What wires does Verizon provide to the customer for a fixed wireless broadband provider? I don't know who Alamo buys its upstream connection from, I don't see it listed on their website. I expect, however, that if it is Verizon and Verizon doesn't provide the service their contract calls for, Alamo will point their lawyers at the problem and a breach of contract lawsuit will be filed pdq.
True. The monopoly power comes from being a telco.
The franchise that creates the telco monopoly has nothing to do with the ISP service that telco provides. It doesn't have a monopoly as an ISP to start with. No such franchise exists anywhere in the US. If you know of a place, provide a citation.
The only reason they allow Alamo to exist is because the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (I think that is the one) requires them to lease them the lines.
And you think Alamo has no recourse if the lines they lease to reach their internet source don't work?
Take a meander through history with me:
First the telcos were not ISPs and everyone used dial-up. The telcos are "neutral" to the ISPs at this point.
Au contraire. The telcos were very unhappy with ISPs because they were distorting the statistics for line usage. Instead of the previous voice call statistics, now you had people using a voice grade line for hours at a time. That tied up switching equipment and reduced quality of service to everyone else. So, they tried creating a special class of phone service called a "data line". That was the same copper pair but with a higher price tag. So no, claiming that telcos were neutral wrt ISPs is just silly.
Then the telcos start becoming ISPs directly, which presents a conflict of interest between them and the ISP. Why should they allow an ISP to use their lines?
Because the law said they should.
So they simply refused to allow the ISPs access to the lines at all.
The telcos were quite happy selling phone lines to ISPs. I know, because I was involved with the local ISP and they had a couple hundred incoming lines. Every one of those was punched down from the demarc to the modems by yours truly.
That takes us to today, where almost everyone uses the telco or cable provider as their ISP.
Not because the telco has a monopoly, but because it is simply more convenient to do it that way. It's more difficult to get a DSL line from the telco and then ISP service from someone else. The fact that ISPs still exist outside the alleged telco monopoly is pretty good proof that there is no monopoly.
Alamo is one of a few who are left. It might be that Alamo exists only exist because the telco doesn't want to provide ISP service in rural areas, and Alamo does that for them.
Alamo doesn't work for the telco. They are an independent ISP. If they need to lease lines from someone else than the telco, they can. Fiber can be run that isn't telco-owned.
And it is likely that such a sign is on a highway where the speed was 55 but drops for a mile or less for a speed trap. What good is making sure that the car doesn't go faster than 85 when it is already 20 over the real speed limit?
In addition, our Constitution lets the author make that decision, not the government.
Ummm, no. The Constitution does not let the author of a book determine what is classified material and what is not.
You only get to challenge the author for allegedly disclosing critical secrets after they're published.
He submitted the book voluntarily for review. What did you expect the people who reviewed it to do? Declassify stuff just because he had it in his book? Why did he do that? I'm guessing Streisand Effect.
... but if this person got the information without looking at classified materials, who do they think they are to tell him to not publish?
Without knowing the pedigree of the material he looked at, it is impossible to know whether it was classified or not. Simply releasing classified material to the public does not declassify it, especially if the release was unauthorized.
Who do they think they are? They are the people who are paid to protect classified information doing the job they are paid to do, when asked to do that job by the author of the book. He asked, they had to tell him to cut things. They don't get the right to change the classification on material, that has to go through the classifying authority.
Verizon, the ISP, does not pay Verizon, the telephone company, for leased access to the lines. It gets them for free.
Except Verizon the ISP is not a monopoly just because Verizon the telephone company is. The franchise that Verizon the telephone company operates under to run cables using the public rights of way does not in any way grant them a monopoly status as an ISP.
Alamo, the ISP, will get stonewalled by Verizon, the telephone company, when a customer cannot get a good signal.
The customer signal has nothing to do with Verizon, so I don't see how Verizon can stonewall anything in that instance.
This happens because Alamo, the ISP, is not legally permitted to install wires in the ground or on the telephone poles.
Alamo the ISP has no need to install wires in the ground, so the fact that it cannot do so is irrelevant. Nor does "Joe's ISP" that sells DSL service -- they use the existing lines that are already installed.
Alamo cannot fairly compete with a company that has been granted that monopoly power.
