I do understand the concepts. Often, it's religious believers who seem to have missed it.
This conversation appears to be replayed on an infinite loop:
Believer: NO HOMO! Leviticus something-or-other.
Me: New Covenant, Mixed Fibers, Shrimp.
Believer: Oh, right. Something vaguely worded from Paul, not Jesus.
/ time passes
Believer: NO HOMO! Leviticus something-or-other.
It's like they forget. Or they're deliberately forgetting. They can, in theory, make a case based on various Epistles, but it's hard for me to take their exigesis seriously when I have to start fixing the really obvious errors. I'm not supposed to have to be the one to have to point out that New Covenant stuff, or the obvious contradictions in picking and choosing from Leviticus.
And in fact spending that money on better desalinization might be a far more effective project. It would save a lot of lives, and possibly even help stabilize some regions that are making us spend so much money on defense as it is.
Sadly, the bullshit pork projects have powerful defenders, while the most effective measures tend to go unnoticed. An unfortunately common process is to declare that we're going to cut some highly visible and popular project, then have it restored via some "emergency" measure without cutting any of the valueless projects. (In DC, it's called "Washington Monument Syndrome". It's become popular to call "WMS" any time somebody wants to cut your favorite project, even when it's bullshit, but it's also a real thing.)
This is true, but that doesn't mean that we need to spend every dollar defending against them. No amount of defense spending is going to turn them into friends, either.
I can't say how much is the "right amount", but I do know that we're spending the majority of our income tax dollars on it (and some of our social welfare taxes, which are nominally a separate bucket but runs a surplus most years that gets "loaned" to the rest of the budget). And that sum is considerably more than all of our nominal enemies put together. If even the tiniest reduction is to be seen as "weakness", then we are truly boned and may as well give up.
As the top-level post noted, even a 1% cut spent instead on science and technology would be a vast boon to those fields, while leaving us massively outspending our national enemies and still devoting a substantial chunk of our gross national product to defending against the non-state enemies. With the considerable possible bonus of economic benefits that increase our total income and even develop technologies that we can put to defending against our enemies in economic and technological rather than purely military ways.
I think H3 (tritium) was intended, though still, it's magical thinking that even an infinite free supply of the stuff solves our energy problems with either current or foreseeable tech.
I think a lot of the worst hypocrisies come from different people speaking up at different times. You'll rarely catch one individual being quite so blatant about it.
That said, there are also a lot of individuals who write software and grumble that their bosses don't give it away, not realizing that if they did, they'd be out of a job. Many are counting on the fact that their software is specialized, such that nobody else would particularly want it, and can smugly believe their jobs to be safe while the people who write software with wide appeal (games, infrastructure) would have the same safety.
It's a bit more to it than that. It's actually done with a new opcode in the underlying JVM, which allows them to implement those classes without having to construct new inner classes for each. There were cases where large numbers of nearly-identical inner classes were costing too much memory in certain parts of the JVM, and the new opcode makes that more efficient. (This was more a problem for Scala than for Java itself.)
But yeah, from a Java perspective, it's just syntactic sugar for anonymous inner classes. It's a particularly nice piece of syntactic sugar, since it makes the code more robust to certain kinds of changes by eliminating redundancy. You could, for example, change the name of the implemented class or the name of the method without breaking every lambda. Plus, it's nice to have that redundancy gone: a good IDE could resolve some of it for you but it makes the code more verbose than is strictly required.
There, I sure can't help ya. I found it pretty interesting; it's more relevant to my interests than much of what Slashdot has done of late. But you're absolutely right that there's a whole passel of science of equal interest that gets ignored, while fluff that I find uninteresting (or worse) gets there day after day.
I originally thought that Slashdot had the most insightful scientific and technical commentary on the web. The articles of moderate interest were greatly enhanced by other scientists with a close familiarity. I've found that to be substantially worse for the past couple of years, and I don't think that's the usual rose-colored-glasses about "the good old days" that makes every popular web site seem to degenerate over time. I believe that the quality of commenters is worse.
