Not sure what blocking re-employment has to do with leaks. If anything driving people to other companies is likely to cause MORE leaks.
This is almost certainly about eliminating the risk of contingent workforce being classified as employees. My own employer does the same thing, though it does not bar long-term relationships as long as the company doesn't interview individual workers. That is, if we hire Fred to help out with something, then Fred is gone in two years and must take a break. On the other hand, if we hire Acme janitorial to clean our trash and they send over Fred then he can work for years, but we don't get a veto on who they send/etc.
I have mixed feelings. On one hand it does make things harder on those who end up having to move on. On the other hand, before the policy we used to have a LOT of people who would be dragged along in a contract position with the elusive promise of a hire that would take years to happen. The policy forces managers to act if they don't want to lose somebody.
I love when they reset your router config. I couldn't figure out why PXE boot stopped working after I had them fix an issue with my CableCard. Ah, that would be the DHCP server in the router being turned back on. If it weren't a royal PITA I'd bridge the thing...
Sounds like there is a simple solution to that for Netflix.
Have their application send outgoing packets to an IP on their ISP which just get fed to the bit bucket by the border router. So, if you download a movie at 2Mbps, the client sends random data at 4Mbps back. That forces your ISP to upload more than it downloads, and thus they have to negotiate peering.
From documentaries/etc that I've seen there were a few issues:
1. An airline timetable that was used to check published routes was improperly adjusted for timezone, thus missing the planned takeoff. 2. The operator interrogating the aircraft transponder kept the aircraft selected for a long time - which caused it to keep a different aircraft's response after they had separated on the screen. If they had re-interrogated it they'd probably have picked up the civilian transponder code. 3. I believe there had been threats or an actual attack on another ship recently, putting pressure on the captain to not let hostiles get too close.
The only reason that more events like this happen is that the Iranians (or anyone else) haven't actually fired on a US ship. So, US ships accept risky situations that would be likely to get them sunk in an actual conflict. The fact that an aircraft is using a civilian transponder code and is on an airline timetable doesn't in any way ensure that it isn't a hostile aircraft. If somebody actually launched an attack by masquerading as a civilian aircraft it would make air travel a LOT less safe overnight. Either the US would have to stop putting naval ships in constrained waters like the Persian Gulf, or it would have to announce fairly large no-fly zones (extending over national airspace), or it would have to accept losing the occasional ship when somebody decides to sink one (unless Aegis really is that good).
One other thing - appropriate training for flying a drone is not the same as for flying a plane. There is no need to have a class 2 medical to fly a drone, or a regular pilot's license. Being able to demonstrate stick-and-rudder skills is pointless when you're flying something with a keyboard and a mouse. Really the appropriate training would probably be about procedures and maintenance more than anything else, and there is no need for it to be expensive.
Requiring a conventional pilot's license to fly a drone is like the FBI requiring people investigating computer crimes to first prove themselves by apprehending drug dealers on the streets.
So again, like I stated originally, just because you can buy something capable of doing the deed doesn't make you qualified to do so. You can buy a hammer and some wire cutters from the hardware store, do you think that makes you qualified to build a safe house for people as well? Hint: It doesn't.
You're equating flying a $500 drone with a camera with being a professional engineer.
Did you know that if you hit a baseball and it goes the wrong way you could land it on the face of a driver going 70mph in a convertible and kill them? Does that mean that we should require $15k worth of training to operate a baseball bat? Heck, we allow people to buy guns which are outright designed with the primary purpose of killing people, and you don't need any training to legally operate one, or even to legally kill somebody with it in some circumstances.
Why not just have some common-sense rules to keep drones at low altitudes and away from airports, and allow for higher-altitude use with appropriate training and equipment. Heck, the FAA can't even get people to put ADS-B in their planes because they can't figure out how to regulate them in a way that doesn't make them cost a fortune, despite every giveaway cell phone in the country being more sophisticated (even feature phones).
