The private sector isn't known for cutting costs in the short-term at the expense of the long-term to make numbers look good?
Oh, they are known for it. But the difference is that when they go belly-up for being short-sighted, the people on the hook are the creditors. When a government agency racks up hidden debts, taxpayers pay.
remind me again exactly which private company that provided pensions 20 years ago hasn't reneged on that promise? Answer: none.
I don't think I'm aware of a mass of pension defaults, but in any event they paid insurance against those commitments. If those companies are dead and cannot pay, the pensions were insured by federal law. If only the government followed the same rules, we wouldn't have the current crisis.
No, #1 is certainly not worse in the private sector. They would love to do it, but they are disallowed from doing so by law. Meanwhile, underfunded pensions and unfunded retiree healthcare benefits abound in the governments of the USA.
Doing it at the municipal level helps with #3, since the Feds or state can come in and stomp all over corruption. But the problem with doing it at the municipal level is that you lose the ability to force the telcom to provide rural service. Muni broadband is pretty good, because it only has to deal with the densely populated area and not with the people out in the sticks like POTS did.
Commercial launches would bring in foreign money, for one thing. African companies that depend on space assets would be able to go to a local source, for another.
The city already controls the poles - I'm not sure why they need to buy them. I'd rather the city not be in the pole-citing and maintenance business. It's not their area of expertise and it provides no tangible benefit.
Sure there is - government owns the wire, and ISP's provide access at an aggregate point.
Are you seriously claiming that the government running the "pipes" wouldn't have any drawbacks?
I can think of a few without trying very hard: 1. Government tends to reduce costs in the short term at the expense of the long term because they don't have to follow their own accounting rules. As an example, they under-pay employees but make up for it with generous future benefits that don't show up on a balance sheet. 2. Government has very little incentive to upgrade the capability of the infrastructure. This same criticism applies to monopolies, though they are at least susceptible to disruptive technology (e.g. solar panels eating into electricity business, mobile phones eating into phone business, etc.). 3. Government is susceptible to graft and corruption, and this is highly correlated to the amount of power that they have. As an example, look at how tool booth collectors are hired. Look at the fact that they still exist at all!
It may very well be a reasonable option to have the government provide the pipes, but let's not pretend it is "perfect". You can put out a competitive bid for maintenance of the pipes and probably get most of the same benefits without the unfunded liabilities - similar to how some states handle the separation between electricity production and distribution.
I don't think there are very many people who believe in a free market "utopia". It's just that many people rightly point out that free markets tend to be more efficient than governments. This is great when efficiency takes priority over all else - like, say, the cost of a roll of scotch tape. For things like utilities, most people agree that there are other factors besides raw price that are important: wires strung all over the place is ugly and complicated, and yet restricting to a single right-of-way tends toward monopoly over the lines. The difficult bit is managing the tradeoff between government corruption and inefficiency versus free market weirdness like supply and demand instability and exclusion of non-economic considerations.
There is not and there never will be a "right" answer or a correct balance - every possible solution has pros and cons. Like any dynamic system, caution should be taken when making adjustments. Just as violently shifting an aircraft's controls will lead to instability, suddenly changing the rules of commerce can lead to things like rolling blackouts in CA.
Back on topic, tweaking the utility pole rules to allow Google to hang fiber on them seems like a reasonable path forward.
I didn't "attack" him, but there's no question where the talent was concentrated. The only "random people" that wouldn't know Paul Simon probably weren't born yet when he was popular. Even children of the 80s would remember "Bodyguard" with Chevy Chase on MTV, if not the massive Central Park concert. Garfunkel gets name recognition because his name is extremely unique. "Paul Simon" is pretty generic.
My personal experience differs from yours. I saw plenty of evidence of piracy in my youth. I don't have any kind of scientific study* to point to piracy rates over time, and I suspect neither do you. I'm very suspicious that human nature has changed over the past 30 years. Hell, I'd argue that software piracy is the reason we are all stuck with no competition to MS Office today. Literally every home computer I have ever worked on for a friend or family member until MS started "activation" had a copy of the office suite from work or school on it. In college during the 90s, I'm not sure I came upon a legitimate copy of a game anywhere unless you include Sega Genesis.