Which is to say... I have no idea why this article got picked out. I'd have liked to have seen better commentary that would put it in better context. I personally would rather see more like this, not less, but that's just my taste. I can't conceive of what's driving the editing selections, and I do think that they, too, are worse than formerly.
We knew all along that we were the final cause. The question was whether they had been declining before that.
That was the thesis of this paper, which concluded (based on diversity of mitochondrial DNA) that the species had declined considerably before humans arrived.
That was in 2004; ten years later, a different analysis concludes that the moa were not in fact as numerous as the 2004 paper thought, and the number had in fact been pretty stable. It was only when humans arrived that the number dropped.
Even the 2004 paper didn't let humans off the hook, but it suggested that moas were already vulnerable.
It's more about the use than the age. After all, NYC isn't any older than Boston, but it has a very different development history.
NYC is an island: when people say "NYC" they mean "Manhattan". It was a manufacturing hub all through the 19th century, having access to both materials and markets through its ports. There were bridges, but they could only carry so many people per day, and labor tended to concentrate on the island itself.
Further, it was a major port of entry for foreign arrivals, many of whom found homes in the Manhattan slums, which had very high density. They proceeded to work for those factories, most famously as sweatshops.
That concentration became self-affirming: the wealth and need for capital made it a financial center in the 20th century, and the limited land made it build up instead of out. It did develop suburbs in Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island, and they look a lot like suburbs elsewhere, but they're not what people think of when they say "New York City".
Boston was also based around its harbor, but its geography meant that the manufacturing moved out of the city proper. They built up famous manufacturing suburbs like Lowell, where the land was cheaper. The city is more spread out; it's more akin to European cities than most in America but it still doesn't have the intensive concentration of NYC.
NYC still spread out fast enough that it needed a public transportation system, and farsighted city planners built it one of the best subways in the world. These helped connect what became (in later decades) the skyscraper boom. That makes NYC very different from European cities, which were designed around walkability between relatively low buildings from centuries past.
Er... hadn't meant to launch into a dissertation. Thanks for reading this far...
If that's the only definition they give, then it's wrong. Anarchism isn't a single political theory; it's a collection of numerous (sometimes only tenuously related) political theories.
The Wikipedia article is actually pretty good. And it begins with "Anarchy has more than one definition."
They're actually better as individuals than as a group. It's more about the dynamics between Republicans and Democrats than about either group running the country into the ground by itself. There are sincere disagreements about what has to be done, and any attempt to make progress on the things that do get wide agreement are met with accusations of collaboration by extremist minorities.
For which I blame the Republicans far, far more than Democrats, though they are not innocent of it. In part as a reaction to Republican extremism, though not entirely. I don't want to let them off the hook, but when I'm looking for solutions, they all start with ceasing to have elections between "the stupid party" and the "at least we're not completely insane" party.
It's mandatory from the President's point of view. He can't change legislation. The best he could do is to propose new legislation and budget based on that, and some articles on the subject were disappointed that he didn't. But I think it's politically astute in an era where he could copy the last Republican proposal verbatim and still have it declared "socialism" as soon as it hit print.
There are a lot of ways to curb mandatory spending, but the budget isn't the right place to sort them out. It should be done as a separate legislative effort. But it won't happen in an election year, because even talking about reducing spending on these programs is toxic. Obama himself isn't up for election, but all of the Representatives and a third of the Senators are, and none of them wants to talk about it.
The biggest jump was 2008-2009, a budget proposed by Bush, not Obama. Much of this has been dealing with the economic crisis; other parts are dealing with an increasing retired population. This is a problem that any President would have faced, and it's wishful thinking that McCain or Romney had some magical solution. Maybe they would have, maybe not. They certainly wouldn't have faced a Congress who can't take "yes" for an answer, and where newspapers don't even bother writing the standard "Dead on arrival" story for each budget because it's too obvious.
