If you know how, if you bother to do that, if you think you voted, and you are interested at all. An average turnout is usually less than 50%, maybe higher in major elections. All those people who didn't vote aren't going to spend a lot of time online tracking their ballot to find out that somehow they did vote.
And a spouse whose ballot was voted by their partner isn't going to look online or report the problem.
Having 100 ballots doesn't do anything if you also don't have the corresponding 100 signatures to be verified by monitored election officials.
Yeah, good thing that the super of a large apartment building doesn't have copies of signed leases on hand as a source of the resident's signatures or anything. Or signatures on copies of the rent checks.
It's almost like this has been thought through before being implemented successfully in several states.
Depends on your definition of "successful". Ron Wyden and Peter Defazio got elected/reelected, so it must be successful, by some definitions.
Time Warner just adds 1,000 to the channel number and it's HD, but the SD version is still on the cable* taking up bandwidth.
So what? That's not bandwidth you get to use, it's reserved for the cable channels. Your internet is not a cable TV channel. The people who only have SD TVs appreciate getting a signal their TV can view.
Every cable system is digital now - why aren't we only using the bandwidth necessary for the thing you're actually watching,
Because it is cheaper to broadcast the digital signals and have the converters know what they can decode, than to have a switched video system. It is much cheaper for the consumer equipment to simply decode the right thing than for it to have to negotiate with a distant head-end for what it gets sent to decode. And if your system hasn't yet encrypted every damn channel, it makes your digital ready TV and VCR possible.
And how many channels are reserved for pay-per-view, which millions of people will NEVER use?
Before our system went encrypted for everything, there were about four "channels" (with multiple possible streams) in use for OnDirect. If you had a digital-ready TV you could actually watch other people's OnDirect programs. PPV broadcasts take up just one channel.
How many cable systems actually have "millions of viewers" on one segment of the cable? Why does it matter in Philly how many people aren't watching PPV in Atlanta?
I'm not saying only offer one channel that tries to appease everyone. Their satellites support over 100 channels so instead of having dozens of almost identical versions and then HD copies of those same channels why not have each channel specifically target 1% of the population.
You said: "They would be much better off to get rid of half of the channels and only offer channels that generate them a large revenue...". A 1% channel isn't going to generate large revenues. Supplying only channels that create large revenues is going to lead to the same problems broadcast TV has.
The infrastructure is the same but now instead of appealing to the majority you can also appeal to each niche separately.
That was the initial grand view of what cable television would be able to do. And as I already pointed out, the niche channels learned that they could make more money by being less niche and more mainline. The cable companies cannot provide the content that does not exist.
getting 5 million viewers each on 100 channels
According to the Census "population clock" there are 325 million people in the US.
Five million viewers of any channel is a huge number. That's not niche, that's mainstream.
well DUH you think an entire apartment building full of people is not going to notice that their ballots are missing?
By the time they do, the votes will have been dropped into the collection boxes. Those who don't notice/don't care will have voted. Those who do care will be stuck arguing with the election officials to get another ballot and how to get the first vote to be uncounted.
well DUH do you think that your fellow humans are too stupid to figure out what is going on when a whole apartment building has their ballots stolen?
When I lived in an apartment building, I had no idea what mail other people got. Most of the people who do notice they didn't get a ballot will not know the entire building's ballots were stolen without a lot of work. By the time they do, the evidence to prove who did it will be long gone, and the votes for those who didn't notice will be cast.
Suppose it is only the ballots for the people the super knows are out of town or have recently moved? Is a little fraud ok?
Here in WA ballots are SENT by mail but returning ballot by mail is just one of several options, to include: counties organize to provide large, physical dropboxes you can walk up to & place your ballot in.
Dropboxes solve none of the problems of by-mail voting. They are a difference that makes no difference.
The fairly long window for voting also greatly increases the cost needed to approimate the fabled 'thugs pressuring at polling places'.
No, it just moves the thuggery up to the day before the ballots are mailed. "When you get your ballot, sign it and give it to me" doesn't need to happen on one day in November to be effective.
"I already submitted my ballot" is a ready excuse to attempted coercion here.
"I told you to sign it and hand it over before you sent it in. You thought your life in this union was bad before, now you're going to face hell."
Saves me (and the impoverished/the state) from having to pay the $0.50 to mail it back individually.
Vote by mail does not save the expense of returning a ballot. And the state never intended to foot the bill for sending them back, but it does have the expense of mailing them to every registered voter, even if that voter has no intention of voting with it.
I'm glad you prefer that system. I bet you didn't realize you could use that option with an absentee ballot without forcing everyone else to vote by mail and opening up the system to such trivial fraud.
No, anonymity is mandatory. If you make it optional, then those who wish to buy votes or coerce someone will simply force them to choose the non-anonymous option.
if i were forced to vote WITH MY NAME ON IT, id vote blank every time
The ballot itself does not have your name on it. The inner envelope you put it in does not. The outer envelope does.
When we used to have polling places, you'd take your completed ballot to the final checker who would verify that it was the one you were given (by a tear-off serial number strip), tear off the strip, and you'd slide your ballot into the box without any id on it. Now your ballot leaves your possession and you have no way of knowing that the election officials aren't just tossing it because it has your name on it.
In Oregon, no. It requires a signature of the voter on the "secrecy" envelope. The election officials are supposed to verify the signature against the registration documents.
If they think the signatures don't match they don't count the vote. They don't notify the voter of the problem, they just don't count it. (The address of the voter is on the envelope, they COULD send a postcard if they thought telling you that your vote wasn't being counted was important to know. Hell, a postcard that was sent to the voter telling them their vote WAS counted would be a good idea anyway.) If you find out about it prior to the end of voting, I think you can go in to the election office and vote in person, but that requires a trip to the county election office and knowing that your vote wasn't counted.
And now with motor-voter in Oregon, the signature they have to match against will be a stored, digitized version as it appears on your driver's license or state id. That makes it impossible for anyone to ever produce your signature on a forged ballot. Yes.
