No, I explicitly differentiated between language customs in English and other languages. English has a tradition of adopting foreign words, many other languages do not and are more resistant to it.
The fact that Christian Arabs use the word Allah to name the Christian god and the Muslim god has *absolutely no bearing* on what the Christian god and the Muslim god are called in English.
The fact that you think my argument is "incoherent" when it's just pointing out some fairly obvious attributes of our shared language is very odd.
No because I already knew that, as I indicated in my post ("Arabs can call God whatever they want in their own language, including Arab Christians who call the Christian god Allah.").
The words people use in Arabic are different than the words people use in English. If they want to use Allah to describe both concepts they can do that. I'm talking about how some people translate Allah into God when speaking English. That doesn't make sense. We don't translate other religious names like Jesus and Muhammed. We transliterate them, but we don't come up with completely different sounding new names based on people in our own culture who play a similar role in some respect. Like, oh Muhammed is a really common name for Muslims, so that's like the equivalent of John. Let's call him John! Or, Muhammed was a prophet, let's just call him Moses because he was a prophet too, and they both start with M! That's dumb, we don't do that with names.
Let's say it's 9am. My pediatrician's office is open. The urgent care down the road is open. The ER is open. My child has a fever of 105F.
Why on Earth do you think the *real cost* of treating my child at the ER is 10x greater than at my pediatrician's office or the urgent care place? Do you think regular pediatricians make $200k/year, but ER p ediatricians make $2 million/year? Do ER nurses make 10x more salary than regular nurses? Does infant Tylenol cost 10x more when an ER buys it?
If ER is 10x more expensive, that means they are doing cost-sharing between unprofitable and profitable services. A thug with a gunshot wound may cost a lot to treat, and may end up not paying, so they jack up the prices of infant Tylenol to cover for it. It's a poor-man's insurance scheme for doctors... people facing emergencies may not pay, so soak the ones who do pay.
The thing is, if you successfully divert all the people with fevers away from the ER and over to urgent care, that doesn't magically make the ER more cost efficient. It doesn't actually save money. It just gets rid of some of the cost-sharing. So other services that you can't shift get even more expensive.
And if you're simply talking about preventive care making emergencies happen less frequently, studies are inconclusive about whether that actually saves money on average. The cost of preventive care over a 50 year period is more than the ER cost of a single episode.
The idea of regular/preventive care saving money is not established. Some studies have shown reduced costs, others have shown increased costs. If it were settled, then all hospitals would do what you described, because all hospitals want to save money while also providing better care.
You've overabstracted and that leads to false equivalences. It's like saying "You don't like chocolate, and you don't like strawberry, but you claim you actually like pistachio ice cream??? Nonsense! You said you don't like 'flavors' and pistachio is also a 'flavor'!"
Complaining about one or two specific either/or arguments is not the same as complaining about all either/or arguments.
In July, there will be a market for the generic... the people who don't want to pay top dollar for the new drug and were happy with the old drug. Why would all these people magically forget about how great the old drug was and not see that there's now a cheap alternative treatment?
In the meantime, why would the new drug be more expensive than the old drug? The old drug is still under patent protection until July so they can set the price to be whatever they want without risk of losing share to competition... unless of course there is competition that you're not telling us about, like alternative treatments. And those will still exist for the new drug.
The stories I've heard are more along the lines of the drug company introducing a genuinely superior product.. not necessarily in its effectiveness, but in something tangential like easy of administration. A 24-hour tablet instead of taking 6 pills throughout the day. A non-drowsy version.
Then the generic comes along but it's for the old method, which is now seen as crappy by consumers. So many people still pay more for the new drug.
That actually makes sense and there's not really anything wrong with it. That's good actually... now there's a cheap version and a premium version and people can choose.
Someone citing white privilege pretty much immediately reveals they have no clue about real white people. They get their information from movies and biographies of famous people. The person who came up with the "white privilege" concept, Peggy McIntosh, did indeed have a privileged life. She studied at Radcliffe and Harvard and ended up with a cushy professorship teaching "women's studies" -- pretty much a complete BS job.
Of course, she had no clue that she was confusing most of her points about white privilege with "rich privilege." She's a true idiot.
I think there is validity to the concept of white privilege, but it's much different than what race baiters spout off about today. I also understand the concept of black privilege, male privilege, female privilege, etc. Every group has something that can be seen as a privilege.
