...they're NOT closing anything in relation to this announcement. In fact, had someone clicked on the article they wouldn't have to scan too far to find this:
"Texas’s power grid operator has stressed the need for more electricity resources in the region to power oil and gas drilling operations."
So no, they're not closing fossil fuel plants in favor of this...and the reason they're building this is BECAUSE of fossil fuel efforts.
...and since they are, isn't the simultaneous raising of the fees for the same service akin to price fixing? How is this NOT reviewable as a possible antitrust violation?
...writing ad copy for GEICO, Progressive and Farmers Insurance. Advertising where the level of insipid doesn't appear to matter one atom will be it's economic sweet spot.
Actually, right now there is kind of a scandal going on with Reddit's ad platform.
They did allow ads to be targeted to individual subreddits and the spend per click was actually really affordable. However, they recently changed that model and, to say they botched the roll out of the new system would be an attempt at Olympic levels of understatement. Advertisers had a cap on spend per period...the new platform absolutely ignored the cap and people were getting astronomical advertising bills for impressions. That and the cost per either click or impression skyrocketed. The typical increase I've been reading in posts is at 500% at a minimum. The Reddit ads team is also notoriously unresponsive and lately the mods on the subreddit for ads (https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads/) has been censoring some posts (according to examples posted by users).
About the only good thing that might come out of this entire debacle is someone might get the bright idea for a "How To NOT" guide using Reddit's new ad scheme as the shining star example.
And I'll bet that you're intentionally missing the obvious...that the word I typed in originally got changed to "within". The obvious word selection there and which matches the point of the post would be "without".
However, I'm a fairly smart person and don't think that even a simple changed word (that I imagine most other casual readers realized was a obvious typo) will change your condescension.
You can believe you're right but clearly the question isn't settled so claiming some false sense of superior understanding or intellect is childish and, frankly, tiring.
You cannot restrict the speech offered by a radio or television both of whom often disseminate their message in a pre-recorded fashion via their chosen mediums simply BECAUSE they're not a human being at the moment the message is delivered. It's pretty much identical here.
You can choose to sit or stand while you digest the obvious parallels there.
I think I'm a little closer to understanding than you are. The bot works within the human directly controlling it. Your megaphone and pencil do not. They do not operate independently of you. The bot does.
The issue isn't the medium or the technology but the concept that the message can be received and then, via an programming algorithm, restated in various forums and venues. Your pencil nor your megaphone have that ability. They do not disseminate your message without your immediate and direct control. The bot does.
Would a scheduled tweet or status update delivered by an automated process be considered a bot? If so then, yes, a bot has a right to free speech as it is an extension of the speech that a person wishes to express. The fact that it's not delivered, in person (so to say), by a human being doesn't abrogate the rights of that speech to be heard as that was the intent of the speaker in the first place.
Really, no different than the delayed reading of a printed newspaper editorial. The medium and method of delivery are irrelevant.
Of course, how "bot" is defined is what's pertinent here. Most of what people today would call "bots" are really just prerecorded messages where the automation isn't the speech itself but the means by which it is delivered.
Did pretty much the same when the kids were living at home. Once they moved off to college I considered dumping Comcast TV altogether and keep their cable internet. Turns out, if I dropped TV my bill would INCREASE something like $15/mo.
Best solution was to scale it all the way back to basic cable (local channels and no fluff). Picked up and tried both Hulu and YouTube TV for a time. Liked them both but found we simply didn't watch much network TV. Dropped them both, went with Netflix and Amazon video (which we already had through our Prime account) and added HBO to that (which, honestly, I also don't watch all that much).
What cinches it for me is the absolute abysmal quality of network television programming. I can hardly watch a few minutes of any of the "popular" shows without feeling like my brain is dying. Unfunny, not entertaining and chock full of political slant (that shit is everywhere these days).
It would seem television companies learned nothing from watching what happened to the music industry.