I haven't bothered to check, but I'd guess that those who get their ballots at a PO box and don't care about voting may discard them in the PO itself -- a collection of known valid but unvoted ballots. But the issue is much worse than just mailed in fake or forged ballots. As others have pointed out, vote by mail opens a big wide door to coerced/sold votes. On the other hand, what a marvelous DOS attack to produce and drop off a few hundred thousand fake ballots. No postage necessary, every county has several convenient, free ballot drop off sites, which are usually just a standard looking postal collection box with the sign "vote here". You wouldn't even have to print actual ballots, just the outer and secrecy envelopes and put a piece of blank paper inside. The election folks would be so busy verifying addresses and signatures it would delay the results for days.
Besides the ability to create fake voting sites to gather official, signed ballots to be fixed, there were warnings about "helpful people" who would stand near the official drop sites and offer to drop your ballot into the box for you so you didn't even need to get out of your car.
I am not surprised at all that our dear Doctor Wyden has suggested the entire country go to this system.
It makes even less sense when we are talking directv and dish where assuming I already have the dish, the cost of them providing me a single channel is effectively free.
The incremental cost of adding you as a viewer from a technical viewpoint is small, but not free. You need to pay your share of the infrastructure.
But the incremental cost of you viewing that channel from a content viewpoint is whatever the per-sub cost for providing that channel is. It isn't free.
They would be much better off to get rid of half of the channels and only offer channels that generate them a large revenue
I think this is called the tragedy of the commons. Do you really want cable and satellite services to offer only those channels that draw the most viewers? This is why broadcast TV has such poor content, you know. Lowest common denominator programming.
Good Grief - guess you have to be OLD to remember THAT WAS WHAT CABLE PROMISED WHEN IT STARTED - commercial free programming - at a price.
I guess you have to be old to remember how cable TV actually started, and that this fictional promise never existed and could never exist.
When cable TV started it was intended to be a community antenna service. It was built to carry existing broadcast services places where it was hard or costly for people to install their own OTA antenna systems. Apartment buildings, for example, where all people could use were rabbit ears, but a few antennas on the roof could serve the entire building. Or a rural area where getting the OTA required a tower and a few directional antennas. THAT is what cable TV started as. The CATV acronym doesn't mean "CAble TeleVision", it stands for "Community Antenna TV".
That model then grew as the convenience of not having to install your own antennas at all was marketed to areas where it wasn't hard, just inconvenient, to install your own. But the content was retransmission of OTA broadcasts, and there was no way that cable could promise to remove the ads from that content, and they certainly did not do so.
Once those distribution channels existed, THEN it became feasible for satellite content distribution of pay services. HBO came AFTER cable TV was well established, not before. And along with the ad-free (not really -- just ads limited to HBO services) networks came the advertising supported ones like WGN and TBS. And CNN. (TBS grew out of WTBS, a small independent station in Atlanta owned by Ted Turner, where all he did was distribute the station output by cable -- it was local TV being watched all over the US.)
Now, once cable provided a market for the satellite pay services, parts of the world where cable hadn't grown into may have gotten cable to provide just that and were promised "no ads", but that's not how cable started. England, for example, with a large existing OTA network and just a few "channels" there, would be a good market for a cable service with satellite only services, but in that case the horse was still dragging the cart, not the other way around.
In the evolution of HBO and other pay services, I'm not forgetting the direct-to-home satellite services. They were just such a limited market that they didn't count for much. It required putting in a complex, large dish, and that wasn't possible in urban areas and not many people did it in the rural ones.
THEN along came the extra windfall profits from adding advertising BACK into the entertainment packages,
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but advertising in the content is not under the control of the cable company. If HBO or whatever has an ad, it's because HBO or whatever put it there. Now, you might actually be complaining about the local avails (the term for advertising slots made available to the cable company for insertion of local ads), but every one of those slots is an advertising slot created by the content provider, not the cable company, and if the cable company didn't sell the space you'd see a content-provider ad instead.
and the 'package' was designed to minimize the watchable material to just a few channels, no matter how large a package you paid for
Wrong again. The "package" is designed to attract as many people as possible, which is what advertising-supported content requires. The idea long ago was that if there was a demand for a 'scotch tape channel', someone would provide it and the people who wanted it could watch it.
Unfortunately, the people creating the channels fall into the same trap as the cable services. Cable services want a diversity of programming so they attract lots of subscribers. But those specialized programming sources realized they needed to attract more viewers to make more money. That's why Sci-Fi and History and A&E and Discovery aren't the specialized content that they should be based on
But these are not income taxes, so don't equate them as such -
I didn't. I simply pointed out that that $36,000 paid to an employee is an expense that IS TAXED. Nothing in what I quoted said it was an income tax.
it has nothing at all to do with the profit of the business, only the amount chosen to pay.
Uhhh, what? Any tax paid to the government is a reduction in the amount available for profit, whether it is an income tax or tax on the expenses.
Cable? They tend to have exclusivity clauses in their franchise agreements with municipalities.
No, they do not. Exclusive franchise agreements are against federal law. If you actually take time to read a franchise agreement, and the ordinances behind them, they will be explicit in saying they are non-exclusive.
If you find an exclusive franchise agreement, please do two things. First, report it to the FCC and FTC for federal action. Second, post a link here so I can see it.
In addition to salaries and wages, the employer will incur some or all of the following payroll-related expenses:
Employer portion of Social Security tax Employer portion of Medicare tax State unemployment tax Federal unemployment tax Worker compensation insurance Employer portion of insurance (health, dental, vision, life, disability) Employer paid holidays, vacations, and sick days Employer contributions toward 401(k), savings plans, & profit-sharing plans Employer contributions to pension plans Post-retirement health insurance
Four of those are "taxes" by name and are not calculated based on profits but on the expense of paying an employee. They are, indeed, employer-paid taxes on the money paid to employees.