* I found a paper that seems to show the US piracy rate holding steady or maybe declining slightly since the days of Doom. European piracy seems to have plummeted since then.
I never knew those people. Most of my games for the Apple in the mid 80s came from a college-age uncle and every single one started with a "cracked by" splash screen.
I'd add that things like cooking fuel are cheaper in the US as well. Where you'd have a problem, though, is housing. The governments in the US do not tolerate the same sorts of shanty towns that exist in Africa.
They aren't talking about pissing money away. They are investing in infrastructure that does not yet exist. Infrastructure spending often brings multiple returns on investment. If the US passed a bill to spend a 100 billion dollars repairing bridges and tunnels, it would not be an example of "the broken window fallacy".
If we are going to get into intelligence, both of those animals have one over humans. They get fed for free and we pick up their poop. All we get in return is response to cues that we mistake as emotion.
It's also a pretty bad idea to use his name to deceive others whether it is for monetary or personal gain or distorting his words
Yes, it would be terrible if someone invented a deity and then tried to control people through him. Imagine how bad that would be! People of means could placate the have-nots with promises of happiness and riches in an afterlife.
Your parents took care of you growing up, don't throw them away when you do.
Mine did, sure. But some parents have their kids taken from them because they are meth heads.
Take care of them when the get sick and old, something we don't seem to want to do in society today.
Elder care takes up the largest portion of the federal budget.
Yeah, let's institute 7 day workweeks.
That's a warped view of the sabbath. God wants you to take a specific day off, not some day of your choosing. And depending on your interpretation, this can include turning on and off lights or locking your front door. Does that sound like work to you?
You seem to be unable to differentiate between capital punishment and murder.
Yes, we should kill people who cheat on their husbands - preferably with a stone. So long as we call that "capital punishment" and are careful not to call it "murder", our life is Holy and Good. War is fine, too. Unless we lose, then it is a "war crime" and we get to do that fun "capital punishment" thing again. Executions are so delightful, I'm so glad we Americans haven't given them up like every other so-called "civilized" country.
Funny, I though Moses was Jewish.
Fair enough. I'll tell you what, when you guys, the Jews, and the Muslims all settle on an interpretation of the 10 Commandments, we can come back to this. In the meantime, I'll just keep using this Lutheran interpretation.
I smell the stink of bullshit, and your critical thinking skills are a mess. You would let a resume screener in the HR recruiting department toss you out because you think you are smart. In reality, functional people go on interviews and do company research to find out if they are a fit for a particular organization. You don't end up working for the resume screener in HR, Einstein.
That is awful. People have no sense. We had a candidate on an interview last week point out how our servo system was "antiquated". Mind you, it is very state-of-the-art and he was only seeing it visually from the outside. He hadn't seen the control system, or even the coils or magnets. Just the motor housing. What the hell was he thinking?
Well, I was mostly being humorous since we are picking apart arbitrary rules in a book that itself is ambiguous, written in a language that can be translated nine different ways by nine different scholars and interpreted 20 ways by those same nine.
That said, I did not do my own interpretation, but instead went to a Lutheran "explain the commandments" kind of site. If the adherents to the various forms of bible can't agree on what it says, then don't expect me to!:)
Hmmm, in addition - I just had a candidate request a second chance at an interview after he claimed to have slept through his alarm. Plausible, but perhaps it too is an elaborate ruse to weed out worthless, incompetent, superficial employers which are just like, punctuality Nazis, man. I'll have to think about this more.;p
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I can't say whether it is a sound investment or not - only time will tell. I just am certain it is not an example of the broken window fallacy.
The private sector isn't known for cutting costs in the short-term at the expense of the long-term to make numbers look good?