There is a solution to the problem that I think would work better than simply jacking up taxes. We are still living, for the most part, with the core tenets of supply side economics that Reagan and his Congress brought in coming on 40 years ago. In general theory, supply side economics should work and work quite well but, as we all know, all it has done is make the rich way richer, corporations way bigger and more powerful while the American worker, whose wages were supposed to rise right along with the economy, has been left holding the proverbial bag. Wages have fairly stagnated over the course of Reaganomics...and that is the problem.
For those that aren't familiar with the way that economic model works, there are 4 main beliefs:
- Reduce government control of the economy and let business do what business does (basically, reduce/remove regulations)
- Reduce taxes, namely the capital gains and income taxes (let the people keep more of their money and they’ll invest it in business)
- Use the federal reserve to control inflation (this is done by controlling the money supply via the setting of lending rates to banks)
- Reduce the increase in government spending (spending increases but not as much as it had been doing)
The idea was to take the leash off business and in return the economy would grow, jobs would be created, profits and the GDP would increase, federal revenues would increase right along with them and workers would benefit via better jobs and higher wages. All those happened...except that last one. And despite the cases of apoplexy it’ll cause some folks when I say this: supply side/trickle down/Reaganomics just plain works. This truly isn’t up for debate. However, it can be made to work better by fixing that last part (workers wages would rise).
The whole issue is that while the government opened the business/money floodgates at the top of the pipe, nothing more ended up trickling down at the bottom of the pipe than had been before the plan was put into motion. Fabulous wealth was generated (that much is obvious) but it didn’t get shared with those at the middle and bottom of the ladder.
I propose a law wherein if a company (any size) realizes an operating profit (after all expenses including wages/benefits) then a portion of that profit gets distributed to the employees in the form of a profit sharing payment. The portion wouldn’t need to be cripplingly large either.
By way of example, let’s look at two companies: ExxonMobil and Walmart. In 2017, ExxonMobil made $40.6B in profits and had 69,600 employees. If you took just 1% of that profit (meaning 99% stayed with the company) and equally distributed it to every one of their employees in the form of profit sharing, it comes out to $5833 per employee. Just one frickin’ percent equates to an additional $5800 per employee. Naturally, 2% is twice that and so on. But how about Walmart? In 2017 they had around 1.5 million employees and enjoyed a profit of $124.6B. Take the same numbers we did for ExxonMobil and Walmart pays out a 1% profit sharing check of just $830. However, of those 1.5 million employees, the vast majority are part time and some adjustments need to be made to the formula. However, when the Bush tax refunds went out back in 2009 at $300 per taxpayer, it helped to stabilize the economy and inject cash flow into a sluggish market. Using that as a measuring stick, Walmart would need to pay out just 5% of their profits back to their employees or roughly $4150 per personand they still keep 95%.
This idea has a number of attractive features. For one, we’re not using the federal government via the IRS to tax those corporations so that the government can redistribute it (read: mismanage and waste it) via social services. In this case, work (having a job) pays off. It’s a direct transaction between the employer and employee and removes the inefficient middle man. If, for tax purposes, the employer wishes to
This isn't about that. You say they don't do it...except they do. People are leaving high tax places like New York and California precisely because of the direct and indirect effects of a high taxation society. Your mental musings are simply false in the face of actual evidence.
Sorry but that question has been asked and answered and is pretty settled. You have only to look at a business like Amazon and why they're relocating their headquarters from Seattle. The reason they give, quite plainly, is Seattle's high taxes and anti-business environment. Period. Do you think they do that on a whim? Do you have any idea how disrupting that will be to their business operations when it happens? If you have even a clue as to how big a pain in the ass that is, then you should also come to the conclusion that the drivers for that move must be pretty damn powerful as well.
The example you quoted is something out of the 1970's. American factory-based industrial manufacturing was killed off by NAFTA and a raft of other, government hatched idea. Our economy is now much more of a service based one. Insurance, banking, education, etc. Those are the big industries now...and they're much more mobile than your example suggests. Business isn't nearly so hostage to a physical location as you like to believe.
