I don't see any reason to complicate the issue by bringing AI into it. Jobs get created and destroyed all time time for lots of reasons. For example, lots of companies are eliminating cashier and checker jobs in favor of self-service kiosks/self-checkout/mobile apps. Is that because technology and AI became good enough and cheaper? Because the minimum wage went up? Because customers prefer self-checkout? Because it improves throughput? Who knows? I certainly don't.
If we want to help re-train people who lose their job, that's all well and good. I don't see any reason to make a special case for people displaced by AI. And I strongly suspect it would be very hard to really determine who was displaced by AI and who wasn't.
Nice strawman, Mark. Of course not. I said you have to have some reasonable proof of harm to restrict my liberty. Nitric acid counts. Carbonic acid, not so much. 0.000001 molar nitric acid, also probably not an issue.
I know, degree of harm is a really difficult and subtle concept. If you think really, really hard, maybe you'll get it.
We cannot answer the first question because the manufacturers won't tell us.
Gee, if only there were a device you could use to measure the components of a vapor. And if only there were well known techniques for measuring a statistically relevant sample of e-cig vapors to get a general idea of what's in them. I guess it's a hopelessly complicated problem and we're helpless unless the companies report their product contents.
I'd like to point out that this is quite a bit different from an outright ban.
Of course it is. It's a full ban in some (most?) public spaces but allows vaping in private spaces. No one is disputing the fact of that.
That's an oversimplification.
Can you make a water mist without putting energy in? Most e-cigarettes have high temperature elements in them to create that mist, while the mist may be mostly water vapor there is plenty of other stuff in there that combusted in the high temperature environment created by the device.
So I honestly have no data about the physics of how an e-cig works. However, I'd be very, very suprised if there are anywhere near the reactions going on in a battery powered e-cig versus combusting tobacco. If I were building an e-cig, I'd use the lowest power possible to vaporize the fluid. I'd keep the temperature to the bare minimum I could because I want to maximize the battery life. Heck, I'm surprised they use heat and not ultrasonics. But I'd be really, really surprised if any chemical reactions at all occur, let alone combustion or ionization. Do you have any reason to believe otherwise?
Remember also, tobacco is a plant. Plants are insanely complicated with thousands of interesting compounds. Combustion in a cigarette is also a really commplicated and it generates thousands of other compounds. Vaping fluid is likely distilled water, nicotine, and a dozen or so other additives. I suspect you can count the number of detectable chemicals on your fingers and toes. That's orders of magnitudes simpler than what's in tobacco smoke.
Amen. The straightforward way to address this is to allow any and all comers who want to provide internet access in SF (or anywhere) free reign to build and sell their product. If fiber to the home is so valuable, someone will be greedy enough (read: "will spot an underserved market opportunity") to want the easy bucks. And we all win.
I don't see the disagreement. Tobacco use is banned in public places in New York state for the same reason. I was pointing out that people can still kill themselves with e-cigarettes in their own home, car, and other private places all they want.
My bad, I misread your comment. I though you wrote "the law isn't telling people what they can't do."
The problem though is that the e-cigarettes are the ultimate moving target for safety. There are thousands of different cocktails available for them on the market today, and almost none of them list their contents. Once we show that one is toxic what do we do about the rest of them? Even if cocktail "ABC1" was shown toxic, how would you know if the guy next to you is smoking "ABC1", "ABC2", or "XYZ28"? You simply don't know that, and the user might not know - or care - if their favorite blend has been proven toxic.
True, but I still don't know we have any idea whether the vapor has any practical toxicity. OK, it has formaldehyde in it. How much? And is it enough to have any effect? We accept lots of risks in our daily lives (just crossing the street is dangerous) and I don't think we consider how risky things are absolute terms before banning them.
I'm also bothered by the frequent comparison between vaping and smoking. They're incredibly different. One involves burning a plant and producing tons of definitively-proven harmful compounds. The other involves vaporizing water with nicotine and trace flavoring chemicals. That mist you see? It's not combustion particles, it's water droplets. It's fog. To my mind, vaping better compared to cologne than smoking. How much do we regulate (or concern ourselves) with the potentially toxic chemicals in perfume?
