Really? I think having last-mile service that isn't tied to anything more is an excellent idea. [...] It's only the lack of such service that forces us to push for Net Neutrality.
In different words, you actually realize that net neutrality/ISPs and publicly owned last mile infrastructure are distinct issues, yet you deliberately confuse them.
Thanks for illustrating again what a dishonest debater you actually are.
I stand by my statement: a.eu domain "subject to EU law" means that you are subject to intrusive monitoring by EU governments, as well as EU restrictions on free speech.
This observation may annoy European moderators, but I challenge you to point out where my observation is actually factually incorrect.
Actually, that's what we want for last-mile data service. If that's available, we get actual competition among ISPs, who can offer assorted capabilities at whatever price they want.
In the context of the net neutrality discussion, "ISP" right now refers to companies like Verizon and Comcast. They are not just last mile providers.
If you're advocating for publicly owned or regulated last mile service that is shared by other kinds of providers, you are not talking about anything related to what is currently under discussion for net neutrality. In different words, you are trying to mislead people with a bait-and-switch argument.
And what exactly killed them? It certainly wasn't regulation, since wireless is—and has been—specifically exempted from Title II regulation
There are many, many countries other than the US, and we can look to them what happens when net neutrality gets applied to a networking technology.
My local municipality provides electric and water at rates that make sense to everyone, and I'd certainly trust them to provide Internet as well, were they allowed to do so by the state.
So you are happy with a government-granted monopoly to provide electricity and water and say it works well. Yet you say that you are not suggesting to do the same for ISPs. Why not? Somewhere your reasoning is wildly inconsistent.
Furthermore, how do you know that these rates "make sense to everyone"? Did you poll everybody? And how is "everybody" even qualified to pass judgement on utility rates? Do you live in a neighborhood of expert quantitative economists?
I'm not suggesting we take private ISPs public, nor do I view government-run utilities as the panacea that some make them out to be. I simply view them as a way to introduce healthy competition, which is what's sorely needed in the broadband space
Then why do you advocate net neutrality and municipal ISPs? Those pretty much guarantee that there will only be a single ISP available: net neutrality means that there is little ability for product differentiation, and a taxpayer funded competitor means that companies have little incentives to enter a market at all.
A website with a.eu or . domain name extension tells your customers that you are a legal entity based in the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway and are therefore, subject to EU law and other relevant trading standards.
Translation: half a dozen EU security services can freely dig into your personal data, impose gag orders on you, and impose stiff penalties for speech they disapprove of. A.eu domain is a strong signal for people to stay away if they have any sense.
So, I guess money (and reelection campaigns) must have something to do with why state legislatures would 'screw over' their constituency.
As far as I'm concerned, state legislatures outlawing municipal broadband is actually good for their constituencies. It's city governments that screw over their constituencies by wasting money on municipal broadband.
However, as a matter of principle, I think cities should be free to screw themselves over any way they like, provided the state government doesn't bail them out.
The dominant ISPs achieved their positions by leveraging natural monopolies.
Almost all Americans have two or more broadband providers available to them, in addition to numerous wireless providers. Where is the "monopoly"?
They’ve had no real competition in years. They’ve grown complacent and lazy because they’ve had no reason to innovate, compete, or even just try.
Net neutrality advocates want ISPs to be just dumb, interchangeable pipes with a simple rate structure, and that has pretty much been reflected in government policies. Innovations like "we give you a free phone with Facebook in return for ads" have been killed. So what area do you want ISPs to innovate in?
Why in the world would you consider their low standard to be the best that a local utility could hope to achieve in terms of efficiency? At a minimum you can cut the lobbyists to see an immediate improvement to the bottom line.
Private monopolies have no incentive to keep prices down, but they have the same incentive as any other private company to keep expenses down because that maximizes return for investors. Government monopolies, on the other hand, have the incentive to keep prices down but no incentive to keep costs down, which frequently makes them money losing propositions.
Also, I have lived with government-run telecoms and they were a disaster; when they were privatized, service improved massively and prices went down.
Where I’m from, the public electric and water utility bills us based on our usage. I’d assume they’d do the same with Internet, and I’m fine with that, given that it’s a perfectly equitable way of handling things, even if it does mean that I’m likely to be paying the highest bill in the neighborhood I live in.