Oh, they are known for it. But the difference is that when they go belly-up for being short-sighted, the people on the hook are the creditors. When a government agency racks up hidden debts, taxpayers pay.
remind me again exactly which private company that provided pensions 20 years ago hasn't reneged on that promise? Answer: none.
I don't think I'm aware of a mass of pension defaults, but in any event they paid insurance against those commitments. If those companies are dead and cannot pay, the pensions were insured by federal law. If only the government followed the same rules, we wouldn't have the current crisis.
I'll tell you what can't help them attract commercial launches: no space program whatsoever.
No, #1 is certainly not worse in the private sector. They would love to do it, but they are disallowed from doing so by law. Meanwhile, underfunded pensions and unfunded retiree healthcare benefits abound in the governments of the USA.
Doing it at the municipal level helps with #3, since the Feds or state can come in and stomp all over corruption. But the problem with doing it at the municipal level is that you lose the ability to force the telcom to provide rural service. Muni broadband is pretty good, because it only has to deal with the densely populated area and not with the people out in the sticks like POTS did.
Ha, look at that! Thanks for the correction.
Commercial launches would bring in foreign money, for one thing. African companies that depend on space assets would be able to go to a local source, for another.
The city already controls the poles - I'm not sure why they need to buy them. I'd rather the city not be in the pole-citing and maintenance business. It's not their area of expertise and it provides no tangible benefit.
Sure there is - government owns the wire, and ISP's provide access at an aggregate point.
Are you seriously claiming that the government running the "pipes" wouldn't have any drawbacks?
I can think of a few without trying very hard:
1. Government tends to reduce costs in the short term at the expense of the long term because they don't have to follow their own accounting rules. As an example, they under-pay employees but make up for it with generous future benefits that don't show up on a balance sheet.
2. Government has very little incentive to upgrade the capability of the infrastructure. This same criticism applies to monopolies, though they are at least susceptible to disruptive technology (e.g. solar panels eating into electricity business, mobile phones eating into phone business, etc.).
3. Government is susceptible to graft and corruption, and this is highly correlated to the amount of power that they have. As an example, look at how tool booth collectors are hired. Look at the fact that they still exist at all!
It may very well be a reasonable option to have the government provide the pipes, but let's not pretend it is "perfect". You can put out a competitive bid for maintenance of the pipes and probably get most of the same benefits without the unfunded liabilities - similar to how some states handle the separation between electricity production and distribution.
Neither can Springsteen :)
I don't think there are very many people who believe in a free market "utopia". It's just that many people rightly point out that free markets tend to be more efficient than governments. This is great when efficiency takes priority over all else - like, say, the cost of a roll of scotch tape. For things like utilities, most people agree that there are other factors besides raw price that are important: wires strung all over the place is ugly and complicated, and yet restricting to a single right-of-way tends toward monopoly over the lines. The difficult bit is managing the tradeoff between government corruption and inefficiency versus free market weirdness like supply and demand instability and exclusion of non-economic considerations.
There is not and there never will be a "right" answer or a correct balance - every possible solution has pros and cons. Like any dynamic system, caution should be taken when making adjustments. Just as violently shifting an aircraft's controls will lead to instability, suddenly changing the rules of commerce can lead to things like rolling blackouts in CA.
Back on topic, tweaking the utility pole rules to allow Google to hang fiber on them seems like a reasonable path forward.
I didn't "attack" him, but there's no question where the talent was concentrated. The only "random people" that wouldn't know Paul Simon probably weren't born yet when he was popular. Even children of the 80s would remember "Bodyguard" with Chevy Chase on MTV, if not the massive Central Park concert. Garfunkel gets name recognition because his name is extremely unique. "Paul Simon" is pretty generic.
That was the B side to "Feelin' Groovy".
