The bill would prohibit Internet service providers from blocking or throttling lawful traffic, and from requiring fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to consumers. The bill also imposes limits on data cap exemptions (so-called "zero-rating") and says that ISPs may not attempt to evade net neutrality protections by slowing down traffic at network interconnection points.
Other than zero-rating some video (which arguably just benefits their customers), are there any ISPs in CA currently actually doing anything this bill prohibits? If not, then who are they targeting? This seems to essentially be the "limit zero-rating" bill, which just screws over some consumers.
I guess it's another bill in a long tradition of useless legislation which gets passed so some politicians can congratulate themselves on "doing something" about a non-problem, ignoring any costs to society as a result of one more layer of laws and regulations for people to pay lawyers to ensure they're complying with.
Spending your money on hosting a blog, making a movie, purchasing advertising in a magazine/newspaper/billboard, and similar activities all involve "giving someone money". They're also all forms of speech and covered under what is described as freedom of the press in the Constitution.
Money is just a means to facilitate an exchange. As an example, if you exchange your efforts for money, then exchange that money for someone else's efforts to post a billboard, it's just a more efficient way of doing things than if you post the billboard yourself. Money isn't speech, but giving someone else your money in order to sponsor speech or in order to advance your political point of view is certainly speech and political speech, respectively. Just like writing these very words, it's an action you're taking in order to communicate and advance your ideas in the marketplace of ideas.
To pick a less politically charged example of the same principle, you might say "Giving a building contractor money isn't construction! You're not building a house when you do that! They're completely separate things!", yet banning paying someone to build a house is going to result in a lot less houses being built, isn't it?
In terms of corporations, if you compare them to any other similar sized group of people (shareholders+employees) who agree on something and want to influence politicians about it, they may benefit from their level of organization, but they don't really have much more in terms of resources than is available elsewhere.
I suppose really what you're seeing is that because the people involved have formed a limited-purpose organization, the effect is more focused/concentrated on the issues which the people involved with the corporation are jointly concerned with, while the effect of a more general mass of people will tend to work more at cross purposes.
Compare corporate influence to the political influence of a political party, though. Or compare to a trade association, or even a mayors or governors association. Heck, compare to the political influence of many charities, unions (some of which are being diminished), the AMA, the ACLU, the media (which also tend to be corporations), etc... There are lots of organizations of people who are able to organize for a common purpose and thus wield more focused political influence for that purpose.
So yeah, all the various special interests can be a problem. The general interests suffer when special interests are allowed to have priority. The only solution I've seen is to disallow the people in government from being allowed to make decisions which benefit special interests. That removes the incentives involved on both sides and is one of the reasons why whenever some group proposes the government start regulating something, you have to watch out, because it's usually only a matter of time before that process is captured by those most interested in the results of it.
Here in the U.S. we have a variety of basic freedoms recognized as things the government hasn't been given the power by the people to take away. Among those basic freedoms are the right to express our political views to other people, even if we want to spend our own money to amplify and express those views, and the right to petition our government officials, i.e. tell them what we want them to do for us.
Lobbyists are people the more organized among us hire to represent their interests in telling politicians what they want. Campaign donations are one of they ways we support the politicians we agree with and help them represent our interests and viewpoints in government.
It wasn't an exhaustive search, it was literally the first result and in line with Hatch's level of power in the Senate. It also pretty easily contradicts the "didn't feel obligated to do anything" narrative above, though, doesn't it?
For the news sources, see 96 Percent of Google Search Results for 'Trump' News Are from Liberal Media Outlets and then you can confirm for yourself by going to Google News and either looking at their headlines or searching for any politically relevant topic and counting the number of sources they highlight first on the left vs. the right side of the media bias chart, which if anything underestimates sources like CNN which have turned farther left since the election.
I do find it interesting that an obvious flamebait comment literally directed at half the country and which is clearly untrue in at least one particular is currently "insightful", but my reply asking for examples of the claim has been modded down to 0 at this point.
If you read the link.... as the Senate Finance Chairman, he held up the IRS from giving Equifax a contract and told Equifax to:
Provide the Committee a detailed timeline of the breach, including when it began, its discovery, the investigation of its scope and source, notification of authorities, efforts to notify customers and consumers, notification to the Equifax board of directors, and notification of Equifax senior executives – including, but not limited to, John Gamble Jr., Rodolfo Ploder, and Joseph Loughran.
