of money by not doing single payer. If you take the most anti-single payer stance possible (the Koch Bros) you come up with $2 trillion in savings in 10 years. That's absolute worst case scenario by a right wing think tank trying to torpedo single payer. Other estimates have put it north of $17 trillion. And that's before you start factoring productivity and wage gains from people being healthier and being able to change jobs w/o fear of losing access to their meds and dying.
But heck, lets say we take that $13 billion and just focus on the 45,000 that die every year of preventable illnesses due to lack of healthcare. I think that'd go a long way. It would also help stabilize our country's political situation.
Wages are declining, high paying work's being replaced with McJobs and healthcare and housing are becoming inaccessible. We're in a second gilded age. That's can't continue. Sooner or later it's going to blow up in our faces like it did for Germany in the late 30s/early 40s when the world put those damn reparations on them.
[oldmanrant] is it just me or did the quality of discourse really go to heck recently here on/.? I mean, I'm not expeting everybody here to be a ham radio enthusiast but I'd like to think this being a geek and tech forum we'd all know enough about how cell phones work, how spectrum is dolled out and why, if you're out in the boondocks fighting fires you'd need to stick with a particular carrier to understand why the fire department doesn't have a lot of options for a mobile carrier. I mean, I needed to know that just to choose a carrier (I picked T-Mobile because although their spectrum sucks in building and out on a trail it's the best in a city and I don't do astronomy and hiking so speed and cheap unlimited data was what I was after). [/oldmanrant]
we've granted the cell phone companies a spectrum monopoly. This is actually necessary given the nature of radio waves, but rather than treat it like a lease on the public commons we 'sold' an unlimited monopoly to certain spectrum to each carrier. You don't get to compete with Verizon because that's not how radio works, and cell phones are just fancy radios.
As for another vendor, see above.
As for negotiating, They can't negotiate since the kind of spectrum that reaches out to where the fires are was sold to Verizon.
As for a metered plan, screw that noise. It's a public good (radio waves) and the fire department. Just use eminent domain to require them to provide unlimited service to emergency services. That is literally what eminent domain is for. It's bad enough we're letting the cell phone companies abuse us but now we're letting them endanger our lives and our property in blind obedience to some capitalist ideal we had pounded into our skulls in grade school. Jeez, enough already.
Now, if you want a public space with full security paid for by tax payer dollars that's fine. But that's not what schools are. They're places of learning. The tone of your post implies an alt-right bent, which would mean you'd oppose taxpayer funded safe spaces for people to speak. Personally as a lefty I'm all for it. I'm also for mandating voting as a means of ending voter suppression and requiring people to participate in society.
but our government is specifically structured to limit your influence and increase the influence of rural voters. That's why we have a Senate and why we have an Electoral College...
you don't have to pay to fix your car. I've been in several accidents were I wasn't at fault and never once gotten away clean. Insurance will only pay to fix on a new car but they don't pay the lost resale value that an on record accident causes. You can hire a lawyer but they take so much you break even or lose. And if your car is totaled they pay the dealer invoice price, e.g. what the dealer would pay if you took it for a trade in. That's usually 3/4 what the car is worth. And yes, you're rates are going up, no matter what they say.
If you're severely injured you might come out ahead, but then you've traded real injury for a some money. Otherwise the way insurance structure means you're not getting away free and clear. The same is going to be true for Self Driving cars, which have to carry insurance too. I imagine we'll see something like how UPS eliminated left turns to save gas. We'll see programming designed to avoid nut cases like I learned to do over the years, aka "Defensive Driving".
that disproportionately apply to the wealthy. That was implied by context. The wealthy receive the greatest benefit from society and therefor must pay a larger share of it's upkeep. Civilization is like a club you join and pay dues for. Taxes are those dues. If the people who use the club the most don't pay their dues the club goes to ruin.
America had it's best years when the top marginal tax rage (income over $12 million/year adjusted for inflation) was 90%. Things started going downhill when Reagan slashed taxes and restructured corporate taxes to make pump and dump style stock buy backs a thing. Clinton accelerated this trend but the.com boom and later the housing boom hid the damage.