My personal experience differs from yours. I saw plenty of evidence of piracy in my youth. I don't have any kind of scientific study* to point to piracy rates over time, and I suspect neither do you. I'm very suspicious that human nature has changed over the past 30 years. Hell, I'd argue that software piracy is the reason we are all stuck with no competition to MS Office today. Literally every home computer I have ever worked on for a friend or family member until MS started "activation" had a copy of the office suite from work or school on it. In college during the 90s, I'm not sure I came upon a legitimate copy of a game anywhere unless you include Sega Genesis.
* I found a paper that seems to show the US piracy rate holding steady or maybe declining slightly since the days of Doom. European piracy seems to have plummeted since then.
I never knew those people. Most of my games for the Apple in the mid 80s came from a college-age uncle and every single one started with a "cracked by" splash screen.
I'd go with Simon and Garfunkel.
Thanks, you saved me from having to post that.
I'd add that things like cooking fuel are cheaper in the US as well. Where you'd have a problem, though, is housing. The governments in the US do not tolerate the same sorts of shanty towns that exist in Africa.
They aren't talking about pissing money away. They are investing in infrastructure that does not yet exist. Infrastructure spending often brings multiple returns on investment. If the US passed a bill to spend a 100 billion dollars repairing bridges and tunnels, it would not be an example of "the broken window fallacy".
If we are going to get into intelligence, both of those animals have one over humans. They get fed for free and we pick up their poop. All we get in return is response to cues that we mistake as emotion.
Google has HR drones. A lot of them.
It's also a pretty bad idea to use his name to deceive others whether it is for monetary or personal gain or distorting his words
Yes, it would be terrible if someone invented a deity and then tried to control people through him. Imagine how bad that would be! People of means could placate the have-nots with promises of happiness and riches in an afterlife.
Your parents took care of you growing up, don't throw them away when you do.
Mine did, sure. But some parents have their kids taken from them because they are meth heads.
Take care of them when the get sick and old, something we don't seem to want to do in society today.
Elder care takes up the largest portion of the federal budget.
Yeah, let's institute 7 day workweeks.
That's a warped view of the sabbath. God wants you to take a specific day off, not some day of your choosing. And depending on your interpretation, this can include turning on and off lights or locking your front door. Does that sound like work to you?
You seem to be unable to differentiate between capital punishment and murder.
Yes, we should kill people who cheat on their husbands - preferably with a stone. So long as we call that "capital punishment" and are careful not to call it "murder", our life is Holy and Good. War is fine, too. Unless we lose, then it is a "war crime" and we get to do that fun "capital punishment" thing again. Executions are so delightful, I'm so glad we Americans haven't given them up like every other so-called "civilized" country.
Funny, I though Moses was Jewish.
Fair enough. I'll tell you what, when you guys, the Jews, and the Muslims all settle on an interpretation of the 10 Commandments, we can come back to this. In the meantime, I'll just keep using this Lutheran interpretation.
I smell the stink of bullshit, and your critical thinking skills are a mess. You would let a resume screener in the HR recruiting department toss you out because you think you are smart. In reality, functional people go on interviews and do company research to find out if they are a fit for a particular organization. You don't end up working for the resume screener in HR, Einstein.
That is awful. People have no sense. We had a candidate on an interview last week point out how our servo system was "antiquated". Mind you, it is very state-of-the-art and he was only seeing it visually from the outside. He hadn't seen the control system, or even the coils or magnets. Just the motor housing. What the hell was he thinking?
Well, I was mostly being humorous since we are picking apart arbitrary rules in a book that itself is ambiguous, written in a language that can be translated nine different ways by nine different scholars and interpreted 20 ways by those same nine.
That said, I did not do my own interpretation, but instead went to a Lutheran "explain the commandments" kind of site. If the adherents to the various forms of bible can't agree on what it says, then don't expect me to! :)
Hmmm, in addition - I just had a candidate request a second chance at an interview after he claimed to have slept through his alarm. Plausible, but perhaps it too is an elaborate ruse to weed out worthless, incompetent, superficial employers which are just like, punctuality Nazis, man. I'll have to think about this more. ;p
I had considered that their goal may be to not get hired. I'm happy to help them in that regard.