and the ability to mark Grandma as okay even if her internet is down is pretty appealing.
The Internet will be one of the first things to go down in a disaster. The fact that Grandma hasn't told Facebook she's ok because she can't get to Facebook will only scare Grandma's relatives. Same for Grandpa, Pa, Ma, Jr., Missie, etc. This will drive an overload of existing resources as panicky people outside the area try even harder to reach in to find out loved ones status', because my goodness if they haven't said they're ok using this app, they are probably not.
In other words, the existence of this "feature" will become like email -- assumed to be 100% reliable and fast, and if someone hasn't clicked the "I'm OK" button the assumption won't be "the internet is down and they can't, be patient", it will be "they're dead and cannot click a simple button. Panic!"
No, but the person who sells the Tesla car is a person who happens to work for Tesla.
The person who arranges the transaction doesn't own the car, the person known as "Tesla Corporation" does. It is a transaction between a corporation and a person, not a personal transaction between the salesman and you. When you say a person should be able to sell anything to another person in this context, you are saying that you consider the Tesla Corporation to be a person. (And we are, of course, ignoring the issue that a fleet or other corporate purchase creates, that of the buyer being a corporate "person". Ok, we aren't ignoring it, we just pointed it out.)
I happen to agree, but I just wanted to make it clear that you're basing that statement on a not entirely universal belief about the "personhood" of corporations.
I would rather order the thing online direct from the factory (or Amazon) and just have it delivered. There is so much crap an nonsense you have to deal with at a car dealership, it's not even funny.
Having to ship it back to get warranty repairs would kind of make warranties useless. I much prefer being able to drive it to the dealer and telling him "it isn't working, fix it." Also to deal with recalls. (This is a lesson I learned after many years of buying commodity PCs. I've had to drive 60 miles to take one back that wasn't working, and I much prefer walking into the local shop and dropping the problem in their lap.)
As for "nonsense", you just need to find a good dealer. They exist. I went to a local Chevy dealer looking for my last car and was offered a good deal on a used one. I told the guy I would think about it and he said ok. I called him two days later and said 'no thanks'. The next day the manager called me to twist my arm -- and I told him in no uncertain terms that when I said 'no' I meant no and I was not going to accept his strong-arm tactics and he'd just cost Chevy and his dealership a long-time Chevy owner. So I went somewhere else.
That somewhere else has been an excellent dealer with no nonsense or drama, no attempts to sell me a new model when take my current one in for service, and they gave me a good price on the one I've bought from them so far. I'll certainly go back for the next one.
You must be insane. TrueCar shows me that the base price of a Tesla 2014 S is $70,890, and the "performance" version is $94,390. Kelley Blue Book puts the base price at $68,710 - $73,429. A car for the masses? A car for the lower end of the 1% more like it.
It's not just the cost. Nobody wants their streets dug up 30 times in order to let those 30 potential competitors lay their wiring.
In my town, streets are dug up on a regular basis for all kinds of things except for cable lines. Those are on the poles, which have space.
Somehow, big cable has convinced the regulators to lay off, citing satellite as competition. But satellite broadband sucks,
The days of cable regulation dealt with the cable television product, not the cable internet. Satellite broadband is irrelevant, it's the satellite television that matters. Yes, Dish and Direct are both competitors for cable, especially since installing a system is so simple nowadays. And, IIRC, Charlie Ergen wanted to buy DirectTV a long time ago and was stopped precisely because it would decrease competition too much.
Opening up the market to 30 competitors is impractical, but governments should grant at least one cable competitor equal access...
Now you're back at the problem that you cannot force a company to compete in a market they don't want to, and there just isn't enough profit to be made to make competition viable. Governments can grant a second franchise, but first they need someone to ask for it.
That's not true. The wire still handles the same number of bits.
Ok, if you want to have twenty companies all limited to 1/20 of the potential bandwidth of the wire, you can claim that the wire will handle the same number of bits. Or you'll have the same terrible situation where ISPs make claims of potential maximum bandwidth that you will never be able to achieve because they've oversold the capacity of the wire.
You could have five cable companies all using the same wire today, except for that problem. It would be trivial in this day of programmable digital converters for each company to send their own authorizations down the wire which allows you to tune only to their channels. The problem is that you'd be limited to 1/5 the number of channels that one company could send. Considering the huge amount of duplication of content required, it would be a huge waste of resources.
Slashdot just had a story on how this works wonders in Sweden.
I bet it is just wonderful to know that not only is your bandwidth is being limited by your neighbor's use, but that your neighbor isn't even a customer of the same ISP you are. I can hear the howls now: a "centurylink" customer's high usage is hindering a "comcast" customer's access. A great system.
Sure about that? If you wanted to opened a store featuring goods carried at your typical Wal-Mart, would you be more or less interested in moving to a jurisdiction that refused to let them in?
I'm sure. Your example is not a government shutting down a business because they define it to be "terrible" at service. A Walmart that isn't allowed into a city because of zoning issues (the usual reason) hasn't invested money in building and stock and hiring people. An operating company that is being shut down for "terrible service" has.