But in the case of cable companies, they're granted a virtual monopoly in most markets.
They may have a defacto monopoly, but it was not granted to them, is is based on economic factors.
Raising prices in response is only to "punish" the economy that fined them and keep their profits the same and reward shareholders (if applicable) for allowing the mismanagement.
This is something that the proponents of Measure 97 in Oregon vehemently deny will happen when a tax on sales is enacted. Companies will NOT raise prices to cover this new cost, they'll absorb it.
Let's. And let's limit this to the points where I've commented.
Sawdust and ethics:
again stop the reducto ad absurdum. McD is bad food, no argument there.
Reducto ad absurdum is a valid argument. When someone says that they do not have a responsibility to feed someone properly when they accept the responsibility to feed people voluntarily, then it is sufficient to disprove that claim by showing that there is, indeed, a level of responsibility they assume towards feeding people properly. If they have no responsibility, then sawdust is an acceptable "food". If they have some responsibility, then it is not. Can we agree that "sawdust" is not acceptable? Then we must also agree that there is a responsibility to feed people properly.
And sorry, but "bad food" is a subjective evaluation. Some of the things they sell do not lead to a healthy lifestyle if eaten to extremes.
I agree (as will most) that giving sawdust when promising food is not ethical as you did not follow through on your promise.
Not just because you didn't follow through on your promise, but because you did not accept the responsibility to do the job properly when you accepted the job in the first place.
You raised the point that anyone who promises something has some kind of moral mandate to follow through to some arbitrary level of quality.
That does not mean that the company has been mandated to feed people. That is a voluntary choice. Your points about "company is mandated to feed..." are irrelevant because in this case the decision was voluntary.
You claim that if they can't afford McD they will shop elsewhere.
Once again, NO, that is not what I claimed. I referred to people who cannot afford more than McD prices. This was in response to the point that there is obviously a demand for quality because of all the high quality places that are still open despite of McD. "Demand for quality" has nothing to do with "ability to pay" -- the latter being the criterion for free lunch programs in any sane place. And those who have zero ability to pay will eat at neither location, so they are clearly not part of the discussion of how McD's free food program would impact other sources of food.
The only way your argument holds water is if there are people who get the free lunch, but who otherwise could afford to eat elsewhere (a minority).
I doubt your claim that this group is a minority of the people getting free lunches, but that is irrelevant. My argument is solely about those people. The fact that they will stop buying from other sources when McD gives them free lunches will have an economic impact on those other sources, which may result in a loss of competition.
If we are to accept your argument, then by the same logic, any business who chooses to have a big sale should not do so from an ethical viewpoint because this may cause their competition to fold from lost sales as people take advantage of this big sale.
An interesting point. And I might point to the laws against dumping and predatory pricing that already exist, and the great deal of antipathy towards companies like Walmart that have what amounts to continuous "sales" and do cause local competition to fold. For example, when Borders opened in my city, the one main, really good magazine shop folded. Then Borders folded, and now we have none.
Why can't people see the positive side of this.
I didn't say there were no positives. The question was "what is wrong with", and that's what I was limiting my comments to.
Comcast is not a US Government Granted Monopoly, but a local one when the city that wants to offer Broadband sign a contract with Comcast, that they are the only ones who can do business in that city for cable.
I never referred to a US government granted monopoly.
It is not a local government granted monopoly because there is nothing stopping anyone else who wants to be an ISP or offer broadband from doing the same thing. Exclusive franchises are a thing of the past, outlawed at the federal level.
This is also the case in many apartments in Baltimore, where the Landlord signs a contract with ISP Of Choice
Now you're confusing a contract between a private citizen (the landlord) and Comcast with a government-granted monopoly.
The US Government doesnt have any say in these deals.
You are right, the US Government doesn't have any say in the contract between a landlord and Comcast, but they have PLENTY of say over what the cities can do in that regard.
Many if not all municipalities have franchise agreements which prevents other competitors from entering the market.
Please provide a link to one such exclusive franchise agreement. I didn't say municipalities didn't have franchise agreements, I said they were all non-exclusive. Municipalities CANNOT prevent anyone who wants to seek a franchise agreement from doing so.
So you might want to do some actual research and speak to some municipalities.
I have. Have you? Do you read the franchises or just complain because they exist?
It is often helpful to the discussion to quote a bit of what you are replying to so the antecedents to pronouns can be properly identified. It appears you think I claimed there are no de facto monopolies, and you are obviously mistaken.
The OP said government granted monopoly and you went on some tired about Federal this and Federal that. Somehow you missed the municipal level. Funny how that works.
Sigh. Just sigh. The FEDERAL level is a LAW that prohibits MUNICIPAL levels from granting exclusive franchises. The municipalities cannot grant exclusive franchises any more, and have not been allowed to do so for such a long period of time that any existing ones will have expired and been renegotiated. And when they were renegotiated, they became NON EXCLUSIVE, and thus NOT a government-granted monopoly.
Federal law trumps municipal law. Funny how that works, huh?
My response needs no disambiguation. You don't need to add words to what I said for me.
Somehow, you have the pomposity to believe your own PR. That's not unusual.
It is pompous for me to believe what I say? Is it pompous when you believe what you say? Calling it "PR" would be like me calling what you say propaganda. I'm not writing "PR", and it would be unproductive to call what you write propaganda.
Whether de facto, de jure, de legis, amazingly, you agree that there is a monopoly,
Stop the bullshit attempt at putting words in my mouth. I have never denied there is a de facto monopoly for cable television, only the de jure. There's nothing amazing about it. I have readily admitted the de facto status regarding cable TV because it is a simple fact. But it is also a simple fact that there is NO monopoly whatsoever for ISP services.
But this is also about the topic of privacy, and where DNS comes in is pretty amusing.
No, I'm sorry, my comment was about the lack of government-granted monopoly status for ISPs. From the posting I replied to, very specific in it's limited context: "Since when was having a government-granted monopoly not a great business model?"