The problem is that the FAA hasn't figured out how to regulate anything other than airliners, so they just try to turn everything into an airliner.
Many FAA regulations could be argued as making the sky less safe.
Making $1000 worth of avionics cost $50k means that small airplanes don't use them, which means that pilots have less situational awareness. Why don't small planes have CatIII-capable ILS? We're talking about 1980s technology in many cases, and it is only expensive because of regulation. (And yes, I know there is more to Cat III than the hardware.)
There is no reason to restrict the operation of light drones below 1000 feet and away from major airports. They're about as capable of causing damage as baseballs are, and we don't require a private pilots's license to join the little league.
Yup. You could also have a reputation system. Set the expectation that cars are kept clean and in good repair, and have cameras inside. If your car shows up and it isn't right, then you hit a button to get a new car, the old car sends itself for servicing, and somebody checks the recordings to find out who gets to pay the bills and fines.
I doubt it. I think you're expected to carry travel insurance. I know as a Canadian I don't get covered out of the country by provincial health care.
I was thinking more of a Canadian travelling to the UK being covered by the UK NHS, and a UK citizen travelling to Canada being covered by Health Canada.
As I said, I have no idea if this is the case, but it would make sense for me for countries with similar levels of coverage to arrange for reciprocal benefits like this as it just makes things easier on everybody without really incurring any net costs.
Take an autopilot for a drone, strap it to a rocket, and write some software with an ADS-B decoder and $20 SDR and now you have an anti-aircraft missile capable of targeting airliners by name. Or you have rocket artillery with fairly high precision. Before you know it Pumpkin Chunkin will involve an accuracy class with the goal to be able to hit a tin can with a trebuchet and guided pumpkin from 200 yards.
Fast forward a while longer and people will be able to make fission weapons in their basements.
Sooner or later we need to come up with ways of handling conflict in society that don't require keeping weapons out of the hands of the public, because that is becoming harder and harder to do.
Plus, it really eliminates the need to own so many cars. The car can do multiple duty, and borrowing a car is much more practical when it can pick you up at your door (whether it is shared between neighbors or is actually a taxi).
Parking becomes much easier to optimize when cars can drop and pick people up anywhere, and park themselves. There is no need for parking locations to be within a short walk of every destination.
You can also split up cargo vs personnel transport. Passenger vehicles could be smaller and optimized for passengers, with cargo vehicles being big boxes on wheels. You could take a bus to the grocery store and send your 12 bags home in a cargo vehicle while you take a bus back, or a 1-person car, etc. People don't need to own a vehicle large enough to make that trip they make once a month - they can rent for that.
Endless possibilities for transportation when you don't need people in the loop.
some areas of business are just natural monopolies
"Natural monopolies" — a pro-government excuse like "market failure". If Tokyo has competing subway lines, why can't New York City have any?
Well, why don't you go build one? Just spend a few billion of your own money - I'm sure you'll make a profit in no time, despite not being able to charge your full costs due to the presence of an established company that has paid for these sunk costs.
Regulation is required anytime you have a monopoly, no matter how it got there.
The primary focus of the "regulation" is to try to ensure the presence of healthy competition — which is by far the best regulator there can be. No government-created monopolies (like AT&T's) and no duopolies either, please (as there were with cell-phone service in the 90ies).
Thus, it does matter, "how it got there" — if it was government-orchestrated in the first place (as AT&T was), for example, it may need to be forcibly split-up. If it grew up on its own (like Microsoft), it just needs to be watched so that it does not use its monopoly position to against competition.
I agree that one of the best ways to use regulation is to create competition, thus minimizing the scope of regulation.
However, I don't think the origin of the monopoly matters at all. Obviously if a monopoly resulted from poor regulation that should be fixed, simply because it is poor regulation. However, all monopolies will tend to use their position to block competition and extract maximum economic rent. That is just the nature of business. It is only the fear of regulation that might cause companies to avoid it at all. If they didn't do these things in the US the directors could probably be sued for it.