There is no monopoly power with respect to being an ISP. Nobody has been granted such a monopoly. They have a hard time competing with a LARGER company, but that larger company has no special legal status when it comes to being an ISP.
Maybe a good summary would be that it's inefficient and freedom-reducing when a minority of actors has undue control of a market.
We'll leave the "freedom-reducing" for later, but it certainly can be very much more efficient when a large company provides services compared to a multitude of small ones. Economy of scale is a significant cost reduction and is why Mom and Pop stores never (as far as I've seen) have lower prices than the big box chains. It simply costs less for one store to make a massive order of 10,000 widgets than for a plethora of small stores to make 100 orders of 100 each.
This is why growing companies strive for both horizontal and vertical integration in their supply systems. This is why Mom and Pop stores may hire out various functions to a company that specializes in doing the same thing for a lot of other companies, like payroll or insurance management. It's simply more efficient for them. Not for everyone, but for them.
...without an understanding of either the purpose of taxation or how it affects socioeconomic status/societal structure.
Some people believe that the purpose of taxation should be to fund essential government services, period. The "affect socioeconomic status/social structure" part is extraneous and is social engineering that should be left out of the process. Increasing taxes not because you need the extra money (and especially when you admit that the tax increase will actually decrease revenue) but to make things "fair" is social engineering writ large.
I'm not mixing them together. The local government and PSC is mixing them together.
No. The cable television part of Comcast is regulated by the FCC and in very limited amount by the local government through franchise. The ISP part of Comcast is FCC alone. The ISP is not granted a monopoly of any kind, and no such monopoly exists in practice.
If they do that, they are at the mercy of the telephone company who will try to find ways to push them out of business.
Just as any larger company tries to push others out of business. This is not because the telco is a monopoly as an ISP, because it clearly isn't.
Exactly, Alamo is no different. That's what I was trying to say. Sorry for being unclear. They are the same as CavTel was. They must be licensing lines from a local telecom.
No, they are different because they are neither a cable nor a telco dejure or defacto monopoly player. The net neutrality laws that now apply to them have nothing to do with them being a monopoly because they simply are not. I have no idea who they buy their upstream connections from, but if it is the telco they are certainly not being put out of business by the telco -- the telco is making money from selling the service.
Ultimately, the story of the late 90s and early 2000s is that almost every "ISP" who was not a telephone company or a cable company died.
Just as many of the brick and mortar bookstores are dying. As are many things based on economies of scale and not monopolies.
But for those ISPs to succeed, we must also bar the franchise monopolies from being ISPs.
There are many things we could do to distort the marketplace to protect every small player from larger competitors. That does not mean we should do so. Would you favor laws that protect Mom and Pop grocery stores against chains? What happens when Mom and Pop decide to become their own chain?
Go ahead and support Alamo the same way I supported Cavtel. I hope they survive.
This discussion was not about Alamo etc. surviving. It was a response to someone who claimed that the FCC net neutrality laws were trying to regulate how monopolies behaved. I pointed out that the ISPs are not monopolies even if the underlying hardware delivery systems can be. Thus the net neutrality laws cannot be about managing monopolies, they manage everyone who plays. And a prime example of this is found in the fine summary.
Doesn't a diet like that eventually cause heart and circulatory system problems?
I have yet to have any doctor tell me that.
The fact that Dr. Atkins died from something related to a heart issue is a wonderful correlation but not scientific evidence. He could have died from being run over by a bus and it wouldn't mean that people using the Atkins diet are more likely to be run over by a bus.
Any industry which does not appeal to ~half of its prospective workers might want to spend a bit of time trying to figure out why, instead of getting all defensive and blaming everyone and everything else for the issue.
I would bet that the waste management industry does not appeal to a much larger fraction than half of the potential workers. Should they try to figure out why?
Personally, I would get very tired of my local garbage company trying to entice me into becoming one of the few, the proud, the Garbagemen.
The bechdel "test" is meant to illustrate how low the bar is, and how many movies/projects still fail it.
I think the point isn't whether some movie or coding project passes or fails this test, but that the test is truly meaningless.
If movie producers want to make movies with two women who talk to each other about something other than men, they are free to do so. Whether it will be a success depends on what they talk about. I think any movie that focuses on two people talking is going to be boring so I wouldn't choose to watch it, no matter whether it was two women or two men. Or one of each. I mean, I found the older Dr. Who talk-talk-talk parts of the series boring, too, and that was a bona fide time lord talking to someone. I admit, talking to Leila was always interesting... "should I kill him now, Doctor?" And Nyssa. And now Clara. Yes, Clara.
