Okay, first, you gotta get rights to lay copper from all the property owners. Then you have to outlay millions upon millions of dollars to dig up the ground and lay said infrastructure. And then you've gotta actually deploy the service.
That is chump change to existing large companies that provide similar services in other areas. The biggest hindrance now is not cost, but getting every local government to permit them to use their public property in the same way it is used by existing providers.
Yeah, I'm sure a little ol' startup can handle all that.
A "little ol' startup" would obviously supply to fewer customers. There goes your whole "millions upon millions" shock and awe argument. Please try to stay in context next time.
Verizon has blown enormous dollars to roll out fiber
That's because the huge demand for fiber is not a huge demand. Corn ethanol suddenly comes to mind.
You still have not, and could never, justify the individual rights violations that would occur if the government forced a company to break up or change its practices, against its own intentions.
You forget entirely about price collusion. When everyone is screwing the customer, what business can customers turn to?
The newly-created one that has the huge incentive of customer demand for cheaper products.
The problem with this whole debate is the pragmatic, unprincipled approach taken by everyone opposing the free market. According to this approach, nobody has a right to any of their products, services, or property - the customer instead has all those rights. Unfortunately for that argument, individuals have rights, regardless of how popular it has become to violate those rights. By promoting the violation of Google's employee's rights through government intervention, you promote the violation of your own rights.
You might think it would be dumb, but if you're providing something like an Operating System for computers everyone buys, who cares if you provide what the consumer wants or not
Computers that everyone buys, but nobody wants???
when you can essentially force them to purchase it anyway?
How do you force (or "essentially force") someone to buy something, exactly? Does the computer manufacturer/dealer have no interest in maintaining its userbase, by providing what its customer wants? Does the OS maker have no interest in maintaining its relationship with the computer dealer, by providing what the dealer wants, in order to maintain their userbase?
People who believe in truly free markets often ignore the barrier to entry for competition.
Correction: people who oppose the free market often tout a barrier to entry for competition. However the largest restrictions (e.g. the local telco's you mention) are created and maintained by the government.
The free market also relies on a voluntary exchange of goods or services - which requires government "regulation" to prevent theft and other involuntary exchange. Government is also needed to provide things such as tort resolution and contract enforcement.
Of course. A force-backed entity is always necessary in order to punish theft and other violations of individual rights. That is quite different from the discussion at hand however. These people imagine they have a right to Google's search engine, and if Google starts to voluntarily buy up other search engines (who ALSO voluntarily sell to Google), and then decides they want to flood their site with huge flash ads, and sell out the top 10 search results to the highest bidder, these people would demand the government intervene to destroy this monopoly. Such an action by the government could only mean one thing: violating the rights of each and every Google employee to do with their property and product as they decide. There is no right to a search engine. If a monopoly's services are bad enough, a second service provider will naturally emerge to provide better service. The only thing that could prevent such an emergence is force, and the only force-backed entity in the US is the government.
When left to their own devices, the businesses will try to fuck the consumer
That would be dumb of them. Don't those employees have any interest in keeping their jobs and putting food on the table? How can they stay in business if they screw over their customers. What stops a customer from switching to another service provider?
and the consumer who has virtually no individual power
Their wallets are all the power they need. Don't like a company? Pick another? If another doesn't exist, persuade everyone you know to demand better service and another company will come along to provide that service (if the demand is high enough, of course).
The free market relies on companies not *leveraging* their monopolies.
Not quite. The free market relies on governments not propping up monopolies. Until politicians decide to stop heeding special interests, destructive monopolies (e.g. telecom) will continue to thrive. The free market does not guarantee that monopolies won't exist at any given time, but it does guarantee that if the monopoly's services are poor enough, the demand for better service will be so great that better service will be provided, by another company if necessary. Only when a force-backed entity comes in and prevents another company from providing competing service, or implements selective restrictions on competition (e.g. taxes / tax breaks), does an unjust monopoly exist. To my knowledge the only force-backed entity in the US is the government.
Your assumption that anyone in favour of a welfare state is in it for greed rather than for principled support of the idea of general welfare is, in itself a good example of what's wrong with politics today
Where did I make that assumption? Greed (ie self-interest) that does not violate the rights of others is a good thing - it leads to progress. What does not lead to progress, but instead invariably results in economic disaster, is the violation of the rights of some in favor of the temporary relief of others.