We can do better. We should have done better. But I've got no interest in hatchet-job newspaper articles that are more about ideological carping than sound analysis.
mandatory (adj): Obligatory; required or commanded by authority.
As the article points out, most of this is going to mandatory programs, which would be the same even if it were Romney or McCain or Sarah Fucking Palin in office.
What this means, for those dumb enough to believe what they read in IBD, is that what Obama has achieved is to reduce the amount of spending on the discretionary side. Agriculture, down 8%. HHS, down 7.6%. Even Homeland Security, down 2.8%. The Pentagon is down over $100 billion.
But hey, by all means, let's make sure that this looks like Obama's doing a bad job, because that was clearly the author's goal before he wrote it. The rest is just a matter of selecting the data until it proves what you wanted it to prove.
When we hear a serious discussion of how to cut benefits (something other than "the poor should die" and "let's give it all to Wall Street, because they're so freaking responsible"), we can have an actual conversation. But articles like this show why anything from Obama, no matter how reasonable, is doomed even before it gets printed.
Step 2 would have to be "flood the world with extra light", because a pinhole camera does a great job of focusing but doesn't bring in a lot of light.
That said... pinhole eyeglasses are a real thing. They're mostly quackery, aimed at reducing the amount of light from a computer display screen and supposedly "strengthening the eye", but that's rubbish.
I find this just a bit ironic, laughing at him for not knowing the terminology, while having literally no conception of what his job is or what it entails.
Should the guy know what an ISP is? Yeah, sure. Maybe he's not competent because he doesn't know. But do you have any conception of what else his job involves? Do you know who else might have been sent to do it? Do you know who else is on the team, buttressing his weaknesses? Do you have even the faintest conception of what it even means to "negotiate cybersecurity with China"?
Government is a job, like any other job, in that it involves some highly specialized and specific requirements that look like irrelevant trivia to people not doing it. You're all programmers here, and I'm sure you get irritated when somebody dismisses some vastly complex task as a "simple matter of programming". It seems a little rich to be so unaware that the same goes for everybody else's job, even a "government job". The overwhelming majority of what you hear about "the government" is frank BS. I'd feel a lot safer if the voters took a bit more effort to understand what the government actually does and why. Hearing the same kind of Fox News-level anti-government propaganda from this supposedly-smarter echo chamber does not fill me with confidence./dons asbestos undies
I'd argue that it's *precisely* what it's there for. Every single law is there to define and guide your behavior. Most people think it's a good thing to guide you away from murder, theft, rape, arson, etc. It's widely thought to be necessary to live in together in a society; these laws are essentially universal in first-world societies.
The question isn't whether, but how much. Pigovian taxes (ones to encourage/discourage behavior rather than raise revenue) are a gentler method of limiting behavior than banning it outright. It's a good way to resolve tragedies-of-the-commons issues, another thing widely thought to be a reasonable province of government. When everybody doing exactly what's best for them leads to worse outcomes for everybody, we agree to abide by restrictions that leave everybody better off.
It's not always as obvious as regulating access to grazing land. It's an open question of whether we want to treat this as a commons to be managed, and if we do, whether a Pigovian tax is the best way to gently manage it while allowing market forces to continue to operate. But it's hard to take seriously the proposition that government has automatically no place in the question.
Which begs the question as to whether the canabinoids are effective or the placebo effect is what is being observed.
It also brings up the question of why they didn't try an inhaled version rather than an oral version. Marijuana is known to have antiemetic benefits, for example, and delivering it via the lungs is both faster and avoids the problem of vomiting up the drug before it's absorbed. Pills are not the best way to deliver antiemetics; the leading anti-nausea drug (Ondansetron) is frequently delivered rectally or via IV. Delivery by inhalation has substantial advantages.
I really don't know why there aren't inhaled versions. I don't know if it's because research indicated that it wouldn't work, or if it's because it's so difficult to experiment on THC-derived compounds that nobody wanted to put forth the effort.