Please describe Equifax’s efforts to identify the scope of affected consumers and breadth of information compromised.
What steps has Equifax taken to identify and limit potential consumer harm associated with this breach?
Does Equifax plan to provide notice to each affected consumer, or will it rely on the consumer-initiated checks found at “equifaxsecurity2017.com” to inform them?
Your firm set up a website, “equifaxsecurity2017.com,” in the wake of this announcement.
The site states that “[t]he information accessed primarily includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some instances, driver’s license numbers,” (emphasis added). What other information was or may have been accessed on these accounts?
As a remedy to those whose PII was accessed, Equifax is offering free, temporary access to its own identity protection services. Does the firm plan to promote its paid service to these individuals at the end of the free year?
Credit monitoring can protect against identity thieves opening new accounts, but what protection does Equifax plan to offer consumers who may have had their existing credit accounts compromised?
The site’s terms of service contain a binding arbitration clause, binding participants of the program from participating in any class-action lawsuits that may arise from the incident. Friday morning, Equifax updated their terms of service to include an opt-out provision giving consumers 30 days to notify Equifax in writing that they do not wish to participate in the arbitration provision. Please explain the decision to require this opt-out to be made in writing. Do any other services provided by equifaxsecurity2017.com require consumers to contact Equifax in writing? Are there any technical barriers preventing Equifax from providing consumers the ability to opt-out on the equifaxsecurity2017.com site?
Please describe the resources that Equifax has focused on its own information security. Does Equifax employ a Chief Information Security Officer? If so, to whom does this person report? How many full-time employees focus on information security? Do any members of Equifax's board of directors have a background in information security?
In the past 24 months, how many times has Equifax employed third-party cyber security experts to conduct penetration tests of its internal and external systems? Has the company addressed all of the issues identified by these experts and implemented all of their recommendations? Please provide us with copies of all penetration test and audit reports produced for Equifax by outside cyber security firms.
Does Equifax have procedures in place to receive and act on vulnerability reports from outside parties including security researchers? If so, please describe these procedures, when they were implemented, and how frequently the company acts to remediate vulnerabilities identified by third-parties.
There isn't a single "gay bashing" quote from Trump in that article, so I guess you couldn't find any. All the article has is positive quotes from Trump about gays, plus the article author's disagreements with policy decisions by his Administration.
But hey, if you do find a couple of actual quotes, feel free to reply with them. Until then we'll mark you down as yet another TDS sufferer.
Please provide a couple of examples of Trump's "gay bashing vitriol" which you accuse him of speaking. Curious if you are just clueless, or suffering from TDS, or actually have heard something.
Trump has always been about squashing liberties. Now he wants to squash freedom of speech and freedom of the press. (actually, he's been against those two things all along- this is just another example).
I'm completely against any government censorship of the news, or media at any level. Of course, so is Trump:
“You know, I’d rather have fake news like CNN,” he said, waving toward the bank of reporters in front of him. “I would rather have fake news — it’s true — than have anybody, including liberals, socialists, anything, than have anybody stopped and censored.”
“You can’t have censorship. You can’t pick one person and say, ‘Well, we don’t like what he’s been saying. He’s out.’ So, we’ll live with fake news,” he said. “I mean, I hate to say it. But we have no choice. Because that’s by far, the better alternative. We can’t have people saying, ‘censorship.’ Because you know what? It could turn around. It could be them next We believe in the right of Americans to speak their minds.”
That's from a speech from less than a week ago.
Google news isn't biased against Trump nor against right-wing news sources because someone is manually tilting it, it's biased against them because the people at Google are leftist in outlook in general and so they consider left-leaning news sources more "reliable". If the NY Times and the Washington Post and CNN are your gold standards, and your algorithm uses a web of left-leaning sources (academia, government sites) to judge how good a news source is, you're going to end up with news summary which is slanted to the left in terms of what it considers a reliable source.
The extra money for being a single Mom isn't the only reason, i.e. it's not sufficient by itself, but it is enough to push many people over the line between getting married and not getting married, and to remove some of the stigma.