Utility pricing is completely out of whack. In California, low income electric rate payers subsidize high income home owners; water is ridiculously underpriced, leading to massive shortages. In Germany, residential rate payers subsidize electricity used by industry. Past government owned or regulated telecom monopolies delayed the widespread deployment of the Internet by 10-20 years and were massively gouging consumers. And public transportation is even more of a disaster and money pit.
I said that it was in their interest, not that they are "drumming up support". They don't need to "drum up support" because they are already sitting at the levers of power.
(But some basic data may help you understand the issue better: it's primarily Democratic and progressive politicians that are pushing for municipal broadband; public sector employees are 2:1 tilted in favor of Democrats, and public sector unions donate to Democrats over Republicans 10:1.)
You assume the government operation would break even from user fees. They don't have to. They can make up any deficit through taxes. You can save a lot more than 11% when you are taxing you neighbors to fund your internet use.
So you agree then: municipal broadband is a scheme by which some people have their Internet usage subsidized by their neighbors via taxes. Why do you think it is fair or just to force some people to subsidize a lifestyle luxury for others?
The whole reference to paying for "tiers" regarding email, video, streaming was a fiction. It didn't happen before NN rules went into place, and nobody has announced such a pricing structure now that they are removed.
You're right that the ludicrous scenarios proponents of net neutrality tried to scare people with didn't happen. What did happen is that numerous companies tried to offer various kinds of free services and were beaten down by net neutrality rules. Hopefully, we'll see more of those free services return again now that net neutrality has been repealed. But it's much easier to destroy a market via regulation than to create a market, and it may be many years before the damage of net neutrality restrictions can be reversed.
And Why should I subsidize your parents when they become the few people using e-mail and demand that tier be kept around?
You shouldn't. Now, with a private broadband provider, the provider is only going to offer services to my parents if they pay for what they use. On the other hand, with a public or regulated utility, my parents, being a desirable voter class, might ultimately well be able to force you to subsidize them. That's what happens when you move business decisions out of the market in to the political arena.
I've set it in this thread earlier, keep your hands off my data stream. Just do your job and connect me to the internet. It's NOTB what I do on it. Only when I impact other customers should they intervene.
But it makes a huge difference to costs when and how you use data, and where your data comes from. You're trying to force ISPs to ignore those cost differences. It's like trying to force supermarkets to offer every kind of wine for $10/bottle, no matter the origin or size of the bottle because "supermarkets should keep their hands off the contents of the bottle and focus on delivering the bottles".
I think the ACLU is completely correct, the Internet has come to the point where it's de-facto a Public Utility
A public utility is something that is owned by the public. So, no, the Internet is not a "public utility", not even close.
ISPs have gotten to the point where they're just price-gouging
Telecoms have a net profit margin of around 11%. That's the maximum they could be overcharging for their services. So where is the "price gouging"? Where is the evidence that municipal broadband is any more efficient?
Municipal broadband appears cheaper because it loses money, money that needs to be made up for by tax payers one way or another.
I don't think states should impose this on cities; if cities want to screw their citizens, they should be allowed to do so.
But don't pretend that city governments do this for pure motives. Politicians in cities depend on the support and donations of city employees and their unions, and those employees and unions have a massive interest in expanding city government at the expense of city tax payers.
The people who use it perhaps? Or would you rather have Big Company ISP nickel and dimeing you to death for each 'tier' of service
In short, yes. Net profit margins for telecoms are around 11%; that's the maximum you could save if government operated as efficiently as a for profit corporation. But government has no incentives to operate that efficiently.
Furthermore, what you call "nickel and dimeing" amounts to charging people with different needs different amounts; I think that's a good thing. My parents only need E-mail and a few news sites; why should they be forced to cross-subsidize the real-time low latency streaming of gamers and Netflix addicts?
The point remains: although most great art is innovative, great art is a tiny percentage among all innovative art and most innovative art is crap. So, even if Melancholia had been innovative (instead of the trite, boring piece it was), that wouldn't have been something in its favor.
Furthermore, if the art succeeds among the modern bourgeoisie and academics, the kind of people that go to "experimental performances", you can be pretty certain that it isn't great art: both groups of people are overwhelmingly ignorant fools.
Sure Google may have just used the API and written the underlying implementation, but think about it - most languages these days are only powerful because of extensive libraries and API's.