And to assign functions in a programming project to "woman author" and "man author" is just silly. I have no idea how many projects pass or fail this test simply because I have no interest in (and in most cases no way of identifying) which wrote what.
Carbs aren't crap. In fact, they're essential to having a well run body.
No, they aren't. Your body will get along quite well on zero carbohydrate. The metabolic pathways that process protein and fat into energy will kick in and you'll feel less hunger during the day. You may have to urinate more often as you start to produce ketones (byproduct of using protein for energy), but that's a minor annoyance.
What you WON'T get are massive blood sugar spikes as you ingest and digest carbs directly into glucose (or overload your system with HFCS), and then your insulin kicks in and your levels plummet.
I've been doing it for years. I've watched the spikes when I eat carbs, and I've watched the "not spikes" when I don't.
Most ISPs are either cable companies or telephone companies,
If you brand Comcast as an ISP at the national level, and treat the other cable and telco operations the same way, then no, most ISPs are not. But that is irrelevant. You're mixing the different parts of the business together. Comcast is not a defacto monopoly because it is an ISP, it is because it started that way as a cable television provider, and the ISP service is carried on the same hardware. Ditto for the telco ISPs.
who are granted their monopoly status by the local public service commission (PSC).
A franchise is not a monopoly unless it is explicitly made that way. Someone else just made the claim that Comcast of Seattle was a government granted monopoly but the franchise is quite clear in saying otherwise. It's also not a public service commission that does this, it is usually a city or county government. Local government have very little regulatory power over cable nowadays, which means they aren't PSC equivalents.
Technically, anyone can be an ISP, but that is really tough to compete when the local monopoly is providing ISP service as well.
It is tough to compete with any larger provider. That's life. Mom and Pop grocery stores have a problem competing with the large chains, even if the chain is only a dozen stores.
Your only options are to use VPN, or lease lines from the local telephone monopoly.
Whose only option? The ISP? Yes, the ISP has to pay for it's connection to the Internet. The customer? No, there are other options. In fact, Alamo Broadband is a perfect example of one.
Do you know of any place in the US where that situation exists?
You mean where the FCC net neutrality rules apply to ISPs and not just cable TV or telco operations? Yes, all over the US. The new rules apply to "broadband internet access", wired or wireless. That means anyone who is an ISP with speeds that meet the arbitrary definition of "broadband". That includes wireless services like T-Mobile and AT&T and Verizon and Sprint and... none of which are monopolies in that service.
Is Alamo somehow different?
Let me Google that for you. Alamo is neither a cable television nor telephone provider. It is a broadband internet service.
When deciding whether to break up a monopoly, does it really matter how it formed?
Yes. If it was created through legal means (dejure) then removing those legal means should be sufficient and the proper course of action. If it is a monopoly based on economics or on superior service and consumer desire, then first you need to determine if it truly is a problem before using different means of solving the problem.
But since the correct answer is that "Alamo Broadband is not a monopoly of any kind", then net neutrality that applies to Alamo is not a law that is dealing with monopolies. That was the specific claim I replied to. And net neutrality has nothing at all to do with breaking monopolies up.
Looks like you're moving the goal posts. He didn't say granted monopoly, he just said monopoly.
And I asked in which market was Alamo Broadband a monopoly. I didn't ask if it were a government-granted monopoly. The answer is: it isn't a monopoly anywhere.
But given how many places have THE cable company and THE phone company, one must conclude that there is some structural element that causes monopolies.
Yes, monopolies in cables companies and telephone companies, based on infrastructure costs for the former and both infrastructure costs and legal reasons for the latter. But the cable company and the telephone company are not the only ISPs. Alamo Broadband, for example, is neither.
Comcast is in Seattle. In most of the city, it is illegal for other cable companies to compete.
It is illegal insofar as no other company has obtained the necessary franchise to do so.
Comcast most certainly has a government-granted monopoly here.
No. They have a franchise to operate, which is not really much different than being required to have a business license to conduct business in a city. You would not claim that Joe's Plumbing Shop has been granted a government monopoly just because they got a city-issued business license, so why does a franchise mean a government-granted monopoly? Yes, it is a bit harder to get a franchise, but it can be done. Comcast did it.