That's an overstatement, there. The law isn't telling people they can't do it, rather it is saying that the rest of society has the right to not be exposed to it involuntarily (as is also the case with regular tobacco smoke). You can still smoke it in your private home, or in your private car, or in other private places. Those who are intelligent enough to not smoke this should not be forcibly exposed to the toxic brew that is produces.
No, the law is quite definitely telling people they may not vape in public places.
I really like having smoking bans but I'm also not at all comfortable with the rationale. We assumed that second-hand smoke was dangerous. I don't know how well supported that was. But at the time, the believe was that we had hard proof that second-hand smoke really did endanger people. That was a strong enough case to overcome our presumption that people should be at liberty to behave the way they want unless there's a very compelling reason to limit it.
What many other posters are saying is we have no such evidence in the vaping case. Maybe the vapor is harmful, maybe it's no more toxic than normal city air. I honestly have no idea. But until someone produces some reasonably strong evidence, we should be quite hesitant to ban it.
(No, we shouldn't follow a strict precautionary principle where you ban anything you can't prove is safe. You can't ever prove something is safe. All you can do is look at it and say it seems safer or less safe than other risks we already accept, like the air pollution in a typical environment. I haven't heard anyone make a case that the chemicals in vape vapor is more or less harmful than ordinary air.)
I don't care if you think it's safe, I don't want it. If you could do it without exhaling and all the second hand vape, people wouldn't mind. I don't want to know that today is your caramel day and yesterday was peppermint.
It's a free country, or at least it used to be. You not liking something isn't sufficient grounds to ban it. IMHO, if you want to ban something, you have the onus to prove there's a reason to restrict my liberty.
You[r] stench may be pleasing to you, but nobody else, and your figurative fist is touching my literal nose. Isn't that the libertarian line in the sand?
No, actually. The libertarian line in the sand is a literal fist hitting your literal nose. There's a huge difference between a figurative and literal fist. I find many T-shirts offensive to my eyes. I find many smells objectionable. But we as a country value liberty, which means a figurative fist isn't enough.
When we lose local news and radio, we lose one more check against corporate control of information. Yes, your right that we already sort of lost it a long time ago, since groups kept buying up all the stations. I haven't kept up with local news lately, and that is a shame. I remember it covered local issues well. We need the small and independent voices.
Amen brother. I'm entirely with you that having many small voices is a good thing. Having a local station which focuses on local issues is valuable. I can't affect things happening at the state or national level, but if I show up at a city counsel meeting, I might change some minds. As TV stations consolidate and fire local staff (which is what this is all about, getting rid of local facilities and staff), we will lose those voices.
What I would hope is the station groups would figure out that having nothing but the national evening news isn't a very compelling product and that ratings will plunge when they implement it. Personally, I stopped watching the national TV news first and gave up watching local TV news last. In the mean time, I'll open the San Jose Local News YouTube channel to screw the national networks.
Voters have direct control over who is their Government.
I only have indirect control over who represents me in government. In practice, I have no control because I live in heavily partisan districts where the candidate from the Democratic party is virtually guaranteed to win.
The only way to exercise that same control over the corporations is to have lots of money and buy the result you want. Corporations are more dangerous, because we have less control over them.
There's a key difference. I can choose to not buy a product from any given corporation. No one can force me to watch NBC. There are very, very few situations where there really is an absolute monopoly over something you really must have. In fact, many people will assert such monopolies virtually never occur without some sort of government interference preventing competitors from entering the market. There's some logic to that. Once a company has a monopoly, they tend to get sloppy and try to earn exceptionally large profits, which provides a window for a competitor to come in and undercut them. I have no data to support or refute this assertion other than looking around and seeing competitors anywhere a government doesn't grant an exclusive monopoly.
The difference is libertarian idiots scream loudly whenever the government might tell them what to do, and are stunningly silent when a corporation has that same power or worse.