In a country like Canada you can't just move there for six months to have your cancer fixed.
Sure you can. You just have to call yourself a refugee.
Moving to Canada as a refugee is a far more involved process than moving to a different state in the US.
I can just pay for a hotel room in another US state, move there, and claim residence as long as I live out of that hotel. Nobody has to approve my residency, there are no border crossings, etc.
A tourist visiting Canada and staying in a hotel is generally not eligible for their nationalized health system. They expect payment/etc just like most other countries would. I don't know the details, but I wouldn't be surprised if they offer free healthcare to citizens of comparable countries that reciprocate for emergency conditions/etc, which would be fairly logical.
We can't even get an NHS passed by simple majority. You'll never see another constitutional amendment within your lifetime, unless it is for something like the Patriot Act.
You'd have as much success trying to turn the US into a parliamentary system with proportional representation.
Mass doesn't have a single-payer heathcare system, basic income, etc.
What is called socialism in the US is not what most people in the world would call socialism. I'll agree that it is a matter of degree, but there really is only so much you can offer when people can freely shift income/wealth outside of your taxing jurisdiction and those who have needs can freely move into it.
That's an interesting alternate history you've concocted there. So robber-barons, child labor, rampant pollution, and killing workers the attempted to stand up for themselves is you idea of the best the United States ever was?
What! You left out the best part: slavery!
Err, rather, the contracted sale of persons into a mutually beneficial arrangement where their owner obtains the benefit of their labor, and the worker obtains the benefit of not having to worry about feeding or clothing themselves, or having to repair the bars on their windows when they wear out.
It is not stolen, without that money it would be very much harder for you to do your labor. What with no roads,reliable electric grid, phone service.
The concept of stealing something requires a recognition that it was yours to steal in the first place. Legally it isn't - the tax dollars belonged to the government the moment they were "earned."
Even the word "earned" isn't completely appropriate. It suggests that you received your income purely on the basis of things that you provided through your own efforts. However, the fact that you are able to walk, talk, and think is in no way based on your own efforts, nor is the fact that somebody took the time to teach you how to read and write, and so on (assuming that you're even able to do those things - many can't).
I can't say that I've earned my income any more than I can say that some mentally retarded and physically disabled orphan earned their life of destitution. Thus, I have a responsibility to ensure that they are cared for, and this responsibility includes using legal means to compel others to support them as well.
It is impossible to have socialism at the state government level because states are not permitted to levy tariffs or control immigration.
You can't have socialism without both of those. If a state were to offer free healthcare paid for by taxes, then the unemployed who need healthcare would just travel to that state, while employers would move to other states where taxes are lower. That doesn't mean that single-payer healthcare can't work - just that it can't work in the context of a US state. In a country like Canada you can't just move there for six months to have your cancer fixed, and anybody from outside of Canada selling goods there is subject to tariffs which are intended to help ensure that the cost basis for producing those goods is somewhat comparable.
I've heard the whole laboratory for experimentation argument about the role of the federal/state governments, but it really only allows for experimentation on fairly minor things and for the most part is just a race for the bottom. Look at what companies do when they negotiate their taxes while threatening to move operations.
That's fine unless they report you to a credit agency. Yeah, you could clear yourself of that, but it would be a PITA.
Only time can clear you of it. The most you can do is put a protest letter in your file, which everybody will ignore. Everybody who accesses your credit report plans on behaving just like Comcast did in this call anyway, so the fact that you stood up to them is hardly going to inspire them to give you a nice deal.
The Statists will admit that Government enables these monopolies to exist, but they still blame it on Corporations, but change the topic to the influence of Money on Government.
Nah. They will point to the fact that some areas of business are just natural monopolies. Don't get me wrong - regulatory capture makes it even worse than it would be otherwise, but even though it is fairly free from regulation and many of the last mile problems I don't see 47 companies offering satellite cable.