You might want to read the franchise agreement. It's online for all to see. Page 1, section 1.4(A): "This franchise is not exclusive." It is not a dejure monopoly. The only thing keeping any competitors out is economic, not legal.
The thief wants the hardware (which is valuable) not your personal information (which, lets face it, is completely worthless).
Uhhh, what? People bank using their phones. They have online accounts for all kinds of things. Personal data is used to commit identity theft. They SHOULDN'T let the phone browser remember passwords for places like Amazon, but they DO.
The data may be worthless to the street kid snatching the phone, but to others it can have a lot of value.
For my latest phone, I'd say the equation you propose is exactly backwards. The phone cost $40. Were I to have actually put personal account data on it, I could be out more than $40 very quickly if the phone is stolen. I'm not treating this phone as my phone, I'm using it as a media device and practice in dealing with a rooted device. I went as far as to create a new Google Play account with no tied credit card data, but a regular user would have all that kind of data on it.
If they're going to sell the phone for parts, why wait for the battery to die? Beyond this, why not simply just remove the SIM card instead.
If the phone has a battery you can remove it. No need to wait. But some phones don't have removable batteries. And many phones don't have SIM cards. If you just put the phone in your pocket and take it home to dismantle it, PING, you're it. Go to Jail. If you put it in a bag before you get home, you know it can't ping no matter what it is.
You're assuming the criminals are smart enough to know what a SIM is or know which phones have and have not removable batteries, or they will know for sure that the phone is off and not just put to sleep. Much safer to bag it and wait.
Democratic governments represent the will of the people so, if the people are greedy, their governments will be greedy.
There is a quote from DeToqueville (sp?) that goes something like "democracies exist only until the majority realizes they can tax the minority to pay for things they want." When the majority doesn't pay a tax but they can vote to enact it, you've arrived. And when the majority is defined by "people who don't pay that tax" and nothing else, we've kicked our shoes off and are sittin' a spell, long past just "arrived".
2. Regulate the behavior of monopolies.
Net Neutrality attempts to do #2.
In which market is Alamo Broadband a monopoly?
I know of no government granted monopoly status to ISPs. Comcast/TW/etc are defacto (not dejure) monopolies in cable television delivered internet service. Verizon/whatever are dejure monopolies on telephone-company provided ISPs. There exist many ISPs in the same markets as all of the previously mentioned companies. There are even ISPs that can provide ISP service via DSL over those dejure telco monopoly systems.
Do the FCC net neutrality rules actually limit themselves to places where there are actually defacto or dejure monopolies, or do they apply to every ISP? If they apply to every ISP, then they are not regulating the actions of monopolies, they are regulating many non-monopolies as well.
I'm fascinated by the FCC response to a filing that had to take place within ten days of their action and only happened close to the end of those ten days: "premature". Sorry FCC, you don't get to tell people they filed too early just because they filed within the very short deadline.
and thieves know that they can just grab the phone, stuff it in a tinfoil envelope, let it sit for a week or two until the battery dies, disassemble it, then sell the screen, case, and other parts for a good amount of cash. Same thing happens with bicycles.
I've heard that the batteries in a bike take much longer to run down, and it's hard to find a tinfoil bag big enough. But done right, yes, it's very effective.
And they don't get that from the fingerprint scanner. They get it from your much more invasive and privacy wrecking customs declaration form. What do advertisers get from the fingerprint that they don't already have? NOTHING.
That wooshing sound was the point zinging past your head. (In which case it should be a "zing" sound, but historical precedent rules.)
What do advertisers learn from anyone using a fingerprint scanner at customs? "They were at the airport, going through customs..." In fact, since you've already got to fill out customs forms that contain a LOT more information than your fingerprint gives them (what you bought, what countries you were in, are you carrying...), the addition of a fingerprint scanner gives them nothing that wasn't already available.
I have never been under any illusion that I am a Google customer. In Google's eyes, I am cattle.
So we're left with the unacceptable situation of Google "coercing" customers to stay with them by doing what the customers want them to do. How awful. Laws must be passed. Every company that provides the service that the customer pays for must be hobbled so that customers are not unfairly influenced in their selection of vendors.
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Verizon is providing the wires that it runs over.