I'm deeply opposed to regressive taxation. Meaning taxes that target the working class, especially the working poor. The "Netflix Tax" was a great example of this, as are soda taxes, sales tax and many Vehicle License Taxes. I favor progressive taxation. Meaning the larger benefit a person receives from society the more they pay for it's upkeep and improvement. I'm a Democratic Socialist after all.
at the Federal Level? The Republican party has signaled they view Net Neutrality as an unnecessary and at times dangerous regulation. We can debate whether they're right or not, but their stance cannot be denied. And they're currently in charge of all three branches of Government. There's already been some bills proposed that would preempt the California one with weaker and largely meaningless controls. Baring a change during the Mid Terms those will pass.
I don't mind seeing CA doing this, I just don't think it will matter. Not unless there's a big change in our country's politics...
if you've got a college degree then employers know you're at least stable enough to make it through a 4 year degree.
Now, if they weren't currently being allowed almost limitless access to imported foreign labor in the form of multiple work visas (don't trust the "caps", there's so many ways around them I can't list them all here) then that might not be a factor. But, well, I've yet to see any sign of any politician reigning that in. I was hoping really Trump would (he said he would), but so far he's burned me there. He still hasn't reversed the Obama era executive order allowing spouses of H1-B holders to work. That alone was tens of thousands of jobs closed off to American workers....
Hate Speech is speech specifically intended to incite, encourage or justify hatred; often racial hatred but also includes religious, class, and a variety of other hatred. The key feature is that hatred is directed at a specific group of individuals because of those individuals membership in that group and not because of any specific actions by those individuals or even that group as a whole.
It is commonly used by a ruling class in order to divide the working class into manageable chunks. It is part of a broader series of techniques used to fleece the working class out of their earnings. As such, it is in indispensable technique for controlling the population.
Recognizing and giving names to the techniques used to oppress the working class is the first step to ending that oppression.
this is just a rich guy evading taxes. The "Snowbirds" in Arizona & Florida who live there 6.5 months out of the year do the same damn thing.
As someone who lives in one state and pays every dime of taxes owed with zero deductions (stopped getting those when my kid turned 17.5) screw this noise. Enjoy civilization? Pay your dues like everyone else.
If anything most of the shouting down & censorship is done at the left.
Basically, the right wing are running a victim complex to deflect attention away from their own actions. Think about it, the political right have complete control of virtually all branches and levels of government. There's a handful of left leaning districts in CA & NY, but nationally they've got the House, Senate, Presidency and locally they have virtually all the State Legislatures (they were just shy of calling a constitutional convention when a few crazies ruined for them by getting busted for sexual harassment so extreme it couldn't be ignored).
I know it sounds like I'm trolling, but that's kind of what makes going after the American Right wing so hard. It's called Poe's Law. The stuff they're engaged in is so terrible you can't distinguish from somebody doing it and somebody making fun of it. But it's real. All of it. I'm sorry, but it's high time we wake up, smell the coffee, and put our house in order.
It's the lobbying group the 6 folks who want this set up. I bet if you did some digging you'd find they're not just after security. If I had to guess they run a company that fuels the planes or something. Every time I see something like this that no sane person would want I find a PAC behind it looking to line their pockets.
to a civilization. Contrary to popular thought you _can_ teach critical thinking. But you can't do it with Math. Math is too difficult a subject and there's no value in being 50% right.
As for why you want people to learn critical thinking, well, what's one of the first things a fascist does when he seizes power? Even before he goes after guns? That's right, they crack down on the intelligentsia. Fascism can't exist in a country of critical thinkers. People see past the bullshit.
As for why _you_ want to pay for the humanities (and with it a nation of critical thinkers), unless you get lucky and become one of the fascist's todies that doesn't get powerful enough to be killed (boy that's a fine line to walk, just ask anybody in the North Korea) then you're gonna be part of the working class. And do you really want to be part of the working class of a fascist dictatorship? Again, just ask anybody in NK...
