It is inherently a local problem. Homeless people do not live "in the USA", they live "under the bridge at Third and Madison in Sometown". The money to pay for their help is distributed by local agencies. The money is spent for local solutions. There is no "top down solution" because there simply is no way to deal with a local issue like this from the top.
Oh and by the way who is going to pay for it?
Well, in a good world, it would be paid for by charity. In the modern world where "the government" has usurped the role of charity, it has to be "the government". But not the federal government, because it is not a top-down problem. It is a local problem.
Had the government not started to be "charity", then taxpayers wouldn't be paying as much in taxes, and they wouldn't have the attitude that "I'm paying taxes to fix this". We're all being trained that the right way to solve any problem is to hold out our hand and expect someone else to be taxed to pay for the solutions.
The Top 50 Percent of All Taxpayers Paid 97 Percent of All Income Taxes; the Top 5 Percent Paid 57 Percent of All Income Taxes; and the Top 1 Percent Paid 35 Percent of All Income Taxes in 2011
The top 5% paid 57% of all income taxes. That's a majority.
Now, you can argue that "income tax isn't everything", but your "top-down" solution is going to be paid out of income taxes, so yes, it's everything in this context.
Most taxes are not levied on people who do not have wealth.
Again, that's debatable.
No, again, that's a fact. From the same source, already quoted. If the top 50% are paying 97% of the income taxes, then that means that the other 50% are paying only 3% of the tax. Most of the taxes (97%) are not levied on people who don't have wealth (the bottom 50%).
Rich people have ways of avoiding paying taxes. Or weren't you aware of that?
Apparently you weren't aware that 5% of the people ("the rich") are paying 57% of the income taxes. Yes, there are tax laws that reduce the amount of taxes someone pays, and some of those reductions require someone to actually have money that would have been taxed. That's obvious. You can't get a deduction for a charitable contribution of money unless you had the money, and poor people aren't likely to be able to take advantage of that law. But then, the poor people didn't have the money and weren't being taxed on it in the first place, so they really haven't lost anything by not being able to deduct what they didn't have in income anyway.
Who is a scofflaw? The street vendor? They have done nothing wrong but trying to EARN a living. I am a Libertarian,
So, in libertarian thought, how many laws can one ignore when one is just "trying to EARN a living"?
I'm trying to earn a living by transporting people around the city. I don't have a driver's license, and my car has no registration, but I am just "trying to EARN a living". Am I ok?
I'm helping people by providing a gasoline delivery service. The laws prohibit such action, but I am trying to earn a living. Does the law not apply to me?
"Trying to EARN a living" does not supersede existing laws. I'm trying to earn a living as an assassin... I'm not a scofflaw!
The real villains in this are all the people who think people earning a living is somehow evil.
You're making an assumption of motive that is invalid. Objecting to people who break the law in the course of trying to make a living is not objecting to them making a living, it's objecting to the violation of law.
Because homelessness is a local problem that needs to be solved at the local level. "Top-down" solutions don't adapt to the needs locally. And "top-down" solutions don't mean taking all the money from the 1%ers, who don't have enough money to solve the problem your way anyway.
why shouldn't they be the ones who are paying to solve problems like homelessness, either directly, or through taxation?
They already pay the majority of the taxes.
Why should the burden be put on people who don't have wealth?
Most taxes are not levied on people who do not have wealth. Saying the solution is not top-down says nothing about who is paying for it, only who is prescribing it.
I'd imagine that it has to be a bit more complicated than that though, otherwise a single pixel of difference is all that breaks the checksum.
A single pixel change is unlikely, but that's why I also said it probably included some image matching. There are simple ways of comparing images that would give good results.
I suppose it might be "reduce the image to a simple form" (reduced color depth, size, etc) and then checksum, but that would consume an awful lot of computing resources.
6. Came bundled by default with useful software, so if you didn't pay close attention and uncheck the box it would install itself whenever you updated, IIRC, Java, and I think a couple of other things.
Any software that needs to piggyback itself on other packages like that is really great software, yes I do say. That earned itself a place on my list of "uninstall immediately" packages whenever I see it installed on something I manage.