What wires does Verizon provide to the customer for a fixed wireless broadband provider? I don't know who Alamo buys its upstream connection from, I don't see it listed on their website. I expect, however, that if it is Verizon and Verizon doesn't provide the service their contract calls for, Alamo will point their lawyers at the problem and a breach of contract lawsuit will be filed pdq.
True. The monopoly power comes from being a telco.
The franchise that creates the telco monopoly has nothing to do with the ISP service that telco provides. It doesn't have a monopoly as an ISP to start with. No such franchise exists anywhere in the US. If you know of a place, provide a citation.
The only reason they allow Alamo to exist is because the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (I think that is the one) requires them to lease them the lines.
And you think Alamo has no recourse if the lines they lease to reach their internet source don't work?
Take a meander through history with me: First the telcos were not ISPs and everyone used dial-up. The telcos are "neutral" to the ISPs at this point.
Au contraire. The telcos were very unhappy with ISPs because they were distorting the statistics for line usage. Instead of the previous voice call statistics, now you had people using a voice grade line for hours at a time. That tied up switching equipment and reduced quality of service to everyone else. So, they tried creating a special class of phone service called a "data line". That was the same copper pair but with a higher price tag. So no, claiming that telcos were neutral wrt ISPs is just silly.
Then the telcos start becoming ISPs directly, which presents a conflict of interest between them and the ISP. Why should they allow an ISP to use their lines?
Because the law said they should.
So they simply refused to allow the ISPs access to the lines at all.
The telcos were quite happy selling phone lines to ISPs. I know, because I was involved with the local ISP and they had a couple hundred incoming lines. Every one of those was punched down from the demarc to the modems by yours truly.
That takes us to today, where almost everyone uses the telco or cable provider as their ISP.
Not because the telco has a monopoly, but because it is simply more convenient to do it that way. It's more difficult to get a DSL line from the telco and then ISP service from someone else. The fact that ISPs still exist outside the alleged telco monopoly is pretty good proof that there is no monopoly.
Alamo is one of a few who are left. It might be that Alamo exists only exist because the telco doesn't want to provide ISP service in rural areas, and Alamo does that for them.
Alamo doesn't work for the telco. They are an independent ISP. If they need to lease lines from someone else than the telco, they can. Fiber can be run that isn't telco-owned.
And it is likely that such a sign is on a highway where the speed was 55 but drops for a mile or less for a speed trap. What good is making sure that the car doesn't go faster than 85 when it is already 20 over the real speed limit?
In addition, our Constitution lets the author make that decision, not the government.
Ummm, no. The Constitution does not let the author of a book determine what is classified material and what is not.
You only get to challenge the author for allegedly disclosing critical secrets after they're published.
He submitted the book voluntarily for review. What did you expect the people who reviewed it to do? Declassify stuff just because he had it in his book? Why did he do that? I'm guessing Streisand Effect.
Without knowing the pedigree of the material he looked at, it is impossible to know whether it was classified or not. Simply releasing classified material to the public does not declassify it, especially if the release was unauthorized.
Who do they think they are? They are the people who are paid to protect classified information doing the job they are paid to do, when asked to do that job by the author of the book. He asked, they had to tell him to cut things. They don't get the right to change the classification on material, that has to go through the classifying authority.
Verizon, the ISP, does not pay Verizon, the telephone company, for leased access to the lines. It gets them for free.
Except Verizon the ISP is not a monopoly just because Verizon the telephone company is. The franchise that Verizon the telephone company operates under to run cables using the public rights of way does not in any way grant them a monopoly status as an ISP.
Alamo, the ISP, will get stonewalled by Verizon, the telephone company, when a customer cannot get a good signal.
The customer signal has nothing to do with Verizon, so I don't see how Verizon can stonewall anything in that instance.
This happens because Alamo, the ISP, is not legally permitted to install wires in the ground or on the telephone poles.
Alamo the ISP has no need to install wires in the ground, so the fact that it cannot do so is irrelevant. Nor does "Joe's ISP" that sells DSL service -- they use the existing lines that are already installed.
Alamo cannot fairly compete with a company that has been granted that monopoly power.
There is no monopoly power with respect to being an ISP. Nobody has been granted such a monopoly. They have a hard time competing with a LARGER company, but that larger company has no special legal status when it comes to being an ISP.