I'm pretty sure that slavery wasn't created by African Americans.
You're absolutely right. Who do you think created slavery, though?
The issue here is not, "reverse discrimination to make things equal." That is a straw man. What is being discussed is identifying where American society is failing to provide opportunities, and targeting those demographics
You're deluding yourself. Giving help to some people and not others on the basis of irrelevant traits like race and gender and "those demographics", is exactly what "reverse discrimination to make things equal" means.
If you want to make a Center for Kids Who Can't Program Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too, then guess what... you can do that! Note the complete absence of words like "black" and "girl" and "Latino" and "demographics" and all that. If you want to help kids who can't program, then say "Hey can you program? No? Take this class!"
It's not hard and anything that strays from that simple technique is racist bullshit itself.
It seems stupid to translate words that have become proper names for distinct concepts. David is David in English and David in French. Do you know what David is in German? David. In Arabic it's also David. Just because other cultures have similar sounding or meaning names doesn't mean you substitute them.. David is not Davide, it's not Davit, it's not Dawid, it's not Daud... it's David.
We definitely don't translate names like "Abdullah" to "Abdugod."
In English it's common to adopt words from other languages to express new concepts. The Muslim god is Allah, not God. Allah is too different from God to get the same name in English. Arabs can call God whatever they want in their own language, including Arab Christians who call the Christian god Allah.
It's just so stupid when things like "Allahu akbar!" are translated in news stories as "God is great" as if it means anything close to the same thing when Muslims say it as when Christians say it.
If I had a choice between getting mugged, and getting arrested by the cops on fake charges and charged with a felony, I'd rather get mugged.
Pretty sure your chances of the former are higher.
Let's put it this way... would you rather experience an encounter of unknown outcome with a mugger, randomly selected from all muggings, or an encounter of unknown outcome with a cop, randomly selected from all encounters with cops?
But I don't have to worry, because that mostly happens to people who are black.
It happens mostly to people who commit serious crimes or are around people who commit serious crimes, not to people who are black. There is overlap of course.
Even if you assume racism is involved at various steps of the process, it's hardly "garbage" data.
Then there's the possibility that areas with racist law enforcement genuinely have more crime, either due to people committing crimes in protest, or due to cops becoming racist due to the criminals who they interact with. In that case the "racist" data is completely valid in helping predict future crime levels.
"Efficient law enforcement" is not a higher priority than "free and fair society".
Racial profiling does not take away from a free and fair society though.
Well, it depends exactly what you mean by racial profiling since the term encompasses so many possible actions. Going around harassing black people "just in case" is counter to a free and fair society. But making law enforcement more efficient by looking at factors like race, sex, age, wealth, hairstyle, clothing, gang affiliation, etc is fine.
There are credit card processors today that have a fee structure to take micropayments into account.
Paypal, for instance, charges 5% + 5 cents if that works out to be less than their normal fee.
Amazon Payments used to have the information publicly visible, but now you have to contact sales, but from what I recall it used to be 5% + 5 cents as well.
A small business might be paying 2.5%, but a large, multiple state grocery store isn't. There's certainly no way they are paying 5%, which is my cash back reward for groceries.
I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of loss leaders, so why is it hard to believe credit card companies lose money on some customers in the hopes that on average they'll make more money?
No they don't. They haven't spent any money on CAPEX, just a monthly lease for each end user connection: why would they charge more if the costs to them work out to be the same? If I spend the equivalent of $20/month on my own infra instead of $20/month using someone elses, my prices are probably going to be the same.
You're still missing my point. In the absence of price regulation, what you describe can't happen.
Let's say A pays $20/month/subscriber in infrastructure maintenance, upgrades, new development, etc.
Case 1a - there's no price regulation, and A can still sell to consumers. Case 1b - there's no price regulation, and A cannot sell to consumers, just to the other providers Case 2a - there is price regulation, and A can still sell to consumers Case 2b - there is price regulation, and A cannot sell to consumers, just to the other providers
In 1a, A will charge what the market will bear. They'll have incentives for new subscribers and poor people that let them get on the network. The cost will be like $30/month. For most subscribers, the cost will be $40/month. What will A charge B? If they charge less than $40/month... let's say $35/month... they will potentially lose their core customers because B might undercut them at $39/month. Why would they do that?