Make the environment so inhospitable and those rich people and those wealthy companies DO pick up their ball and they WILL move.
So how do we pull this money back, and inject it back into the economy? I'll give you a hint - it starts with a T.
Your hint has been tried and it doesn't work. I'm sorry but the evidence is pretty settled on this. Taking money from someone who has it and giving it to the government supposedly on behalf of the poor who you wish to help isn't the answer. The government's involvement in the transfer of money from those who have it to those who don't is right out there on par with loan sharks for effectiveness. The government does indeed excel in big projects...but they don't really do that anymore (despite our desperate infrastructure needs) but paying for an existing subway system whose ridership is more than adequate to pay for itself IF that system is run efficiently and is subject to strict oversight isn't something the government can do well...because the very subject of the conversation is how they're in such a mess as it is now.
That same cry for "this tax goes directly to that project" means that those who run that project now have zero incentive to actually run that project with any passing notion of efficiency. If they fall short, the taxes cover it and when that becomes a chronic problem...oh well...raise those taxes!
Your hint is indeed a hint...just not the correct answer to the question is all.
Because forcing people to use run-down and broken public transportation doesn't fix the problem of a systematic, long-term lack of investment in the transportation infrastructure. What fixes that is more money. Where that money comes from used to be the economic engine of the middle class, but that's pretty much gone. Where did the money go? To the 1%. So if we need money to fix problems, that's where it's going to have to come from.
If the rich had been content to be rich, life would go on as usual. But they weren't content with that. They needed to have it all while everyone else got pretty much nothing. Right now, the top 1% richest people in the US own 35% of the wealth. If you look at the top 5% of the richest people in the US, they have 62% of the wealth in the country. That's absurd. And the bottom 40% of people, the bottom half of what used to be the middle class and the poor, own less than 1% of the wealth in the country.
40% of our country collectively owns 1% of the wealth of the whole country. I get that you've got yours and fuck everyone else, but you can't squeeze blood from a stone. It's not "soaking the rich" when they're so wealthy they don't know what to do with it, and we literally can't get any more money out of 40% of the population.
That's all very eloquent but you won't solve your problem when your solution is "tax the rich". That's California's recipe for success and people are fleeing that state in droves BECAUSE of those policies but while Cali has been getting all that kind of press lately, New York is right there along with them: https://www.bizjournals.com/ne...
You cannot tax yourself to prosperity. It doesn't work, has never worked and won't ever work even though you have an entirely valid point of who holds all the wealth. Those with the wealth leave when someone tries to take too much of it. Cali and NY are stark evidence of it.
So we can't tax wealthy people at all because that's "soaking the rich", but a great alternative is to make things more expensive for the working class by imposing taxes and fees on their transportation.
So, "the rich" is the guy who owns the business or who has his assets registered in a place that NYC can tax. Business owner simply adds a few cents to the cost of whatever it is his business does, and while most of the assets people shrug their shoulders and pay up, some of them move their assets away from the taxing authority...so the net difference is the same. Taxing the rich has literally never been the panacea solution to raising revenue long term because its those same rich people who can take advantage of tax loopholes, shelters and havens. Those folks are the ones whose assets that count (aka: "the ones you wanna tax") are fairly mobile and if it gets too onerous, those mobile assets...move.
I should have perhaps explained that better the first time around.
Unless the working population of NYC has dropped, how are these people who used to take the transit getting to work? If your solution is to soak the rich (which literally never works) to pay for the less rich, why not direct your attention to those who are driving into work? Raise parking rates and/or toll fees. DISCOURAGE the alternate behavior.
The court simply decided to not determine which way NN will be implemented (if it's implemented at all). It allows for the FCC to enact a NN rule administratively. This is good for the functioning of the government while it could be potentially bad for the topic at hand (NN). This is appropriate though as NN really ought to be a law (coming from Congress) and not an administrative ruling.