The libertarian perspective is that I can vote with my dollars or simply choose to not participate in broadcast media. I think most media companies care about dollars more than politicians care about votes. I also can't opt out of participating in a government edict.
Personally I live in very Democratic districts and state (CA). None of my elected politicians has to give a rat's ass about my opinion. They know they'll get re-elected regardless of what I think.
If I don't like what CBS/NBC/ABC/Fox/PBS is broadcasting through my local station, I can use DirecTV, Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, or any number of other media outlets. There's a ton of competition to keep companies honest and the most important competition isn't the other local stations. It's satellite and Internet streaming services.
Amen, brother. It's not a race. We all with with clean, safe nuclear and well-made long range electric cars. In the long run, it doesn't matter much where they're designed, built, or deployed.
How is this bad for humanity? Talking about this in terms of a race with winners and losers totally obscures the big pictures with parochialism and tribal loyalty.
Political boundaries have little to no meaning in terms of economics, human welfare, or the state of the environment. All of humanity is a winner if we produce cleaner energy with less environmental impact. As an American, I'd be delighted to buy a well made, inexpensive, reliable, long range electric car regardless of whether it's made by Tesla (a dozen miles from my home) or Beijing.
If I were an a EV producer, yeah, I'd care. But the producers are totally outnumbered by the consumers who win either way.
I haven't actually seen the Apple UI. I would hope there's a label telling you that the WiFI or Bluetooth button means "disconnect". When I go to turn these off, it's generally because (a) I'm on an airplane or (b) my battery is running low and I want to conserve power. In both cases, what I intended was to turn the radios off. Maybe I'm weird. When I do want to disconnect from the crummy coffee shop network, my Android phone has a different screen dedicated to picking which WiFi network I'm on (or which Bluetooth devices I'm connected to).
I don't know about you all but I find it really hard to tell my Samsung phone from an iPhone these days. Maybe to a designer a circle versus oval home button jumps out like a flashing red light. To me, a mere mortal, I have to look carefully to tell which is which. They're both white rectangles with a button on the bottom and a rectangular screen.
As to the notch making an iPhone instantly recognizable again, that sounds like wishful thinking. They're still both going to be rounded white rectangles with a rectangular screen. "Oh yeah, that one has a little piece of something near the top, must be an iPhone."
The big problem here is Facebook EU (using a spurious example) pays Facebook Ireland a huge fee for licensing certain proprietary technologies. Facebook EU therefore makes no profit, while Facebook Ireland makes a huge profit, but Ireland has low taxation so they pay far less overall.
Spot on. There are always problems with any kind of tax system. Whatever you tax, you'll get less of. And the taxpayers will willingly spend $100 million in legal fees creating goofy corporate structures to avoid $1 billion in taxes.
As near as I can tell, the fine finance ministers don't actually care about whether taxing profit or revenue is ethically right, or causes less distortion of the economy. They just want more money. They could just raise the tax rate on profits or muddle the issue by talking about profit vs. revenue. My belief is we should always first talk about how much money we want the government to collect and spend, then start talking about how to best collect it. I think it's often disingenuous to mix the two conversations. This is just like buying a car: first agree on the price, then start talking about financing.
I've got home internet service from AT&T. I have a data cap on my service but have no idea what it is. I don't think I've ever been close to hitting it and we've had four people streaming video at all hours.
I'd be really curious to know, of the ISPs with data caps, how often does someone actually hit the cap (and have the ISP actually do anything). Like the guys in Newport, maybe AT&T doesn't actually enforce the cap.
So, open question: has anyone personally had their data throttled or been charged for a data overage? How'd that happen? Was it "normal" usage or did you accidentally try to download all of archive.org one day?
But on the list is...beer companies?!? There are more breweries and good beers available today than in any time in human history. OK, I'm being elitist because all the beers I drink are expensive craft beers. But the point is, there's an enormous range of beer quality and price available. There's no way you can argue the beer market isn't healthy and thriving. Well, other than oppressive beer distribution regulations in some states (*caugh*New York, Chuckie*caugh*).
What are Schumer and Pelosi looking for, a way to pander to red-state rural Trump voters?