In 1b, A cannot sell to consumers, just to B. But A still knows that the market can bear so many subscribers at $30/month plus so many more at $40/month. They know if they charge $100/month, nobody will sign up and they'll lose money. They know if they charge $21/month, more people will sign up but their profit will be too low. What do they do? If they're allowed to charge differential prices, it's exactly the same as 1a. "Oh, you want to lease a new line? $30/month special. After a year it's $40/month." If they're not allowed to charge differential prices, they figure out the weighted average and charge that. Maybe $35/month. Their overall profit is the same, meanwhile B and C make money in some areas and lose money in others (perhaps they're regulated to provide equivalent coverage).
In 2a, with price regulation, you say okay A, we know it costs you $20/month, and we think $30/month is a fair profit, so you WILL charge $30/month per line.
In 2b... it's exactly the same.
As you can see, the fake competition provided by B, C, D, E, etc play no role in establishing the market price for the service, because they do not control the service. Only the price controls work. The sub-divisions of "a" and "b" make no difference either... just the price controls.
Provider B gets a committed information rate on Provider A's infrastructure, which for 6mbit/s DSL is probably going to be about 64kbit/s, but since Provider B would have 1,000 customers aggregated, there's total available bandwidth on Provider A's network available of 60mbit/s or so, allowing Provider B's customers to achieve 6mbit/s speeds (in other words, this is how it works already, except that instead of 1 retailer utilizing the infrastructure you have many).
The thing is, you're assuming A is required to allow B to hook up their own interconnects. That's incorrect. That was my point with bringing up Comcast in real life... they can say "Yeah I know it's slow. It sucks. But too bad, we're not letting you connect faster lines to OUR network." This has actually come up in real life. I'm sure you read about Netflix offering to pay 100% of the cost to upgrade Comcast's interconnect with Level 3 (the carrier for Netflix). Comcast refused, because they want a nice fat monthly fee, not a one-time free upgrade.
And if the law is purely "You have to lease the lines you control to B, C, D, E, and F" then you have not changed that (even with price controls). You're going to have to introduce additional regulations that say "And you have to let B, C, D, E, and F have access at the interconnects so they can upgrade them at their own cost or whatever."
This isn't an echo chamber. You suggested that nuclear power is not flourishing under authoritarian regimes, but in fact it is.. at least among regimes with the technical and manufacturing know-how to build nuclear reactors. Almost every developing country that doesn't have nuclear power wants it. And those who do have it are expanding it.
Flourishing doesn't mean nuclear provides a majority of the electricity in those countries, as you pointed out, but that's okay. The point is China is building 28 reactors or whatever, and the US is building... 4. And they are delayed and over budget. It's definitely flourishing compared to here.
Even under less authoritarian regimes, like India, the simple lack of as many environmental (including human impact) regulations is letting them explore technologies like thorium reactors more feasibly than we could here.
China has 21 nuclear power plants. There are 28 additional plants under construction. Because of lower construction costs and faster time to market, the cost of building THE SAME nuclear plants in China is about 1/3 the cost in America. (They are building modern plants like the AP1000, which is also being considered in the US.)
Then you have India which is investing in the thorium fuel cycle.
Conclusion: In countries where there is less regulation, or equivalently the government is fully behind the project, nuclear is flowering and provides low cost baseline electricity.
Are you suggesting that provider A would sell access to the infrastructure at the same price to a retail customer as they would a wholesale customer (who is in turn the retail provider)?
No, I said "But they have to charge end-customers even more, because otherwise provider B would not have a sustainable business."
One has to consider that regulations would not permit simply undercutting the competition simply because they own the infra.
If you are going to regulate prices anyway, then like I said, this is just an economic welfare project for B, C, D. They aren't providing "competition" that is lowering prices... your regulation is lowering prices.
Yes, those providers are still captive HOWEVER they still have their own core networks and connections to other ASNs - the thing being leased in such a scenario is L2 or L3 access on some form of last mile infrastructure, we're not talking about VISPs or white-label providers or anything.
Yes but whether it's white-label or "real" access is irrelevant because it's still provider A that owns the infrastructure and makes the decisions. Look at the stuff going on with net neutrality. Comcast can just say "Ok, we're not upgrading this peering connection until Netflix pays us extra." And that screws Netflix and the other Level 3 customers trying to use that congested link.