But that value of an API is created not by the company that created the APIs but by the companies that invest their time and money in using the APIs.
In the case of Sun/Oracle, there are three additional factors to consider: (1) Sun achieved rapid and widespread adoption of Java's APIs by falsely claiming that they would make those APIs an open standard; that is, Java APIs would not have succeeded in the market if Sun had been clear from the beginning that they would not allow compatible third party implementations; (2) large parts of the Java APIs were not even developed by Sun or were copied from other APIs; (3) Sun/Oracle has a long history of building their products on other people's APIs.
Why didn't Google design the APIs themselves? Oh yeah, they thought they could steal it without paying anything. Why spend millions and waste several years when you can just steal?
Sun claimed for years and years that Java was an open platform, and large parts of the Java platform were developed and contributed freely by third parties. That's why Google didn't design the APIs themselves.
On top of that, Sun itself took other people's APIs and built proprietary products around them numerous times, so the company that created Java thought it was OK.
You're lying to yourself and others: There are ZERO reliable reproducible studies that show any cancer effect from non-ionizing radiation at the frequencies and signal strengths used in cell-phone networks.
Well, and I didn't claim that there was. As I was saying: cell phones are, for practical purposes, completely safe.
Unfortunately, your understanding of statistics and biology is obviously as faulty as that of the people you criticize. A big reason why so many policy debates involving science are so hard to resolve in practice is because of people like you: people who accidentally latch onto the right conclusions but are incapable of making a reasoned and rational argument for that conclusion. On top of that, you engage in uncivil behavior and ad hominems.
Now, you can continue making a fool of yourself, or you can sharpen your arguments and then replace your incoherent ramblings with coherent scientific arguments for why cell phones are safe. It's up to you.
Sometimes, Cannes picks genuinely good movies. Often, they just pick pretentious crap like Melancholia. On balance, an award at Cannes is more likely to be a negative than a positive.
Obama had a facebook app that you had to install, that told you what it was doing and that you agreed to what it was doing. It did not suck in all your connections data against the TOS and your own preferences. It did not "scrape".
Scraping your connections is exactly what it did. And in Obama's case, it wasn't a company that got data from a researcher that got data from Facebook via an app, in Obama's case, it was his campaign.
What Cambridge Analytica did was against the platform TOS, probably illegal, and they are being hauled over the coals for it. Rightly so, no matter who it was for.
Whether Cambridge Analytica violated the TOS is a civil matter between Facebook and CA. I think that's questionable.
In fact, instead of making this kind of data sharing illegal, we should do the opposite and make TOS that prohibit data scraping unenforceable. Right now, the data that Google and Facebook hold gives these companies a near monopoly on targeting voters for propaganda and manipulation, and given their massive support for Democrats in past elections, that certainly gives Democrats an unfair advantage.
In no credible way, however, did either Cambridge Analytica's data mining undermine the integrity of the US election.
Second, effective HIV treatment costs a few hundred dollars per year
They sure as hell don't here. I'm going to assume you mean "there"
Correct: effective HIV treatments abroad cost a few hundred dollars, whereas people pay ruinous amounts for it in the US because of America's broken health care system.
Everyone was forced to do this before hand with their FICA taxes, or if they were like the majority of the country with private insurance- insured through their employer- they were doing it that way. What the fuck was your point again?
Correct: people didn't have a choice about this before either. My point is that you misrepresent something as a personal choice and charity when, in fact, it is coercion.
The extra spending is definitely related to capitalism run amok, but it's not cronyism. The pharmaceutical industry has realized the power it has without any government help whatsoever, short of patent and trademark enforcement.
The pharmaceutical industry and medical providers in the US can charge very high prices because government forces Americans to pay whatever the industry charges. That isn't capitalism, it's a fascist economic model.
That's still an unfortunate mistake.
No, it is reckless behavior.
You're a callous piece of shit.
No, I'm afraid it's you who is a "callous piece of shit", because your kind of choices condemn millions to a slow, agonizing death from HIV and other preventable diseases. You're self-righteous, selfish, ignorant, and evil.
People are upset because the data was used in a way that affected the integrity or our elections.
We're not talking about whether Trump is a good president or whether he violated any laws. We are talking about the integrity of the election, and you have failed to make any rational argument that there was any problem with the integrity of the last election. Now...