So if before someone unmarried were to get pregnant and then say "You need to marry me and help take care of this kid", with extensive government benefits in the mix, they're much more likely than before to say "You're too much trouble, I'll just take what I can get in paternity payments and with food stamps, free health care, section 8 rent and some cash just make do with that."
The implication isn't that people are going to go out and have kids unmarried on purpose just for the benefits all the time, just that it's enough to make a the marginal difference in lots of people's decision-making around getting married, keeping another kid, getting a job or not, etc...
Anyone with a basic machine shop can make just about any sort of firearm they want.
There are no countries which have banned firearms which don't have any firearms at all as a result.
You can't stop people from getting a gun if they want one. You can only make it more difficult. Unfortunately, the side effect of any of the proposed ways of making it more difficult for someone who will misuse a gun to get one is that you make things more difficult on 99 other law-abiding people with an inherent right recognized in our Constitution to self-defense for every bad guy you inconvenience. In the end, the criminals will have guns because they want them more and don't care about following the law, while the most law-abiding will be disarmed.
Not to mention that it's literally impossible to round up and destroy the existing firearms in the U.S. without causing a civil war where most of the military will be on the side of the other people with the guns.
That's what the big 5 publishers want you to do, buy a paper book. They're pricing their ebooks to try and keep their paper sales alive.
Indie publishers have much more expensive paper pricing costs and thus price their ebooks based on supply and demand to maximize revenue, so they're typically half or even a third in price of the tradpub books. That's why in most genres they're eating the big 5 publishers alive in ebooks and why Indie ebooks have exploded recently while tradpub ebook sales are declining. Recently, Indie authors combined sell more eBooks than the big 5 publishers combined.
Don't worry, you can always go look at the nominees for the Dragon Awards and find some actual decent Science Fiction. The "Hugh" awards are basically dead, more an indicator of what not to read now, at least if you're an SF fan, rather than a literary SJW.
The four biggest impacts from Trump (And the GOP Congress) on the economy are (in order of impact): 1. Tax cuts, especially the significant cut in corporate taxes, leading companies to return their money/assets from abroad to the U.S. and invest them here instead. Also increases the return on money invested in the U.S., leading to a big impact on economic growth from an increase of investments of 10-15%. 2. Regulatory reforms, slowing down new regulations, expediting others and starting on cutting old ones (estimated to account for over.5% of GDP growth per year) 3. Increased spending, keeping with the recent trends (small crowding out effect on private investment, more than made up for by #1 above, but will be worse long term, 10+ years) 4. Increased tariffs, currently only a minor negative effect as they haven't increased much or in very many sectors in reality, despite the bluster
If the left-wing economists hadn't predicted the economy and stock market tanking as soon as Trump was elected (with Paul Krugman even famously saying the stock market would never recover, the day after the election), then they might have more of a leg to stand on that the economy was predicted to be fine all along. Instead, they keep estimating future GDP growth and jobs numbers and then having to revise them later in the better-for-Trump direction, which is the opposite of what they did under Obama, when they kept predicting better growth than actually happened.
Yep, most of it is regulatory capture by the industry itself.
That's still not unfettered capitalism. That'd be if we didn't allow the government to have the power to fetter them quite so much, so there was less regulation to capture and less of an ability to prevent competition.
You can describe the wireless industry as a lot of things, but "unfettered capitalism" isn't one of them. Do you have any idea how many rules, regulations and regulators at various levels of government wireless carriers are involved with?
Slashdot Mirror
Other than zero-rating some video (which arguably just benefits their customers), are there any ISPs in CA currently actually doing anything this bill prohibits? If not, then who are they targeting? This seems to essentially be the "limit zero-rating" bill, which just screws over some consumers.
I guess it's another bill in a long tradition of useless legislation which gets passed so some politicians can congratulate themselves on "doing something" about a non-problem, ignoring any costs to society as a result of one more layer of laws and regulations for people to pay lawyers to ensure they're complying with.
Spending your money on hosting a blog, making a movie, purchasing advertising in a magazine/newspaper/billboard, and similar activities all involve "giving someone money". They're also all forms of speech and covered under what is described as freedom of the press in the Constitution.
Money is just a means to facilitate an exchange. As an example, if you exchange your efforts for money, then exchange that money for someone else's efforts to post a billboard, it's just a more efficient way of doing things than if you post the billboard yourself. Money isn't speech, but giving someone else your money in order to sponsor speech or in order to advance your political point of view is certainly speech and political speech, respectively. Just like writing these very words, it's an action you're taking in order to communicate and advance your ideas in the marketplace of ideas.