Demonizing your opponents has always been the tool of the tyrant.
I don't think that word means what you think it means. Anyone in a position of governmental power who actively promotes "general welfare" is more of a tyrant than someone who promotes individual rights, by definition.
And please stop confusing the authoritarian-libertarian axis with the left-right axis, they are orthogonal.
Where did I confuse that? Classical conservatism (which used to be classical liberalism) promotes capitalism and individual rights.
That "effort to buy votes" as you so cynically call it could also be referred to as "attempting to address the desires of the nation", which is the whole fucking point of a democracy.
Adn we are not a democracy, but a republic. Learn the difference. One is founded on certain principles (in our case, individual rights), while the other rejects all principles in favor of pragmatism. Your response indicates that you support pragmatism, and thus run contrary to the principles on which this country was founded.
Maybe if the voting machines occasionally spewed out some cash, you might get better voter turnout.
Bah, the government is too smart for that! They'll promise you cash in exchange for votes - cash that they'll get from you in the first place - but they'll never actually give you that money, and certainly not so often as to "occasionally" happen. So I guess my analogy is not accurate - you're more likely to get money back from a slot machine than a voting machine.
Your ideas also go unheard if you don't tell them to anyone
It's not my fault if people can't read my mind! It's The Man keeping me down, silencing anyone who tries to create a mind-reading device, thus preventing my brilliant idea from ever being realized.
Unfortunately, my only brilliant idea is for a mind-reading device, so by the time someone actually succeeds in developing such a device to read my mind and know my brilliant idea, it ceases to be a brilliant idea.
A cat in a box comes to mind.
Re:You keep using that word, but...
on
Censorship By Glut
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think his whole point is that there's no real difference between the 2.
One is a violation of individual rights, the other is not. Nobody forces you to accept the Slashdot rating system. Set your threshold to -1 and read every comment. You're sure to find gems rated 0 or 1. If, however,/. editors start deleting your comments, then you've got censorship. Even then, though, individual rights are not being violated, because they are allowed to delete comments on their own site. It would be foolish of them to try it, but they'd be justified in doing so. Only when a force-backed entity demands that your comment be taken down, on threat of punishment to/., do individual rights get violated. Only then is it immoral and unjustifiable.
The exact same thing can truthfully be said of those on the left of the political spectrum.
My, how the political spectrum have been skewed. Today's "right" is just as far to the left as the "left". They are both in favor of political and economic pragmatism, rejecting principled support of individual rights, in favor of increased welfare statism, all in an effort to buy votes from people who mistake their voting machines for slot machines.
What they actually fed them was a high-fat, high-sugar diet that bears some nutritional similarity to a junk food diet.
What types of fat? What types of sugar? None of this is specified. This sort of research has been going on for decades. The only unique thing about this study is that they looked at certain genes. In the end, though, they just connected it back through correlation to the likelihood of developing Alzheimer's, without any new insight... so remind again what the point of the research was. It's not laying groundwork for future study. That groundwork has already been laid.
Don't you think contrasting different kinds of fats and nutrients would be the logical NEXT controlled mouse experiment?
Yes, I would think so, except that this sort of research has been done for decades now. That's why I don't get what's so interesting about this study. How can someone get grant money to do their doctoral thesis on such general, useless research as has already been done to death? Is it simply because they looked at specific genes? That seems to be the only unique thing about the research. But then all they did in the end was just connect it back to Alzheimer's without any new insight.
Sorry, I should have been more specific: double-blind study on humans. As far as "correlation/causation" - I'm not sure where you picked up that I made that claim. Correlation is fine, as long as you actually do a thorough examination and try to determine what components (or missing components) provide the best correlation. Otherwise you're just dangerously misinforming the public, as this study does.
As you'll find with almost all dietary research, the conclusions are baseless. They fed the mice junk food, and focused on only a couple measures of the contents of the junk food - "fat", cholesterol, sugar. What about the other crap in junk food? What about the nutrients you DON'T find in junk food but that are crucial to life? Do any of those components (or lack thereof) correlate better? Blank out. What types of fat are bad, and what types are good? Trans fat? polyunsaturated? monounsaturated? saturated? long chain, medium chain, or short chain? WHICH TYPES OF FAT?! Blank out.