In your scenario, why would it be any different (except apparently your price regulations would prevent Comcast from even being able to ask for more money). Let's say my neighborhood has crappy phone lines and low speed DSL, and I'm like screw provider A, I'm switching to B. When I switch from A to B, A still makes money. When I switch from B to C because of course the network still sucks, A still makes money. When I switch to D, thinking "My God, so many ISPs in this town.. surely one of them must be better" then A continues to make money. A has no incentive to upgrade my neighborhood's phone lines or reduce prices or anything, and the other providers aren't able to upgrade my neighborhood's phone lines or reduce prices below what A charges (plus their own overhead).
Oh, unless you regulate improvements as well as prices... in which case, like I said, the "competition" aspect of the situation is a sham.
I'm not sure you've ever seen real competition, and it would appear that you've never lived abroad (especially in a country where you have a 1-2 providers dealing with infrastructure and a multitude of retailers to choose from), have you?
No I have never lived abroad, but you're being silly now... ISPs aren't the only businesses that compete. I've seen plenty of competition. Toyota and Ford compete for my business, as an example. That's why I know that the only way to have effective competition is to have separate companies competing on the good or service in question. If I want to contrive a situation where I get provider A to upgrade the network infrastructure in my neighborhood, then I need to invent competition for the network infrastructure in my neighborhood. Not services running on top of it. That makes zero difference. If I want provider A to install new fiber lines, then you could add 15000 "competitors" who are forced to lease A's network and it would accomplish nothing at all.
But add 1 company like Google that runs new lines in my neighborhood, and suddenly provider A will either upgrade its infrastructure, dramatically lower prices, or go out of business. That's competition.
I still don't see the point. Provider A made the investment, and has to charge provider B enough to still be profitable. But they have to charge end-customers even more, because otherwise provider B would not have a sustainable business. So in other words, you've artificially increased the cost to the end-customer, just for the sake of giving provider B a job mimicking provider A.
In your second scenario, where provider A is fully prohibited from selling to the end-customer, how is the network situation any better than now? Provider A still has captive customers... instead of me and you, the captive customers are providers B, C, D, and E. What incentive does provider A have to upgrade their network? I don't see how it's any better than now.
And in this situation you're still imposing an artificially high cost on the consumer. What value-add does provider B give the end-consumer? If it's actually *worth* the extra charge, then there's no need to prohibit A from dealing with end-consumers, because presumably they'd choose B anyway. And if it's not worth it, then you're forcing the end-consumer to pay extra for a service that isn't worth it.
The only real competition is when multiple companies have multiple lines going to your house, and you can totally switch your business between them. For things like water, sewer, and maybe electricity, the costs are so high that it can't realistically happen. But for internet, look, we already have coax cable and copper phone. Why not add another fiber? The costs obviously aren't that high for running a little cable -- as Google showed in their deployments. So let them compete from the very ground up.
It's not a non-sequitor, that's when the conclusion does not logically follow from the premise. What I did was apply your logic to another situation. Unless you can articulate a reason why the wedding band doesn't make a difference, but race does, then it's fair to assume the logic must be the same in the two situations.
No, he said that he couldn't whether the 7% difference was significant, not that there was no significance to his findings. He said "What it does show, even with such a small sample, is that in the underlying population there's almost certainly no huge gap between people's opinions of black women vs. white women breastfeeding in photos."
He's right about that.. if there was a huge gap between opinions on black vs white breastfeeding, then even with that sample size there would be a clear difference.
It seems like you (and other posters here) have a double standard about the conclusions here. You are accepting the conclusion from the original article saying that there IS a statistically significant difference in opinions, even though they presented no evidence of it. You accept is so thoroughly that you're ready to toss the "white male privilege" card. Why is that?
In the context of whether or not a picture of that woman breastfeeding their child is considered to be inappropriate? No, there's no difference. A breastfeeding woman is a breastfeeding woman regardless of whether or not she chooses to wear jewelry on her fingers.
There is a difference, one is wearing a ring and one isn't. People are judging the picture as a whole and there are lots of factors that go into that judgment besides whether the person approves of breastfeeding in general.
If it makes no difference to alter factors like marital status between the two pictures, then it must also make no difference to consider factors like race, so you must think the whole issue under discussion is nonsensical.
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No, I explicitly differentiated between language customs in English and other languages. English has a tradition of adopting foreign words, many other languages do not and are more resistant to it.
The fact that Christian Arabs use the word Allah to name the Christian god and the Muslim god has *absolutely no bearing* on what the Christian god and the Muslim god are called in English.