The corporations are doing what they always do - charge whatever the market will bear. Regulation is required anytime you have a monopoly, no matter how it got there. Obviously regulation that encourages competition so as to minimize the need for future regulation should be preferred.
I'd argue that the best solution is to break up the vertical integration. Have a traditional utility (cost-plus basis) own the last mile wires. Then let anybody sell services over them. The service providers would not be allowed to own the utilities, but otherwise they would be free from regulation. The utilities would just charge you a monthly fee to maintain the lines, and would charge a flat rate to anybody renting rack-space to provide services - they wouldn't be in a position to choose winners/losers/etc.
The idea is that regulation of some things is necessary, but we should try to structure regulation so that we minimize its scope.
I did exactly this a couple of times and my credit wasn't ruined. I just attached the little protest note they let you attach and then no one gave a crap about my $50 argument with Verizon. I suppose my score would have been higher without that on there, but it was by no means ruined.
I suspect your score is indeed lower, and that companies will take that bad report into account (and ignore your protest letter).
Your credit history doesn't just impact your ability to get loans - it also impacts the interest rate you pay on those loans. So, disputed charges can cost you real money - quite a bit of it if you're talking about a mortgage.
Big companies don't care whether you had a legitimate reason to dispute a charge. When they want to impose some illegal contract change on you they don't want you legitimately disputing their charges either.
I read "in the meantime you still have to deal with the damage" as meaning "I support Google knuckling under and removing the search results." Apparently I was mistaken.
My point was more that I can understand the logic behind the approach. I just tend to not favor those kinds of approaches. I'd rather change society so that somebody who can never get a job doesn't starve to death in the first place. Another improvement would be changing privacy law such that nobody has a clean reputation, forcing companies to resort to hiring people with bad reputations. I think as a society we need to get to a point where anybody can pull up a video of their boss getting dressed in the morning and not really care enough to bother to do so.
While I think that the laws around Copyright need massive reform, I do have a problem with the "not our job to plug loopholes" mentality.
It is impossible to create a law free of loopholes. The law is static, and people are not. There will always be a way around the letter of the law, and that means that a country that forces itself to be bound by the letter of the law basically ends up not being ruled by laws at all.
What the Supreme Court needs to do is issue a ruling that says, "We find that the tax shelter employed by Acme Corp to be completely legal and compliant with IRS guidelines. Nevertheless, we fine it $1B anyway just to prove the point that companies should pay taxes, a figure that is 3x higher than what they would have paid if they just took the marginal rate times their gross revenue without applying any deductions at all." Sure, it would be arbitrary and capricious, and that is the point. Lawyers would then realize that if they pushed things too far, they could end up getting their heads lopped off, so to speak, and that would lead to moderation, which is what makes laws work well.
I know a judge who gave a presentation on ethics in his area of practice to a room full of lawyers. He said that the theme of 95% of the Q&A was around identifying just how much a lawyer could push the rules before they'd get sanctioned. It would be like walking up to a police officer and asking them if you'd get pulled over for going 60 in a 55 zone, then asking if 65 was ok, then if 70 was ok, and then if 69.5 was ok, and so on. There was really no interest in just doing the right thing for its own sake.
Unless MS can turn marketshare into money, it's worthless. So, MS has put Xboxes into millions of homes, and they have... oh, wait, no profit to show for it.
That's like saying that a Superbowl ad is only worth the money if lots of people click on it. Oh wait, you can't click on TV ads, and yet companies have considered them valuable for a long time.
The point is that from a marketing experience the XBox gets's MS's name out there. The 30-year-old playing games on the XBox goes into work and gets to make technology purchasing decisions. You want them to be thinking about MS.
So, even if the XBox just barely broke even, it might have value beyond the direct revenue. That is the sort of thing that MBAs tend to ignore - the intangibles. Will Virgin Galactic ever make money? I'm skeptical. On the other hand, might it lead more people to fly on Virgin Airlines? Quite possibly, even though no MBA could prove it.