Maybe instead of building this new power plant, they should just convince more people to switch to LED light bulbs.
Yes, this would save energy, but you should add in the savings when people turn off radios because all they hear is the static from the LED electronics.
I had to go back to simple hot wire bulbs in my living room because both the CFL and LED bulbs put out so much RF that listening to the radio was impossible. The LEDs were very nice, except for that one fatal problem.
I reached a $10,000 limit in buying through PayPal, and they demanded I link my account to a bank account 'for security'. The argument that "I've spent $10,000 through you over ten years or so without any problem at all, so now it's a security issue?" didn't get around that.
So now they have a link into an account that has $5 (plus some small amount of interest) in it, and I have to change the payment method each time I buy something (which is pretty simple, not "impossible" as another poster claimed).
The upside of the matter was that it alerted me to the fact that the bank account had gone dormant and I needed to do something (like a PayPal withdraw/deposit) to reactivate it.
I wonder exactly what they use for matching. It's not like most pictures of a kid in a swimsuit are CP,
It is probably as simple as an MD5 sum, but could include simple image matching. From TFA:
The project, which a foundation spokeswoman described as a pilot, facilitates removal of all circulating copies of particular abuse images.
In other words, they have an image that is already known to be CP, and they're looking for other places where it is available on the web. It's not a hard problem to do a checksum and then visually examine anything that matches. It won't catch your "picture of your kid in a swimsuit" or "mom in the bathtub with baby Susie" unless you've been distributing it as CP already.
Actually it's a shame they described the book that way,
Actually, it's a shame that when you order from them they demand an email address that they tell you they will use to "Notify me about upcoming promotions", but not that this is the only way they will tell you how to get the books you just bought. It's only after you pay the money that they tell you about some "download link" that you are supposed to get, apparently by email, since there is no download link that appears after purchase.
A nifty way to gather validated email addresses for future marketing, that have had to opt-in in order to take delivery of the product.
Federal law may prevent "exclusive" franchises, but doesn't prevent sole franchises.
Being the only franchisee isn't a "government-granted monopoly". It is a representation of the economic truth of the matter.
The local government is enforcing "sole franchise" status, even if not "exclusive".
There is no "sole franchise status". There is a franchise which, of course, the government would enforce as any other contract. But they cannot enforce "sole franchise", because that would make that franchise exclusive. To be enforcing some "sole franchise status", the government would have to tell any applicants that they cannot have one because Comcast already has the one sole franchise. And federal law, as I've already pointed out, prohibits that. The government is not enforcing a sole-franchisee status.
Non sequitur. Read GP. " Comcast's enforced monopoly " There was no mention that the enforced monopoly was an ISP monopoly.
The context is ISP data caps. Cable television doesn't have a data cap. And the GP did, indeed, refer earlier to a "government-enforced monopoly" in that context. You can switch contexts to try to prove some evil plot on Comcast's part, but that still doesn't change the fact that they do not have a government-enforced monopoly in ANYTHING.
Either they are the sole licensee for the CATV service (making them the "exclusive" one,
They are the sole franchisee only because nobody else has bothered to get one, not because the government is enforcing some special "sole franchisee status". "Exclusive" has a meaning which is not synonymous with "sole", in either simple English or the law.
The fact is that exclusive franchises (government-enforced monopolies) are ILLEGAL for cable television systems, and Comcast does not have exclusive franchises anywhere. Hate on them for real things, not this fictional nonsense. And please stop wasting time complaining about this when even the most cursory review of franchise ordinances show they are non-exclusive -- and specifically so.
There's nothing that says he wasn't a space alien as well.
Nice strawman.
This entire sub-thread is a straw man and irrelevant to start with. Reagan has nothing to do with the iPhone hack or the FBI.
Alzheimer's often goes undiagnosed
And space aliens have yet to be identified despite decades of living amongst us. At least that's what the space aliens would claim. And we have a lot more awareness and technology to help us detect them today, let alone 20+ years ago. So, there's nothing to say he wasn't a space alien, either. It's just mud-slinging to make such accusations so long after the fact and without any medical evidence to back it up.
On one hand, is it forensically legitimate if they can't explain how they got the evidence?