I'm making the argument that the system he's touting won't be used by him and his congressional buddies. For someone who seems to think he's smarter than everyone else to the point of suggesting someone who disagrees with his hero is dumb, you're either redefining dumb or being intentionally obtuse.
As soon as socialist Bernie's master plan applies to EVERYONE then he's a hypocrite (like I said).
For years, when I was asked to describe my job (web application dev) I replied that I was, pretty much, a high tech carpenter. I built things and once those things were built, I was seeking the next thing to build because the people who employed me to build things did not tend to keep me to maintain them.
Enter India, Bangladesh and China and I found that when I was bidding on projects, I was doing so against a foreign ignoramus who would bid 1/4 of what I was quoting. What made that situation more galling was that I also mentored for my particular language on a tech forum and I'd have Indians, Bangladeshis and Chinese create an account, vomit an entire code module into a post and conclude with some pidjin English version of "how I fix?".
Long story short, my industry (application development) does not value the end product nearly as much as they care about how many dollars can they get a barely functioning POS up and creaking along. No appreciation for future maintenance, upgrading and patching costs, no apparent awareness of how their delightfully cheap overseas dev will sell their "custom" code to the next similar project.
Software developers are only valued for their immediate capabilities of building the house...that the company will allow to fall into disrepair via neglect or cheap maintenance attentions.
I think it's worth noting that, as a sitting United States Senator, Bernie himself doesn't use the system he's touting. His health care plan is to get an Obamacare Gold plan and, like all senators, he receives a 72% subsidy for that.
So, until and unless Medicare starts qualifying as a Obamacare Gold plan (good luck with that), we're not even talking apples to apples.
Bernie is as crooked a politician as the rest of them: says one thing, does another. He's no better than any of the rest of them but his hypocrisy is quite a bit bigger.
Slashdot Mirror
...they're NOT closing anything in relation to this announcement. In fact, had someone clicked on the article they wouldn't have to scan too far to find this:
"Texas’s power grid operator has stressed the need for more electricity resources in the region to power oil and gas drilling operations."
So no, they're not closing fossil fuel plants in favor of this...and the reason they're building this is BECAUSE of fossil fuel efforts.
...and since they are, isn't the simultaneous raising of the fees for the same service akin to price fixing? How is this NOT reviewable as a possible antitrust violation?
...writing ad copy for GEICO, Progressive and Farmers Insurance. Advertising where the level of insipid doesn't appear to matter one atom will be it's economic sweet spot.
Actually, right now there is kind of a scandal going on with Reddit's ad platform.
They did allow ads to be targeted to individual subreddits and the spend per click was actually really affordable. However, they recently changed that model and, to say they botched the roll out of the new system would be an attempt at Olympic levels of understatement. Advertisers had a cap on spend per period...the new platform absolutely ignored the cap and people were getting astronomical advertising bills for impressions. That and the cost per either click or impression skyrocketed. The typical increase I've been reading in posts is at 500% at a minimum. The Reddit ads team is also notoriously unresponsive and lately the mods on the subreddit for ads (https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads/) has been censoring some posts (according to examples posted by users).
About the only good thing that might come out of this entire debacle is someone might get the bright idea for a "How To NOT" guide using Reddit's new ad scheme as the shining star example.
...does there need to be an "answer" to the US GPS? Is there something the EU member want to do that the current GPS network cannot or declines to do?
"C/C++ must seem like nuclear power plants run by squirrels". Thank you for my daily chortle. :D
We usually don't feel the need to.
And I'll bet that you're intentionally missing the obvious...that the word I typed in originally got changed to "within". The obvious word selection there and which matches the point of the post would be "without".
However, I'm a fairly smart person and don't think that even a simple changed word (that I imagine most other casual readers realized was a obvious typo) will change your condescension.
You can believe you're right but clearly the question isn't settled so claiming some false sense of superior understanding or intellect is childish and, frankly, tiring.
You cannot restrict the speech offered by a radio or television both of whom often disseminate their message in a pre-recorded fashion via their chosen mediums simply BECAUSE they're not a human being at the moment the message is delivered. It's pretty much identical here.