Nope, you won't find that here. All fat is assumed to be bad. Other studies show all cholesterol to be bad, or all protein to be bad, or all carbs to be bad, without actually examining in detail the nutrient content of the food to find what component actually correlates the most with their definition of "bad".
Until a randomized, double blind study is done, the only thing you can conclude from this is that junk food correlates to a certain degree with Alzheimer's. Nothing can be said about "fat", nor about cholesterol, nor about sugar.
How, praytell, does eating fat clog arteries? I always thought it was caused by small VLDL, but maybe you've uncovered some brilliant discovery? Please share with the class.
Honestly, there is no satisfactory solution to the ageing problem, no snake oil in any form will change that in the long term.
Way to gloss over the whole discussion and blindly assert that aging is inevitable. Your unsupported assumption is that the same evolutionary process that discovered binocular vision, figured out how to convert light energy into chemical energy, and discovered that information exists and can be transmitted from one place to another (see nodes of ranvier), is incapable of identifying necessary inputs (nutrients) and utilizing them for maintenance and sustenance.
All we really need to do is learn how to get out of our body's way (granted, the scientific understanding may be far off), and the rest should take care of itself.
Your brain is screwing up because you're not getting enough myelin around the axons of your neurons - think of it as stripping away the insulation around the wires inside a computer. They're going to start smacking into eachother and short circuiting.
Also, the more fat you eat, the less sugar/carbs you'll be eating, so you won't be creating as many advanced glycation end-products (AGEs), which build up in your body over decades and interfere with proper brain function. AGEs have also been associated with increased amyloidosis among Alzheimer's patients.
"One possible implementation that has piqued manufacturers' interests involves a device that detects wavelengths of light, transmits those signals across a large distance, and rebuilds the image at a remote receiver for viewing by the user."
Am I the only one canceling my cable rather than buy into the BS being fed to me? "It's so much better than your broadcast signal that BY LAW you will be forced to buy into it or give up your existing service." Joy!
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, first, you gotta get rights to lay copper from all the property owners. Then you have to outlay millions upon millions of dollars to dig up the ground and lay said infrastructure. And then you've gotta actually deploy the service.
That is chump change to existing large companies that provide similar services in other areas. The biggest hindrance now is not cost, but getting every local government to permit them to use their public property in the same way it is used by existing providers.
Yeah, I'm sure a little ol' startup can handle all that.
A "little ol' startup" would obviously supply to fewer customers. There goes your whole "millions upon millions" shock and awe argument. Please try to stay in context next time.
Verizon has blown enormous dollars to roll out fiber
That's because the huge demand for fiber is not a huge demand. Corn ethanol suddenly comes to mind.
You still have not, and could never, justify the individual rights violations that would occur if the government forced a company to break up or change its practices, against its own intentions.
You forget entirely about price collusion. When everyone is screwing the customer, what business can customers turn to?
The newly-created one that has the huge incentive of customer demand for cheaper products.
The problem with this whole debate is the pragmatic, unprincipled approach taken by everyone opposing the free market. According to this approach, nobody has a right to any of their products, services, or property - the customer instead has all those rights. Unfortunately for that argument, individuals have rights, regardless of how popular it has become to violate those rights. By promoting the violation of Google's employee's rights through government intervention, you promote the violation of your own rights.
You might think it would be dumb, but if you're providing something like an Operating System for computers everyone buys, who cares if you provide what the consumer wants or not
Computers that everyone buys, but nobody wants???
when you can essentially force them to purchase it anyway?
How do you force (or "essentially force") someone to buy something, exactly? Does the computer manufacturer/dealer have no interest in maintaining its userbase, by providing what its customer wants? Does the OS maker have no interest in maintaining its relationship with the computer dealer, by providing what the dealer wants, in order to maintain their userbase?
People who believe in truly free markets often ignore the barrier to entry for competition.
Correction: people who oppose the free market often tout a barrier to entry for competition. However the largest restrictions (e.g. the local telco's you mention) are created and maintained by the government.
The free market also relies on a voluntary exchange of goods or services - which requires government "regulation" to prevent theft and other involuntary exchange. Government is also needed to provide things such as tort resolution and contract enforcement.