Actually, it SHOULD define terrible quite explicitly so you can judge if you would ever meet the criteria.
No, the government should NOT define "terrible" for me. I am free to define it myself. As I pointed out, even the best companies have customers who think the service is terrible, just as they have customers who think it is great.
It works with electricity because it doesn't matter which electrons you pull from the wire, you're paying the company that pushes them onto it. Internet doesn't work that way. It matters which bytes you get. Twenty different ISPs means that the wire needs to be able to handle twenty times the data at the same time.
I read about new medical research all day. It's my job.
Let's cut this short. That's nice. You read about research. The comment you made that I replied to was concerning the FREEDOM TO DO SUCH RESEARCH. People should be free to study insane things, as you put it. And I AGREED. No question. But that's not good enough for you.
You seem to think that NIH has to fund insane research in order for people to be free to do it. You've completely abused the word "free" by starting at "freedom" and winding up at "at taxpayer expense". Your "freedom" to keep and bear arms does not incur a governmental responsibility to buy you a gun so you can be "free", any more than freedom to do research incurs a government responsibility to pay for it, and you've said nothing that would even begin to argue otherwise.
Nobody in the industry or in academic medical research believes that private investment could fund the kind of research the NIH does.
That's insane. I'm in academia (not medical, but medical has no special status when it comes to having their hand out for grant money) and I fully expect condom companies to spend their own money developing new kinds of condoms. That's private industry funding precisely the kind of "research" that NIH has become involved with. You even pointed out that Bill Gates is dumping $100M into such projects, and that's "private investment" writ large.
And when it comes to why fat girls can't get dates, or whether drunk men accost women, I don't care if NIH is the only place that could or would fund such ridiculous research, they shouldn't be doing it. If YOU want to know why a fat girl can't get a date, you pay for it. If you care which hand chimpanzees use to fling their poo (right-handed, BTW) that's nice, but it's hardly worth spending taxpayer money on. It's a waste of NIH money when they're complaining they don't have enough to fund important research. That makes them hypocrites as well as money-wasters.
I note that the only research you chose to defend was the ass condoms, which is a pretty clear admission that you cannot defend the other examples. Yet, you insult me when I point out the wastes and won't accept them as valid, valuable, fundable research projects. Hmmm. It appears you think NIH can do no wrong when it hands out money, and that NIH has to hand it out or people aren't free anymore. You cherry pick one example of money wasting research and try to defend it as part of the overall "AIDS research" (when it is not research into curing AIDS but into commercial development of a commercial product that a commercial company could do just as well), but the others you cannot defend at all.
I also meet people who believe that the government can't do anything,
I think they call this a "straw man" argument. Since you can't show where I've said anything close to that, your attempt at insulting me with the statement fails even the briefest sniff test.
So I realize that you believe the government is wasting money on NIH research, no facts will convince you otherwise,
You've provided exactly zero new information, so why should I have changed my mind? I agreed with your statement that people should be free to do insane research, but you've not said anything that would show that the government has to fund insane research. "It's AIDS!" Well, that's nice, but most of the examples weren't. "They had a reason." Sorry, I know how grants are written and everyone comes up with a "reason" their research is important and critical and vital and crucial and novel and new and should be funded. That's the grant writing process. Some universities run workshops on how to do that; what key words to use in your proposals to improve the chance of them being approved. You can expect EVERY grant request to contain a plethora of reasons why it should be funded, but not every grant request will actually contain research that should be funded. The
The market would open up for less terrible companies to move in?
If I operated a company and was looking at moving into an area, and found out that the local government had the power to shut down companies based on some arbitrary definition of "terrible", I'd think more than twice about going there. Why should I invest in opening a new store if someone can get a bug up their ass and get the local city council to shut me down because I'm "terrible"? Even the best companies have customers who think they are terrible.
The government should not be in the business of defining "terrible" (in the context of this discussion), they should allow customers to decide. I much prefer the situation I'm in where I decided a long time ago that Dish Network was terrible and I dropped them, rather than have my city council decide to keep me from being able to choose their service should I want it.
The (as in one) license implies that that there is a monopoly. Dejeure or defacto is irrelevant.
No, dejure or defacto is quite relevant when talking about whether a government is granting a monopoly or not. Defacto monopolies exist when only one company decides to compete. Dejure means only one company is ALLOWED to compete. If the franchise in that city is exclusive, then there is a dejure monopoly granted by the government. If the franchise is non-exclusive it is defacto.
Not that it matters. The point I was making to the OP in this thread was that there is a monopoly.
Not just that it was a monopoly but a dejure monopoly. As in:
Monopoly player 1 (Comcast) is attempting to purchase the monopoly franchise from monopoly player 2
If the franchise is not exclusive, then it is not a "monopoly franchise".
You think that illegally divvying up territory in an anti-competitive and monopolistic fashion is "simple business economics"?
It is not illegal for one company to decide it will not compete with another in a certain region when the decision is a simple one based on simple economics. The name "Walmart" has come up in other places in this discussion. Walmart chooses locations to build stores based on expected return on investment. It is not illegal for them to decide not to build in an area that already has a large number of other low-price stores, it is a simple business decision based on economics.