It's a lie because the original definition communicated to voters an indication of how the economy was doing,
Fer cryin' out loud. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
For a statistic to be meaningful, it has to have a crisp definition. If you use the statistic without understanding the definition, you're asking for trouble. For years, "unemployment" has meant "percent of people who want to work but can't find a job." I remember hearing that definition in, oh I dunno, High School, and realizing the economists term "unemployment" doesn't mean what I thought it did. What I thought "unemployment" should be is actually called the labor participation rate (well, 1 - LPR), which is the percent of people of working age (18-65) who have a job.
Neither number is right or better or truer. They just measure different things. Depending on what you're trying to understand, use the best one for you. Understanding both is probably a good thing. Neither one by itself gives you anything close to "an indication of how the economy was going" just like the DJIA doesn't tell you anything but a tiny sliver either.
...most people create no value in their shitty jobs.
If that's so, why do you suppose someone is paying them?
I'm not sure what you include in the shitty job category. Cleaning bathrooms, perhaps? Yup, shitty job, literally. But I sure value having clean bathrooms here in my office.
WRONG. They use the money as collateral for a loan at a cheap rate (since there is zero risk), and the payments are made tax deductible.
I'm lost. Which "they" are you talking about? I was talking about on Apple, Google, and Microsoft. I'm not aware any of these are in the business of making and servicing loans, at least, not to any major extent.
(That's not exactly true, though. The tech giants probably have some of their money in bonds. Those are essentially a loan to someone else: a company, city, state, or country.)
What banks do with their deposits is another topic and it quite complicated. I have my perception of banks, sorta like out of It's A Wonderful Life. I know banking is a lot more complicated than that now so I don't pretend to understand what exactly they do with deposits.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see any reason to complicate the issue by bringing AI into it. Jobs get created and destroyed all time time for lots of reasons. For example, lots of companies are eliminating cashier and checker jobs in favor of self-service kiosks/self-checkout/mobile apps. Is that because technology and AI became good enough and cheaper? Because the minimum wage went up? Because customers prefer self-checkout? Because it improves throughput? Who knows? I certainly don't.
If we want to help re-train people who lose their job, that's all well and good. I don't see any reason to make a special case for people displaced by AI. And I strongly suspect it would be very hard to really determine who was displaced by AI and who wasn't.
Nice strawman, Mark. Of course not. I said you have to have some reasonable proof of harm to restrict my liberty. Nitric acid counts. Carbonic acid, not so much. 0.000001 molar nitric acid, also probably not an issue.
I know, degree of harm is a really difficult and subtle concept. If you think really, really hard, maybe you'll get it.
We cannot answer the first question because the manufacturers won't tell us.
Gee, if only there were a device you could use to measure the components of a vapor. And if only there were well known techniques for measuring a statistically relevant sample of e-cig vapors to get a general idea of what's in them. I guess it's a hopelessly complicated problem and we're helpless unless the companies report their product contents.
I'd like to point out that this is quite a bit different from an outright ban.
Of course it is. It's a full ban in some (most?) public spaces but allows vaping in private spaces. No one is disputing the fact of that.
That's an oversimplification.
Can you make a water mist without putting energy in? Most e-cigarettes have high temperature elements in them to create that mist, while the mist may be mostly water vapor there is plenty of other stuff in there that combusted in the high temperature environment created by the device.
So I honestly have no data about the physics of how an e-cig works. However, I'd be very, very suprised if there are anywhere near the reactions going on in a battery powered e-cig versus combusting tobacco. If I were building an e-cig, I'd use the lowest power possible to vaporize the fluid. I'd keep the temperature to the bare minimum I could because I want to maximize the battery life. Heck, I'm surprised they use heat and not ultrasonics. But I'd be really, really surprised if any chemical reactions at all occur, let alone combustion or ionization. Do you have any reason to believe otherwise?