That comment has nothing to do with DNS. It has nothing to do with cable television, really, either. It was a comment in the context of internet providers. It claims there is a government-granted monopoly involved, and that is a false statement.
Some places might have had an exclusive cable TV franchise long ago (I don't know of any, and there were none in any of the places I was involved in dealing with franchise issues. And that was from the public side, not the corporate side. They were called "cable commissions", and they were made up of citizens like me.) The fact is that they are illegal today and have been for a long time, and nobody has yet been able to point to one as an example.
Now, I understand you want to thrash to death reasons to hate on Comcast and TW, and talk about how their DNS servers are an invasion of your right to privacy, and all kinds of things like that. Go over to the threads in this discussion where that's being discussed, because that's not relevant to my comment in any way. I have been explicit already in saying there are reasons to dislike them, but them having a government-granted monopoly is NOT one of those reasons.
So, you can weasel-word what you'd like, but most people have no choice in their provider, so it is a de facto monopoly,
I did not say there were no de-facto monopolies, only that the claim that it is a government-granted monopoly is quite false. You call being accurate "weasle-word[ing]", but I call it being truthful.
and in some cases where legislatures were bribed to inhibit/prohibit communities from doing their own networks de jure monopolies.
The fact that municipalities were prohibited from competing unfairly with a company they have entered into a contract with doesn't make the resulting de facto monopoly into a de jure. It simply supports the existing non-exclusive franchise agreement. When a company makes promises that become part of the franchise agreement in exchange for being allowed to operate in a community, and then the community says "we're going to become a taxpayer supported, non-profit competitor with none of the requirements you agreed to and none of the expenses attached to those promises", that's unfair beyond reason.
And once this is through the courts, then what of the DNS data they collect?
I'm sorry, but how did we get from debating the monopoly status (lack thereof) of a cable TV company into 'DNS data' that someone collects? DNS data is an ISP function, for which zero government-granted monopolies exist.
Consumers are pretty much f#cked when it comes to cable and broadband "service providers", their lousy services, their monopoly-ingrained mindset, and their revenue-at-all-costs stance.
And not a single word of those reasons to dislike Comcast depends on them having a de jure monopoly, which is good because they do not. I have said not a word contradicting any of those reasons, either.
That's 0 / 2 from you mate. (although both for the same reason)... This is all about opportunity cost.
No. It is about ethical behaviour as a human being. The "false, of course" comment was a reply to my statement that when you accept the responsibility to feed someone, you accept the responsibility to do it properly. "Opportunity cost" has nothing to do with it. Once you say "I'll give you free food because you cannot afford to feed yourself", you have a responsibility to provide actual, real, working food. You can't ethically say "I'll feed you..." and then give someone sawdust. If you think that statement is "false, of course", then you are a poor excuse for a human being.
You give quite a list of possible outcomes, but the fact that "not being promised food, getting no food and starving" and "getting promised food and getting sawdust instead", while reaching the same ends, are quite different in the means. The ends are the same, but one involves a promise to provide food and not following through.
If you cannot afford to hand out the free food (too high a cost) then you don't make the promise, and not promising to feed someone means you haven't assumed the responsibility to do it properly.
And your list fails to recognize that McD is not being mandated to provide food here. The original question was "Can you explain what would be wrong with McDonald's offering free lunches to some people?" The "company is mandated" items in your list are outside the context of this discussion.
This person is not someone who will ever be a paying customer was the OP's point.
Except he's wrong. "This person" is "[people] who cannot afford better than McD for lunch". That really does mean they will be a customer somewhere, but not at the "high quality" places that still manage to operate despite McD's existence. McD's free lunch will, indeed, reduce sales at other restaurants, which can cause them to fold, no matter how good their food happens to be. This leaves less choice for people who cannot afford more than McD prices, so they're now stuck with one option -- McD. And THOSE will be sales to "this person", despite your claim of zero sales overall.
I see there are Comcast employees actively participating on Slashdot...
That may be true, but I am not one of them. I am simply someone who has been involved in cable franchising for a long time and have kept up with the changing legal landscape on that topic. And I choose to correct those who claim that exclusive franchises still exist. If you want to bash Comcast or TW, do so for any number of valid reasons; spreading falsehoods about their legal status is neither necessary nor appropriate.
There are federal laws prohibiting exclusive cable franchises, which are how government-granted monopolies in that industry were created. While there may have been a government-granted monopoly in some places (none of the places I've lived has had an exclusive franchise even when they were legal) they have long ago expired and must now be non-exclusive. I have repeatedly challenged claims of current exclusive franchises by asking only that a link to one be provided, and one has yet to be produced. Some have pointed me to franchises that are quite explicit in saying that they are non-exclusive, so it is clear that those people have failed to read what they are using as proof.
And there are, of course, NO government-granted monopolies for ISPs and never have been.
It is to serve as a disincentive to dropping cable TV service, just as it always was.
Uhhh, what? The fee doesn't change depending on your cable TV subscription or lack thereof.
Now, what I want to know is, what is an "in-browser announcement"? (Yes, I know, but let's be angry about an actual abuse here. Changing the content you get from a website so it pops up a window is deliberately breaking the internet standards. Just like running a defective name server is.)
So you would see no problem in feeding people in homeless shelters bowls of boiled sawdust? There is no responsibility to feed people properly when you accept the responsibility to feed them?
What other things do you think you can do improperly after you've promised to do them?
Note also that "people who cannot afford to feed themselves" already do not eat at McDonald's.
When McDonalds feeds them for free they do. Do you really not remember that this entire discussion is about McD giving free lunches to people who qualify for free lunches?
Slashdot Mirror
You can track your ballot online.
If you know how, if you bother to do that, if you think you voted, and you are interested at all. An average turnout is usually less than 50%, maybe higher in major elections. All those people who didn't vote aren't going to spend a lot of time online tracking their ballot to find out that somehow they did vote.