You can choose to sit or stand while you digest the obvious parallels there.
I think I'm a little closer to understanding than you are. The bot works within the human directly controlling it. Your megaphone and pencil do not. They do not operate independently of you. The bot does. The issue isn't the medium or the technology but the concept that the message can be received and then, via an programming algorithm, restated in various forums and venues. Your pencil nor your megaphone have that ability. They do not disseminate your message without your immediate and direct control. The bot does.
Would a scheduled tweet or status update delivered by an automated process be considered a bot? If so then, yes, a bot has a right to free speech as it is an extension of the speech that a person wishes to express. The fact that it's not delivered, in person (so to say), by a human being doesn't abrogate the rights of that speech to be heard as that was the intent of the speaker in the first place.
Really, no different than the delayed reading of a printed newspaper editorial. The medium and method of delivery are irrelevant.
Of course, how "bot" is defined is what's pertinent here. Most of what people today would call "bots" are really just prerecorded messages where the automation isn't the speech itself but the means by which it is delivered.
Did pretty much the same when the kids were living at home. Once they moved off to college I considered dumping Comcast TV altogether and keep their cable internet. Turns out, if I dropped TV my bill would INCREASE something like $15/mo.
Best solution was to scale it all the way back to basic cable (local channels and no fluff). Picked up and tried both Hulu and YouTube TV for a time. Liked them both but found we simply didn't watch much network TV. Dropped them both, went with Netflix and Amazon video (which we already had through our Prime account) and added HBO to that (which, honestly, I also don't watch all that much).
What cinches it for me is the absolute abysmal quality of network television programming. I can hardly watch a few minutes of any of the "popular" shows without feeling like my brain is dying. Unfunny, not entertaining and chock full of political slant (that shit is everywhere these days).
It would seem television companies learned nothing from watching what happened to the music industry.
That would depend on where you measure "Earth" from. The middle or the edge.
...was pretty damned impressive. Training sims will be a lot more effective anyway.
There is a solution to the problem that I think would work better than simply jacking up taxes. We are still living, for the most part, with the core tenets of supply side economics that Reagan and his Congress brought in coming on 40 years ago. In general theory, supply side economics should work and work quite well but, as we all know, all it has done is make the rich way richer, corporations way bigger and more powerful while the American worker, whose wages were supposed to rise right along with the economy, has been left holding the proverbial bag. Wages have fairly stagnated over the course of Reaganomics...and that is the problem.
For those that aren't familiar with the way that economic model works, there are 4 main beliefs:
- Reduce government control of the economy and let business do what business does (basically, reduce/remove regulations)
- Reduce taxes, namely the capital gains and income taxes (let the people keep more of their money and they’ll invest it in business)
- Use the federal reserve to control inflation (this is done by controlling the money supply via the setting of lending rates to banks)
- Reduce the increase in government spending (spending increases but not as much as it had been doing)
The idea was to take the leash off business and in return the economy would grow, jobs would be created, profits and the GDP would increase, federal revenues would increase right along with them and workers would benefit via better jobs and higher wages. All those happened...except that last one. And despite the cases of apoplexy it’ll cause some folks when I say this: supply side/trickle down/Reaganomics just plain works. This truly isn’t up for debate. However, it can be made to work better by fixing that last part (workers wages would rise).
The whole issue is that while the government opened the business/money floodgates at the top of the pipe, nothing more ended up trickling down at the bottom of the pipe than had been before the plan was put into motion. Fabulous wealth was generated (that much is obvious) but it didn’t get shared with those at the middle and bottom of the ladder.
I propose a law wherein if a company (any size) realizes an operating profit (after all expenses including wages/benefits) then a portion of that profit gets distributed to the employees in the form of a profit sharing payment. The portion wouldn’t need to be cripplingly large either.