Remember also, tobacco is a plant. Plants are insanely complicated with thousands of interesting compounds. Combustion in a cigarette is also a really commplicated and it generates thousands of other compounds. Vaping fluid is likely distilled water, nicotine, and a dozen or so other additives. I suspect you can count the number of detectable chemicals on your fingers and toes. That's orders of magnitudes simpler than what's in tobacco smoke.
Amen. The straightforward way to address this is to allow any and all comers who want to provide internet access in SF (or anywhere) free reign to build and sell their product. If fiber to the home is so valuable, someone will be greedy enough (read: "will spot an underserved market opportunity") to want the easy bucks. And we all win.
I don't see the disagreement. Tobacco use is banned in public places in New York state for the same reason. I was pointing out that people can still kill themselves with e-cigarettes in their own home, car, and other private places all they want.
My bad, I misread your comment. I though you wrote "the law isn't telling people what they can't do."
The problem though is that the e-cigarettes are the ultimate moving target for safety. There are thousands of different cocktails available for them on the market today, and almost none of them list their contents. Once we show that one is toxic what do we do about the rest of them? Even if cocktail "ABC1" was shown toxic, how would you know if the guy next to you is smoking "ABC1", "ABC2", or "XYZ28"? You simply don't know that, and the user might not know - or care - if their favorite blend has been proven toxic.
True, but I still don't know we have any idea whether the vapor has any practical toxicity. OK, it has formaldehyde in it. How much? And is it enough to have any effect? We accept lots of risks in our daily lives (just crossing the street is dangerous) and I don't think we consider how risky things are absolute terms before banning them.
I'm also bothered by the frequent comparison between vaping and smoking. They're incredibly different. One involves burning a plant and producing tons of definitively-proven harmful compounds. The other involves vaporizing water with nicotine and trace flavoring chemicals. That mist you see? It's not combustion particles, it's water droplets. It's fog. To my mind, vaping better compared to cologne than smoking. How much do we regulate (or concern ourselves) with the potentially toxic chemicals in perfume?
That's an overstatement, there. The law isn't telling people they can't do it, rather it is saying that the rest of society has the right to not be exposed to it involuntarily (as is also the case with regular tobacco smoke). You can still smoke it in your private home, or in your private car, or in other private places. Those who are intelligent enough to not smoke this should not be forcibly exposed to the toxic brew that is produces.
No, the law is quite definitely telling people they may not vape in public places.
I really like having smoking bans but I'm also not at all comfortable with the rationale. We assumed that second-hand smoke was dangerous. I don't know how well supported that was. But at the time, the believe was that we had hard proof that second-hand smoke really did endanger people. That was a strong enough case to overcome our presumption that people should be at liberty to behave the way they want unless there's a very compelling reason to limit it.
What many other posters are saying is we have no such evidence in the vaping case. Maybe the vapor is harmful, maybe it's no more toxic than normal city air. I honestly have no idea. But until someone produces some reasonably strong evidence, we should be quite hesitant to ban it.
(No, we shouldn't follow a strict precautionary principle where you ban anything you can't prove is safe. You can't ever prove something is safe. All you can do is look at it and say it seems safer or less safe than other risks we already accept, like the air pollution in a typical environment. I haven't heard anyone make a case that the chemicals in vape vapor is more or less harmful than ordinary air.)
I don't care if you think it's safe, I don't want it. If you could do it without exhaling and all the second hand vape, people wouldn't mind. I don't want to know that today is your caramel day and yesterday was peppermint.
It's a free country, or at least it used to be. You not liking something isn't sufficient grounds to ban it. IMHO, if you want to ban something, you have the onus to prove there's a reason to restrict my liberty.
You[r] stench may be pleasing to you, but nobody else, and your figurative fist is touching my literal nose. Isn't that the libertarian line in the sand?
No, actually. The libertarian line in the sand is a literal fist hitting your literal nose. There's a huge difference between a figurative and literal fist. I find many T-shirts offensive to my eyes. I find many smells objectionable. But we as a country value liberty, which means a figurative fist isn't enough.
When we lose local news and radio, we lose one more check against corporate control of information. Yes, your right that we already sort of lost it a long time ago, since groups kept buying up all the stations. I haven't kept up with local news lately, and that is a shame. I remember it covered local issues well. We need the small and independent voices.