And a spouse whose ballot was voted by their partner isn't going to look online or report the problem.
Having 100 ballots doesn't do anything if you also don't have the corresponding 100 signatures to be verified by monitored election officials.
Yeah, good thing that the super of a large apartment building doesn't have copies of signed leases on hand as a source of the resident's signatures or anything. Or signatures on copies of the rent checks.
It's almost like this has been thought through before being implemented successfully in several states.
Depends on your definition of "successful". Ron Wyden and Peter Defazio got elected/reelected, so it must be successful, by some definitions.
Time Warner just adds 1,000 to the channel number and it's HD, but the SD version is still on the cable* taking up bandwidth.
So what? That's not bandwidth you get to use, it's reserved for the cable channels. Your internet is not a cable TV channel. The people who only have SD TVs appreciate getting a signal their TV can view.
Every cable system is digital now - why aren't we only using the bandwidth necessary for the thing you're actually watching,
Because it is cheaper to broadcast the digital signals and have the converters know what they can decode, than to have a switched video system. It is much cheaper for the consumer equipment to simply decode the right thing than for it to have to negotiate with a distant head-end for what it gets sent to decode. And if your system hasn't yet encrypted every damn channel, it makes your digital ready TV and VCR possible.
And how many channels are reserved for pay-per-view, which millions of people will NEVER use?
Before our system went encrypted for everything, there were about four "channels" (with multiple possible streams) in use for OnDirect. If you had a digital-ready TV you could actually watch other people's OnDirect programs. PPV broadcasts take up just one channel.
How many cable systems actually have "millions of viewers" on one segment of the cable? Why does it matter in Philly how many people aren't watching PPV in Atlanta?
I'm not saying only offer one channel that tries to appease everyone. Their satellites support over 100 channels so instead of having dozens of almost identical versions and then HD copies of those same channels why not have each channel specifically target 1% of the population.
You said: "They would be much better off to get rid of half of the channels and only offer channels that generate them a large revenue...". A 1% channel isn't going to generate large revenues. Supplying only channels that create large revenues is going to lead to the same problems broadcast TV has.
The infrastructure is the same but now instead of appealing to the majority you can also appeal to each niche separately.
That was the initial grand view of what cable television would be able to do. And as I already pointed out, the niche channels learned that they could make more money by being less niche and more mainline. The cable companies cannot provide the content that does not exist.
getting 5 million viewers each on 100 channels
According to the Census "population clock" there are 325 million people in the US.
Five million viewers of any channel is a huge number. That's not niche, that's mainstream.
well DUH you think an entire apartment building full of people is not going to notice that their ballots are missing?
By the time they do, the votes will have been dropped into the collection boxes. Those who don't notice/don't care will have voted. Those who do care will be stuck arguing with the election officials to get another ballot and how to get the first vote to be uncounted.
well DUH do you think that your fellow humans are too stupid to figure out what is going on when a whole apartment building has their ballots stolen?
When I lived in an apartment building, I had no idea what mail other people got. Most of the people who do notice they didn't get a ballot will not know the entire building's ballots were stolen without a lot of work. By the time they do, the evidence to prove who did it will be long gone, and the votes for those who didn't notice will be cast.
Suppose it is only the ballots for the people the super knows are out of town or have recently moved? Is a little fraud ok?
Here in WA ballots are SENT by mail but returning ballot by mail is just one of several options, to include: counties organize to provide large, physical dropboxes you can walk up to & place your ballot in.
Dropboxes solve none of the problems of by-mail voting. They are a difference that makes no difference.
The fairly long window for voting also greatly increases the cost needed to approimate the fabled 'thugs pressuring at polling places'.
No, it just moves the thuggery up to the day before the ballots are mailed. "When you get your ballot, sign it and give it to me" doesn't need to happen on one day in November to be effective.
"I already submitted my ballot" is a ready excuse to attempted coercion here.
"I told you to sign it and hand it over before you sent it in. You thought your life in this union was bad before, now you're going to face hell."
Saves me (and the impoverished/the state) from having to pay the $0.50 to mail it back individually.
Vote by mail does not save the expense of returning a ballot. And the state never intended to foot the bill for sending them back, but it does have the expense of mailing them to every registered voter, even if that voter has no intention of voting with it.
I'm glad you prefer that system. I bet you didn't realize you could use that option with an absentee ballot without forcing everyone else to vote by mail and opening up the system to such trivial fraud.
Mh ... yea, anonimity should be an option, indeed.
No, anonymity is mandatory. If you make it optional, then those who wish to buy votes or coerce someone will simply force them to choose the non-anonymous option.
if i were forced to vote WITH MY NAME ON IT, id vote blank every time
The ballot itself does not have your name on it. The inner envelope you put it in does not. The outer envelope does.
When we used to have polling places, you'd take your completed ballot to the final checker who would verify that it was the one you were given (by a tear-off serial number strip), tear off the strip, and you'd slide your ballot into the box without any id on it. Now your ballot leaves your possession and you have no way of knowing that the election officials aren't just tossing it because it has your name on it.
Does "vote by mail" require any sort of ID?
In Oregon, no. It requires a signature of the voter on the "secrecy" envelope. The election officials are supposed to verify the signature against the registration documents.
If they think the signatures don't match they don't count the vote. They don't notify the voter of the problem, they just don't count it. (The address of the voter is on the envelope, they COULD send a postcard if they thought telling you that your vote wasn't being counted was important to know. Hell, a postcard that was sent to the voter telling them their vote WAS counted would be a good idea anyway.) If you find out about it prior to the end of voting, I think you can go in to the election office and vote in person, but that requires a trip to the county election office and knowing that your vote wasn't counted.
And now with motor-voter in Oregon, the signature they have to match against will be a stored, digitized version as it appears on your driver's license or state id. That makes it impossible for anyone to ever produce your signature on a forged ballot. Yes.