Of course. A force-backed entity is always necessary in order to punish theft and other violations of individual rights. That is quite different from the discussion at hand however. These people imagine they have a right to Google's search engine, and if Google starts to voluntarily buy up other search engines (who ALSO voluntarily sell to Google), and then decides they want to flood their site with huge flash ads, and sell out the top 10 search results to the highest bidder, these people would demand the government intervene to destroy this monopoly. Such an action by the government could only mean one thing: violating the rights of each and every Google employee to do with their property and product as they decide. There is no right to a search engine. If a monopoly's services are bad enough, a second service provider will naturally emerge to provide better service. The only thing that could prevent such an emergence is force, and the only force-backed entity in the US is the government.
When left to their own devices, the businesses will try to fuck the consumer
That would be dumb of them. Don't those employees have any interest in keeping their jobs and putting food on the table? How can they stay in business if they screw over their customers. What stops a customer from switching to another service provider?
and the consumer who has virtually no individual power
Their wallets are all the power they need. Don't like a company? Pick another? If another doesn't exist, persuade everyone you know to demand better service and another company will come along to provide that service (if the demand is high enough, of course).
The free market relies on companies not *leveraging* their monopolies.
Not quite. The free market relies on governments not propping up monopolies. Until politicians decide to stop heeding special interests, destructive monopolies (e.g. telecom) will continue to thrive. The free market does not guarantee that monopolies won't exist at any given time, but it does guarantee that if the monopoly's services are poor enough, the demand for better service will be so great that better service will be provided, by another company if necessary. Only when a force-backed entity comes in and prevents another company from providing competing service, or implements selective restrictions on competition (e.g. taxes / tax breaks), does an unjust monopoly exist. To my knowledge the only force-backed entity in the US is the government.
DOJ Was 3 Hours Away From Violating Google's Rights
There, fixed that for ya.
Why did the DOJ call off the attack on Microsoft, yet decide to go after Google and Yahoo on this...?
For the same reason the government does anything. Whim. Political pull. Don't try to make sense of it.
Your assumption that anyone in favour of a welfare state is in it for greed rather than for principled support of the idea of general welfare is, in itself a good example of what's wrong with politics today
Where did I make that assumption? Greed (ie self-interest) that does not violate the rights of others is a good thing - it leads to progress. What does not lead to progress, but instead invariably results in economic disaster, is the violation of the rights of some in favor of the temporary relief of others.
Demonizing your opponents has always been the tool of the tyrant.
I don't think that word means what you think it means. Anyone in a position of governmental power who actively promotes "general welfare" is more of a tyrant than someone who promotes individual rights, by definition.
And please stop confusing the authoritarian-libertarian axis with the left-right axis, they are orthogonal.
Where did I confuse that? Classical conservatism (which used to be classical liberalism) promotes capitalism and individual rights.
That "effort to buy votes" as you so cynically call it could also be referred to as "attempting to address the desires of the nation", which is the whole fucking point of a democracy.
Adn we are not a democracy, but a republic. Learn the difference. One is founded on certain principles (in our case, individual rights), while the other rejects all principles in favor of pragmatism. Your response indicates that you support pragmatism, and thus run contrary to the principles on which this country was founded.
Maybe if the voting machines occasionally spewed out some cash, you might get better voter turnout.
Bah, the government is too smart for that! They'll promise you cash in exchange for votes - cash that they'll get from you in the first place - but they'll never actually give you that money, and certainly not so often as to "occasionally" happen. So I guess my analogy is not accurate - you're more likely to get money back from a slot machine than a voting machine.
Your ideas also go unheard if you don't tell them to anyone
It's not my fault if people can't read my mind! It's The Man keeping me down, silencing anyone who tries to create a mind-reading device, thus preventing my brilliant idea from ever being realized.
Unfortunately, my only brilliant idea is for a mind-reading device, so by the time someone actually succeeds in developing such a device to read my mind and know my brilliant idea, it ceases to be a brilliant idea.
A cat in a box comes to mind.
I think his whole point is that there's no real difference between the 2.
One is a violation of individual rights, the other is not. Nobody forces you to accept the Slashdot rating system. Set your threshold to -1 and read every comment. You're sure to find gems rated 0 or 1. If, however, /. editors start deleting your comments, then you've got censorship. Even then, though, individual rights are not being violated, because they are allowed to delete comments on their own site. It would be foolish of them to try it, but they'd be justified in doing so. Only when a force-backed entity demands that your comment be taken down, on threat of punishment to /., do individual rights get violated. Only then is it immoral and unjustifiable.