The fact that you think my argument is "incoherent" when it's just pointing out some fairly obvious attributes of our shared language is very odd.
No because I already knew that, as I indicated in my post ("Arabs can call God whatever they want in their own language, including Arab Christians who call the Christian god Allah.").
The words people use in Arabic are different than the words people use in English. If they want to use Allah to describe both concepts they can do that. I'm talking about how some people translate Allah into God when speaking English. That doesn't make sense. We don't translate other religious names like Jesus and Muhammed. We transliterate them, but we don't come up with completely different sounding new names based on people in our own culture who play a similar role in some respect. Like, oh Muhammed is a really common name for Muslims, so that's like the equivalent of John. Let's call him John! Or, Muhammed was a prophet, let's just call him Moses because he was a prophet too, and they both start with M! That's dumb, we don't do that with names.
This isn't about etymology. It's irrelevant how God and Allah were derived. What's relevant is how they're used today.
Louis in German is Louis, obviously.
Sorry, do you actually believe what you wrote?
Let's say it's 9am. My pediatrician's office is open. The urgent care down the road is open. The ER is open. My child has a fever of 105F.
Why on Earth do you think the *real cost* of treating my child at the ER is 10x greater than at my pediatrician's office or the urgent care place? Do you think regular pediatricians make $200k/year, but ER p ediatricians make $2 million/year? Do ER nurses make 10x more salary than regular nurses? Does infant Tylenol cost 10x more when an ER buys it?
If ER is 10x more expensive, that means they are doing cost-sharing between unprofitable and profitable services. A thug with a gunshot wound may cost a lot to treat, and may end up not paying, so they jack up the prices of infant Tylenol to cover for it. It's a poor-man's insurance scheme for doctors... people facing emergencies may not pay, so soak the ones who do pay.
The thing is, if you successfully divert all the people with fevers away from the ER and over to urgent care, that doesn't magically make the ER more cost efficient. It doesn't actually save money. It just gets rid of some of the cost-sharing. So other services that you can't shift get even more expensive.
And if you're simply talking about preventive care making emergencies happen less frequently, studies are inconclusive about whether that actually saves money on average. The cost of preventive care over a 50 year period is more than the ER cost of a single episode.
The idea of regular/preventive care saving money is not established. Some studies have shown reduced costs, others have shown increased costs. If it were settled, then all hospitals would do what you described, because all hospitals want to save money while also providing better care.
You've overabstracted and that leads to false equivalences. It's like saying "You don't like chocolate, and you don't like strawberry, but you claim you actually like pistachio ice cream??? Nonsense! You said you don't like 'flavors' and pistachio is also a 'flavor'!"
Complaining about one or two specific either/or arguments is not the same as complaining about all either/or arguments.
In July, there will be a market for the generic... the people who don't want to pay top dollar for the new drug and were happy with the old drug. Why would all these people magically forget about how great the old drug was and not see that there's now a cheap alternative treatment?
In the meantime, why would the new drug be more expensive than the old drug? The old drug is still under patent protection until July so they can set the price to be whatever they want without risk of losing share to competition... unless of course there is competition that you're not telling us about, like alternative treatments. And those will still exist for the new drug.
The stories I've heard are more along the lines of the drug company introducing a genuinely superior product.. not necessarily in its effectiveness, but in something tangential like easy of administration. A 24-hour tablet instead of taking 6 pills throughout the day. A non-drowsy version.
Then the generic comes along but it's for the old method, which is now seen as crappy by consumers. So many people still pay more for the new drug.
That actually makes sense and there's not really anything wrong with it. That's good actually... now there's a cheap version and a premium version and people can choose.
Someone citing white privilege pretty much immediately reveals they have no clue about real white people. They get their information from movies and biographies of famous people. The person who came up with the "white privilege" concept, Peggy McIntosh, did indeed have a privileged life. She studied at Radcliffe and Harvard and ended up with a cushy professorship teaching "women's studies" -- pretty much a complete BS job.
Of course, she had no clue that she was confusing most of her points about white privilege with "rich privilege." She's a true idiot.
I think there is validity to the concept of white privilege, but it's much different than what race baiters spout off about today. I also understand the concept of black privilege, male privilege, female privilege, etc. Every group has something that can be seen as a privilege.
I'm pretty sure that slavery wasn't created by African Americans.
You're absolutely right. Who do you think created slavery, though?