I've never once seen a Union care if a worker quits. If anything the higher wages they bargain for benefit worker mobility. One of the key things that hurts worker mobility is that in the modern economy if you're an hourly worker your experience doesn't count for anything. When you quit you're starting over from scratch.
Right now we're seeing something never before: near full employment but wages are declining. Economists have mostly agreed this is caused by two things: Low wage jobs replacing high wages ones (factory jobs replaced with fast food & Walmart) and the end of collective bargaining reducing workers ability to negotiate better wages. Notice I didn't use the "U" word there. Neither do they. There's been a non-stop anti-Union propaganda campaign from the mega corporations (which, let's be real, own the mass media). So much so that you're not generally allowed to say anything as simple as "Wages are down because one guy on his own can't negotiate the same rates as half a million workers".
You don't have to take my word for it, just google what Walmart does everytime their employees try to Unionize. Or look at Disney, where the workers just got bumped to $15/hr because they organized. No Man is an Island. Collective bargaining works.
that law couldn't be any broader if it tried. Thanks to it _any_ unauthorized access to a computer system is criminal. And so what if they can't use the CFAA. There's plenty of existing law to cover interfering with an election. They're after more powers, that's all.
that makes it their business. The only question is are we, as a society, going to tell them no. So far we're not. We've elected an anti-regulation, pro-corporate (or pro-business if you prefer) administration to virtually all levels of government. Net Neutrality is a regulation. We shouldn't be surprised when an administration opposed to regulation eliminates a regulation...
That's exactly what happens. It's so common there's a phrase for it ("People made a run on banks").
Austerity isn't the solution nor is government spending the problem. The United States had it's best years during heavy government spending. Hell, it was WWII and the Military Industrial Complex that got us out of our permanent recession. Government spending is essential to prevent kleptocrats from monopolizing everything.
Venezuela is in a temporary downturn due to the price of oil. They were never a 'healthy' economy, they were a third world country that took their oil money and instead of giving it to the 1% and foreign powers used it to transform themselves into a first world nation. We shut them out of the world bank system so that when the price of oil dipped they couldn't keep up with the loans they took out to develop their country. We did that so we could steal the property they held outside their country.
This is a frighteningly common this America does. We've been fucking with South America as long as I've been alive. Again, it's so common we have a name for it ("Banana Republic"). We had CIA backed death squads down there in the 80s (thanks to Reagan). When it comes to the national stage we are not nice people, and we continue to do awful things because we turn a blind eye to it and blame the victim. All the while complaining about their refugees coming up here and taking our jobs.
Also, I'm guessing Venezuela would be doing a lot better if the US would stop sanctioning them. There's no excuse for those sanctions. Especially when we back dictatorships like Saudi Arabia. I was trying to figure out why we bothered until I noticed our private corporations seized a bunch of oil fields owned by Venezuela when they defaulted on loans.
remember, they also on the receiving end of the massive corporate tax break he just enacted. He's generating a ton of web traffic which is good for their ad business. He's lax on regulation which large corporations always love.
Bottom line, this is a bunch of very, very wealthy people having a completely meaningless scuff up while the world burns for the working class.
if you're a corrupt politician you want the dollars from the cable companies. If you're not corrupt, well, this matters but you've got much bigger things to worry about. Healthcare for one. 45,000 people die in America every year from preventable diseases. Then there's the 8 wars we're in right now. Or our crumbling infrastructure. Or the fact that we're seeing more kids with food insecurity due to plummeting wages.
Even if you're a white knight who wants NN there's only so much you can do. That's certainly the vibe I get from Bernie. He did a bit of talking on NN but he's too busy with Medicare for All, the student loan crisis and getting wages raised. There's only so much time in the day and so much space in his constituents minds.
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of money by not doing single payer. If you take the most anti-single payer stance possible (the Koch Bros) you come up with $2 trillion in savings in 10 years. That's absolute worst case scenario by a right wing think tank trying to torpedo single payer. Other estimates have put it north of $17 trillion. And that's before you start factoring productivity and wage gains from people being healthier and being able to change jobs w/o fear of losing access to their meds and dying.