To pick a less politically charged example of the same principle, you might say "Giving a building contractor money isn't construction! You're not building a house when you do that! They're completely separate things!", yet banning paying someone to build a house is going to result in a lot less houses being built, isn't it?
I appreciate your thoughtful response.
In terms of corporations, if you compare them to any other similar sized group of people (shareholders+employees) who agree on something and want to influence politicians about it, they may benefit from their level of organization, but they don't really have much more in terms of resources than is available elsewhere.
I suppose really what you're seeing is that because the people involved have formed a limited-purpose organization, the effect is more focused/concentrated on the issues which the people involved with the corporation are jointly concerned with, while the effect of a more general mass of people will tend to work more at cross purposes.
Compare corporate influence to the political influence of a political party, though. Or compare to a trade association, or even a mayors or governors association. Heck, compare to the political influence of many charities, unions (some of which are being diminished), the AMA, the ACLU, the media (which also tend to be corporations), etc... There are lots of organizations of people who are able to organize for a common purpose and thus wield more focused political influence for that purpose.
So yeah, all the various special interests can be a problem. The general interests suffer when special interests are allowed to have priority. The only solution I've seen is to disallow the people in government from being allowed to make decisions which benefit special interests. That removes the incentives involved on both sides and is one of the reasons why whenever some group proposes the government start regulating something, you have to watch out, because it's usually only a matter of time before that process is captured by those most interested in the results of it.
Here in the U.S. we have a variety of basic freedoms recognized as things the government hasn't been given the power by the people to take away. Among those basic freedoms are the right to express our political views to other people, even if we want to spend our own money to amplify and express those views, and the right to petition our government officials, i.e. tell them what we want them to do for us.
Lobbyists are people the more organized among us hire to represent their interests in telling politicians what they want. Campaign donations are one of they ways we support the politicians we agree with and help them represent our interests and viewpoints in government.
Please stop advocating for taking away any of our basic liberties. We've been known to be willing to get violent to defend them from people who look like they've been taking them away.
It wasn't an exhaustive search, it was literally the first result and in line with Hatch's level of power in the Senate. It also pretty easily contradicts the "didn't feel obligated to do anything" narrative above, though, doesn't it?
Sure, using support for Democratic politicians as a proxy for leftward lean: "Google employees are spending heavily to elect Democrats in California and to flip the House" and it's not a recent thing, "98% of search engine's employees gave money to Democrats in '04".
For the news sources, see 96 Percent of Google Search Results for 'Trump' News Are from Liberal Media Outlets and then you can confirm for yourself by going to Google News and either looking at their headlines or searching for any politically relevant topic and counting the number of sources they highlight first on the left vs. the right side of the media bias chart, which if anything underestimates sources like CNN which have turned farther left since the election.
I do find it interesting that an obvious flamebait comment literally directed at half the country and which is clearly untrue in at least one particular is currently "insightful", but my reply asking for examples of the claim has been modded down to 0 at this point.
So, no "gay bashing vitriol" in that article....
So, zero examples of "gay bashing vitriol" provided, right?
If you read the link.... as the Senate Finance Chairman, he held up the IRS from giving Equifax a contract and told Equifax to:
There isn't a single "gay bashing" quote from Trump in that article, so I guess you couldn't find any. All the article has is positive quotes from Trump about gays, plus the article author's disagreements with policy decisions by his Administration.
But hey, if you do find a couple of actual quotes, feel free to reply with them. Until then we'll mark you down as yet another TDS sufferer.
Here's the very first google result for https://www.google.com/search?... .
Please attempt an attack line next time which takes more than 5 seconds to totally disprove.
Please provide a couple of examples of Trump's "gay bashing vitriol" which you accuse him of speaking. Curious if you are just clueless, or suffering from TDS, or actually have heard something.
I'm completely against any government censorship of the news, or media at any level. Of course, so is Trump:
That's from a speech from less than a week ago.
Google news isn't biased against Trump nor against right-wing news sources because someone is manually tilting it, it's biased against them because the people at Google are leftist in outlook in general and so they consider left-leaning news sources more "reliable". If the NY Times and the Washington Post and CNN are your gold standards, and your algorithm uses a web of left-leaning sources (academia, government sites) to judge how good a news source is, you're going to end up with news summary which is slanted to the left in terms of what it considers a reliable source.