I haven't bothered to check, but I'd guess that those who get their ballots at a PO box and don't care about voting may discard them in the PO itself -- a collection of known valid but unvoted ballots. But the issue is much worse than just mailed in fake or forged ballots. As others have pointed out, vote by mail opens a big wide door to coerced/sold votes. On the other hand, what a marvelous DOS attack to produce and drop off a few hundred thousand fake ballots. No postage necessary, every county has several convenient, free ballot drop off sites, which are usually just a standard looking postal collection box with the sign "vote here". You wouldn't even have to print actual ballots, just the outer and secrecy envelopes and put a piece of blank paper inside. The election folks would be so busy verifying addresses and signatures it would delay the results for days.
Besides the ability to create fake voting sites to gather official, signed ballots to be fixed, there were warnings about "helpful people" who would stand near the official drop sites and offer to drop your ballot into the box for you so you didn't even need to get out of your car.
I am not surprised at all that our dear Doctor Wyden has suggested the entire country go to this system.
It makes even less sense when we are talking directv and dish where assuming I already have the dish, the cost of them providing me a single channel is effectively free.
The incremental cost of adding you as a viewer from a technical viewpoint is small, but not free. You need to pay your share of the infrastructure.
But the incremental cost of you viewing that channel from a content viewpoint is whatever the per-sub cost for providing that channel is. It isn't free.
They would be much better off to get rid of half of the channels and only offer channels that generate them a large revenue
I think this is called the tragedy of the commons. Do you really want cable and satellite services to offer only those channels that draw the most viewers? This is why broadcast TV has such poor content, you know. Lowest common denominator programming.
Good Grief - guess you have to be OLD to remember THAT WAS WHAT CABLE PROMISED WHEN IT STARTED - commercial free programming - at a price.
I guess you have to be old to remember how cable TV actually started, and that this fictional promise never existed and could never exist.
When cable TV started it was intended to be a community antenna service. It was built to carry existing broadcast services places where it was hard or costly for people to install their own OTA antenna systems. Apartment buildings, for example, where all people could use were rabbit ears, but a few antennas on the roof could serve the entire building. Or a rural area where getting the OTA required a tower and a few directional antennas. THAT is what cable TV started as. The CATV acronym doesn't mean "CAble TeleVision", it stands for "Community Antenna TV".
That model then grew as the convenience of not having to install your own antennas at all was marketed to areas where it wasn't hard, just inconvenient, to install your own. But the content was retransmission of OTA broadcasts, and there was no way that cable could promise to remove the ads from that content, and they certainly did not do so.
Once those distribution channels existed, THEN it became feasible for satellite content distribution of pay services. HBO came AFTER cable TV was well established, not before. And along with the ad-free (not really -- just ads limited to HBO services) networks came the advertising supported ones like WGN and TBS. And CNN. (TBS grew out of WTBS, a small independent station in Atlanta owned by Ted Turner, where all he did was distribute the station output by cable -- it was local TV being watched all over the US.)
Now, once cable provided a market for the satellite pay services, parts of the world where cable hadn't grown into may have gotten cable to provide just that and were promised "no ads", but that's not how cable started. England, for example, with a large existing OTA network and just a few "channels" there, would be a good market for a cable service with satellite only services, but in that case the horse was still dragging the cart, not the other way around.
In the evolution of HBO and other pay services, I'm not forgetting the direct-to-home satellite services. They were just such a limited market that they didn't count for much. It required putting in a complex, large dish, and that wasn't possible in urban areas and not many people did it in the rural ones.
THEN along came the extra windfall profits from adding advertising BACK into the entertainment packages,
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but advertising in the content is not under the control of the cable company. If HBO or whatever has an ad, it's because HBO or whatever put it there. Now, you might actually be complaining about the local avails (the term for advertising slots made available to the cable company for insertion of local ads), but every one of those slots is an advertising slot created by the content provider, not the cable company, and if the cable company didn't sell the space you'd see a content-provider ad instead.
and the 'package' was designed to minimize the watchable material to just a few channels, no matter how large a package you paid for
Wrong again. The "package" is designed to attract as many people as possible, which is what advertising-supported content requires. The idea long ago was that if there was a demand for a 'scotch tape channel', someone would provide it and the people who wanted it could watch it.
Unfortunately, the people creating the channels fall into the same trap as the cable services. Cable services want a diversity of programming so they attract lots of subscribers. But those specialized programming sources realized they needed to attract more viewers to make more money. That's why Sci-Fi and History and A&E and Discovery aren't the specialized content that they should be based on
But these are not income taxes, so don't equate them as such -
I didn't. I simply pointed out that that $36,000 paid to an employee is an expense that IS TAXED. Nothing in what I quoted said it was an income tax.
it has nothing at all to do with the profit of the business, only the amount chosen to pay.
Uhhh, what? Any tax paid to the government is a reduction in the amount available for profit, whether it is an income tax or tax on the expenses.
Cable? They tend to have exclusivity clauses in their franchise agreements with municipalities.
No, they do not. Exclusive franchise agreements are against federal law. If you actually take time to read a franchise agreement, and the ordinances behind them, they will be explicit in saying they are non-exclusive.
If you find an exclusive franchise agreement, please do two things. First, report it to the FCC and FTC for federal action. Second, post a link here so I can see it.
The business does not pay taxes on revenue - they pay it on profits.
Measure 97 currently on the fall ballot in Oregon will tax some businesses 2.5% on sales, not profit.
The $36,000/year is an expense and it's not part of the profit and not taxed.
From here:
Four of those are "taxes" by name and are not calculated based on profits but on the expense of paying an employee. They are, indeed, employer-paid taxes on the money paid to employees.
But in the case of cable companies, they're granted a virtual monopoly in most markets.
They may have a defacto monopoly, but it was not granted to them, is is based on economic factors.
Raising prices in response is only to "punish" the economy that fined them and keep their profits the same and reward shareholders (if applicable) for allowing the mismanagement.