It is *not* the miracle drug that its proponents like to pretend it is, but it seems to be better than placebo for various indications and has the advantage of being cheap. And it would be readily available, were it not for laws preventing that. Since it appears to be no more dangerous than other commonly-available drugs, I don't see why it remains a Schedule I drug.
It undercuts the local affiliates, some of which are owned by the networks themselves and others have exclusivity contracts with the networks. It's the affiliates (and their ability to insert local advertising) who lose out. And since there's still a chunk of the market that only gets OTA signals, the broadcasters and affiliates are reluctant to give that up.
Part of the government would be only too happy to let OTA die and reclaim the bandwidth, but other parts are protective of that fraction of the country who only get that signal. They are poor and frequently rural, and they don't want them to be left out.
And bonus: these taxes are specifically excluded when people say "the poor pay no income tax". The poor actually pay a fair bit of tax, and as far as your paycheck is concerned, the "withholding" line looks just like the "FICA" lines. At low wages, the former is tiny, while the latter is quite large. On a rich person's paycheck, the latter is capped so that it comes to practically nothing. Or they'll be paid in forms other than paychecks, so that it IS literally nothing.
But when your goal is to "prove" that the poor are all lazy degenerates, only the former line counts as "taxes" and the latter is ignored.
They often seem oddly ignorant of existing market failures. BTC fans crave a fixed standard for currency, apparently unaware of the numerous market panics the US suffered while on the gold standard.
That's not to justify our existing plan, or even necessarily to criticize the idea of BTC. But we're not going to be able to hold a cogent argument when they can't agree on even the most basic and most obvious facts. Coming to me with a one-dimensional supply-and-demand model from the first three weeks of Econ 101 is a clear signal that they haven't thought about it deeply, but stopped when they got to the lesson that proved what they wanted it to prove.
Slashdot Mirror
I do understand the concepts. Often, it's religious believers who seem to have missed it.
This conversation appears to be replayed on an infinite loop:
Believer: NO HOMO! Leviticus something-or-other.
Me: New Covenant, Mixed Fibers, Shrimp.
Believer: Oh, right. Something vaguely worded from Paul, not Jesus.
/ time passes
Believer: NO HOMO! Leviticus something-or-other.
It's like they forget. Or they're deliberately forgetting. They can, in theory, make a case based on various Epistles, but it's hard for me to take their exigesis seriously when I have to start fixing the really obvious errors. I'm not supposed to have to be the one to have to point out that New Covenant stuff, or the obvious contradictions in picking and choosing from Leviticus.
Yes, I was counting only individual income tax. Thanks for the numbers.
And in fact spending that money on better desalinization might be a far more effective project. It would save a lot of lives, and possibly even help stabilize some regions that are making us spend so much money on defense as it is.
Sadly, the bullshit pork projects have powerful defenders, while the most effective measures tend to go unnoticed. An unfortunately common process is to declare that we're going to cut some highly visible and popular project, then have it restored via some "emergency" measure without cutting any of the valueless projects. (In DC, it's called "Washington Monument Syndrome". It's become popular to call "WMS" any time somebody wants to cut your favorite project, even when it's bullshit, but it's also a real thing.)
This is true, but that doesn't mean that we need to spend every dollar defending against them. No amount of defense spending is going to turn them into friends, either.
I can't say how much is the "right amount", but I do know that we're spending the majority of our income tax dollars on it (and some of our social welfare taxes, which are nominally a separate bucket but runs a surplus most years that gets "loaned" to the rest of the budget). And that sum is considerably more than all of our nominal enemies put together. If even the tiniest reduction is to be seen as "weakness", then we are truly boned and may as well give up.
As the top-level post noted, even a 1% cut spent instead on science and technology would be a vast boon to those fields, while leaving us massively outspending our national enemies and still devoting a substantial chunk of our gross national product to defending against the non-state enemies. With the considerable possible bonus of economic benefits that increase our total income and even develop technologies that we can put to defending against our enemies in economic and technological rather than purely military ways.