Second, each company's decision not to compete with the other has no binding on any other company that wishes try to compete. Therefore, it is not anti-competitive. You cannot force a company to compete in a market it does not want to, so you cannot prohibit one from making the decision not to. So, you cannot force Walmart to build in your town to compete with existing markets, and it is not illegal for the other markets to exist.
What WOULD be illegal and anti-competitive would be if Comcast (or TW) decided to drop rates to below cost to drive competitors out of a market they wanted to compete in.
Holy sheet. How much do they pay you, you bootlicking shill?
I'm sorry that your hatred for Comcast blinds you to simple business economics and drives you to insult those who try to educate you.
Yep, that's the current system. Of course, since 1% of the people have 90% of the money, most likely your vote doesn't count for much.
So you're saying that the evil rich 1% of the residents of the city who would "vote" for Comcast and keep the service they have would be enough to keep Comcast in the area? They'd have to buy an AWFUL lot of cable services to do that. While Comcast's prices for service are high, I don't think a 1% saturation would keep them in the black.
There are differences, of course, but they balance out, I think. First, Comcast needs infrastructure across the whole city in order to deliver it's services, and I think that gives the city even more right to decide wether or not to let them do it. They'd be using city owed property and be given rights of way in order to do their business,
A very nice argument, but completely off the mark. Comcast isn't asking to build anything, they're buying the license (franchise) from Charter who has already done all of that. It will be very hard to justify not allowing the transfer based on anything you've said.
So... on the outside, it seems like Walmart would have a better case for suing.
I live in a town that tried to keep Walmart out. As long as the land use laws are being applied evenly and fairly, Walmart had no grounds to sue anyone. What they wound up doing is following the land use laws and building one of their "local markets" -- small versions of the megastores.
At the same time, the destruction in the wake of the Walmart tornados are terrible...
We have yet to see the "tornado". So far, two groceries have closed. One was marginal and in direct competition with a non-Walmart large store that always had better prices anyway. The other was a chain that closed several stores because the whole chain went bankrupt. That included a store ten miles away from the closest evil Walmart that was the main grocery in that town.
The problem is that the regulators are mis-regulating, and as a result usually consumers have NO choice... they get the one company in their area, and that's it.
So, of course, it is better for the consumer to have NO company in their area.
Comcast and Time Warner Cable have divided up most of the U.S. between themselves, and voluntarily choose not to compete in their respective areas. That's illegal anti-competitive practice,
No, it is not. They aren't keeping anyone else from competing, they've just made a reasonable business decision that it would not be profitable for one of them to compete with the other in an already built area, or to try building out at the same time. It's not profitable for two companies to build out the same area and wind up with only half the potential customers. Fixed costs are the same, spread over half the customers, meaning the prices go up. Your desire to be able to choose would mean that everyone would pay more for the same service, not less.
Hell, Comcast even practically BRAGGED about it to the FCC, claiming that a merger would not hurt competition because they're not competing anyway.
It is not bragging to state a simple fact, which arose not because of some conspiracy but because of simple business economics.
In my area, a City committee votes annually on whether to "allow competition" in the cable market. Every year they have voted it down.
Your city council is an ass, and it is your responsibility to get them voted out if you don't like them.
Yea, how dare a city have any say in what goes on within the city!
So if a city council decides to issue an exclusive franchise, or to issue only one franchise, for a cable television system they are BAD BAD BAD for creating a monopoly, but if they try to keep the only cable company that wants to be in their town out they are GOOD GOOD GOOD for "having a say in what goes on within the city?" How is the former action not "having a say in what goes on within the city"?
Of course, this city council doesn't have a say, it is the city manager who decides. And he's really got very little to decide, it is a transfer of an existing contract, not the creation of a new one.
Monopoly player 1 (Comcast) is attempting to purchase the monopoly franchise from monopoly player 2 (Charter).
Neither company has a dejure monopoly. Comcast has already purchased the license.
Unfortunately for them, the city council has a say in whether or not they can do so.
No, if you RTFA you'll see that the city manager has the say and can ignore the council if he wishes.
In response, the Council voted 8-3 to urge Worcester's city manager to let the company's license request die. The deadline for the decision is Wednesday, but the manager is not bound by the vote of the Council.
TFA also says that if the license transfer request "dies", Comcast will simply appeal the decision and will almost certainly win. The city has already granted a franchise to Charter and as long as Comcast follows the franchise agreement the city has no reason to refuse the transfer. And if the city manager tries to keep Comcast from taking over from Charter, that means there will be no cable operator (and one less broadband ISP) in that city, a fact that the residents may take great umbrage at. As in, they elect the city council that caused their TV and internet to go away.
The article makes it clear that about half of the ~5000 warheads were left behind when the Iraqi army ran away from ISIS.
Are you saying that ISIS was a credible enough threat to cause the Iraqi army to "run away" during the 2004-2011 timeframe that the article says the weapons were found? I don't recall hearing about ISIS or ISIL or whatever until mid-2014.
Some of us already knew that Iraq had WMD because we heard the reports at the time, and we read the papers when the yellowcake that didn't exist was sold to Canada.