Insects understanding language? I doubt it. I tell them to get the f**k away from me all the time and do they listen............no they do NOT!
Oh, they listen. They listen and understand. And they remember. For a very very long time ...
They just ignore you because they know you are inferior.
Maybe a good summary would be that it's inefficient and freedom-reducing when a minority of actors has undue control of a market.
We'll leave the "freedom-reducing" for later, but it certainly can be very much more efficient when a large company provides services compared to a multitude of small ones. Economy of scale is a significant cost reduction and is why Mom and Pop stores never (as far as I've seen) have lower prices than the big box chains. It simply costs less for one store to make a massive order of 10,000 widgets than for a plethora of small stores to make 100 orders of 100 each.
This is why growing companies strive for both horizontal and vertical integration in their supply systems. This is why Mom and Pop stores may hire out various functions to a company that specializes in doing the same thing for a lot of other companies, like payroll or insurance management. It's simply more efficient for them. Not for everyone, but for them.
...without an understanding of either the purpose of taxation or how it affects socioeconomic status/societal structure.
Some people believe that the purpose of taxation should be to fund essential government services, period. The "affect socioeconomic status/social structure" part is extraneous and is social engineering that should be left out of the process. Increasing taxes not because you need the extra money (and especially when you admit that the tax increase will actually decrease revenue) but to make things "fair" is social engineering writ large.
I'm not mixing them together. The local government and PSC is mixing them together.
No. The cable television part of Comcast is regulated by the FCC and in very limited amount by the local government through franchise. The ISP part of Comcast is FCC alone. The ISP is not granted a monopoly of any kind, and no such monopoly exists in practice.
If they do that, they are at the mercy of the telephone company who will try to find ways to push them out of business.
Just as any larger company tries to push others out of business. This is not because the telco is a monopoly as an ISP, because it clearly isn't.
Exactly, Alamo is no different. That's what I was trying to say. Sorry for being unclear. They are the same as CavTel was. They must be licensing lines from a local telecom.
No, they are different because they are neither a cable nor a telco dejure or defacto monopoly player. The net neutrality laws that now apply to them have nothing to do with them being a monopoly because they simply are not. I have no idea who they buy their upstream connections from, but if it is the telco they are certainly not being put out of business by the telco -- the telco is making money from selling the service.
Ultimately, the story of the late 90s and early 2000s is that almost every "ISP" who was not a telephone company or a cable company died.
Just as many of the brick and mortar bookstores are dying. As are many things based on economies of scale and not monopolies.
But for those ISPs to succeed, we must also bar the franchise monopolies from being ISPs.
There are many things we could do to distort the marketplace to protect every small player from larger competitors. That does not mean we should do so. Would you favor laws that protect Mom and Pop grocery stores against chains? What happens when Mom and Pop decide to become their own chain?
Go ahead and support Alamo the same way I supported Cavtel. I hope they survive.
This discussion was not about Alamo etc. surviving. It was a response to someone who claimed that the FCC net neutrality laws were trying to regulate how monopolies behaved. I pointed out that the ISPs are not monopolies even if the underlying hardware delivery systems can be. Thus the net neutrality laws cannot be about managing monopolies, they manage everyone who plays. And a prime example of this is found in the fine summary.
Doesn't a diet like that eventually cause heart and circulatory system problems?
I have yet to have any doctor tell me that.
The fact that Dr. Atkins died from something related to a heart issue is a wonderful correlation but not scientific evidence. He could have died from being run over by a bus and it wouldn't mean that people using the Atkins diet are more likely to be run over by a bus.
Any industry which does not appeal to ~half of its prospective workers might want to spend a bit of time trying to figure out why, instead of getting all defensive and blaming everyone and everything else for the issue.
I would bet that the waste management industry does not appeal to a much larger fraction than half of the potential workers. Should they try to figure out why?
Personally, I would get very tired of my local garbage company trying to entice me into becoming one of the few, the proud, the Garbagemen.
The bechdel "test" is meant to illustrate how low the bar is, and how many movies/projects still fail it.
I think the point isn't whether some movie or coding project passes or fails this test, but that the test is truly meaningless.