I think H3 (tritium) was intended, though still, it's magical thinking that even an infinite free supply of the stuff solves our energy problems with either current or foreseeable tech.
I think a lot of the worst hypocrisies come from different people speaking up at different times. You'll rarely catch one individual being quite so blatant about it.
That said, there are also a lot of individuals who write software and grumble that their bosses don't give it away, not realizing that if they did, they'd be out of a job. Many are counting on the fact that their software is specialized, such that nobody else would particularly want it, and can smugly believe their jobs to be safe while the people who write software with wide appeal (games, infrastructure) would have the same safety.
It's a bit more to it than that. It's actually done with a new opcode in the underlying JVM, which allows them to implement those classes without having to construct new inner classes for each. There were cases where large numbers of nearly-identical inner classes were costing too much memory in certain parts of the JVM, and the new opcode makes that more efficient. (This was more a problem for Scala than for Java itself.)
But yeah, from a Java perspective, it's just syntactic sugar for anonymous inner classes. It's a particularly nice piece of syntactic sugar, since it makes the code more robust to certain kinds of changes by eliminating redundancy. You could, for example, change the name of the implemented class or the name of the method without breaking every lambda. Plus, it's nice to have that redundancy gone: a good IDE could resolve some of it for you but it makes the code more verbose than is strictly required.
There, I sure can't help ya. I found it pretty interesting; it's more relevant to my interests than much of what Slashdot has done of late. But you're absolutely right that there's a whole passel of science of equal interest that gets ignored, while fluff that I find uninteresting (or worse) gets there day after day.
I originally thought that Slashdot had the most insightful scientific and technical commentary on the web. The articles of moderate interest were greatly enhanced by other scientists with a close familiarity. I've found that to be substantially worse for the past couple of years, and I don't think that's the usual rose-colored-glasses about "the good old days" that makes every popular web site seem to degenerate over time. I believe that the quality of commenters is worse.
Which is to say... I have no idea why this article got picked out. I'd have liked to have seen better commentary that would put it in better context. I personally would rather see more like this, not less, but that's just my taste. I can't conceive of what's driving the editing selections, and I do think that they, too, are worse than formerly.
We knew all along that we were the final cause. The question was whether they had been declining before that.
That was the thesis of this paper, which concluded (based on diversity of mitochondrial DNA) that the species had declined considerably before humans arrived.
That was in 2004; ten years later, a different analysis concludes that the moa were not in fact as numerous as the 2004 paper thought, and the number had in fact been pretty stable. It was only when humans arrived that the number dropped.
Even the 2004 paper didn't let humans off the hook, but it suggested that moas were already vulnerable.
It's more about the use than the age. After all, NYC isn't any older than Boston, but it has a very different development history.
NYC is an island: when people say "NYC" they mean "Manhattan". It was a manufacturing hub all through the 19th century, having access to both materials and markets through its ports. There were bridges, but they could only carry so many people per day, and labor tended to concentrate on the island itself.
Further, it was a major port of entry for foreign arrivals, many of whom found homes in the Manhattan slums, which had very high density. They proceeded to work for those factories, most famously as sweatshops.
That concentration became self-affirming: the wealth and need for capital made it a financial center in the 20th century, and the limited land made it build up instead of out. It did develop suburbs in Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island, and they look a lot like suburbs elsewhere, but they're not what people think of when they say "New York City".
Boston was also based around its harbor, but its geography meant that the manufacturing moved out of the city proper. They built up famous manufacturing suburbs like Lowell, where the land was cheaper. The city is more spread out; it's more akin to European cities than most in America but it still doesn't have the intensive concentration of NYC.
NYC still spread out fast enough that it needed a public transportation system, and farsighted city planners built it one of the best subways in the world. These helped connect what became (in later decades) the skyscraper boom. That makes NYC very different from European cities, which were designed around walkability between relatively low buildings from centuries past.