First, what the fuck does Howie Katz know about NIH grants?
I've seen this story in so many places that what this Howie Katz fellow does or doesn' t know seems to be irrelevant.
Second, the condoms he's talking about, as far as I can figure out, had funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and the Small Business Administration.
The article I linked talked about $2.4 million from NIH. A second article said that the Fenway group was working with NIH but didn't list the amount. But of course, taxpayer dollars from the SBA are still taxpayer dollars.
Third, the most common way AIDS is transmitted in this country is through anal intercourse,
The POINT is, which you are deliberately ignoring, that PRIVATE MONEY can just as easily fund this kind of "research", and it doesn't have to take taxpayer dollars to get companies to make these products, it only requires that there will be a market. If there is no market nobody is going to make them anyway, so throwing taxpayer dollars down the toilet to design this stuff is a waste of money. And when the grant recipient uses the money for other things, as the stories report, it is fraud as well as waste.
You are free to research ass condoms all you want. Go for it. Get Bill Gates to pay for it. It doesn't take public money to do it. Your freedom to conduct this research is not hindered by a failure of the NIH to fund it. In fact, your freedom to do research is ENHANCED when the government isn't funding it. The well-known federal ban on stem cell research is a ban on FEDERALLY FUNDED stem cell research using other than the existing lines.
Any stupid right-wing blogger can get a list of NIH grants, post it on his web site and say, "Look at how stupid they are,"
And anyone else can look at that list and agree. Right-handed chimpanzees, why fat girls cannot get dates, that drunk men might coerce women into unprotected sex, that's all ridiculous research. I understand why you cherry-picked one item on the list. It's because you have a hot-button disease that you can tie it to. Anyone who objects to public funding for this kind of research must be -- gasp -- a homophobe! That's why you ignored all the other examples I gave and focused on this one.
But the fact remains, a lot of money is wasted, and even the grant you are supporting could be done just as well by funding only through private sources. And finally, the freedom to do that research is not limited.
but in fact every grant has to give good reasons why this is a good use of government money,
No, they don't. They need to give reasons, but nothing says they have to be good reasons. All they have to do is get by the granting agency. When money is involved, you don't think that people can make up all kinds of "good" reasons to spend public money on something? You seem to be able to do it for the one grant you selected to defend. And nothing says that this research cannot be done without public money being thrown at it, which is the main point. Why SHOULD public money go into designing the next product a large corporation will try to sell -- and then probably fail because nobody wants it?
Your freedom to do research does not mean the taxpayer has to fund it, any more than your freedom to carry a gun means the taxpayer has to buy you one.
I can't deal with people who make things up. When you've decided to tell the truth, let me know.
Isn't it amazing what you can find when you actually look at what is happening?
Here's something that Trojan could never come up with on its own, plus a bunch of other stuff. I bet it is a revelation that male fruit flies prefer hot, sexy younger female fruit flies, and who could have guessed (or really cared) that it was because old hag fruit flies don't have as much female hormones to attract them. (Headline: "Female fruit flies suffer from menopause, film at 11!") Perhaps most useful of all: most chimpanzees are right handed. The manufacturer of chimpanzee scissors is ecstatic to get that information to help his business.
The NIH is also dumping almost a quarter million dollars into industry to get them to develop more products that they could have paid for with a pittance of their current profits and will be selling for a goodly amount of money. Do you really think the taxpayer should have to pay a company to develop a product that apparently nobody wants because no company is currently producing it already?
Among them: spending $1.75 million over seven years on a "Hollywood liaison" whose job was to help movie and television studios develop accurate plot lines about diseases. To pay the position, the CDC tapped into an account that was supposed to be used to develop responses to bio-terrorism.
Yes, a movie being more accurate about a disease is a good way to respond to a biological agent. And God knows that the movie industry couldn't have paid for someone to help them make movies more accurate.
Defend the NIH for the right things it does, but don't let that blind you to the stupid stuff it does. And don't let it confuse you into thinking that "freedom to perform research" requires public tax dollars. If you look at this article, which I believe is talking about the same Origami product my first link is, you'll note:
Also supporting innovative condom research is the Gates Foundation's Grand Challenge Explorations grants, a commitment of $100M to encourage scientists to expand the pipeline of ideas to fight our greatest health challenges.
So the idea that private money cannot fund "freedom of research" is just ridiculous.
... by discouraging people from engaging in the activities that spread AIDS. But they didn't know what that activities were.
And studying a Peruvian brothel was the only and correct way to find out. Right. I'm sorry, but there is a difference between studying something in a reasonable way and doing it frivolously.
I can't deal with people who make things up.
I used a fictional example. It's done during discussions a lot. It was meant to represent an entire class of wasted money and didn't need to be specific. Most people, I wager, got the idea. I'm sorry that it offended you.
When you've decided to tell the truth, let me know.
I've written the truth all along here. You just don't agree with it. That happens. Calling someone a liar because you disagree with his opinions is rather trite. Or perhaps you disagree that studying why paperclips link up in the box would be a waste of money? Is that it?