If movie producers want to make movies with two women who talk to each other about something other than men, they are free to do so. Whether it will be a success depends on what they talk about. I think any movie that focuses on two people talking is going to be boring so I wouldn't choose to watch it, no matter whether it was two women or two men. Or one of each. I mean, I found the older Dr. Who talk-talk-talk parts of the series boring, too, and that was a bona fide time lord talking to someone. I admit, talking to Leila was always interesting ... "should I kill him now, Doctor?" And Nyssa. And now Clara. Yes, Clara.
And to assign functions in a programming project to "woman author" and "man author" is just silly. I have no idea how many projects pass or fail this test simply because I have no interest in (and in most cases no way of identifying) which wrote what.
Carbs aren't crap. In fact, they're essential to having a well run body.
No, they aren't. Your body will get along quite well on zero carbohydrate. The metabolic pathways that process protein and fat into energy will kick in and you'll feel less hunger during the day. You may have to urinate more often as you start to produce ketones (byproduct of using protein for energy), but that's a minor annoyance.
What you WON'T get are massive blood sugar spikes as you ingest and digest carbs directly into glucose (or overload your system with HFCS), and then your insulin kicks in and your levels plummet.
I've been doing it for years. I've watched the spikes when I eat carbs, and I've watched the "not spikes" when I don't.
Most ISPs are either cable companies or telephone companies,
If you brand Comcast as an ISP at the national level, and treat the other cable and telco operations the same way, then no, most ISPs are not. But that is irrelevant. You're mixing the different parts of the business together. Comcast is not a defacto monopoly because it is an ISP, it is because it started that way as a cable television provider, and the ISP service is carried on the same hardware. Ditto for the telco ISPs.
who are granted their monopoly status by the local public service commission (PSC).
A franchise is not a monopoly unless it is explicitly made that way. Someone else just made the claim that Comcast of Seattle was a government granted monopoly but the franchise is quite clear in saying otherwise. It's also not a public service commission that does this, it is usually a city or county government. Local government have very little regulatory power over cable nowadays, which means they aren't PSC equivalents.
Technically, anyone can be an ISP, but that is really tough to compete when the local monopoly is providing ISP service as well.
It is tough to compete with any larger provider. That's life. Mom and Pop grocery stores have a problem competing with the large chains, even if the chain is only a dozen stores.
Your only options are to use VPN, or lease lines from the local telephone monopoly.
Whose only option? The ISP? Yes, the ISP has to pay for it's connection to the Internet. The customer? No, there are other options. In fact, Alamo Broadband is a perfect example of one.
Do you know of any place in the US where that situation exists?
You mean where the FCC net neutrality rules apply to ISPs and not just cable TV or telco operations? Yes, all over the US. The new rules apply to "broadband internet access", wired or wireless. That means anyone who is an ISP with speeds that meet the arbitrary definition of "broadband". That includes wireless services like T-Mobile and AT&T and Verizon and Sprint and ... none of which are monopolies in that service.
Is Alamo somehow different?
Let me Google that for you. Alamo is neither a cable television nor telephone provider. It is a broadband internet service.
When deciding whether to break up a monopoly, does it really matter how it formed?
Yes. If it was created through legal means (dejure) then removing those legal means should be sufficient and the proper course of action. If it is a monopoly based on economics or on superior service and consumer desire, then first you need to determine if it truly is a problem before using different means of solving the problem.
But since the correct answer is that "Alamo Broadband is not a monopoly of any kind", then net neutrality that applies to Alamo is not a law that is dealing with monopolies. That was the specific claim I replied to. And net neutrality has nothing at all to do with breaking monopolies up.
Looks like you're moving the goal posts. He didn't say granted monopoly, he just said monopoly.
And I asked in which market was Alamo Broadband a monopoly. I didn't ask if it were a government-granted monopoly. The answer is: it isn't a monopoly anywhere.
But given how many places have THE cable company and THE phone company, one must conclude that there is some structural element that causes monopolies.
Yes, monopolies in cables companies and telephone companies, based on infrastructure costs for the former and both infrastructure costs and legal reasons for the latter. But the cable company and the telephone company are not the only ISPs. Alamo Broadband, for example, is neither.
Comcast is in Seattle. In most of the city, it is illegal for other cable companies to compete.
It is illegal insofar as no other company has obtained the necessary franchise to do so.
Comcast most certainly has a government-granted monopoly here.