Amen brother. I'm entirely with you that having many small voices is a good thing. Having a local station which focuses on local issues is valuable. I can't affect things happening at the state or national level, but if I show up at a city counsel meeting, I might change some minds. As TV stations consolidate and fire local staff (which is what this is all about, getting rid of local facilities and staff), we will lose those voices.
What I would hope is the station groups would figure out that having nothing but the national evening news isn't a very compelling product and that ratings will plunge when they implement it. Personally, I stopped watching the national TV news first and gave up watching local TV news last. In the mean time, I'll open the San Jose Local News YouTube channel to screw the national networks.
Voters have direct control over who is their Government.
I only have indirect control over who represents me in government. In practice, I have no control because I live in heavily partisan districts where the candidate from the Democratic party is virtually guaranteed to win.
The only way to exercise that same control over the corporations is to have lots of money and buy the result you want. Corporations are more dangerous, because we have less control over them.
There's a key difference. I can choose to not buy a product from any given corporation. No one can force me to watch NBC. There are very, very few situations where there really is an absolute monopoly over something you really must have. In fact, many people will assert such monopolies virtually never occur without some sort of government interference preventing competitors from entering the market. There's some logic to that. Once a company has a monopoly, they tend to get sloppy and try to earn exceptionally large profits, which provides a window for a competitor to come in and undercut them. I have no data to support or refute this assertion other than looking around and seeing competitors anywhere a government doesn't grant an exclusive monopoly.
The difference is libertarian idiots scream loudly whenever the government might tell them what to do, and are stunningly silent when a corporation has that same power or worse.
The libertarian perspective is that I can vote with my dollars or simply choose to not participate in broadcast media. I think most media companies care about dollars more than politicians care about votes. I also can't opt out of participating in a government edict.
Personally I live in very Democratic districts and state (CA). None of my elected politicians has to give a rat's ass about my opinion. They know they'll get re-elected regardless of what I think.
If I don't like what CBS/NBC/ABC/Fox/PBS is broadcasting through my local station, I can use DirecTV, Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, or any number of other media outlets. There's a ton of competition to keep companies honest and the most important competition isn't the other local stations. It's satellite and Internet streaming services.
Amen, brother. It's not a race. We all with with clean, safe nuclear and well-made long range electric cars. In the long run, it doesn't matter much where they're designed, built, or deployed.
How is this bad for humanity? Talking about this in terms of a race with winners and losers totally obscures the big pictures with parochialism and tribal loyalty.
Political boundaries have little to no meaning in terms of economics, human welfare, or the state of the environment. All of humanity is a winner if we produce cleaner energy with less environmental impact. As an American, I'd be delighted to buy a well made, inexpensive, reliable, long range electric car regardless of whether it's made by Tesla (a dozen miles from my home) or Beijing.
If I were an a EV producer, yeah, I'd care. But the producers are totally outnumbered by the consumers who win either way.
No, the point is a level 5 car doesn't have a driver. :)
That makes an electric an excellent commuter car, a good choice for a two car family. It's a non-starter if it's the only car I have access to.
* I hardly think they'd suddenly ban all IC engine vehicles. That would be a disaster, so don't even think about it.
This is CARB we're talking about. It doesn't have to be technologically impossible or an impending disaster for them to think it's a smashing idea.
No, you can't use solar, the air's too smoggy.
I haven't actually seen the Apple UI. I would hope there's a label telling you that the WiFI or Bluetooth button means "disconnect". When I go to turn these off, it's generally because (a) I'm on an airplane or (b) my battery is running low and I want to conserve power. In both cases, what I intended was to turn the radios off. Maybe I'm weird. When I do want to disconnect from the crummy coffee shop network, my Android phone has a different screen dedicated to picking which WiFi network I'm on (or which Bluetooth devices I'm connected to).
I don't know about you all but I find it really hard to tell my Samsung phone from an iPhone these days. Maybe to a designer a circle versus oval home button jumps out like a flashing red light. To me, a mere mortal, I have to look carefully to tell which is which. They're both white rectangles with a button on the bottom and a rectangular screen.