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Not sure what blocking re-employment has to do with leaks. If anything driving people to other companies is likely to cause MORE leaks.
This is almost certainly about eliminating the risk of contingent workforce being classified as employees. My own employer does the same thing, though it does not bar long-term relationships as long as the company doesn't interview individual workers. That is, if we hire Fred to help out with something, then Fred is gone in two years and must take a break. On the other hand, if we hire Acme janitorial to clean our trash and they send over Fred then he can work for years, but we don't get a veto on who they send/etc.
I have mixed feelings. On one hand it does make things harder on those who end up having to move on. On the other hand, before the policy we used to have a LOT of people who would be dragged along in a contract position with the elusive promise of a hire that would take years to happen. The policy forces managers to act if they don't want to lose somebody.
I love when they reset your router config. I couldn't figure out why PXE boot stopped working after I had them fix an issue with my CableCard. Ah, that would be the DHCP server in the router being turned back on. If it weren't a royal PITA I'd bridge the thing...
Sounds like there is a simple solution to that for Netflix.
Have their application send outgoing packets to an IP on their ISP which just get fed to the bit bucket by the border router. So, if you download a movie at 2Mbps, the client sends random data at 4Mbps back. That forces your ISP to upload more than it downloads, and thus they have to negotiate peering.
From documentaries/etc that I've seen there were a few issues:
1. An airline timetable that was used to check published routes was improperly adjusted for timezone, thus missing the planned takeoff.
2. The operator interrogating the aircraft transponder kept the aircraft selected for a long time - which caused it to keep a different aircraft's response after they had separated on the screen. If they had re-interrogated it they'd probably have picked up the civilian transponder code.
3. I believe there had been threats or an actual attack on another ship recently, putting pressure on the captain to not let hostiles get too close.
The only reason that more events like this happen is that the Iranians (or anyone else) haven't actually fired on a US ship. So, US ships accept risky situations that would be likely to get them sunk in an actual conflict. The fact that an aircraft is using a civilian transponder code and is on an airline timetable doesn't in any way ensure that it isn't a hostile aircraft. If somebody actually launched an attack by masquerading as a civilian aircraft it would make air travel a LOT less safe overnight. Either the US would have to stop putting naval ships in constrained waters like the Persian Gulf, or it would have to announce fairly large no-fly zones (extending over national airspace), or it would have to accept losing the occasional ship when somebody decides to sink one (unless Aegis really is that good).
One other thing - appropriate training for flying a drone is not the same as for flying a plane. There is no need to have a class 2 medical to fly a drone, or a regular pilot's license. Being able to demonstrate stick-and-rudder skills is pointless when you're flying something with a keyboard and a mouse. Really the appropriate training would probably be about procedures and maintenance more than anything else, and there is no need for it to be expensive.
Requiring a conventional pilot's license to fly a drone is like the FBI requiring people investigating computer crimes to first prove themselves by apprehending drug dealers on the streets.
So again, like I stated originally, just because you can buy something capable of doing the deed doesn't make you qualified to do so. You can buy a hammer and some wire cutters from the hardware store, do you think that makes you qualified to build a safe house for people as well? Hint: It doesn't.
You're equating flying a $500 drone with a camera with being a professional engineer.
Did you know that if you hit a baseball and it goes the wrong way you could land it on the face of a driver going 70mph in a convertible and kill them? Does that mean that we should require $15k worth of training to operate a baseball bat? Heck, we allow people to buy guns which are outright designed with the primary purpose of killing people, and you don't need any training to legally operate one, or even to legally kill somebody with it in some circumstances.
Why not just have some common-sense rules to keep drones at low altitudes and away from airports, and allow for higher-altitude use with appropriate training and equipment. Heck, the FAA can't even get people to put ADS-B in their planes because they can't figure out how to regulate them in a way that doesn't make them cost a fortune, despite every giveaway cell phone in the country being more sophisticated (even feature phones).