But heck, lets say we take that $13 billion and just focus on the 45,000 that die every year of preventable illnesses due to lack of healthcare. I think that'd go a long way. It would also help stabilize our country's political situation.
Wages are declining, high paying work's being replaced with McJobs and healthcare and housing are becoming inaccessible. We're in a second gilded age. That's can't continue. Sooner or later it's going to blow up in our faces like it did for Germany in the late 30s/early 40s when the world put those damn reparations on them.
[oldmanrant] is it just me or did the quality of discourse really go to heck recently here on /.? I mean, I'm not expeting everybody here to be a ham radio enthusiast but I'd like to think this being a geek and tech forum we'd all know enough about how cell phones work, how spectrum is dolled out and why, if you're out in the boondocks fighting fires you'd need to stick with a particular carrier to understand why the fire department doesn't have a lot of options for a mobile carrier. I mean, I needed to know that just to choose a carrier (I picked T-Mobile because although their spectrum sucks in building and out on a trail it's the best in a city and I don't do astronomy and hiking so speed and cheap unlimited data was what I was after). [/oldmanrant]
we've granted the cell phone companies a spectrum monopoly. This is actually necessary given the nature of radio waves, but rather than treat it like a lease on the public commons we 'sold' an unlimited monopoly to certain spectrum to each carrier. You don't get to compete with Verizon because that's not how radio works, and cell phones are just fancy radios.
As for another vendor, see above.
As for negotiating, They can't negotiate since the kind of spectrum that reaches out to where the fires are was sold to Verizon.
As for a metered plan, screw that noise. It's a public good (radio waves) and the fire department. Just use eminent domain to require them to provide unlimited service to emergency services. That is literally what eminent domain is for. It's bad enough we're letting the cell phone companies abuse us but now we're letting them endanger our lives and our property in blind obedience to some capitalist ideal we had pounded into our skulls in grade school. Jeez, enough already.
see for a study citation that shows most of the censorship on campus is directed at left wing people. Make of it what you will but the study appears accurate. As for Milo, he was welcome to speak at the campus in question. They asked him to pay for his own security, which is the standard practice for controversial speakers who are likely to result in violence. It doesn't matter who causes the violence (left, right, white, black or purpose), what matters is that the even was deemed risky and required security and the school wasn't going to pay for it.
Now, if you want a public space with full security paid for by tax payer dollars that's fine. But that's not what schools are. They're places of learning. The tone of your post implies an alt-right bent, which would mean you'd oppose taxpayer funded safe spaces for people to speak. Personally as a lefty I'm all for it. I'm also for mandating voting as a means of ending voter suppression and requiring people to participate in society.
just another case of a company lining it's pockets with taxpayer dollars. I figured as much.
but our government is specifically structured to limit your influence and increase the influence of rural voters. That's why we have a Senate and why we have an Electoral College...
you don't have to pay to fix your car. I've been in several accidents were I wasn't at fault and never once gotten away clean. Insurance will only pay to fix on a new car but they don't pay the lost resale value that an on record accident causes. You can hire a lawyer but they take so much you break even or lose. And if your car is totaled they pay the dealer invoice price, e.g. what the dealer would pay if you took it for a trade in. That's usually 3/4 what the car is worth. And yes, you're rates are going up, no matter what they say.
If you're severely injured you might come out ahead, but then you've traded real injury for a some money. Otherwise the way insurance structure means you're not getting away free and clear. The same is going to be true for Self Driving cars, which have to carry insurance too. I imagine we'll see something like how UPS eliminated left turns to save gas. We'll see programming designed to avoid nut cases like I learned to do over the years, aka "Defensive Driving".
that disproportionately apply to the wealthy. That was implied by context. The wealthy receive the greatest benefit from society and therefor must pay a larger share of it's upkeep. Civilization is like a club you join and pay dues for. Taxes are those dues. If the people who use the club the most don't pay their dues the club goes to ruin.
.com boom and later the housing boom hid the damage.