Slashdot Mirror
and the ability to mark Grandma as okay even if her internet is down is pretty appealing.
The Internet will be one of the first things to go down in a disaster. The fact that Grandma hasn't told Facebook she's ok because she can't get to Facebook will only scare Grandma's relatives. Same for Grandpa, Pa, Ma, Jr., Missie, etc. This will drive an overload of existing resources as panicky people outside the area try even harder to reach in to find out loved ones status', because my goodness if they haven't said they're ok using this app, they are probably not.
In other words, the existence of this "feature" will become like email -- assumed to be 100% reliable and fast, and if someone hasn't clicked the "I'm OK" button the assumption won't be "the internet is down and they can't, be patient", it will be "they're dead and cannot click a simple button. Panic!"
No, but the person who sells the Tesla car is a person who happens to work for Tesla.
The person who arranges the transaction doesn't own the car, the person known as "Tesla Corporation" does. It is a transaction between a corporation and a person, not a personal transaction between the salesman and you. When you say a person should be able to sell anything to another person in this context, you are saying that you consider the Tesla Corporation to be a person. (And we are, of course, ignoring the issue that a fleet or other corporate purchase creates, that of the buyer being a corporate "person". Ok, we aren't ignoring it, we just pointed it out.)
I happen to agree, but I just wanted to make it clear that you're basing that statement on a not entirely universal belief about the "personhood" of corporations.
I would rather order the thing online direct from the factory (or Amazon) and just have it delivered. There is so much crap an nonsense you have to deal with at a car dealership, it's not even funny.
Having to ship it back to get warranty repairs would kind of make warranties useless. I much prefer being able to drive it to the dealer and telling him "it isn't working, fix it." Also to deal with recalls. (This is a lesson I learned after many years of buying commodity PCs. I've had to drive 60 miles to take one back that wasn't working, and I much prefer walking into the local shop and dropping the problem in their lap.)
As for "nonsense", you just need to find a good dealer. They exist. I went to a local Chevy dealer looking for my last car and was offered a good deal on a used one. I told the guy I would think about it and he said ok. I called him two days later and said 'no thanks'. The next day the manager called me to twist my arm -- and I told him in no uncertain terms that when I said 'no' I meant no and I was not going to accept his strong-arm tactics and he'd just cost Chevy and his dealership a long-time Chevy owner. So I went somewhere else.
That somewhere else has been an excellent dealer with no nonsense or drama, no attempts to sell me a new model when take my current one in for service, and they gave me a good price on the one I've bought from them so far. I'll certainly go back for the next one.
I don't understand how the state can prevent one man from selling his goods to another. Land of the free indeed.
Shall I see this as a statement that the corporation called "Tesla" is equivalent to a person?
Silly Rabbit, Teslas are for the masses.
You must be insane. TrueCar shows me that the base price of a Tesla 2014 S is $70,890, and the "performance" version is $94,390. Kelley Blue Book puts the base price at $68,710 - $73,429. A car for the masses? A car for the lower end of the 1% more like it.
It's not just the cost. Nobody wants their streets dug up 30 times in order to let those 30 potential competitors lay their wiring.
In my town, streets are dug up on a regular basis for all kinds of things except for cable lines. Those are on the poles, which have space.
Somehow, big cable has convinced the regulators to lay off, citing satellite as competition. But satellite broadband sucks,
The days of cable regulation dealt with the cable television product, not the cable internet. Satellite broadband is irrelevant, it's the satellite television that matters. Yes, Dish and Direct are both competitors for cable, especially since installing a system is so simple nowadays. And, IIRC, Charlie Ergen wanted to buy DirectTV a long time ago and was stopped precisely because it would decrease competition too much.
Opening up the market to 30 competitors is impractical, but governments should grant at least one cable competitor equal access...
Now you're back at the problem that you cannot force a company to compete in a market they don't want to, and there just isn't enough profit to be made to make competition viable. Governments can grant a second franchise, but first they need someone to ask for it.
That's not true. The wire still handles the same number of bits.
Ok, if you want to have twenty companies all limited to 1/20 of the potential bandwidth of the wire, you can claim that the wire will handle the same number of bits. Or you'll have the same terrible situation where ISPs make claims of potential maximum bandwidth that you will never be able to achieve because they've oversold the capacity of the wire.
You could have five cable companies all using the same wire today, except for that problem. It would be trivial in this day of programmable digital converters for each company to send their own authorizations down the wire which allows you to tune only to their channels. The problem is that you'd be limited to 1/5 the number of channels that one company could send. Considering the huge amount of duplication of content required, it would be a huge waste of resources.
Slashdot just had a story on how this works wonders in Sweden.
I bet it is just wonderful to know that not only is your bandwidth is being limited by your neighbor's use, but that your neighbor isn't even a customer of the same ISP you are. I can hear the howls now: a "centurylink" customer's high usage is hindering a "comcast" customer's access. A great system.
Sure about that? If you wanted to opened a store featuring goods carried at your typical Wal-Mart, would you be more or less interested in moving to a jurisdiction that refused to let them in?