"Your honor, you see, there's these spinning platters covered with magnetic material. Floating about 2 microns above the surface of these platters are some very very tiny magnetic sensors attached to a moving arm. The arm is controlled by a servo... NRZ... bit stuffing... FFT... JPEG... CPU... RAM... USB... PostScript... photosensitive transfer belt... toner... fuser... [three hours later]... and that's how we recovered the digital photo of the defendant holding the severed head of his victim aloft like a trophy."
Defense attorney: "I move the evidence be excluded, it was clearly printed on a printer that uses PCL and not PostScript! The witness's description is technically wrong."
Sure.
I suspect that if this gets to court, everything from the phone that is actually entered as evidence will have corroboration from other sources.
Every enterprise shop run by grownups can handle that by placing those machines in their own OU in AD.
Except not every "enterprise shop" uses AD.
Now that you know what to ask for, do you need suggestions on what to say to get it done?
If "corporate policy" requires users to log out every night, then yes, I would expect I would say "I need to run something for two days straight". At which point, the OP would say "it is corporate policy, you must log out every night". And then a 48 hour model run takes a week because I can only do it 8 hours at a time.
But you're confused a bit. I was pointing out the failure of having such a ridiculous, counter-productive corporate policy, not complaining that I personally have a 48 hour model run that such a stupid corporate policy is getting in the way of. So I guess the answer to "what to say to get it done" is really "nothing", because I don't log out every night. In fact, I haven't logged out of some systems for months at a time.
How much of this is because when someone googles the relevant terms it shows them Sci-Hub results and not their local restricted library? I.e., how may people are deliberately pirating papers versus being counted as pirates because that's where Google took them to?
You know, like how you're required to get multiple otherwise-useless TV set-top boxes now to access basic cable.
Who requires you to get multiple STB just for basic cable access? I can see "one", but not "multiple". And even "one" probably isn't required. Comcast would have been happy to let me turn mine in -- it means one less OnDemand user.
I had to rent a Comcast DVR if I wanted that feature again.
There are other, non-Comcast options. SiliconDust sells them, for one.
Nearly everywhere they operate, they are the government-enforced monopoly CATV/cableTV,
Everywhere they operate they may be the only franchisee for cable TV, but they have non-exclusive franchises. In fact, federal law prohibits exclusive franchises. That makes it NOT a government-enforced monopoly.
As for ISP service, there is no franchise system for that, and thus no government monopoly there, either. So what if they are the only incumbent cable-TV delivered internet service? That doesn't make them a monopoly as an ISP. "ISP" and "cable" are not synonyms.
Hate on Comcast for real wrongs, not this fictional "government-enforced monopoly" stuff.
Unless the user is paying attention it is easy to click the restart and apply updates option.
And if you need to power off the system to install a disk or something else, the system forces the updates. I needed to install a USB3 PCI adapter in a system one afternoon, and it turned into an all-afternoon project because of the updates.
Corporate policy requires users to log out of their computers every night.
I have a model run that takes 48 hours. Instead of being done in two days, it will be a week (6 days, plus a weekend thrown in there somewhere.) Great use of resources. Very efficient.
Sometimes a forced reboot isn't just an inconvenience.
Why should the Taxpayer fund the nomination process for the party in the first place?
Because people who affiliate with a party are taxpayers, and if your favorite party wanted to have a primary, they can. If they choose not to, don't complain.
and let EVERYONE vote on those results in the Primary?
No. If you aren't part of the party then you deserve no say in who they put up for election. Your chance to vote comes at the general election. If your party doesn't put up someone you like, don't complain that nobody else has done so for you.
As I said, there are already too many people who think they deserve the right to "help" the other party pick a losing candidate, effectively getting two votes in favor of their candidate.
and don't always stick to a single party's platform, you're penalized by the system for being independent.
You mean people who belong to a certain party aren't as likely to vote for you if you don't hold to the party's platform? Ummm, d'oh.
At least in my state I can't vote in the primary unless I register with one of the two big parties.
Primaries are intended for the parties to select their candidates. Why do you think you should have a voice in what candidate a party puts forward for election when you aren't a member of that party?