America had it's best years when the top marginal tax rage (income over $12 million/year adjusted for inflation) was 90%. Things started going downhill when Reagan slashed taxes and restructured corporate taxes to make pump and dump style stock buy backs a thing. Clinton accelerated this trend but the
I'm deeply opposed to regressive taxation. Meaning taxes that target the working class, especially the working poor. The "Netflix Tax" was a great example of this, as are soda taxes, sales tax and many Vehicle License Taxes. I favor progressive taxation. Meaning the larger benefit a person receives from society the more they pay for it's upkeep and improvement. I'm a Democratic Socialist after all.
at the Federal Level? The Republican party has signaled they view Net Neutrality as an unnecessary and at times dangerous regulation. We can debate whether they're right or not, but their stance cannot be denied. And they're currently in charge of all three branches of Government. There's already been some bills proposed that would preempt the California one with weaker and largely meaningless controls. Baring a change during the Mid Terms those will pass.
I don't mind seeing CA doing this, I just don't think it will matter. Not unless there's a big change in our country's politics...
if you've got a college degree then employers know you're at least stable enough to make it through a 4 year degree.
Now, if they weren't currently being allowed almost limitless access to imported foreign labor in the form of multiple work visas (don't trust the "caps", there's so many ways around them I can't list them all here) then that might not be a factor. But, well, I've yet to see any sign of any politician reigning that in. I was hoping really Trump would (he said he would), but so far he's burned me there. He still hasn't reversed the Obama era executive order allowing spouses of H1-B holders to work. That alone was tens of thousands of jobs closed off to American workers....
Hate Speech is speech specifically intended to incite, encourage or justify hatred; often racial hatred but also includes religious, class, and a variety of other hatred. The key feature is that hatred is directed at a specific group of individuals because of those individuals membership in that group and not because of any specific actions by those individuals or even that group as a whole.
It is commonly used by a ruling class in order to divide the working class into manageable chunks. It is part of a broader series of techniques used to fleece the working class out of their earnings. As such, it is in indispensable technique for controlling the population.
Recognizing and giving names to the techniques used to oppress the working class is the first step to ending that oppression.
this is just a rich guy evading taxes. The "Snowbirds" in Arizona & Florida who live there 6.5 months out of the year do the same damn thing.
As someone who lives in one state and pays every dime of taxes owed with zero deductions (stopped getting those when my kid turned 17.5) screw this noise. Enjoy civilization? Pay your dues like everyone else.
If anything most of the shouting down & censorship is done at the left.
Basically, the right wing are running a victim complex to deflect attention away from their own actions. Think about it, the political right have complete control of virtually all branches and levels of government. There's a handful of left leaning districts in CA & NY, but nationally they've got the House, Senate, Presidency and locally they have virtually all the State Legislatures (they were just shy of calling a constitutional convention when a few crazies ruined for them by getting busted for sexual harassment so extreme it couldn't be ignored).
I know it sounds like I'm trolling, but that's kind of what makes going after the American Right wing so hard. It's called Poe's Law. The stuff they're engaged in is so terrible you can't distinguish from somebody doing it and somebody making fun of it. But it's real. All of it. I'm sorry, but it's high time we wake up, smell the coffee, and put our house in order.
It's the lobbying group the 6 folks who want this set up. I bet if you did some digging you'd find they're not just after security. If I had to guess they run a company that fuels the planes or something. Every time I see something like this that no sane person would want I find a PAC behind it looking to line their pockets.
to a civilization. Contrary to popular thought you _can_ teach critical thinking. But you can't do it with Math. Math is too difficult a subject and there's no value in being 50% right.
As for why you want people to learn critical thinking, well, what's one of the first things a fascist does when he seizes power? Even before he goes after guns? That's right, they crack down on the intelligentsia. Fascism can't exist in a country of critical thinkers. People see past the bullshit.
As for why _you_ want to pay for the humanities (and with it a nation of critical thinkers), unless you get lucky and become one of the fascist's todies that doesn't get powerful enough to be killed (boy that's a fine line to walk, just ask anybody in the North Korea) then you're gonna be part of the working class. And do you really want to be part of the working class of a fascist dictatorship? Again, just ask anybody in NK...