The NPR article says nothing about the integrity of the election. It also doesn't say that CA's activities were "pursued as an illegal campaign contribution", it's merely Peter Overby's opinion that it might be.
The one thing that seems to be consistent among the Trump defenders is that inappropriate activities weren't effective... Just because you suck at cheating doesn't mean that you didn't cheat.
I'm not defending Trump. We are discussing your claim about the integrity of the last election. Even if Trump tried to cheat, but then sucked at it, then the integrity of the election was still preserved.
We have to take this type of thing seriously because we have no way to roll back an election.
Well, and when you have an argument that the "integrity of this election" was actually affected, by all means, do share it. CA using Facebook data clearly did not affect the integrity of the election, even if you could construe it to be illegal in some way.
Given that to my knowledge, _NONE_ of the studies on radio-frequency exposures at the frequencies and signal strengths used in cell phone networks has been shown to have consistant and reliable results,
You're not responding to anything I said. What I said was: There are quite a few studies showing some effect of non-ionizing radiation on tissues, effects plausibly linked to cancer. These are effects like electroporation and enzyme inactivation. These are simple benchtop experiments and are completely reproducible at higher field strengths. I leave it to you to track down the references.
I've read too many bullshit studies by people who use tiny sample sizes and/or P-Hacking
Even if there was no difference at p < 0.01%, we still couldn't answer the question of whether "cell phones cause cancer". That's because that's a statistically meaningless question to begin with. The actual question ought to be "how likely is it that cell phone usage increase cancer rates by a factor of more than X". Existing studies already show us that X must be very close to 1, the difference being too small to worry about in terms of actual cell phone usage. On the other hand, biologically, it is reasonable to believe that X is actually slightly larger than 1 because at higher doses, microwaves do harm tissue through non-thermal interactions, and there is no reason to believe that there are threshold effects (the community had the same debate for threshold effects in ionizing radiation).
As an aside, I think you are not debating in a rational, scientific, or honest way. If you want people to take you seriously, change how you behave towards others.
What does affect elections is that it was done by a third-party on behalf of the campaign. The fair market value of the work that they did most certainly exceeded campaign contribution limits. So it amounts to a form of illegal campaign contribution.
Cambridge Analytica was paid nearly $6 million for their work, and their work was likely largely useless. Furthermore, this isn't being pursued as an "illegal campaign contribution" by anyone. So, your view there doesn't seem consistent with the facts.
The issue with the Trump campaign is that it coordinated (the world colluded has too much of a negative connotation for objective discussion) with other groups in illegal ways.
Well, you have failed to establish that for CA. Furthermore, just because something is illegal doesn't mean that it affects the integrity of an election. In fact, many election laws are designed to destroy the integrity of elections by giving incumbents an unfair advantage.
Now that may have happened on the Hillary side too and we're not hearing about it.
It most certainly did happy on the Hillary side: Silicon Valley was falling all over itself to provide free services and support to Hillary's campaign (same for the Obama campaigns); at my company, people disappeared for months on company dime to help out Hillary's campaign, amounting to hundreds of thousands in in-kind campaign contributions. However, that kind of sleazy and corrupt behavior is minor compared to the massive corruption in Hillary's campaign in other areas.
My medical insurance covers some high dollar AIDS treatment, which means I help cover some high cost AIDS treatment. Something I'm virtually guaranteed never to contract. And frankly, I'd rather it did than see a good person die from an unfortunate mistake. Educational improvement works. Letting them die is stupid.
First, you talk about this as if it were an individual choice, but it's not: under ACA, everybody is forced to do this. Now, you personally may be so wealthy that you may not mind spending $1000/month for something that ought to cost $200/month out of charity, but for other people, the $800 difference is enormous. Second, effective HIV treatment costs a few hundred dollars per year, something that falls within deductibles anyway; the extra spending is for crony capitalism on excessively expensive treatments. Third, we're not usually talking about "an unfortunate mistake": HIV is pretty hard to transmit and most people with HIV got infected after many acts of unprotected sex with many partners.