I'm sure. Your example is not a government shutting down a business because they define it to be "terrible" at service. A Walmart that isn't allowed into a city because of zoning issues (the usual reason) hasn't invested money in building and stock and hiring people. An operating company that is being shut down for "terrible service" has.
Actually, it SHOULD define terrible quite explicitly so you can judge if you would ever meet the criteria.
No, the government should NOT define "terrible" for me. I am free to define it myself. As I pointed out, even the best companies have customers who think the service is terrible, just as they have customers who think it is great.
That's exactly how I wish my internet worked.
It works with electricity because it doesn't matter which electrons you pull from the wire, you're paying the company that pushes them onto it. Internet doesn't work that way. It matters which bytes you get. Twenty different ISPs means that the wire needs to be able to handle twenty times the data at the same time.
I read about new medical research all day. It's my job.
Let's cut this short. That's nice. You read about research. The comment you made that I replied to was concerning the FREEDOM TO DO SUCH RESEARCH. People should be free to study insane things, as you put it. And I AGREED. No question. But that's not good enough for you.
You seem to think that NIH has to fund insane research in order for people to be free to do it. You've completely abused the word "free" by starting at "freedom" and winding up at "at taxpayer expense". Your "freedom" to keep and bear arms does not incur a governmental responsibility to buy you a gun so you can be "free", any more than freedom to do research incurs a government responsibility to pay for it, and you've said nothing that would even begin to argue otherwise.
Nobody in the industry or in academic medical research believes that private investment could fund the kind of research the NIH does.
That's insane. I'm in academia (not medical, but medical has no special status when it comes to having their hand out for grant money) and I fully expect condom companies to spend their own money developing new kinds of condoms. That's private industry funding precisely the kind of "research" that NIH has become involved with. You even pointed out that Bill Gates is dumping $100M into such projects, and that's "private investment" writ large.
And when it comes to why fat girls can't get dates, or whether drunk men accost women, I don't care if NIH is the only place that could or would fund such ridiculous research, they shouldn't be doing it. If YOU want to know why a fat girl can't get a date, you pay for it. If you care which hand chimpanzees use to fling their poo (right-handed, BTW) that's nice, but it's hardly worth spending taxpayer money on. It's a waste of NIH money when they're complaining they don't have enough to fund important research. That makes them hypocrites as well as money-wasters.
I note that the only research you chose to defend was the ass condoms, which is a pretty clear admission that you cannot defend the other examples. Yet, you insult me when I point out the wastes and won't accept them as valid, valuable, fundable research projects. Hmmm. It appears you think NIH can do no wrong when it hands out money, and that NIH has to hand it out or people aren't free anymore. You cherry pick one example of money wasting research and try to defend it as part of the overall "AIDS research" (when it is not research into curing AIDS but into commercial development of a commercial product that a commercial company could do just as well), but the others you cannot defend at all.
I also meet people who believe that the government can't do anything,
I think they call this a "straw man" argument. Since you can't show where I've said anything close to that, your attempt at insulting me with the statement fails even the briefest sniff test.
So I realize that you believe the government is wasting money on NIH research, no facts will convince you otherwise,
You've provided exactly zero new information, so why should I have changed my mind? I agreed with your statement that people should be free to do insane research, but you've not said anything that would show that the government has to fund insane research. "It's AIDS!" Well, that's nice, but most of the examples weren't. "They had a reason." Sorry, I know how grants are written and everyone comes up with a "reason" their research is important and critical and vital and crucial and novel and new and should be funded. That's the grant writing process. Some universities run workshops on how to do that; what key words to use in your proposals to improve the chance of them being approved. You can expect EVERY grant request to contain a plethora of reasons why it should be funded, but not every grant request will actually contain research that should be funded. The
The market would open up for less terrible companies to move in?
If I operated a company and was looking at moving into an area, and found out that the local government had the power to shut down companies based on some arbitrary definition of "terrible", I'd think more than twice about going there. Why should I invest in opening a new store if someone can get a bug up their ass and get the local city council to shut me down because I'm "terrible"? Even the best companies have customers who think they are terrible.
The government should not be in the business of defining "terrible" (in the context of this discussion), they should allow customers to decide. I much prefer the situation I'm in where I decided a long time ago that Dish Network was terrible and I dropped them, rather than have my city council decide to keep me from being able to choose their service should I want it.
The (as in one) license implies that that there is a monopoly. Dejeure or defacto is irrelevant.
No, dejure or defacto is quite relevant when talking about whether a government is granting a monopoly or not. Defacto monopolies exist when only one company decides to compete. Dejure means only one company is ALLOWED to compete. If the franchise in that city is exclusive, then there is a dejure monopoly granted by the government. If the franchise is non-exclusive it is defacto.
Not that it matters. The point I was making to the OP in this thread was that there is a monopoly.
Not just that it was a monopoly but a dejure monopoly. As in:
If the franchise is not exclusive, then it is not a "monopoly franchise".
The city most certainly can define who has access to city owned utility poles. Siply a fact...
Yes, and they've already defined that a cable company called "Charter" can have access. Comcast is buying that franchise, not trying for a new one.
You think that illegally divvying up territory in an anti-competitive and monopolistic fashion is "simple business economics"?