By way of example, let’s look at two companies: ExxonMobil and Walmart. In 2017, ExxonMobil made $40.6B in profits and had 69,600 employees. If you took just 1% of that profit (meaning 99% stayed with the company) and equally distributed it to every one of their employees in the form of profit sharing, it comes out to $5833 per employee. Just one frickin’ percent equates to an additional $5800 per employee. Naturally, 2% is twice that and so on. But how about Walmart? In 2017 they had around 1.5 million employees and enjoyed a profit of $124.6B. Take the same numbers we did for ExxonMobil and Walmart pays out a 1% profit sharing check of just $830. However, of those 1.5 million employees, the vast majority are part time and some adjustments need to be made to the formula. However, when the Bush tax refunds went out back in 2009 at $300 per taxpayer, it helped to stabilize the economy and inject cash flow into a sluggish market. Using that as a measuring stick, Walmart would need to pay out just 5% of their profits back to their employees or roughly $4150 per personand they still keep 95%.
This idea has a number of attractive features. For one, we’re not using the federal government via the IRS to tax those corporations so that the government can redistribute it (read: mismanage and waste it) via social services. In this case, work (having a job) pays off. It’s a direct transaction between the employer and employee and removes the inefficient middle man. If, for tax purposes, the employer wishes to
This isn't about that. You say they don't do it...except they do. People are leaving high tax places like New York and California precisely because of the direct and indirect effects of a high taxation society. Your mental musings are simply false in the face of actual evidence.
Sorry but that question has been asked and answered and is pretty settled. You have only to look at a business like Amazon and why they're relocating their headquarters from Seattle. The reason they give, quite plainly, is Seattle's high taxes and anti-business environment. Period. Do you think they do that on a whim? Do you have any idea how disrupting that will be to their business operations when it happens? If you have even a clue as to how big a pain in the ass that is, then you should also come to the conclusion that the drivers for that move must be pretty damn powerful as well.
The example you quoted is something out of the 1970's. American factory-based industrial manufacturing was killed off by NAFTA and a raft of other, government hatched idea. Our economy is now much more of a service based one. Insurance, banking, education, etc. Those are the big industries now...and they're much more mobile than your example suggests. Business isn't nearly so hostage to a physical location as you like to believe.
Make the environment so inhospitable and those rich people and those wealthy companies DO pick up their ball and they WILL move.
So how do we pull this money back, and inject it back into the economy? I'll give you a hint - it starts with a T.
Your hint has been tried and it doesn't work. I'm sorry but the evidence is pretty settled on this. Taking money from someone who has it and giving it to the government supposedly on behalf of the poor who you wish to help isn't the answer. The government's involvement in the transfer of money from those who have it to those who don't is right out there on par with loan sharks for effectiveness. The government does indeed excel in big projects...but they don't really do that anymore (despite our desperate infrastructure needs) but paying for an existing subway system whose ridership is more than adequate to pay for itself IF that system is run efficiently and is subject to strict oversight isn't something the government can do well...because the very subject of the conversation is how they're in such a mess as it is now.
That same cry for "this tax goes directly to that project" means that those who run that project now have zero incentive to actually run that project with any passing notion of efficiency. If they fall short, the taxes cover it and when that becomes a chronic problem...oh well...raise those taxes!
Your hint is indeed a hint...just not the correct answer to the question is all.
Because the choice is one or the other. Right.
Thanks for playing. We have some lovely parting gifts.
Because forcing people to use run-down and broken public transportation doesn't fix the problem of a systematic, long-term lack of investment in the transportation infrastructure. What fixes that is more money. Where that money comes from used to be the economic engine of the middle class, but that's pretty much gone. Where did the money go? To the 1%. So if we need money to fix problems, that's where it's going to have to come from.
If the rich had been content to be rich, life would go on as usual. But they weren't content with that. They needed to have it all while everyone else got pretty much nothing. Right now, the top 1% richest people in the US own 35% of the wealth. If you look at the top 5% of the richest people in the US, they have 62% of the wealth in the country. That's absurd. And the bottom 40% of people, the bottom half of what used to be the middle class and the poor, own less than 1% of the wealth in the country.
