusing language. Government isn't "allowing competition" through net neutrality regulations; after imposing net neutrality regulations, the set of things that companies are allowed to do is smaller than the set of things they can do now. Companies are already allowed to compete in the way net neutrality envisions, they simply (for various practical reasons) choose not to.
Municipalities are not in a position to "compete" because they aren't businesses; they use taxes and public property to subsidize infrastructure, and property owners end up paying for those subsidies. That looks swell to you when you rent a tiny little delapidated apartment, but it doesn't make any sense for people who actually live and invest in a community.
I'm sure I'm not making any sense to you. The problem there is entirely with you.
You appear to live in a fantasy world where city codes magically let you do exactly what you want and HOAs don't. What that really tells me is that you have a knee jerk reaction against any kind of private voluntary contractual agreements (HOAs) but love government-imposed restrictions, up to the point where they actually restrict what you do, when you start whining and complaining about how incompetents, jerks, or corporations have hijacked government.
In reality, city codes vary as widely as CC&Rs, and it's your responsibility to make sure you can live with both the city codes and the CC&Rs before you spend your money. If you don't, you only have yourself to blame.
"I don't mind this. Especially since it will help others who do not have champagne and caviar right now."
I've lived in one of those European FTTH areas. There was a lot of government spending on FTTH. For years, it couldn't be hooked up because the necessary hardware was too expensive, and when it could get hooked up, it wasn't any faster than other Internet access either. The whole thing was a gigantic boondoggle for unions, telecoms manufacturers, and the telecoms industry.
If you're talking about "cheaper" you have to ask "cheaper for who". For the average tax payer, no it isn't cheaper, because they pay a lot in extra taxes for the government subsidies of the infrastructure. And it gets even more expensive because in many cases, FTTH has been an inefficient solution.
Of course, this sort of deal is very appealing to young, educated folks like students who don't pay a lot of taxes but see the lower ISP bills. That's what makes "European" anything so appealing to that group. But even as far as subsidies for young intellectuals go, this kind of crap is a bad way of doing it, because it mostly transfers money into the hands of big corporations and well paid union workers.
Why would you get "real competition" out of increasing government restrictions?
And municipal services are hugely inefficient and costly; they only seem cheap because they are heavily subsidized by home owners.
The reason AT&T had a monopoly wasn't because they were unregulated, it was because the government had granted them a monopoly and kept other people out of the market. Long distance and other services opened up because of de-regulation.
What the FCC is proposing is to regulate internet providers more. It's exactly the opposite direction of what happened with the phone system.
Your approval of the CC&Rs is a contingency that you need to remove. If you don't remove that contingency, it's no different than if the house fails inspection. It's in the seller's interest to get you the CC&Rs ASAP so that you remove that contingency ASAP.
Maybe you need to find a better agent. A reasonable agent wants to see a smooth sale and wants to see their customers happy.
Yes, right up to the point where your neighbor has a bunch of junk cars in their front yard, their dogs bark all night, and their weeds invade your landscaping. HOAs are a necessary evil in many circumstances.
You can, if you buy private land. If you buy in an HOA, you cannot.
This works exactly the same way in Europe: you can buy private land, and there are a variety of restrictions, easements, and rules depending on where you buy.
Learn something about the world around you before spouting such nonsense.
They often do. But the rules by which they do that are also spelled out. When you buy property inside an association, you agree to abide both by current restrictions and by future restrictions instituted according to the rules.
It's really not the realtor's function to make sure you understand what you're buying.
You ask the seller to provide them or to state in writing that there are none. If he isn't willing to do that, you don't buy. Simple as that. In addition, you can insure against unexpected restrictions and easements.
For developments with shared private common areas, HOAs necessarily cannot end. For others, they frequently end when building has been completed.
Ultimately, it's entirely up to you. If you don't like an HOA, just buy private land and build on it yourself. It's not rocket science.
That's wrong. It's the seller's responsibility to ensure that the buyer is aware of the CC&Rs. If the seller fails in that responsibility, he may be liable to the buyer because the buyer didn't get what he thought he was paying for. But the CC&Rs still apply.
You should have asked for the CC&Rs when you bought the place. If you didn't, it's your fault. If you did and the seller put in writing that they were none, it's his fault and he is liable.
You're free to buy in places without HOAs.
That's why you should check the CC&Rs before you buy something somewhere. If you don't like the restrictions, don't buy.
And if pigs could fly...
Landing men on the moon was a useless stunt and has held space exploration back by decades.
Oh, the military. Plus congressional boondoggles. Plus the public, who wanted to see "American heroes in space". Who cares what the reasons were and are, the fact remains that public funding for NASA does not give us a good return on investment in terms of space exploration because agencies like NASA will always get hijacked by other interests.
Yes, that's been tried: putting government in charge of deciding what is correct and what is incorrect, having government make sure that corporations act in the public interest. The problem is that in order to do that, you end up giving huge amounts of power to a fairly small number of people in government, and they invariably abuse it. It's not hard to see why either: a population that has trouble making good nutritional decisions for themselves has an even harder time figuring out whether their government is working in their interest.
The technical term for having the means of production in private hands but under strong government regulation in the public interest is "fascism", and it's no accident that it has such negative connotations because among the forms of government that have been tried, it is pretty much the worst, because it combines unlimited private greed with unlimited government power. Even socialism is a better system because although it has unlimited and unchecked government power, at least the ability of individuals to enrich themselves is somewhat limited.
I don't see how that is good news. NASA has been incredibly wasteful and inefficient in their use of funding (just look at the space shuttle program). The well run programs NASA runs don't excuse the crap they are doing.
True, lots of smart people buy crap based on erroneous information put out by corporations. But how do you propose to fix that? If you let the government sort out what is good information and bad information, you are relying on a bunch of "smart people" in government. Sometimes they will make good decisions for the entire country. But generally, a few government experts will be much easier to mislead and corrupt for corporations and special interests than an entire free market. So, it's not that the free market is all roses, it's actually pretty bad, but all the alternatives to it are even worse.
No, a free market is only predicated on the idea that economic transactions are voluntary.
People don't just "have" information, they need to get it. Getting information is difficult. It is so difficult that 300 million highly motivated Americans can't do it particularly well, which is why people make lots of bad decisions. But if 300 million highly motivated Americans can't do it, a few thousand government employees in DC are going to be even worse at it. Lack of information is, in fact, precisely why regulation and centralization do not work.
In a free market, there is no "system" to game and no market-relevant "laws" to buy.
Yes, humans will always lie and cheat. That includes the humans running government. By advocating a regulated market, therefore, you don't make the lying and cheating go away, you make it much easier for corporations and people to corrupt the system, because instead of pulling the wool over the eyes of 300 million people, all they need to do is corrupt or mislead a few dozen people at the FDA and other agencies. And those people don't just spread bad information to the public, they can and o make bad and harmful policy mandatory.
Yes, I do, because "the worst possible form of anarcho-capitalism there is" is still better than the kind of world you promote, in which corporations run the government in order to force-feed their poisonous crap to everybody.
Electing a strong executive in order to put corporations in their place was exactly the premise that fascist Germany was built on: corporations working for the benefit of the people and the state. That is the form of government you advocate: fascism.
In fact, free speech means that people can lie, including people who happen to run businesses. That's the nature of free speech; apparently, you don't like free speech.
Stupid lawsuits aren't a problem with the free market, they are a problem with a broken legal system.
You seem to be a bit confused about the meaning of "free market". In a free market, people are free to choose who to listen to and what to buy. Yes, that means that gullible people buy crap. It also means that smart people aren't forced to buy crap.