Read up on marginal cost in economics.
The extra money for being a single Mom isn't the only reason, i.e. it's not sufficient by itself, but it is enough to push many people over the line between getting married and not getting married, and to remove some of the stigma.
So if before someone unmarried were to get pregnant and then say "You need to marry me and help take care of this kid", with extensive government benefits in the mix, they're much more likely than before to say "You're too much trouble, I'll just take what I can get in paternity payments and with food stamps, free health care, section 8 rent and some cash just make do with that."
The implication isn't that people are going to go out and have kids unmarried on purpose just for the benefits all the time, just that it's enough to make a the marginal difference in lots of people's decision-making around getting married, keeping another kid, getting a job or not, etc...
The good news is that mass shootings are down in the U.S. since the 90s and that homicides per capita are at about a 55 year low.
Stuff making the news just increases availability bias and tricks people into thinking it's more common than it actually is.
"An armed society is a polite society."
Anyone with a basic machine shop can make just about any sort of firearm they want.
There are no countries which have banned firearms which don't have any firearms at all as a result.
You can't stop people from getting a gun if they want one. You can only make it more difficult. Unfortunately, the side effect of any of the proposed ways of making it more difficult for someone who will misuse a gun to get one is that you make things more difficult on 99 other law-abiding people with an inherent right recognized in our Constitution to self-defense for every bad guy you inconvenience. In the end, the criminals will have guns because they want them more and don't care about following the law, while the most law-abiding will be disarmed.
Not to mention that it's literally impossible to round up and destroy the existing firearms in the U.S. without causing a civil war where most of the military will be on the side of the other people with the guns.
Don't worry, I'm sure this was a gun free zone, with no firearms allowed, so no one would have had a gun.
That's what the big 5 publishers want you to do, buy a paper book. They're pricing their ebooks to try and keep their paper sales alive.
Indie publishers have much more expensive paper pricing costs and thus price their ebooks based on supply and demand to maximize revenue, so they're typically half or even a third in price of the tradpub books. That's why in most genres they're eating the big 5 publishers alive in ebooks and why Indie ebooks have exploded recently while tradpub ebook sales are declining. Recently, Indie authors combined sell more eBooks than the big 5 publishers combined.
Don't worry, you can always go look at the nominees for the Dragon Awards and find some actual decent Science Fiction. The "Hugh" awards are basically dead, more an indicator of what not to read now, at least if you're an SF fan, rather than a literary SJW.
The four biggest impacts from Trump (And the GOP Congress) on the economy are (in order of impact): .5% of GDP growth per year)
1. Tax cuts, especially the significant cut in corporate taxes, leading companies to return their money/assets from abroad to the U.S. and invest them here instead. Also increases the return on money invested in the U.S., leading to a big impact on economic growth from an increase of investments of 10-15%.
2. Regulatory reforms, slowing down new regulations, expediting others and starting on cutting old ones (estimated to account for over
3. Increased spending, keeping with the recent trends (small crowding out effect on private investment, more than made up for by #1 above, but will be worse long term, 10+ years)
4. Increased tariffs, currently only a minor negative effect as they haven't increased much or in very many sectors in reality, despite the bluster
If the left-wing economists hadn't predicted the economy and stock market tanking as soon as Trump was elected (with Paul Krugman even famously saying the stock market would never recover, the day after the election), then they might have more of a leg to stand on that the economy was predicted to be fine all along. Instead, they keep estimating future GDP growth and jobs numbers and then having to revise them later in the better-for-Trump direction, which is the opposite of what they did under Obama, when they kept predicting better growth than actually happened.
Funny how the summary neglected to put the traditional (D) after Wyden's name, or otherwise indicate which Party he belongs to....
Yep, most of it is regulatory capture by the industry itself.
That's still not unfettered capitalism. That'd be if we didn't allow the government to have the power to fetter them quite so much, so there was less regulation to capture and less of an ability to prevent competition.
You can describe the wireless industry as a lot of things, but "unfettered capitalism" isn't one of them. Do you have any idea how many rules, regulations and regulators at various levels of government wireless carriers are involved with?