I've never once seen a Union care if a worker quits. If anything the higher wages they bargain for benefit worker mobility. One of the key things that hurts worker mobility is that in the modern economy if you're an hourly worker your experience doesn't count for anything. When you quit you're starting over from scratch.
Right now we're seeing something never before: near full employment but wages are declining. Economists have mostly agreed this is caused by two things: Low wage jobs replacing high wages ones (factory jobs replaced with fast food & Walmart) and the end of collective bargaining reducing workers ability to negotiate better wages. Notice I didn't use the "U" word there. Neither do they. There's been a non-stop anti-Union propaganda campaign from the mega corporations (which, let's be real, own the mass media). So much so that you're not generally allowed to say anything as simple as "Wages are down because one guy on his own can't negotiate the same rates as half a million workers".
You don't have to take my word for it, just google what Walmart does everytime their employees try to Unionize. Or look at Disney, where the workers just got bumped to $15/hr because they organized. No Man is an Island. Collective bargaining works.
we've got elections going by a few thousand votes right now, so I'm inclined to say you could.
that law couldn't be any broader if it tried. Thanks to it _any_ unauthorized access to a computer system is criminal. And so what if they can't use the CFAA. There's plenty of existing law to cover interfering with an election. They're after more powers, that's all.
that makes it their business. The only question is are we, as a society, going to tell them no. So far we're not. We've elected an anti-regulation, pro-corporate (or pro-business if you prefer) administration to virtually all levels of government. Net Neutrality is a regulation. We shouldn't be surprised when an administration opposed to regulation eliminates a regulation...
They employ a lot. Last I checked all US tech support is still done out of India (might be the Philippians now, India was getting a little pricey...).
That's exactly what happens. It's so common there's a phrase for it ("People made a run on banks").
Austerity isn't the solution nor is government spending the problem. The United States had it's best years during heavy government spending. Hell, it was WWII and the Military Industrial Complex that got us out of our permanent recession. Government spending is essential to prevent kleptocrats from monopolizing everything.
Venezuela is in a temporary downturn due to the price of oil. They were never a 'healthy' economy, they were a third world country that took their oil money and instead of giving it to the 1% and foreign powers used it to transform themselves into a first world nation. We shut them out of the world bank system so that when the price of oil dipped they couldn't keep up with the loans they took out to develop their country. We did that so we could steal the property they held outside their country.
This is a frighteningly common this America does. We've been fucking with South America as long as I've been alive. Again, it's so common we have a name for it ("Banana Republic"). We had CIA backed death squads down there in the 80s (thanks to Reagan). When it comes to the national stage we are not nice people, and we continue to do awful things because we turn a blind eye to it and blame the victim. All the while complaining about their refugees coming up here and taking our jobs.
See here. Crypto-currency is perfect for this.
Also, I'm guessing Venezuela would be doing a lot better if the US would stop sanctioning them. There's no excuse for those sanctions. Especially when we back dictatorships like Saudi Arabia. I was trying to figure out why we bothered until I noticed our private corporations seized a bunch of oil fields owned by Venezuela when they defaulted on loans.
Always follow the money...
remember, they also on the receiving end of the massive corporate tax break he just enacted. He's generating a ton of web traffic which is good for their ad business. He's lax on regulation which large corporations always love.
Bottom line, this is a bunch of very, very wealthy people having a completely meaningless scuff up while the world burns for the working class.
if you're a corrupt politician you want the dollars from the cable companies. If you're not corrupt, well, this matters but you've got much bigger things to worry about. Healthcare for one. 45,000 people die in America every year from preventable diseases. Then there's the 8 wars we're in right now. Or our crumbling infrastructure. Or the fact that we're seeing more kids with food insecurity due to plummeting wages.
Even if you're a white knight who wants NN there's only so much you can do. That's certainly the vibe I get from Bernie. He did a bit of talking on NN but he's too busy with Medicare for All, the student loan crisis and getting wages raised. There's only so much time in the day and so much space in his constituents minds.