The problem is that the FAA hasn't figured out how to regulate anything other than airliners, so they just try to turn everything into an airliner.
You're confusing compliance with safety.
Many FAA regulations could be argued as making the sky less safe.
Making $1000 worth of avionics cost $50k means that small airplanes don't use them, which means that pilots have less situational awareness. Why don't small planes have CatIII-capable ILS? We're talking about 1980s technology in many cases, and it is only expensive because of regulation. (And yes, I know there is more to Cat III than the hardware.)
There is no reason to restrict the operation of light drones below 1000 feet and away from major airports. They're about as capable of causing damage as baseballs are, and we don't require a private pilots's license to join the little league.
Meh. War zone...middle of the pacific. We're the scenic airline...
Yup. You could also have a reputation system. Set the expectation that cars are kept clean and in good repair, and have cameras inside. If your car shows up and it isn't right, then you hit a button to get a new car, the old car sends itself for servicing, and somebody checks the recordings to find out who gets to pay the bills and fines.
I doubt it. I think you're expected to carry travel insurance. I know as a Canadian I don't get covered out of the country by provincial health care.
I was thinking more of a Canadian travelling to the UK being covered by the UK NHS, and a UK citizen travelling to Canada being covered by Health Canada.
As I said, I have no idea if this is the case, but it would make sense for me for countries with similar levels of coverage to arrange for reciprocal benefits like this as it just makes things easier on everybody without really incurring any net costs.
That's just the march of technology.
Take an autopilot for a drone, strap it to a rocket, and write some software with an ADS-B decoder and $20 SDR and now you have an anti-aircraft missile capable of targeting airliners by name. Or you have rocket artillery with fairly high precision. Before you know it Pumpkin Chunkin will involve an accuracy class with the goal to be able to hit a tin can with a trebuchet and guided pumpkin from 200 yards.
Fast forward a while longer and people will be able to make fission weapons in their basements.
Sooner or later we need to come up with ways of handling conflict in society that don't require keeping weapons out of the hands of the public, because that is becoming harder and harder to do.
Plus, it really eliminates the need to own so many cars. The car can do multiple duty, and borrowing a car is much more practical when it can pick you up at your door (whether it is shared between neighbors or is actually a taxi).
Parking becomes much easier to optimize when cars can drop and pick people up anywhere, and park themselves. There is no need for parking locations to be within a short walk of every destination.
You can also split up cargo vs personnel transport. Passenger vehicles could be smaller and optimized for passengers, with cargo vehicles being big boxes on wheels. You could take a bus to the grocery store and send your 12 bags home in a cargo vehicle while you take a bus back, or a 1-person car, etc. People don't need to own a vehicle large enough to make that trip they make once a month - they can rent for that.
Endless possibilities for transportation when you don't need people in the loop.
"Natural monopolies" — a pro-government excuse like "market failure". If Tokyo has competing subway lines, why can't New York City have any?
Well, why don't you go build one? Just spend a few billion of your own money - I'm sure you'll make a profit in no time, despite not being able to charge your full costs due to the presence of an established company that has paid for these sunk costs.
The primary focus of the "regulation" is to try to ensure the presence of healthy competition — which is by far the best regulator there can be. No government-created monopolies (like AT&T's) and no duopolies either, please (as there were with cell-phone service in the 90ies).
Thus, it does matter, "how it got there" — if it was government-orchestrated in the first place (as AT&T was), for example, it may need to be forcibly split-up. If it grew up on its own (like Microsoft), it just needs to be watched so that it does not use its monopoly position to against competition.
I agree that one of the best ways to use regulation is to create competition, thus minimizing the scope of regulation.
However, I don't think the origin of the monopoly matters at all. Obviously if a monopoly resulted from poor regulation that should be fixed, simply because it is poor regulation. However, all monopolies will tend to use their position to block competition and extract maximum economic rent. That is just the nature of business. It is only the fear of regulation that might cause companies to avoid it at all. If they didn't do these things in the US the directors could probably be sued for it.