No. They have a franchise to operate, which is not really much different than being required to have a business license to conduct business in a city. You would not claim that Joe's Plumbing Shop has been granted a government monopoly just because they got a city-issued business license, so why does a franchise mean a government-granted monopoly? Yes, it is a bit harder to get a franchise, but it can be done. Comcast did it.
You might want to read the franchise agreement. It's online for all to see. Page 1, section 1.4(A): "This franchise is not exclusive." It is not a dejure monopoly. The only thing keeping any competitors out is economic, not legal.
The thief wants the hardware (which is valuable) not your personal information (which, lets face it, is completely worthless).
Uhhh, what? People bank using their phones. They have online accounts for all kinds of things. Personal data is used to commit identity theft. They SHOULDN'T let the phone browser remember passwords for places like Amazon, but they DO.
The data may be worthless to the street kid snatching the phone, but to others it can have a lot of value.
For my latest phone, I'd say the equation you propose is exactly backwards. The phone cost $40. Were I to have actually put personal account data on it, I could be out more than $40 very quickly if the phone is stolen. I'm not treating this phone as my phone, I'm using it as a media device and practice in dealing with a rooted device. I went as far as to create a new Google Play account with no tied credit card data, but a regular user would have all that kind of data on it.
If they're going to sell the phone for parts, why wait for the battery to die? Beyond this, why not simply just remove the SIM card instead.
If the phone has a battery you can remove it. No need to wait. But some phones don't have removable batteries. And many phones don't have SIM cards. If you just put the phone in your pocket and take it home to dismantle it, PING, you're it. Go to Jail. If you put it in a bag before you get home, you know it can't ping no matter what it is.
You're assuming the criminals are smart enough to know what a SIM is or know which phones have and have not removable batteries, or they will know for sure that the phone is off and not just put to sleep. Much safer to bag it and wait.
Democratic governments represent the will of the people so, if the people are greedy, their governments will be greedy.
There is a quote from DeToqueville (sp?) that goes something like "democracies exist only until the majority realizes they can tax the minority to pay for things they want." When the majority doesn't pay a tax but they can vote to enact it, you've arrived. And when the majority is defined by "people who don't pay that tax" and nothing else, we've kicked our shoes off and are sittin' a spell, long past just "arrived".
2. Regulate the behavior of monopolies. Net Neutrality attempts to do #2.
In which market is Alamo Broadband a monopoly?
I know of no government granted monopoly status to ISPs. Comcast/TW/etc are defacto (not dejure) monopolies in cable television delivered internet service. Verizon/whatever are dejure monopolies on telephone-company provided ISPs. There exist many ISPs in the same markets as all of the previously mentioned companies. There are even ISPs that can provide ISP service via DSL over those dejure telco monopoly systems.
Do the FCC net neutrality rules actually limit themselves to places where there are actually defacto or dejure monopolies, or do they apply to every ISP? If they apply to every ISP, then they are not regulating the actions of monopolies, they are regulating many non-monopolies as well.
I'm fascinated by the FCC response to a filing that had to take place within ten days of their action and only happened close to the end of those ten days: "premature". Sorry FCC, you don't get to tell people they filed too early just because they filed within the very short deadline.
and thieves know that they can just grab the phone, stuff it in a tinfoil envelope, let it sit for a week or two until the battery dies, disassemble it, then sell the screen, case, and other parts for a good amount of cash. Same thing happens with bicycles.
I've heard that the batteries in a bike take much longer to run down, and it's hard to find a tinfoil bag big enough. But done right, yes, it's very effective.
Advertisers don't have that information ... yet.
And they don't get that from the fingerprint scanner. They get it from your much more invasive and privacy wrecking customs declaration form. What do advertisers get from the fingerprint that they don't already have? NOTHING.
What do advertisers learn from anyone using a fingerprint scanner at customs? "They were at the airport, going through customs ..." In fact, since you've already got to fill out customs forms that contain a LOT more information than your fingerprint gives them (what you bought, what countries you were in, are you carrying ...), the addition of a fingerprint scanner gives them nothing that wasn't already available.
I have never been under any illusion that I am a Google customer. In Google's eyes, I am cattle.
So we're left with the unacceptable situation of Google "coercing" customers to stay with them by doing what the customers want them to do. How awful. Laws must be passed. Every company that provides the service that the customer pays for must be hobbled so that customers are not unfairly influenced in their selection of vendors.