This thread started with someone mocking Christians for "having a problem with people having sex". It is sensible to have a problem with people having sex outside committed relationships because it is harmful to the individual and it is very costly to society. And it is sensible to have a problem with a system of medical care that completely separates personal responsibility from consequences while forcibly transferring vast amounts of money from tax payers to the private sector in a massive crony capitalist scheme. Not only are your beliefs not helping people, they are causing harm to millions of people. Teaching people about safe sex is far less effective than teaching people to control their base impulses and desires in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
In different words, you actually realize that net neutrality/ISPs and publicly owned last mile infrastructure are distinct issues, yet you deliberately confuse them.
Thanks for illustrating again what a dishonest debater you actually are.
I stand by my statement: a .eu domain "subject to EU law" means that you are subject to intrusive monitoring by EU governments, as well as EU restrictions on free speech.
This observation may annoy European moderators, but I challenge you to point out where my observation is actually factually incorrect.
In the context of the net neutrality discussion, "ISP" right now refers to companies like Verizon and Comcast. They are not just last mile providers.
If you're advocating for publicly owned or regulated last mile service that is shared by other kinds of providers, you are not talking about anything related to what is currently under discussion for net neutrality. In different words, you are trying to mislead people with a bait-and-switch argument.
The FCC keeps moving the goalposts.
There are many, many countries other than the US, and we can look to them what happens when net neutrality gets applied to a networking technology.
So you are happy with a government-granted monopoly to provide electricity and water and say it works well. Yet you say that you are not suggesting to do the same for ISPs. Why not? Somewhere your reasoning is wildly inconsistent.
Furthermore, how do you know that these rates "make sense to everyone"? Did you poll everybody? And how is "everybody" even qualified to pass judgement on utility rates? Do you live in a neighborhood of expert quantitative economists?
Then why do you advocate net neutrality and municipal ISPs? Those pretty much guarantee that there will only be a single ISP available: net neutrality means that there is little ability for product differentiation, and a taxpayer funded competitor means that companies have little incentives to enter a market at all.
Translation: half a dozen EU security services can freely dig into your personal data, impose gag orders on you, and impose stiff penalties for speech they disapprove of. A .eu domain is a strong signal for people to stay away if they have any sense.
As far as I'm concerned, state legislatures outlawing municipal broadband is actually good for their constituencies. It's city governments that screw over their constituencies by wasting money on municipal broadband.
However, as a matter of principle, I think cities should be free to screw themselves over any way they like, provided the state government doesn't bail them out.
Almost all Americans have two or more broadband providers available to them, in addition to numerous wireless providers. Where is the "monopoly"?
Net neutrality advocates want ISPs to be just dumb, interchangeable pipes with a simple rate structure, and that has pretty much been reflected in government policies. Innovations like "we give you a free phone with Facebook in return for ads" have been killed. So what area do you want ISPs to innovate in?
Private monopolies have no incentive to keep prices down, but they have the same incentive as any other private company to keep expenses down because that maximizes return for investors. Government monopolies, on the other hand, have the incentive to keep prices down but no incentive to keep costs down, which frequently makes them money losing propositions.
Also, I have lived with government-run telecoms and they were a disaster; when they were privatized, service improved massively and prices went down.
Utility pricing is completely out of whack. In California, low income electric rate payers subsidize high income home owners; water is ridiculously underpriced, leading to massive shortages. In Germany, residential rate payers subsidize electricity used by industry. Past government owned or regulated telecom monopolies delayed the widespread deployment of the Internet by 10-20 years and were massively gouging consumers. And public transportation is even more of a disaster and money pit.
I said that it was in their interest, not that they are "drumming up support". They don't need to "drum up support" because they are already sitting at the levers of power.
(But some basic data may help you understand the issue better: it's primarily Democratic and progressive politicians that are pushing for municipal broadband; public sector employees are 2:1 tilted in favor of Democrats, and public sector unions donate to Democrats over Republicans 10:1.)
So you agree then: municipal broadband is a scheme by which some people have their Internet usage subsidized by their neighbors via taxes. Why do you think it is fair or just to force some people to subsidize a lifestyle luxury for others?
You're right that the ludicrous scenarios proponents of net neutrality tried to scare people with didn't happen. What did happen is that numerous companies tried to offer various kinds of free services and were beaten down by net neutrality rules. Hopefully, we'll see more of those free services return again now that net neutrality has been repealed. But it's much easier to destroy a market via regulation than to create a market, and it may be many years before the damage of net neutrality restrictions can be reversed.