It is not illegal for one company to decide it will not compete with another in a certain region when the decision is a simple one based on simple economics. The name "Walmart" has come up in other places in this discussion. Walmart chooses locations to build stores based on expected return on investment. It is not illegal for them to decide not to build in an area that already has a large number of other low-price stores, it is a simple business decision based on economics.
Second, each company's decision not to compete with the other has no binding on any other company that wishes try to compete. Therefore, it is not anti-competitive. You cannot force a company to compete in a market it does not want to, so you cannot prohibit one from making the decision not to. So, you cannot force Walmart to build in your town to compete with existing markets, and it is not illegal for the other markets to exist.
What WOULD be illegal and anti-competitive would be if Comcast (or TW) decided to drop rates to below cost to drive competitors out of a market they wanted to compete in.
Holy sheet. How much do they pay you, you bootlicking shill?
I'm sorry that your hatred for Comcast blinds you to simple business economics and drives you to insult those who try to educate you.
Yep, that's the current system. Of course, since 1% of the people have 90% of the money, most likely your vote doesn't count for much.
So you're saying that the evil rich 1% of the residents of the city who would "vote" for Comcast and keep the service they have would be enough to keep Comcast in the area? They'd have to buy an AWFUL lot of cable services to do that. While Comcast's prices for service are high, I don't think a 1% saturation would keep them in the black.
There are differences, of course, but they balance out, I think. First, Comcast needs infrastructure across the whole city in order to deliver it's services, and I think that gives the city even more right to decide wether or not to let them do it. They'd be using city owed property and be given rights of way in order to do their business,
A very nice argument, but completely off the mark. Comcast isn't asking to build anything, they're buying the license (franchise) from Charter who has already done all of that. It will be very hard to justify not allowing the transfer based on anything you've said.
So... on the outside, it seems like Walmart would have a better case for suing.
I live in a town that tried to keep Walmart out. As long as the land use laws are being applied evenly and fairly, Walmart had no grounds to sue anyone. What they wound up doing is following the land use laws and building one of their "local markets" -- small versions of the megastores.
At the same time, the destruction in the wake of the Walmart tornados are terrible...
We have yet to see the "tornado". So far, two groceries have closed. One was marginal and in direct competition with a non-Walmart large store that always had better prices anyway. The other was a chain that closed several stores because the whole chain went bankrupt. That included a store ten miles away from the closest evil Walmart that was the main grocery in that town.
As opposed to when the government gives them a local monopoly?
Unless you know the content of the Wooster/Charter franchise agreement, you don't know the government has given them a local monopoly.
The problem is that the regulators are mis-regulating, and as a result usually consumers have NO choice... they get the one company in their area, and that's it.
So, of course, it is better for the consumer to have NO company in their area.
Comcast and Time Warner Cable have divided up most of the U.S. between themselves, and voluntarily choose not to compete in their respective areas. That's illegal anti-competitive practice,
No, it is not. They aren't keeping anyone else from competing, they've just made a reasonable business decision that it would not be profitable for one of them to compete with the other in an already built area, or to try building out at the same time. It's not profitable for two companies to build out the same area and wind up with only half the potential customers. Fixed costs are the same, spread over half the customers, meaning the prices go up. Your desire to be able to choose would mean that everyone would pay more for the same service, not less.
Hell, Comcast even practically BRAGGED about it to the FCC, claiming that a merger would not hurt competition because they're not competing anyway.
It is not bragging to state a simple fact, which arose not because of some conspiracy but because of simple business economics.
In my area, a City committee votes annually on whether to "allow competition" in the cable market. Every year they have voted it down.
Your city council is an ass, and it is your responsibility to get them voted out if you don't like them.
Yea, how dare a city have any say in what goes on within the city!
So if a city council decides to issue an exclusive franchise, or to issue only one franchise, for a cable television system they are BAD BAD BAD for creating a monopoly, but if they try to keep the only cable company that wants to be in their town out they are GOOD GOOD GOOD for "having a say in what goes on within the city?" How is the former action not "having a say in what goes on within the city"?
Of course, this city council doesn't have a say, it is the city manager who decides. And he's really got very little to decide, it is a transfer of an existing contract, not the creation of a new one.
Monopoly player 1 (Comcast) is attempting to purchase the monopoly franchise from monopoly player 2 (Charter).
Neither company has a dejure monopoly. Comcast has already purchased the license.
Unfortunately for them, the city council has a say in whether or not they can do so.
No, if you RTFA you'll see that the city manager has the say and can ignore the council if he wishes.
TFA also says that if the license transfer request "dies", Comcast will simply appeal the decision and will almost certainly win. The city has already granted a franchise to Charter and as long as Comcast follows the franchise agreement the city has no reason to refuse the transfer. And if the city manager tries to keep Comcast from taking over from Charter, that means there will be no cable operator (and one less broadband ISP) in that city, a fact that the residents may take great umbrage at. As in, they elect the city council that caused their TV and internet to go away.
The article makes it clear that about half of the ~5000 warheads were left behind when the Iraqi army ran away from ISIS.