Er... hadn't meant to launch into a dissertation. Thanks for reading this far...
If that's the only definition they give, then it's wrong. Anarchism isn't a single political theory; it's a collection of numerous (sometimes only tenuously related) political theories.
The Wikipedia article is actually pretty good. And it begins with "Anarchy has more than one definition."
They're actually better as individuals than as a group. It's more about the dynamics between Republicans and Democrats than about either group running the country into the ground by itself. There are sincere disagreements about what has to be done, and any attempt to make progress on the things that do get wide agreement are met with accusations of collaboration by extremist minorities.
For which I blame the Republicans far, far more than Democrats, though they are not innocent of it. In part as a reaction to Republican extremism, though not entirely. I don't want to let them off the hook, but when I'm looking for solutions, they all start with ceasing to have elections between "the stupid party" and the "at least we're not completely insane" party.
It's mandatory from the President's point of view. He can't change legislation. The best he could do is to propose new legislation and budget based on that, and some articles on the subject were disappointed that he didn't. But I think it's politically astute in an era where he could copy the last Republican proposal verbatim and still have it declared "socialism" as soon as it hit print.
There are a lot of ways to curb mandatory spending, but the budget isn't the right place to sort them out. It should be done as a separate legislative effort. But it won't happen in an election year, because even talking about reducing spending on these programs is toxic. Obama himself isn't up for election, but all of the Representatives and a third of the Senators are, and none of them wants to talk about it.
Maybe next year. But probably not.
You would have done well if you'd gone on to actually cite them and clarify them rather than just dropping in a one-liner.
The biggest jump was 2008-2009, a budget proposed by Bush, not Obama. Much of this has been dealing with the economic crisis; other parts are dealing with an increasing retired population. This is a problem that any President would have faced, and it's wishful thinking that McCain or Romney had some magical solution. Maybe they would have, maybe not. They certainly wouldn't have faced a Congress who can't take "yes" for an answer, and where newspapers don't even bother writing the standard "Dead on arrival" story for each budget because it's too obvious.
We can do better. We should have done better. But I've got no interest in hatchet-job newspaper articles that are more about ideological carping than sound analysis.
mandatory (adj): Obligatory; required or commanded by authority.
As the article points out, most of this is going to mandatory programs, which would be the same even if it were Romney or McCain or Sarah Fucking Palin in office.
What this means, for those dumb enough to believe what they read in IBD, is that what Obama has achieved is to reduce the amount of spending on the discretionary side. Agriculture, down 8%. HHS, down 7.6%. Even Homeland Security, down 2.8%. The Pentagon is down over $100 billion.
But hey, by all means, let's make sure that this looks like Obama's doing a bad job, because that was clearly the author's goal before he wrote it. The rest is just a matter of selecting the data until it proves what you wanted it to prove.
When we hear a serious discussion of how to cut benefits (something other than "the poor should die" and "let's give it all to Wall Street, because they're so freaking responsible"), we can have an actual conversation. But articles like this show why anything from Obama, no matter how reasonable, is doomed even before it gets printed.
Step 2 would have to be "flood the world with extra light", because a pinhole camera does a great job of focusing but doesn't bring in a lot of light.
That said... pinhole eyeglasses are a real thing. They're mostly quackery, aimed at reducing the amount of light from a computer display screen and supposedly "strengthening the eye", but that's rubbish.
I find this just a bit ironic, laughing at him for not knowing the terminology, while having literally no conception of what his job is or what it entails.
Should the guy know what an ISP is? Yeah, sure. Maybe he's not competent because he doesn't know. But do you have any conception of what else his job involves? Do you know who else might have been sent to do it? Do you know who else is on the team, buttressing his weaknesses? Do you have even the faintest conception of what it even means to "negotiate cybersecurity with China"?