You shouldn't. Now, with a private broadband provider, the provider is only going to offer services to my parents if they pay for what they use. On the other hand, with a public or regulated utility, my parents, being a desirable voter class, might ultimately well be able to force you to subsidize them. That's what happens when you move business decisions out of the market in to the political arena.
But it makes a huge difference to costs when and how you use data, and where your data comes from. You're trying to force ISPs to ignore those cost differences. It's like trying to force supermarkets to offer every kind of wine for $10/bottle, no matter the origin or size of the bottle because "supermarkets should keep their hands off the contents of the bottle and focus on delivering the bottles".
A public utility is something that is owned by the public. So, no, the Internet is not a "public utility", not even close.
Telecoms have a net profit margin of around 11%. That's the maximum they could be overcharging for their services. So where is the "price gouging"? Where is the evidence that municipal broadband is any more efficient?
Municipal broadband appears cheaper because it loses money, money that needs to be made up for by tax payers one way or another.
I don't think states should impose this on cities; if cities want to screw their citizens, they should be allowed to do so.
But don't pretend that city governments do this for pure motives. Politicians in cities depend on the support and donations of city employees and their unions, and those employees and unions have a massive interest in expanding city government at the expense of city tax payers.
In short, yes. Net profit margins for telecoms are around 11%; that's the maximum you could save if government operated as efficiently as a for profit corporation. But government has no incentives to operate that efficiently.
Furthermore, what you call "nickel and dimeing" amounts to charging people with different needs different amounts; I think that's a good thing. My parents only need E-mail and a few news sites; why should they be forced to cross-subsidize the real-time low latency streaming of gamers and Netflix addicts?
The point remains: although most great art is innovative, great art is a tiny percentage among all innovative art and most innovative art is crap. So, even if Melancholia had been innovative (instead of the trite, boring piece it was), that wouldn't have been something in its favor.
Furthermore, if the art succeeds among the modern bourgeoisie and academics, the kind of people that go to "experimental performances", you can be pretty certain that it isn't great art: both groups of people are overwhelmingly ignorant fools.
But that value of an API is created not by the company that created the APIs but by the companies that invest their time and money in using the APIs.
In the case of Sun/Oracle, there are three additional factors to consider: (1) Sun achieved rapid and widespread adoption of Java's APIs by falsely claiming that they would make those APIs an open standard; that is, Java APIs would not have succeeded in the market if Sun had been clear from the beginning that they would not allow compatible third party implementations; (2) large parts of the Java APIs were not even developed by Sun or were copied from other APIs; (3) Sun/Oracle has a long history of building their products on other people's APIs.
Sun claimed for years and years that Java was an open platform, and large parts of the Java platform were developed and contributed freely by third parties. That's why Google didn't design the APIs themselves.
On top of that, Sun itself took other people's APIs and built proprietary products around them numerous times, so the company that created Java thought it was OK.
Great art tends to be innovative. But innovative art is rarely great art.
Well, and I didn't claim that there was. As I was saying: cell phones are, for practical purposes, completely safe.
Unfortunately, your understanding of statistics and biology is obviously as faulty as that of the people you criticize. A big reason why so many policy debates involving science are so hard to resolve in practice is because of people like you: people who accidentally latch onto the right conclusions but are incapable of making a reasoned and rational argument for that conclusion. On top of that, you engage in uncivil behavior and ad hominems.
Now, you can continue making a fool of yourself, or you can sharpen your arguments and then replace your incoherent ramblings with coherent scientific arguments for why cell phones are safe. It's up to you.
Sometimes, Cannes picks genuinely good movies. Often, they just pick pretentious crap like Melancholia. On balance, an award at Cannes is more likely to be a negative than a positive.
Scraping your connections is exactly what it did. And in Obama's case, it wasn't a company that got data from a researcher that got data from Facebook via an app, in Obama's case, it was his campaign.
Whether Cambridge Analytica violated the TOS is a civil matter between Facebook and CA. I think that's questionable.
In fact, instead of making this kind of data sharing illegal, we should do the opposite and make TOS that prohibit data scraping unenforceable. Right now, the data that Google and Facebook hold gives these companies a near monopoly on targeting voters for propaganda and manipulation, and given their massive support for Democrats in past elections, that certainly gives Democrats an unfair advantage.
In no credible way, however, did either Cambridge Analytica's data mining undermine the integrity of the US election.