Are you saying that ISIS was a credible enough threat to cause the Iraqi army to "run away" during the 2004-2011 timeframe that the article says the weapons were found? I don't recall hearing about ISIS or ISIL or whatever until mid-2014.
Some of us already knew that Iraq had WMD because we heard the reports at the time, and we read the papers when the yellowcake that didn't exist was sold to Canada.
First, what the fuck does Howie Katz know about NIH grants?
I've seen this story in so many places that what this Howie Katz fellow does or doesn' t know seems to be irrelevant.
Second, the condoms he's talking about, as far as I can figure out, had funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and the Small Business Administration.
The article I linked talked about $2.4 million from NIH. A second article said that the Fenway group was working with NIH but didn't list the amount. But of course, taxpayer dollars from the SBA are still taxpayer dollars.
Third, the most common way AIDS is transmitted in this country is through anal intercourse,
The POINT is, which you are deliberately ignoring, that PRIVATE MONEY can just as easily fund this kind of "research", and it doesn't have to take taxpayer dollars to get companies to make these products, it only requires that there will be a market. If there is no market nobody is going to make them anyway, so throwing taxpayer dollars down the toilet to design this stuff is a waste of money. And when the grant recipient uses the money for other things, as the stories report, it is fraud as well as waste.
You are free to research ass condoms all you want. Go for it. Get Bill Gates to pay for it. It doesn't take public money to do it. Your freedom to conduct this research is not hindered by a failure of the NIH to fund it. In fact, your freedom to do research is ENHANCED when the government isn't funding it. The well-known federal ban on stem cell research is a ban on FEDERALLY FUNDED stem cell research using other than the existing lines.
Any stupid right-wing blogger can get a list of NIH grants, post it on his web site and say, "Look at how stupid they are,"
And anyone else can look at that list and agree. Right-handed chimpanzees, why fat girls cannot get dates, that drunk men might coerce women into unprotected sex, that's all ridiculous research. I understand why you cherry-picked one item on the list. It's because you have a hot-button disease that you can tie it to. Anyone who objects to public funding for this kind of research must be -- gasp -- a homophobe! That's why you ignored all the other examples I gave and focused on this one.
But the fact remains, a lot of money is wasted, and even the grant you are supporting could be done just as well by funding only through private sources. And finally, the freedom to do that research is not limited.
but in fact every grant has to give good reasons why this is a good use of government money,
No, they don't. They need to give reasons, but nothing says they have to be good reasons. All they have to do is get by the granting agency. When money is involved, you don't think that people can make up all kinds of "good" reasons to spend public money on something? You seem to be able to do it for the one grant you selected to defend. And nothing says that this research cannot be done without public money being thrown at it, which is the main point. Why SHOULD public money go into designing the next product a large corporation will try to sell -- and then probably fail because nobody wants it?
Your freedom to do research does not mean the taxpayer has to fund it, any more than your freedom to carry a gun means the taxpayer has to buy you one.
I can't deal with people who make things up. When you've decided to tell the truth, let me know.
Isn't it amazing what you can find when you actually look at what is happening?
Here's something that Trojan could never come up with on its own, plus a bunch of other stuff. I bet it is a revelation that male fruit flies prefer hot, sexy younger female fruit flies, and who could have guessed (or really cared) that it was because old hag fruit flies don't have as much female hormones to attract them. (Headline: "Female fruit flies suffer from menopause, film at 11!") Perhaps most useful of all: most chimpanzees are right handed. The manufacturer of chimpanzee scissors is ecstatic to get that information to help his business.
The NIH is also dumping almost a quarter million dollars into industry to get them to develop more products that they could have paid for with a pittance of their current profits and will be selling for a goodly amount of money. Do you really think the taxpayer should have to pay a company to develop a product that apparently nobody wants because no company is currently producing it already?
Would you like to know why fat girls can't get dates? Was there really any question that drunk men sometimes try to coerce women into unprotected sex?
Should we mention the CDC?
Yes, a movie being more accurate about a disease is a good way to respond to a biological agent. And God knows that the movie industry couldn't have paid for someone to help them make movies more accurate.
Defend the NIH for the right things it does, but don't let that blind you to the stupid stuff it does. And don't let it confuse you into thinking that "freedom to perform research" requires public tax dollars. If you look at this article, which I believe is talking about the same Origami product my first link is, you'll note:
So the idea that private money cannot fund "freedom of research" is just ridiculous.
... by discouraging people from engaging in the activities that spread AIDS. But they didn't know what that activities were.
And studying a Peruvian brothel was the only and correct way to find out. Right. I'm sorry, but there is a difference between studying something in a reasonable way and doing it frivolously.
I can't deal with people who make things up.
I used a fictional example. It's done during discussions a lot. It was meant to represent an entire class of wasted money and didn't need to be specific. Most people, I wager, got the idea. I'm sorry that it offended you.
When you've decided to tell the truth, let me know.
I've written the truth all along here. You just don't agree with it. That happens. Calling someone a liar because you disagree with his opinions is rather trite. Or perhaps you disagree that studying why paperclips link up in the box would be a waste of money? Is that it?