The issue here is not, "reverse discrimination to make things equal." That is a straw man. What is being discussed is identifying where American society is failing to provide opportunities, and targeting those demographics
You're deluding yourself. Giving help to some people and not others on the basis of irrelevant traits like race and gender and "those demographics", is exactly what "reverse discrimination to make things equal" means.
If you want to make a Center for Kids Who Can't Program Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too, then guess what... you can do that! Note the complete absence of words like "black" and "girl" and "Latino" and "demographics" and all that. If you want to help kids who can't program, then say "Hey can you program? No? Take this class!"
It's not hard and anything that strays from that simple technique is racist bullshit itself.
It seems stupid to translate words that have become proper names for distinct concepts. David is David in English and David in French. Do you know what David is in German? David. In Arabic it's also David. Just because other cultures have similar sounding or meaning names doesn't mean you substitute them.. David is not Davide, it's not Davit, it's not Dawid, it's not Daud... it's David.
We definitely don't translate names like "Abdullah" to "Abdugod."
In English it's common to adopt words from other languages to express new concepts. The Muslim god is Allah, not God. Allah is too different from God to get the same name in English. Arabs can call God whatever they want in their own language, including Arab Christians who call the Christian god Allah.
It's just so stupid when things like "Allahu akbar!" are translated in news stories as "God is great" as if it means anything close to the same thing when Muslims say it as when Christians say it.
If I had a choice between getting mugged, and getting arrested by the cops on fake charges and charged with a felony, I'd rather get mugged.
Pretty sure your chances of the former are higher.
Let's put it this way... would you rather experience an encounter of unknown outcome with a mugger, randomly selected from all muggings, or an encounter of unknown outcome with a cop, randomly selected from all encounters with cops?
But I don't have to worry, because that mostly happens to people who are black.
It happens mostly to people who commit serious crimes or are around people who commit serious crimes, not to people who are black. There is overlap of course.
Even if you assume racism is involved at various steps of the process, it's hardly "garbage" data.
Then there's the possibility that areas with racist law enforcement genuinely have more crime, either due to people committing crimes in protest, or due to cops becoming racist due to the criminals who they interact with. In that case the "racist" data is completely valid in helping predict future crime levels.
"Efficient law enforcement" is not a higher priority than "free and fair society".
Racial profiling does not take away from a free and fair society though.
Well, it depends exactly what you mean by racial profiling since the term encompasses so many possible actions. Going around harassing black people "just in case" is counter to a free and fair society. But making law enforcement more efficient by looking at factors like race, sex, age, wealth, hairstyle, clothing, gang affiliation, etc is fine.
There are credit card processors today that have a fee structure to take micropayments into account.
Paypal, for instance, charges 5% + 5 cents if that works out to be less than their normal fee.
Amazon Payments used to have the information publicly visible, but now you have to contact sales, but from what I recall it used to be 5% + 5 cents as well.
So your $1 bread will have about $0.10 in fees.
A small business might be paying 2.5%, but a large, multiple state grocery store isn't. There's certainly no way they are paying 5%, which is my cash back reward for groceries.
I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of loss leaders, so why is it hard to believe credit card companies lose money on some customers in the hopes that on average they'll make more money?
No they don't. They haven't spent any money on CAPEX, just a monthly lease for each end user connection: why would they charge more if the costs to them work out to be the same? If I spend the equivalent of $20/month on my own infra instead of $20/month using someone elses, my prices are probably going to be the same.
You're still missing my point. In the absence of price regulation, what you describe can't happen.
Let's say A pays $20/month/subscriber in infrastructure maintenance, upgrades, new development, etc.
Case 1a - there's no price regulation, and A can still sell to consumers.
Case 1b - there's no price regulation, and A cannot sell to consumers, just to the other providers
Case 2a - there is price regulation, and A can still sell to consumers
Case 2b - there is price regulation, and A cannot sell to consumers, just to the other providers
In 1a, A will charge what the market will bear. They'll have incentives for new subscribers and poor people that let them get on the network. The cost will be like $30/month. For most subscribers, the cost will be $40/month. What will A charge B? If they charge less than $40/month... let's say $35/month... they will potentially lose their core customers because B might undercut them at $39/month. Why would they do that?