As to the notch making an iPhone instantly recognizable again, that sounds like wishful thinking. They're still both going to be rounded white rectangles with a rectangular screen. "Oh yeah, that one has a little piece of something near the top, must be an iPhone."
The big problem here is Facebook EU (using a spurious example) pays Facebook Ireland a huge fee for licensing certain proprietary technologies. Facebook EU therefore makes no profit, while Facebook Ireland makes a huge profit, but Ireland has low taxation so they pay far less overall.
Spot on. There are always problems with any kind of tax system. Whatever you tax, you'll get less of. And the taxpayers will willingly spend $100 million in legal fees creating goofy corporate structures to avoid $1 billion in taxes.
As near as I can tell, the fine finance ministers don't actually care about whether taxing profit or revenue is ethically right, or causes less distortion of the economy. They just want more money. They could just raise the tax rate on profits or muddle the issue by talking about profit vs. revenue. My belief is we should always first talk about how much money we want the government to collect and spend, then start talking about how to best collect it. I think it's often disingenuous to mix the two conversations. This is just like buying a car: first agree on the price, then start talking about financing.
I've got home internet service from AT&T. I have a data cap on my service but have no idea what it is. I don't think I've ever been close to hitting it and we've had four people streaming video at all hours.
I'd be really curious to know, of the ISPs with data caps, how often does someone actually hit the cap (and have the ISP actually do anything). Like the guys in Newport, maybe AT&T doesn't actually enforce the cap.
So, open question: has anyone personally had their data throttled or been charged for a data overage? How'd that happen? Was it "normal" usage or did you accidentally try to download all of archive.org one day?
But on the list is...beer companies?!? There are more breweries and good beers available today than in any time in human history. OK, I'm being elitist because all the beers I drink are expensive craft beers. But the point is, there's an enormous range of beer quality and price available. There's no way you can argue the beer market isn't healthy and thriving. Well, other than oppressive beer distribution regulations in some states (*caugh*New York, Chuckie*caugh*).
What are Schumer and Pelosi looking for, a way to pander to red-state rural Trump voters?
It's a lie because the original definition communicated to voters an indication of how the economy was doing,
Fer cryin' out loud. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
For a statistic to be meaningful, it has to have a crisp definition. If you use the statistic without understanding the definition, you're asking for trouble. For years, "unemployment" has meant "percent of people who want to work but can't find a job." I remember hearing that definition in, oh I dunno, High School, and realizing the economists term "unemployment" doesn't mean what I thought it did. What I thought "unemployment" should be is actually called the labor participation rate (well, 1 - LPR), which is the percent of people of working age (18-65) who have a job.
Neither number is right or better or truer. They just measure different things. Depending on what you're trying to understand, use the best one for you. Understanding both is probably a good thing. Neither one by itself gives you anything close to "an indication of how the economy was going" just like the DJIA doesn't tell you anything but a tiny sliver either.
...most people create no value in their shitty jobs.
If that's so, why do you suppose someone is paying them?
I'm not sure what you include in the shitty job category. Cleaning bathrooms, perhaps? Yup, shitty job, literally. But I sure value having clean bathrooms here in my office.
WRONG. They use the money as collateral for a loan at a cheap rate (since there is zero risk), and the payments are made tax deductible.
I'm lost. Which "they" are you talking about? I was talking about on Apple, Google, and Microsoft. I'm not aware any of these are in the business of making and servicing loans, at least, not to any major extent.
(That's not exactly true, though. The tech giants probably have some of their money in bonds. Those are essentially a loan to someone else: a company, city, state, or country.)
What banks do with their deposits is another topic and it quite complicated. I have my perception of banks, sorta like out of It's A Wonderful Life. I know banking is a lot more complicated than that now so I don't pretend to understand what exactly they do with deposits.
The money sits idle and is leveraged as collateral.
If it's being used as collateral, it's not idle. It's collateral. It's freeing up other money to be lent.