There's too much "helping" going on already. That's where a member of one party registers as the other so they can "help" the other party pick an unelectable candidate. That's dishonest at best.
For a 3rd party to hook up your DSL, their technician had to meet a telco technician; it was your job as the customer to schedule this meeting.
You're saying that none of the third-party DSL vendors was smart enough to take on this job as part of their desire to sell service to people? They really told customers that they had to do this? They didn't want to sell DSL very bad then, did they?
I know a third party DSL vendor in town, and I've never heard them say that I'd have to call the telco to try to schedule someone to meet them at the CO to install DSL, but then, I've only tried to get DSL once. CenturyLink botched the job so bad I just dropped it before it was ever completed.
For the morbidly curious: I ordered the service on my second phone line after the tech I talked to for a long time told me I would be getting three (I think it was) static IP addresses. They installed it on the main line, and then told me that static IP would cost me $15/month extra.
(running two cables to your home is just a dumb and wasteful idea).
I have two cables running to my home, and if you count electricity it's three. While it may seem "dumb", it's called "redundancy". You see, when my cable goes out I can still call the cable company to report the problem, and when my landline phone goes out I can still call the phone company to report it.
The funniest/saddest conversation I've had with Comcast is when the "customer service" person tried upselling me to Xfinity Voice while I was calling to report a complete cable outage. (I've had many stupid/angry/wasted conversations with Comcast, but this one was actually funny in a sad way.)
you cant argue that its unfair for taxpayers to spend money on infrastructure like this
I certainly can argue that it is unfair competition for municipalities, since they can charge less for the service (because they first don't have to make a profit and second can cover any losses by dipping into the general fund), and don't have to play by the same rules that they made the incumbent play by. It's not just an issue of taxpayers having to foot the bill for other people's conveniences.
Just look at the billions of dollars that have been paid by state and local government to fund sports arenas of all sorts as one example.
You mean the loans that add a considerable amount to the ticket prices, so eventually it is the ticket buyer who has spent the money and the public gets the benefit of the commercial traffic the venue generates?
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It's a national problem
It is inherently a local problem. Homeless people do not live "in the USA", they live "under the bridge at Third and Madison in Sometown". The money to pay for their help is distributed by local agencies. The money is spent for local solutions. There is no "top down solution" because there simply is no way to deal with a local issue like this from the top.
Oh and by the way who is going to pay for it?
Well, in a good world, it would be paid for by charity. In the modern world where "the government" has usurped the role of charity, it has to be "the government". But not the federal government, because it is not a top-down problem. It is a local problem.
Had the government not started to be "charity", then taxpayers wouldn't be paying as much in taxes, and they wouldn't have the attitude that "I'm paying taxes to fix this". We're all being trained that the right way to solve any problem is to hold out our hand and expect someone else to be taxed to pay for the solutions.
That's debatable.
No, that's simple fact. From here, for 2011:
The Top 50 Percent of All Taxpayers Paid 97 Percent of All Income Taxes; the Top 5 Percent Paid 57 Percent of All Income Taxes; and the Top 1 Percent Paid 35 Percent of All Income Taxes in 2011
The top 5% paid 57% of all income taxes. That's a majority.
Now, you can argue that "income tax isn't everything", but your "top-down" solution is going to be paid out of income taxes, so yes, it's everything in this context.
Most taxes are not levied on people who do not have wealth.
Again, that's debatable.
No, again, that's a fact. From the same source, already quoted. If the top 50% are paying 97% of the income taxes, then that means that the other 50% are paying only 3% of the tax. Most of the taxes (97%) are not levied on people who don't have wealth (the bottom 50%).
Rich people have ways of avoiding paying taxes. Or weren't you aware of that?
Apparently you weren't aware that 5% of the people ("the rich") are paying 57% of the income taxes. Yes, there are tax laws that reduce the amount of taxes someone pays, and some of those reductions require someone to actually have money that would have been taxed. That's obvious. You can't get a deduction for a charitable contribution of money unless you had the money, and poor people aren't likely to be able to take advantage of that law. But then, the poor people didn't have the money and weren't being taxed on it in the first place, so they really haven't lost anything by not being able to deduct what they didn't have in income anyway.