This is something that the proponents of Measure 97 in Oregon vehemently deny will happen when a tax on sales is enacted. Companies will NOT raise prices to cover this new cost, they'll absorb it.
Ok lets deal with these points now...
Let's. And let's limit this to the points where I've commented.
Sawdust and ethics: again stop the reducto ad absurdum. McD is bad food, no argument there.
Reducto ad absurdum is a valid argument. When someone says that they do not have a responsibility to feed someone properly when they accept the responsibility to feed people voluntarily, then it is sufficient to disprove that claim by showing that there is, indeed, a level of responsibility they assume towards feeding people properly. If they have no responsibility, then sawdust is an acceptable "food". If they have some responsibility, then it is not. Can we agree that "sawdust" is not acceptable? Then we must also agree that there is a responsibility to feed people properly.
And sorry, but "bad food" is a subjective evaluation. Some of the things they sell do not lead to a healthy lifestyle if eaten to extremes.
I agree (as will most) that giving sawdust when promising food is not ethical as you did not follow through on your promise.
Not just because you didn't follow through on your promise, but because you did not accept the responsibility to do the job properly when you accepted the job in the first place.
You raised the point that anyone who promises something has some kind of moral mandate to follow through to some arbitrary level of quality.
That does not mean that the company has been mandated to feed people. That is a voluntary choice. Your points about "company is mandated to feed ..." are irrelevant because in this case the decision was voluntary.
You claim that if they can't afford McD they will shop elsewhere.
Once again, NO, that is not what I claimed. I referred to people who cannot afford more than McD prices. This was in response to the point that there is obviously a demand for quality because of all the high quality places that are still open despite of McD. "Demand for quality" has nothing to do with "ability to pay" -- the latter being the criterion for free lunch programs in any sane place. And those who have zero ability to pay will eat at neither location, so they are clearly not part of the discussion of how McD's free food program would impact other sources of food.
The only way your argument holds water is if there are people who get the free lunch, but who otherwise could afford to eat elsewhere (a minority).
I doubt your claim that this group is a minority of the people getting free lunches, but that is irrelevant. My argument is solely about those people. The fact that they will stop buying from other sources when McD gives them free lunches will have an economic impact on those other sources, which may result in a loss of competition.
If we are to accept your argument, then by the same logic, any business who chooses to have a big sale should not do so from an ethical viewpoint because this may cause their competition to fold from lost sales as people take advantage of this big sale.
An interesting point. And I might point to the laws against dumping and predatory pricing that already exist, and the great deal of antipathy towards companies like Walmart that have what amounts to continuous "sales" and do cause local competition to fold. For example, when Borders opened in my city, the one main, really good magazine shop folded. Then Borders folded, and now we have none.
Why can't people see the positive side of this.
I didn't say there were no positives. The question was "what is wrong with", and that's what I was limiting my comments to.
Comcast is not a US Government Granted Monopoly, but a local one when the city that wants to offer Broadband sign a contract with Comcast, that they are the only ones who can do business in that city for cable.
I never referred to a US government granted monopoly. It is not a local government granted monopoly because there is nothing stopping anyone else who wants to be an ISP or offer broadband from doing the same thing. Exclusive franchises are a thing of the past, outlawed at the federal level.
This is also the case in many apartments in Baltimore, where the Landlord signs a contract with ISP Of Choice
Now you're confusing a contract between a private citizen (the landlord) and Comcast with a government-granted monopoly.
The US Government doesnt have any say in these deals.
You are right, the US Government doesn't have any say in the contract between a landlord and Comcast, but they have PLENTY of say over what the cities can do in that regard.
Many if not all municipalities have franchise agreements which prevents other competitors from entering the market.
Please provide a link to one such exclusive franchise agreement. I didn't say municipalities didn't have franchise agreements, I said they were all non-exclusive. Municipalities CANNOT prevent anyone who wants to seek a franchise agreement from doing so.
So you might want to do some actual research and speak to some municipalities.
I have. Have you? Do you read the franchises or just complain because they exist?
Yes douche bag that's what you claimed.
It is often helpful to the discussion to quote a bit of what you are replying to so the antecedents to pronouns can be properly identified. It appears you think I claimed there are no de facto monopolies, and you are obviously mistaken.
The OP said government granted monopoly and you went on some tired about Federal this and Federal that. Somehow you missed the municipal level. Funny how that works.
Sigh. Just sigh. The FEDERAL level is a LAW that prohibits MUNICIPAL levels from granting exclusive franchises. The municipalities cannot grant exclusive franchises any more, and have not been allowed to do so for such a long period of time that any existing ones will have expired and been renegotiated. And when they were renegotiated, they became NON EXCLUSIVE, and thus NOT a government-granted monopoly.
Federal law trumps municipal law. Funny how that works, huh?
Let me disambiguate your response.
My response needs no disambiguation. You don't need to add words to what I said for me.
Somehow, you have the pomposity to believe your own PR. That's not unusual.
It is pompous for me to believe what I say? Is it pompous when you believe what you say? Calling it "PR" would be like me calling what you say propaganda. I'm not writing "PR", and it would be unproductive to call what you write propaganda.
Whether de facto, de jure, de legis, amazingly, you agree that there is a monopoly,
Stop the bullshit attempt at putting words in my mouth. I have never denied there is a de facto monopoly for cable television, only the de jure. There's nothing amazing about it. I have readily admitted the de facto status regarding cable TV because it is a simple fact. But it is also a simple fact that there is NO monopoly whatsoever for ISP services.
But this is also about the topic of privacy, and where DNS comes in is pretty amusing.
No, I'm sorry, my comment was about the lack of government-granted monopoly status for ISPs. From the posting I replied to, very specific in it's limited context: "Since when was having a government-granted monopoly not a great business model?" That comment has nothing to do with DNS. It has nothing to do with cable television, really, either. It was a comment in the context of internet providers. It claims there is a government-granted monopoly involved, and that is a false statement.