In 1b, A cannot sell to consumers, just to B. But A still knows that the market can bear so many subscribers at $30/month plus so many more at $40/month. They know if they charge $100/month, nobody will sign up and they'll lose money. They know if they charge $21/month, more people will sign up but their profit will be too low. What do they do? If they're allowed to charge differential prices, it's exactly the same as 1a. "Oh, you want to lease a new line? $30/month special. After a year it's $40/month." If they're not allowed to charge differential prices, they figure out the weighted average and charge that. Maybe $35/month. Their overall profit is the same, meanwhile B and C make money in some areas and lose money in others (perhaps they're regulated to provide equivalent coverage).
In 2a, with price regulation, you say okay A, we know it costs you $20/month, and we think $30/month is a fair profit, so you WILL charge $30/month per line.
In 2b... it's exactly the same.
As you can see, the fake competition provided by B, C, D, E, etc play no role in establishing the market price for the service, because they do not control the service. Only the price controls work. The sub-divisions of "a" and "b" make no difference either... just the price controls.
Provider B gets a committed information rate on Provider A's infrastructure, which for 6mbit/s DSL is probably going to be about 64kbit/s, but since Provider B would have 1,000 customers aggregated, there's total available bandwidth on Provider A's network available of 60mbit/s or so, allowing Provider B's customers to achieve 6mbit/s speeds (in other words, this is how it works already, except that instead of 1 retailer utilizing the infrastructure you have many).
The thing is, you're assuming A is required to allow B to hook up their own interconnects. That's incorrect. That was my point with bringing up Comcast in real life... they can say "Yeah I know it's slow. It sucks. But too bad, we're not letting you connect faster lines to OUR network." This has actually come up in real life. I'm sure you read about Netflix offering to pay 100% of the cost to upgrade Comcast's interconnect with Level 3 (the carrier for Netflix). Comcast refused, because they want a nice fat monthly fee, not a one-time free upgrade.
And if the law is purely "You have to lease the lines you control to B, C, D, E, and F" then you have not changed that (even with price controls). You're going to have to introduce additional regulations that say "And you have to let B, C, D, E, and F have access at the interconnects so they can upgrade them at their own cost or whatever."
But then, you can just have tha
This isn't an echo chamber. You suggested that nuclear power is not flourishing under authoritarian regimes, but in fact it is.. at least among regimes with the technical and manufacturing know-how to build nuclear reactors. Almost every developing country that doesn't have nuclear power wants it. And those who do have it are expanding it.
Flourishing doesn't mean nuclear provides a majority of the electricity in those countries, as you pointed out, but that's okay. The point is China is building 28 reactors or whatever, and the US is building... 4. And they are delayed and over budget. It's definitely flourishing compared to here.
Even under less authoritarian regimes, like India, the simple lack of as many environmental (including human impact) regulations is letting them explore technologies like thorium reactors more feasibly than we could here.
China has 21 nuclear power plants. There are 28 additional plants under construction. Because of lower construction costs and faster time to market, the cost of building THE SAME nuclear plants in China is about 1/3 the cost in America. (They are building modern plants like the AP1000, which is also being considered in the US.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
Then you have India which is investing in the thorium fuel cycle.
Conclusion: In countries where there is less regulation, or equivalently the government is fully behind the project, nuclear is flowering and provides low cost baseline electricity.
Are you suggesting that provider A would sell access to the infrastructure at the same price to a retail customer as they would a wholesale customer (who is in turn the retail provider)?
No, I said "But they have to charge end-customers even more, because otherwise provider B would not have a sustainable business."
One has to consider that regulations would not permit simply undercutting the competition simply because they own the infra.
If you are going to regulate prices anyway, then like I said, this is just an economic welfare project for B, C, D. They aren't providing "competition" that is lowering prices... your regulation is lowering prices.
Yes, those providers are still captive HOWEVER they still have their own core networks and connections to other ASNs - the thing being leased in such a scenario is L2 or L3 access on some form of last mile infrastructure, we're not talking about VISPs or white-label providers or anything.
Yes but whether it's white-label or "real" access is irrelevant because it's still provider A that owns the infrastructure and makes the decisions. Look at the stuff going on with net neutrality. Comcast can just say "Ok, we're not upgrading this peering connection until Netflix pays us extra." And that screws Netflix and the other Level 3 customers trying to use that congested link.