The exact same thing can truthfully be said of those on the left of the political spectrum.
My, how the political spectrum have been skewed. Today's "right" is just as far to the left as the "left". They are both in favor of political and economic pragmatism, rejecting principled support of individual rights, in favor of increased welfare statism, all in an effort to buy votes from people who mistake their voting machines for slot machines.
That, and under the proposal, access would be free, no one would have to use it
A free tax increase with no incentive or requirement to use the service funded by the tax? Yay!
What they actually fed them was a high-fat, high-sugar diet that bears some nutritional similarity to a junk food diet.
What types of fat? What types of sugar? None of this is specified. This sort of research has been going on for decades. The only unique thing about this study is that they looked at certain genes. In the end, though, they just connected it back through correlation to the likelihood of developing Alzheimer's, without any new insight... so remind again what the point of the research was. It's not laying groundwork for future study. That groundwork has already been laid.
Don't you think contrasting different kinds of fats and nutrients would be the logical NEXT controlled mouse experiment?
Yes, I would think so, except that this sort of research has been done for decades now. That's why I don't get what's so interesting about this study. How can someone get grant money to do their doctoral thesis on such general, useless research as has already been done to death? Is it simply because they looked at specific genes? That seems to be the only unique thing about the research. But then all they did in the end was just connect it back to Alzheimer's without any new insight.
Sorry, I should have been more specific: double-blind study on humans. As far as "correlation/causation" - I'm not sure where you picked up that I made that claim. Correlation is fine, as long as you actually do a thorough examination and try to determine what components (or missing components) provide the best correlation. Otherwise you're just dangerously misinforming the public, as this study does.
As you'll find with almost all dietary research, the conclusions are baseless. They fed the mice junk food, and focused on only a couple measures of the contents of the junk food - "fat", cholesterol, sugar. What about the other crap in junk food? What about the nutrients you DON'T find in junk food but that are crucial to life? Do any of those components (or lack thereof) correlate better? Blank out. What types of fat are bad, and what types are good? Trans fat? polyunsaturated? monounsaturated? saturated? long chain, medium chain, or short chain? WHICH TYPES OF FAT?! Blank out.
Nope, you won't find that here. All fat is assumed to be bad. Other studies show all cholesterol to be bad, or all protein to be bad, or all carbs to be bad, without actually examining in detail the nutrient content of the food to find what component actually correlates the most with their definition of "bad".
Until a randomized, double blind study is done, the only thing you can conclude from this is that junk food correlates to a certain degree with Alzheimer's. Nothing can be said about "fat", nor about cholesterol, nor about sugar.
Honestly, there is no satisfactory solution to the ageing problem, no snake oil in any form will change that in the long term.
Way to gloss over the whole discussion and blindly assert that aging is inevitable. Your unsupported assumption is that the same evolutionary process that discovered binocular vision, figured out how to convert light energy into chemical energy, and discovered that information exists and can be transmitted from one place to another (see nodes of ranvier), is incapable of identifying necessary inputs (nutrients) and utilizing them for maintenance and sustenance.
All we really need to do is learn how to get out of our body's way (granted, the scientific understanding may be far off), and the rest should take care of itself.
Your brain is screwing up because you're not getting enough myelin around the axons of your neurons - think of it as stripping away the insulation around the wires inside a computer. They're going to start smacking into eachother and short circuiting.
Also, the more fat you eat, the less sugar/carbs you'll be eating, so you won't be creating as many advanced glycation end-products (AGEs), which build up in your body over decades and interfere with proper brain function. AGEs have also been associated with increased amyloidosis among Alzheimer's patients.
You're welcome.
-- The American Taxpayer
*WHOOOSH*
"One possible implementation that has piqued manufacturers' interests involves a device that detects wavelengths of light, transmits those signals across a large distance, and rebuilds the image at a remote receiver for viewing by the user."
Am I the only one canceling my cable rather than buy into the BS being fed to me? "It's so much better than your broadcast signal that BY LAW you will be forced to buy into it or give up your existing service." Joy!
...but when are the two sequels to Zork: Grand Inquisitor coming out?!