Who is a scofflaw? The street vendor? They have done nothing wrong but trying to EARN a living. I am a Libertarian,
So, in libertarian thought, how many laws can one ignore when one is just "trying to EARN a living"?
I'm trying to earn a living by transporting people around the city. I don't have a driver's license, and my car has no registration, but I am just "trying to EARN a living". Am I ok?
I'm helping people by providing a gasoline delivery service. The laws prohibit such action, but I am trying to earn a living. Does the law not apply to me?
"Trying to EARN a living" does not supersede existing laws. I'm trying to earn a living as an assassin... I'm not a scofflaw!
The real villains in this are all the people who think people earning a living is somehow evil.
You're making an assumption of motive that is invalid. Objecting to people who break the law in the course of trying to make a living is not objecting to them making a living, it's objecting to the violation of law.
Now, then.. why wouldn't it work?
Because homelessness is a local problem that needs to be solved at the local level. "Top-down" solutions don't adapt to the needs locally. And "top-down" solutions don't mean taking all the money from the 1%ers, who don't have enough money to solve the problem your way anyway.
why shouldn't they be the ones who are paying to solve problems like homelessness, either directly, or through taxation?
They already pay the majority of the taxes.
Why should the burden be put on people who don't have wealth?
Most taxes are not levied on people who do not have wealth. Saying the solution is not top-down says nothing about who is paying for it, only who is prescribing it.
I'd imagine that it has to be a bit more complicated than that though, otherwise a single pixel of difference is all that breaks the checksum.
A single pixel change is unlikely, but that's why I also said it probably included some image matching. There are simple ways of comparing images that would give good results.
I suppose it might be "reduce the image to a simple form" (reduced color depth, size, etc) and then checksum, but that would consume an awful lot of computing resources.
That would be a waste.
Any software that needs to piggyback itself on other packages like that is really great software, yes I do say. That earned itself a place on my list of "uninstall immediately" packages whenever I see it installed on something I manage.
Maybe instead of building this new power plant, they should just convince more people to switch to LED light bulbs.
Yes, this would save energy, but you should add in the savings when people turn off radios because all they hear is the static from the LED electronics.
I had to go back to simple hot wire bulbs in my living room because both the CFL and LED bulbs put out so much RF that listening to the radio was impossible. The LEDs were very nice, except for that one fatal problem.
So now they have a link into an account that has $5 (plus some small amount of interest) in it, and I have to change the payment method each time I buy something (which is pretty simple, not "impossible" as another poster claimed).
The upside of the matter was that it alerted me to the fact that the bank account had gone dormant and I needed to do something (like a PayPal withdraw/deposit) to reactivate it.
I wonder exactly what they use for matching. It's not like most pictures of a kid in a swimsuit are CP,
It is probably as simple as an MD5 sum, but could include simple image matching. From TFA:
The project, which a foundation spokeswoman described as a pilot, facilitates removal of all circulating copies of particular abuse images.
In other words, they have an image that is already known to be CP, and they're looking for other places where it is available on the web. It's not a hard problem to do a checksum and then visually examine anything that matches. It won't catch your "picture of your kid in a swimsuit" or "mom in the bathtub with baby Susie" unless you've been distributing it as CP already.
Actually it's a shame they described the book that way,
Actually, it's a shame that when you order from them they demand an email address that they tell you they will use to "Notify me about upcoming promotions", but not that this is the only way they will tell you how to get the books you just bought. It's only after you pay the money that they tell you about some "download link" that you are supposed to get, apparently by email, since there is no download link that appears after purchase.
A nifty way to gather validated email addresses for future marketing, that have had to opt-in in order to take delivery of the product.
Federal law may prevent "exclusive" franchises, but doesn't prevent sole franchises.
Being the only franchisee isn't a "government-granted monopoly". It is a representation of the economic truth of the matter.
The local government is enforcing "sole franchise" status, even if not "exclusive".
There is no "sole franchise status". There is a franchise which, of course, the government would enforce as any other contract. But they cannot enforce "sole franchise", because that would make that franchise exclusive. To be enforcing some "sole franchise status", the government would have to tell any applicants that they cannot have one because Comcast already has the one sole franchise. And federal law, as I've already pointed out, prohibits that. The government is not enforcing a sole-franchisee status.