In a country like Canada you can't just move there for six months to have your cancer fixed.
Sure you can. You just have to call yourself a refugee.
Moving to Canada as a refugee is a far more involved process than moving to a different state in the US.
I can just pay for a hotel room in another US state, move there, and claim residence as long as I live out of that hotel. Nobody has to approve my residency, there are no border crossings, etc.
A tourist visiting Canada and staying in a hotel is generally not eligible for their nationalized health system. They expect payment/etc just like most other countries would. I don't know the details, but I wouldn't be surprised if they offer free healthcare to citizens of comparable countries that reciprocate for emergency conditions/etc, which would be fairly logical.
We can't even get an NHS passed by simple majority. You'll never see another constitutional amendment within your lifetime, unless it is for something like the Patriot Act.
You'd have as much success trying to turn the US into a parliamentary system with proportional representation.
Mass doesn't have a single-payer heathcare system, basic income, etc.
What is called socialism in the US is not what most people in the world would call socialism. I'll agree that it is a matter of degree, but there really is only so much you can offer when people can freely shift income/wealth outside of your taxing jurisdiction and those who have needs can freely move into it.
That's an interesting alternate history you've concocted there. So robber-barons, child labor, rampant pollution, and killing workers the attempted to stand up for themselves is you idea of the best the United States ever was?
What! You left out the best part: slavery!
Err, rather, the contracted sale of persons into a mutually beneficial arrangement where their owner obtains the benefit of their labor, and the worker obtains the benefit of not having to worry about feeding or clothing themselves, or having to repair the bars on their windows when they wear out.
It is not stolen, without that money it would be very much harder for you to do your labor. What with no roads,reliable electric grid, phone service.
The concept of stealing something requires a recognition that it was yours to steal in the first place. Legally it isn't - the tax dollars belonged to the government the moment they were "earned."
Even the word "earned" isn't completely appropriate. It suggests that you received your income purely on the basis of things that you provided through your own efforts. However, the fact that you are able to walk, talk, and think is in no way based on your own efforts, nor is the fact that somebody took the time to teach you how to read and write, and so on (assuming that you're even able to do those things - many can't).
I can't say that I've earned my income any more than I can say that some mentally retarded and physically disabled orphan earned their life of destitution. Thus, I have a responsibility to ensure that they are cared for, and this responsibility includes using legal means to compel others to support them as well.
It is impossible to have socialism at the state government level because states are not permitted to levy tariffs or control immigration.
You can't have socialism without both of those. If a state were to offer free healthcare paid for by taxes, then the unemployed who need healthcare would just travel to that state, while employers would move to other states where taxes are lower. That doesn't mean that single-payer healthcare can't work - just that it can't work in the context of a US state. In a country like Canada you can't just move there for six months to have your cancer fixed, and anybody from outside of Canada selling goods there is subject to tariffs which are intended to help ensure that the cost basis for producing those goods is somewhat comparable.
I've heard the whole laboratory for experimentation argument about the role of the federal/state governments, but it really only allows for experimentation on fairly minor things and for the most part is just a race for the bottom. Look at what companies do when they negotiate their taxes while threatening to move operations.
That's fine unless they report you to a credit agency. Yeah, you could clear yourself of that, but it would be a PITA.
Only time can clear you of it. The most you can do is put a protest letter in your file, which everybody will ignore. Everybody who accesses your credit report plans on behaving just like Comcast did in this call anyway, so the fact that you stood up to them is hardly going to inspire them to give you a nice deal.
The Statists will admit that Government enables these monopolies to exist, but they still blame it on Corporations, but change the topic to the influence of Money on Government.
Nah. They will point to the fact that some areas of business are just natural monopolies. Don't get me wrong - regulatory capture makes it even worse than it would be otherwise, but even though it is fairly free from regulation and many of the last mile problems I don't see 47 companies offering satellite cable.