Correct: effective HIV treatments abroad cost a few hundred dollars, whereas people pay ruinous amounts for it in the US because of America's broken health care system.
Correct: people didn't have a choice about this before either. My point is that you misrepresent something as a personal choice and charity when, in fact, it is coercion.
The pharmaceutical industry and medical providers in the US can charge very high prices because government forces Americans to pay whatever the industry charges. That isn't capitalism, it's a fascist economic model.
No, it is reckless behavior.
No, I'm afraid it's you who is a "callous piece of shit", because your kind of choices condemn millions to a slow, agonizing death from HIV and other preventable diseases. You're self-righteous, selfish, ignorant, and evil.
Let's review your claim again:
We're not talking about whether Trump is a good president or whether he violated any laws. We are talking about the integrity of the election, and you have failed to make any rational argument that there was any problem with the integrity of the last election. Now...
The NPR article says nothing about the integrity of the election. It also doesn't say that CA's activities were "pursued as an illegal campaign contribution", it's merely Peter Overby's opinion that it might be.
I'm not defending Trump. We are discussing your claim about the integrity of the last election. Even if Trump tried to cheat, but then sucked at it, then the integrity of the election was still preserved.
Well, and when you have an argument that the "integrity of this election" was actually affected, by all means, do share it. CA using Facebook data clearly did not affect the integrity of the election, even if you could construe it to be illegal in some way.
You're not responding to anything I said. What I said was: There are quite a few studies showing some effect of non-ionizing radiation on tissues, effects plausibly linked to cancer. These are effects like electroporation and enzyme inactivation. These are simple benchtop experiments and are completely reproducible at higher field strengths. I leave it to you to track down the references.
Even if there was no difference at p < 0.01%, we still couldn't answer the question of whether "cell phones cause cancer". That's because that's a statistically meaningless question to begin with. The actual question ought to be "how likely is it that cell phone usage increase cancer rates by a factor of more than X". Existing studies already show us that X must be very close to 1, the difference being too small to worry about in terms of actual cell phone usage. On the other hand, biologically, it is reasonable to believe that X is actually slightly larger than 1 because at higher doses, microwaves do harm tissue through non-thermal interactions, and there is no reason to believe that there are threshold effects (the community had the same debate for threshold effects in ionizing radiation).
As an aside, I think you are not debating in a rational, scientific, or honest way. If you want people to take you seriously, change how you behave towards others.
Cambridge Analytica was paid nearly $6 million for their work, and their work was likely largely useless. Furthermore, this isn't being pursued as an "illegal campaign contribution" by anyone. So, your view there doesn't seem consistent with the facts.
Well, you have failed to establish that for CA. Furthermore, just because something is illegal doesn't mean that it affects the integrity of an election. In fact, many election laws are designed to destroy the integrity of elections by giving incumbents an unfair advantage.
It most certainly did happy on the Hillary side: Silicon Valley was falling all over itself to provide free services and support to Hillary's campaign (same for the Obama campaigns); at my company, people disappeared for months on company dime to help out Hillary's campaign, amounting to hundreds of thousands in in-kind campaign contributions. However, that kind of sleazy and corrupt behavior is minor compared to the massive corruption in Hillary's campaign in other areas.
First, you talk about this as if it were an individual choice, but it's not: under ACA, everybody is forced to do this. Now, you personally may be so wealthy that you may not mind spending $1000/month for something that ought to cost $200/month out of charity, but for other people, the $800 difference is enormous. Second, effective HIV treatment costs a few hundred dollars per year, something that falls within deductibles anyway; the extra spending is for crony capitalism on excessively expensive treatments. Third, we're not usually talking about "an unfortunate mistake": HIV is pretty hard to transmit and most people with HIV got infected after many acts of unprotected sex with many partners.
This thread started with someone mocking Christians for "having a problem with people having sex". It is sensible to have a problem with people having sex outside committed relationships because it is harmful to the individual and it is very costly to society. And it is sensible to have a problem with a system of medical care that completely separates personal responsibility from consequences while forcibly transferring vast amounts of money from tax payers to the private sector in a massive crony capitalist scheme. Not only are your beliefs not helping people, they are causing harm to millions of people. Teaching people about safe sex is far less effective than teaching people to control their base impulses and desires in the first place.