Non sequitur. Read GP. " Comcast's enforced monopoly " There was no mention that the enforced monopoly was an ISP monopoly.
The context is ISP data caps. Cable television doesn't have a data cap. And the GP did, indeed, refer earlier to a "government-enforced monopoly" in that context. You can switch contexts to try to prove some evil plot on Comcast's part, but that still doesn't change the fact that they do not have a government-enforced monopoly in ANYTHING.
Either they are the sole licensee for the CATV service (making them the "exclusive" one,
They are the sole franchisee only because nobody else has bothered to get one, not because the government is enforcing some special "sole franchisee status". "Exclusive" has a meaning which is not synonymous with "sole", in either simple English or the law.
The fact is that exclusive franchises (government-enforced monopolies) are ILLEGAL for cable television systems, and Comcast does not have exclusive franchises anywhere. Hate on them for real things, not this fictional nonsense. And please stop wasting time complaining about this when even the most cursory review of franchise ordinances show they are non-exclusive -- and specifically so.
There's nothing that says he wasn't a space alien as well.
Nice strawman.
This entire sub-thread is a straw man and irrelevant to start with. Reagan has nothing to do with the iPhone hack or the FBI.
Alzheimer's often goes undiagnosed
And space aliens have yet to be identified despite decades of living amongst us. At least that's what the space aliens would claim. And we have a lot more awareness and technology to help us detect them today, let alone 20+ years ago. So, there's nothing to say he wasn't a space alien, either. It's just mud-slinging to make such accusations so long after the fact and without any medical evidence to back it up.
On one hand, is it forensically legitimate if they can't explain how they got the evidence?
"Your honor, you see, there's these spinning platters covered with magnetic material. Floating about 2 microns above the surface of these platters are some very very tiny magnetic sensors attached to a moving arm. The arm is controlled by a servo ... NRZ ... bit stuffing ... FFT ... JPEG ... CPU ... RAM ... USB ... PostScript ... photosensitive transfer belt ... toner ... fuser ... [three hours later] ... and that's how we recovered the digital photo of the defendant holding the severed head of his victim aloft like a trophy."
Defense attorney: "I move the evidence be excluded, it was clearly printed on a printer that uses PCL and not PostScript! The witness's description is technically wrong."
Sure.
I suspect that if this gets to court, everything from the phone that is actually entered as evidence will have corroboration from other sources.
Every enterprise shop run by grownups can handle that by placing those machines in their own OU in AD.
Except not every "enterprise shop" uses AD.
Now that you know what to ask for, do you need suggestions on what to say to get it done?
If "corporate policy" requires users to log out every night, then yes, I would expect I would say "I need to run something for two days straight". At which point, the OP would say "it is corporate policy, you must log out every night". And then a 48 hour model run takes a week because I can only do it 8 hours at a time.
But you're confused a bit. I was pointing out the failure of having such a ridiculous, counter-productive corporate policy, not complaining that I personally have a 48 hour model run that such a stupid corporate policy is getting in the way of. So I guess the answer to "what to say to get it done" is really "nothing", because I don't log out every night. In fact, I haven't logged out of some systems for months at a time.
How much of this is because when someone googles the relevant terms it shows them Sci-Hub results and not their local restricted library? I.e., how may people are deliberately pirating papers versus being counted as pirates because that's where Google took them to?
You know, like how you're required to get multiple otherwise-useless TV set-top boxes now to access basic cable.
Who requires you to get multiple STB just for basic cable access? I can see "one", but not "multiple". And even "one" probably isn't required. Comcast would have been happy to let me turn mine in -- it means one less OnDemand user.
I had to rent a Comcast DVR if I wanted that feature again.
There are other, non-Comcast options. SiliconDust sells them, for one.
Nearly everywhere they operate, they are the government-enforced monopoly CATV/cableTV,
Everywhere they operate they may be the only franchisee for cable TV, but they have non-exclusive franchises. In fact, federal law prohibits exclusive franchises. That makes it NOT a government-enforced monopoly.