The corporations are doing what they always do - charge whatever the market will bear. Regulation is required anytime you have a monopoly, no matter how it got there. Obviously regulation that encourages competition so as to minimize the need for future regulation should be preferred.
I'd argue that the best solution is to break up the vertical integration. Have a traditional utility (cost-plus basis) own the last mile wires. Then let anybody sell services over them. The service providers would not be allowed to own the utilities, but otherwise they would be free from regulation. The utilities would just charge you a monthly fee to maintain the lines, and would charge a flat rate to anybody renting rack-space to provide services - they wouldn't be in a position to choose winners/losers/etc.
The idea is that regulation of some things is necessary, but we should try to structure regulation so that we minimize its scope.
I did exactly this a couple of times and my credit wasn't ruined. I just attached the little protest note they let you attach and then no one gave a crap about my $50 argument with Verizon. I suppose my score would have been higher without that on there, but it was by no means ruined.
I suspect your score is indeed lower, and that companies will take that bad report into account (and ignore your protest letter).
Your credit history doesn't just impact your ability to get loans - it also impacts the interest rate you pay on those loans. So, disputed charges can cost you real money - quite a bit of it if you're talking about a mortgage.
Big companies don't care whether you had a legitimate reason to dispute a charge. When they want to impose some illegal contract change on you they don't want you legitimately disputing their charges either.
I read "in the meantime you still have to deal with the damage" as meaning "I support Google knuckling under and removing the search results." Apparently I was mistaken.
My point was more that I can understand the logic behind the approach. I just tend to not favor those kinds of approaches. I'd rather change society so that somebody who can never get a job doesn't starve to death in the first place. Another improvement would be changing privacy law such that nobody has a clean reputation, forcing companies to resort to hiring people with bad reputations. I think as a society we need to get to a point where anybody can pull up a video of their boss getting dressed in the morning and not really care enough to bother to do so.
While I think that the laws around Copyright need massive reform, I do have a problem with the "not our job to plug loopholes" mentality.
It is impossible to create a law free of loopholes. The law is static, and people are not. There will always be a way around the letter of the law, and that means that a country that forces itself to be bound by the letter of the law basically ends up not being ruled by laws at all.
What the Supreme Court needs to do is issue a ruling that says, "We find that the tax shelter employed by Acme Corp to be completely legal and compliant with IRS guidelines. Nevertheless, we fine it $1B anyway just to prove the point that companies should pay taxes, a figure that is 3x higher than what they would have paid if they just took the marginal rate times their gross revenue without applying any deductions at all." Sure, it would be arbitrary and capricious, and that is the point. Lawyers would then realize that if they pushed things too far, they could end up getting their heads lopped off, so to speak, and that would lead to moderation, which is what makes laws work well.
I know a judge who gave a presentation on ethics in his area of practice to a room full of lawyers. He said that the theme of 95% of the Q&A was around identifying just how much a lawyer could push the rules before they'd get sanctioned. It would be like walking up to a police officer and asking them if you'd get pulled over for going 60 in a 55 zone, then asking if 65 was ok, then if 70 was ok, and then if 69.5 was ok, and so on. There was really no interest in just doing the right thing for its own sake.
Unless MS can turn marketshare into money, it's worthless. So, MS has put Xboxes into millions of homes, and they have... oh, wait, no profit to show for it.
That's like saying that a Superbowl ad is only worth the money if lots of people click on it. Oh wait, you can't click on TV ads, and yet companies have considered them valuable for a long time.
The point is that from a marketing experience the XBox gets's MS's name out there. The 30-year-old playing games on the XBox goes into work and gets to make technology purchasing decisions. You want them to be thinking about MS.
So, even if the XBox just barely broke even, it might have value beyond the direct revenue. That is the sort of thing that MBAs tend to ignore - the intangibles. Will Virgin Galactic ever make money? I'm skeptical. On the other hand, might it lead more people to fly on Virgin Airlines? Quite possibly, even though no MBA could prove it.