Some places might have had an exclusive cable TV franchise long ago (I don't know of any, and there were none in any of the places I was involved in dealing with franchise issues. And that was from the public side, not the corporate side. They were called "cable commissions", and they were made up of citizens like me.) The fact is that they are illegal today and have been for a long time, and nobody has yet been able to point to one as an example.
Now, I understand you want to thrash to death reasons to hate on Comcast and TW, and talk about how their DNS servers are an invasion of your right to privacy, and all kinds of things like that. Go over to the threads in this discussion where that's being discussed, because that's not relevant to my comment in any way. I have been explicit already in saying there are reasons to dislike them, but them having a government-granted monopoly is NOT one of those reasons.
So, you can weasel-word what you'd like, but most people have no choice in their provider, so it is a de facto monopoly,
I did not say there were no de-facto monopolies, only that the claim that it is a government-granted monopoly is quite false. You call being accurate "weasle-word[ing]", but I call it being truthful.
and in some cases where legislatures were bribed to inhibit/prohibit communities from doing their own networks de jure monopolies.
The fact that municipalities were prohibited from competing unfairly with a company they have entered into a contract with doesn't make the resulting de facto monopoly into a de jure. It simply supports the existing non-exclusive franchise agreement. When a company makes promises that become part of the franchise agreement in exchange for being allowed to operate in a community, and then the community says "we're going to become a taxpayer supported, non-profit competitor with none of the requirements you agreed to and none of the expenses attached to those promises", that's unfair beyond reason.
And once this is through the courts, then what of the DNS data they collect?
I'm sorry, but how did we get from debating the monopoly status (lack thereof) of a cable TV company into 'DNS data' that someone collects? DNS data is an ISP function, for which zero government-granted monopolies exist.
Consumers are pretty much f#cked when it comes to cable and broadband "service providers", their lousy services, their monopoly-ingrained mindset, and their revenue-at-all-costs stance.
And not a single word of those reasons to dislike Comcast depends on them having a de jure monopoly, which is good because they do not. I have said not a word contradicting any of those reasons, either.
That's 0 / 2 from you mate. (although both for the same reason) ... This is all about opportunity cost.
No. It is about ethical behaviour as a human being. The "false, of course" comment was a reply to my statement that when you accept the responsibility to feed someone, you accept the responsibility to do it properly. "Opportunity cost" has nothing to do with it. Once you say "I'll give you free food because you cannot afford to feed yourself", you have a responsibility to provide actual, real, working food. You can't ethically say "I'll feed you..." and then give someone sawdust. If you think that statement is "false, of course", then you are a poor excuse for a human being.
You give quite a list of possible outcomes, but the fact that "not being promised food, getting no food and starving" and "getting promised food and getting sawdust instead", while reaching the same ends, are quite different in the means. The ends are the same, but one involves a promise to provide food and not following through.
If you cannot afford to hand out the free food (too high a cost) then you don't make the promise, and not promising to feed someone means you haven't assumed the responsibility to do it properly.
And your list fails to recognize that McD is not being mandated to provide food here. The original question was "Can you explain what would be wrong with McDonald's offering free lunches to some people?" The "company is mandated" items in your list are outside the context of this discussion.
This person is not someone who will ever be a paying customer was the OP's point.
Except he's wrong. "This person" is "[people] who cannot afford better than McD for lunch". That really does mean they will be a customer somewhere, but not at the "high quality" places that still manage to operate despite McD's existence. McD's free lunch will, indeed, reduce sales at other restaurants, which can cause them to fold, no matter how good their food happens to be. This leaves less choice for people who cannot afford more than McD prices, so they're now stuck with one option -- McD. And THOSE will be sales to "this person", despite your claim of zero sales overall.
I see there are Comcast employees actively participating on Slashdot...
That may be true, but I am not one of them. I am simply someone who has been involved in cable franchising for a long time and have kept up with the changing legal landscape on that topic. And I choose to correct those who claim that exclusive franchises still exist. If you want to bash Comcast or TW, do so for any number of valid reasons; spreading falsehoods about their legal status is neither necessary nor appropriate.
There are federal laws prohibiting exclusive cable franchises, which are how government-granted monopolies in that industry were created. While there may have been a government-granted monopoly in some places (none of the places I've lived has had an exclusive franchise even when they were legal) they have long ago expired and must now be non-exclusive. I have repeatedly challenged claims of current exclusive franchises by asking only that a link to one be provided, and one has yet to be produced. Some have pointed me to franchises that are quite explicit in saying that they are non-exclusive, so it is clear that those people have failed to read what they are using as proof.
And there are, of course, NO government-granted monopolies for ISPs and never have been.
And when your use pushes your neighbors internet over the cap, Comcast will charge them more. Win-win.
The visitor's data use is counted against the visitor's data cap, not the owner of the hotspot. From this:
It is to serve as a disincentive to dropping cable TV service, just as it always was.
Uhhh, what? The fee doesn't change depending on your cable TV subscription or lack thereof.
Now, what I want to know is, what is an "in-browser announcement"? (Yes, I know, but let's be angry about an actual abuse here. Changing the content you get from a website so it pops up a window is deliberately breaking the internet standards. Just like running a defective name server is.)
Comcast, in plenty of places.
No place in the US. Exclusive franchises are against federal law and have been for a long time.
Since when was having a government-granted monopoly not a great business model?
Which ISP has a government-granted monopoly? I know of none.
False, of course.
So you would see no problem in feeding people in homeless shelters bowls of boiled sawdust? There is no responsibility to feed people properly when you accept the responsibility to feed them?
What other things do you think you can do improperly after you've promised to do them?
Note also that "people who cannot afford to feed themselves" already do not eat at McDonald's.
When McDonalds feeds them for free they do. Do you really not remember that this entire discussion is about McD giving free lunches to people who qualify for free lunches?