As for ISP service, there is no franchise system for that, and thus no government monopoly there, either. So what if they are the only incumbent cable-TV delivered internet service? That doesn't make them a monopoly as an ISP. "ISP" and "cable" are not synonyms.
Hate on Comcast for real wrongs, not this fictional "government-enforced monopoly" stuff.
What a pity that Comcast's enforced monopoly results in usage of their network.
Where is Comcast a government-enforced monopoly ISP?
Unless the user is paying attention it is easy to click the restart and apply updates option.
And if you need to power off the system to install a disk or something else, the system forces the updates. I needed to install a USB3 PCI adapter in a system one afternoon, and it turned into an all-afternoon project because of the updates.
Corporate policy requires users to log out of their computers every night.
I have a model run that takes 48 hours. Instead of being done in two days, it will be a week (6 days, plus a weekend thrown in there somewhere.) Great use of resources. Very efficient.
Sometimes a forced reboot isn't just an inconvenience.
Because my tax dollars are paying for that primary.
So are theirs. There are lots of things my tax dollars pay for that I don't care about but benefit you.
If you want to vote, get your party to have a primary. If they don't, it's not anyone else's fault.
Why should the Taxpayer fund the nomination process for the party in the first place?
Because people who affiliate with a party are taxpayers, and if your favorite party wanted to have a primary, they can. If they choose not to, don't complain.
and let EVERYONE vote on those results in the Primary?
No. If you aren't part of the party then you deserve no say in who they put up for election. Your chance to vote comes at the general election. If your party doesn't put up someone you like, don't complain that nobody else has done so for you.
As I said, there are already too many people who think they deserve the right to "help" the other party pick a losing candidate, effectively getting two votes in favor of their candidate.
and don't always stick to a single party's platform, you're penalized by the system for being independent.
You mean people who belong to a certain party aren't as likely to vote for you if you don't hold to the party's platform? Ummm, d'oh.
At least in my state I can't vote in the primary unless I register with one of the two big parties.
Primaries are intended for the parties to select their candidates. Why do you think you should have a voice in what candidate a party puts forward for election when you aren't a member of that party?
There's too much "helping" going on already. That's where a member of one party registers as the other so they can "help" the other party pick an unelectable candidate. That's dishonest at best.
For a 3rd party to hook up your DSL, their technician had to meet a telco technician; it was your job as the customer to schedule this meeting.
You're saying that none of the third-party DSL vendors was smart enough to take on this job as part of their desire to sell service to people? They really told customers that they had to do this? They didn't want to sell DSL very bad then, did they?
I know a third party DSL vendor in town, and I've never heard them say that I'd have to call the telco to try to schedule someone to meet them at the CO to install DSL, but then, I've only tried to get DSL once. CenturyLink botched the job so bad I just dropped it before it was ever completed.
For the morbidly curious: I ordered the service on my second phone line after the tech I talked to for a long time told me I would be getting three (I think it was) static IP addresses. They installed it on the main line, and then told me that static IP would cost me $15/month extra.
(running two cables to your home is just a dumb and wasteful idea).
I have two cables running to my home, and if you count electricity it's three. While it may seem "dumb", it's called "redundancy". You see, when my cable goes out I can still call the cable company to report the problem, and when my landline phone goes out I can still call the phone company to report it.
The funniest/saddest conversation I've had with Comcast is when the "customer service" person tried upselling me to Xfinity Voice while I was calling to report a complete cable outage. (I've had many stupid/angry/wasted conversations with Comcast, but this one was actually funny in a sad way.)
you cant argue that its unfair for taxpayers to spend money on infrastructure like this
I certainly can argue that it is unfair competition for municipalities, since they can charge less for the service (because they first don't have to make a profit and second can cover any losses by dipping into the general fund), and don't have to play by the same rules that they made the incumbent play by. It's not just an issue of taxpayers having to foot the bill for other people's conveniences.
Just look at the billions of dollars that have been paid by state and local government to fund sports arenas of all sorts as one example.
You mean the loans that add a considerable amount to the ticket prices, so eventually it is the ticket buyer who has spent the money and the public gets the benefit of the commercial traffic the venue generates?