40% of our country collectively owns 1% of the wealth of the whole country. I get that you've got yours and fuck everyone else, but you can't squeeze blood from a stone. It's not "soaking the rich" when they're so wealthy they don't know what to do with it, and we literally can't get any more money out of 40% of the population.
That's all very eloquent but you won't solve your problem when your solution is "tax the rich". That's California's recipe for success and people are fleeing that state in droves BECAUSE of those policies but while Cali has been getting all that kind of press lately, New York is right there along with them: https://www.bizjournals.com/ne...
You cannot tax yourself to prosperity. It doesn't work, has never worked and won't ever work even though you have an entirely valid point of who holds all the wealth. Those with the wealth leave when someone tries to take too much of it. Cali and NY are stark evidence of it.
So we can't tax wealthy people at all because that's "soaking the rich", but a great alternative is to make things more expensive for the working class by imposing taxes and fees on their transportation.
So, "the rich" is the guy who owns the business or who has his assets registered in a place that NYC can tax. Business owner simply adds a few cents to the cost of whatever it is his business does, and while most of the assets people shrug their shoulders and pay up, some of them move their assets away from the taxing authority...so the net difference is the same. Taxing the rich has literally never been the panacea solution to raising revenue long term because its those same rich people who can take advantage of tax loopholes, shelters and havens. Those folks are the ones whose assets that count (aka: "the ones you wanna tax") are fairly mobile and if it gets too onerous, those mobile assets...move.
I should have perhaps explained that better the first time around.
Unless the working population of NYC has dropped, how are these people who used to take the transit getting to work? If your solution is to soak the rich (which literally never works) to pay for the less rich, why not direct your attention to those who are driving into work? Raise parking rates and/or toll fees. DISCOURAGE the alternate behavior.
An hour's difference gives you jet lag? Really?
The court simply decided to not determine which way NN will be implemented (if it's implemented at all). It allows for the FCC to enact a NN rule administratively. This is good for the functioning of the government while it could be potentially bad for the topic at hand (NN). This is appropriate though as NN really ought to be a law (coming from Congress) and not an administrative ruling.
I'm making the argument that the system he's touting won't be used by him and his congressional buddies. For someone who seems to think he's smarter than everyone else to the point of suggesting someone who disagrees with his hero is dumb, you're either redefining dumb or being intentionally obtuse.
As soon as socialist Bernie's master plan applies to EVERYONE then he's a hypocrite (like I said).
But it doesn't, never has and so he is.
For years, when I was asked to describe my job (web application dev) I replied that I was, pretty much, a high tech carpenter. I built things and once those things were built, I was seeking the next thing to build because the people who employed me to build things did not tend to keep me to maintain them.
Enter India, Bangladesh and China and I found that when I was bidding on projects, I was doing so against a foreign ignoramus who would bid 1/4 of what I was quoting. What made that situation more galling was that I also mentored for my particular language on a tech forum and I'd have Indians, Bangladeshis and Chinese create an account, vomit an entire code module into a post and conclude with some pidjin English version of "how I fix?".
Long story short, my industry (application development) does not value the end product nearly as much as they care about how many dollars can they get a barely functioning POS up and creaking along. No appreciation for future maintenance, upgrading and patching costs, no apparent awareness of how their delightfully cheap overseas dev will sell their "custom" code to the next similar project.
Software developers are only valued for their immediate capabilities of building the house...that the company will allow to fall into disrepair via neglect or cheap maintenance attentions.
I think it's worth noting that, as a sitting United States Senator, Bernie himself doesn't use the system he's touting. His health care plan is to get an Obamacare Gold plan and, like all senators, he receives a 72% subsidy for that.
So, until and unless Medicare starts qualifying as a Obamacare Gold plan (good luck with that), we're not even talking apples to apples.
Bernie is as crooked a politician as the rest of them: says one thing, does another. He's no better than any of the rest of them but his hypocrisy is quite a bit bigger.