In your scenario, why would it be any different (except apparently your price regulations would prevent Comcast from even being able to ask for more money). Let's say my neighborhood has crappy phone lines and low speed DSL, and I'm like screw provider A, I'm switching to B. When I switch from A to B, A still makes money. When I switch from B to C because of course the network still sucks, A still makes money. When I switch to D, thinking "My God, so many ISPs in this town.. surely one of them must be better" then A continues to make money. A has no incentive to upgrade my neighborhood's phone lines or reduce prices or anything, and the other providers aren't able to upgrade my neighborhood's phone lines or reduce prices below what A charges (plus their own overhead).
Oh, unless you regulate improvements as well as prices... in which case, like I said, the "competition" aspect of the situation is a sham.
I'm not sure you've ever seen real competition, and it would appear that you've never lived abroad (especially in a country where you have a 1-2 providers dealing with infrastructure and a multitude of retailers to choose from), have you?
No I have never lived abroad, but you're being silly now... ISPs aren't the only businesses that compete. I've seen plenty of competition. Toyota and Ford compete for my business, as an example. That's why I know that the only way to have effective competition is to have separate companies competing on the good or service in question. If I want to contrive a situation where I get provider A to upgrade the network infrastructure in my neighborhood, then I need to invent competition for the network infrastructure in my neighborhood. Not services running on top of it. That makes zero difference. If I want provider A to install new fiber lines, then you could add 15000 "competitors" who are forced to lease A's network and it would accomplish nothing at all.
But add 1 company like Google that runs new lines in my neighborhood, and suddenly provider A will either upgrade its infrastructure, dramatically lower prices, or go out of business. That's competition.
I still don't see the point. Provider A made the investment, and has to charge provider B enough to still be profitable. But they have to charge end-customers even more, because otherwise provider B would not have a sustainable business. So in other words, you've artificially increased the cost to the end-customer, just for the sake of giving provider B a job mimicking provider A.
In your second scenario, where provider A is fully prohibited from selling to the end-customer, how is the network situation any better than now? Provider A still has captive customers... instead of me and you, the captive customers are providers B, C, D, and E. What incentive does provider A have to upgrade their network? I don't see how it's any better than now.
And in this situation you're still imposing an artificially high cost on the consumer. What value-add does provider B give the end-consumer? If it's actually *worth* the extra charge, then there's no need to prohibit A from dealing with end-consumers, because presumably they'd choose B anyway. And if it's not worth it, then you're forcing the end-consumer to pay extra for a service that isn't worth it.
The only real competition is when multiple companies have multiple lines going to your house, and you can totally switch your business between them. For things like water, sewer, and maybe electricity, the costs are so high that it can't realistically happen. But for internet, look, we already have coax cable and copper phone. Why not add another fiber? The costs obviously aren't that high for running a little cable -- as Google showed in their deployments. So let them compete from the very ground up.
It's not a non-sequitor, that's when the conclusion does not logically follow from the premise. What I did was apply your logic to another situation. Unless you can articulate a reason why the wedding band doesn't make a difference, but race does, then it's fair to assume the logic must be the same in the two situations.
My phone (Nexus 5) isn't rooted and I can record calls. Different apps work on different phones apparently. I'm using "Call Recorder" right now.
Why did you switch from "breasts" to "breastfeed"?
The breasts are fundamental to sexual reproduction because they play a part in sexual attraction, which leads to sex, which leads to babies.
Breastfeeding is not.
No, he said that he couldn't whether the 7% difference was significant, not that there was no significance to his findings. He said "What it does show, even with such a small sample, is that in the underlying population there's almost certainly no huge gap between people's opinions of black women vs. white women breastfeeding in photos."
He's right about that.. if there was a huge gap between opinions on black vs white breastfeeding, then even with that sample size there would be a clear difference.
It seems like you (and other posters here) have a double standard about the conclusions here. You are accepting the conclusion from the original article saying that there IS a statistically significant difference in opinions, even though they presented no evidence of it. You accept is so thoroughly that you're ready to toss the "white male privilege" card. Why is that?
In the context of whether or not a picture of that woman breastfeeding their child is considered to be inappropriate? No, there's no difference. A breastfeeding woman is a breastfeeding woman regardless of whether or not she chooses to wear jewelry on her fingers.
There is a difference, one is wearing a ring and one isn't. People are judging the picture as a whole and there are lots of factors that go into that judgment besides whether the person approves of breastfeeding in general.
If it makes no difference to alter factors like marital status between the two pictures, then it must also make no difference to consider factors like race, so you must think the whole issue under discussion is nonsensical.