Government is a job, like any other job, in that it involves some highly specialized and specific requirements that look like irrelevant trivia to people not doing it. You're all programmers here, and I'm sure you get irritated when somebody dismisses some vastly complex task as a "simple matter of programming". It seems a little rich to be so unaware that the same goes for everybody else's job, even a "government job". The overwhelming majority of what you hear about "the government" is frank BS. I'd feel a lot safer if the voters took a bit more effort to understand what the government actually does and why. Hearing the same kind of Fox News-level anti-government propaganda from this supposedly-smarter echo chamber does not fill me with confidence. /dons asbestos undies
I'd argue that it's *precisely* what it's there for. Every single law is there to define and guide your behavior. Most people think it's a good thing to guide you away from murder, theft, rape, arson, etc. It's widely thought to be necessary to live in together in a society; these laws are essentially universal in first-world societies.
The question isn't whether, but how much. Pigovian taxes (ones to encourage/discourage behavior rather than raise revenue) are a gentler method of limiting behavior than banning it outright. It's a good way to resolve tragedies-of-the-commons issues, another thing widely thought to be a reasonable province of government. When everybody doing exactly what's best for them leads to worse outcomes for everybody, we agree to abide by restrictions that leave everybody better off.
It's not always as obvious as regulating access to grazing land. It's an open question of whether we want to treat this as a commons to be managed, and if we do, whether a Pigovian tax is the best way to gently manage it while allowing market forces to continue to operate. But it's hard to take seriously the proposition that government has automatically no place in the question.
Which begs the question as to whether the canabinoids are effective or the placebo effect is what is being observed.
It also brings up the question of why they didn't try an inhaled version rather than an oral version. Marijuana is known to have antiemetic benefits, for example, and delivering it via the lungs is both faster and avoids the problem of vomiting up the drug before it's absorbed. Pills are not the best way to deliver antiemetics; the leading anti-nausea drug (Ondansetron) is frequently delivered rectally or via IV. Delivery by inhalation has substantial advantages.
I really don't know why there aren't inhaled versions. I don't know if it's because research indicated that it wouldn't work, or if it's because it's so difficult to experiment on THC-derived compounds that nobody wanted to put forth the effort.
It is *not* the miracle drug that its proponents like to pretend it is, but it seems to be better than placebo for various indications and has the advantage of being cheap. And it would be readily available, were it not for laws preventing that. Since it appears to be no more dangerous than other commonly-available drugs, I don't see why it remains a Schedule I drug.
Er, yes, I just realized that upon further research. I withdraw my comment, and return to being baffled.
It undercuts the local affiliates, some of which are owned by the networks themselves and others have exclusivity contracts with the networks. It's the affiliates (and their ability to insert local advertising) who lose out. And since there's still a chunk of the market that only gets OTA signals, the broadcasters and affiliates are reluctant to give that up.
Part of the government would be only too happy to let OTA die and reclaim the bandwidth, but other parts are protective of that fraction of the country who only get that signal. They are poor and frequently rural, and they don't want them to be left out.
And bonus: these taxes are specifically excluded when people say "the poor pay no income tax". The poor actually pay a fair bit of tax, and as far as your paycheck is concerned, the "withholding" line looks just like the "FICA" lines. At low wages, the former is tiny, while the latter is quite large. On a rich person's paycheck, the latter is capped so that it comes to practically nothing. Or they'll be paid in forms other than paychecks, so that it IS literally nothing.
But when your goal is to "prove" that the poor are all lazy degenerates, only the former line counts as "taxes" and the latter is ignored.
They often seem oddly ignorant of existing market failures. BTC fans crave a fixed standard for currency, apparently unaware of the numerous market panics the US suffered while on the gold standard.
That's not to justify our existing plan, or even necessarily to criticize the idea of BTC. But we're not going to be able to hold a cogent argument when they can't agree on even the most basic and most obvious facts. Coming to me with a one-dimensional supply-and-demand model from the first three weeks of Econ 101 is a clear signal that they haven't thought about it deeply, but stopped when they got to the lesson that proved what they wanted it to prove.