If it's a natural monopoly, how come I have four different hard-wired ISP options (Cable, two fiber offerings, one DSL) at my suburban house? Did someone forget to send them all the memo?
It's typically only a monopoly if at some point the government prevented any competition to allow their favored choice to have all the customers. Nothing "natural" about that.
Hence one of the reasons why you don't have the option to buy stuff from Amazon and have it delivered to Norway without using a 3rd party intermediary re-shipper and why consumer prices in United States are 33.77% lower than in Norway.
Why do so many people think that basic consumer protection is some sort of onerous burden?
Because it is. Every regulation tells us what we can't do or what we have to do in order to do business. When you add them up, they're onerous and they prevent people from getting what they want.
Adults aren't little children. We're capable of making decisions based on what the risks are. If you're worried about cheap Chinese products on Amazon, then there is a simple solution, pay attention to the listed Manufacturer and don't buy one! Why the need to use force to prevent the other 250,000 people who want to from buying one?
According to this methodology, the U.S. has more poverty than Mexico does.
Do you really think that passes the smell test? If so, you've never been to Mexico.
Their poverty measurement is based on "half the median household income of the total population" of the country. As a result, the richer a country is, the higher the absolute level of wealth under which someone is considered "poor". So you can be non-poor in one country while living in a dirt floor concrete-walled shack, but "poor" in the U.S. in an air-conditioned apartment with TV and Internet.
Yeah, the people who walk miles carting jugs to get their daily dose of clean water probably feel so sorry for you with your "lifelong student loans, horrible salary" and "money for computers and phones just to stay in society". Consider your personal riches the next time you turn on a faucet with running water.
The Feds only make 18 cents per gallon of gas. Compared to that, the State of CA makes 58 cents a gallon. The gas station (Chevron only owns 5% of their branded stations) makes 3-5 cents a gallon in profit. Chevron makes maybe 10 cents a gallon in profit, assuming they refine the crude and distribute the gas.
So the city should sue themselves and the State of CA first, since they're the ones actually profiting from gasoline sales.
Not a baby boomer, but if the summary given is accurate, this whole book is full of more B.S. than even Piketty was pitching.
Baby boomers aren't much for deregulation and the other statistics given are just as stupid. One example: The U.S. has the third-highest poverty rate? Not in any absolute sense. If you use the World Bank's poverty threshold of $1.90/day PPP, basically nobody in the U.S. is under the poverty rate unless they refuse any help at all from anyone. If you take the U.S. centric threshold of household poverty, then you can be poor in the U.S. and still 2.5 times as rich as the median world household.
Who do you think originally came up with the information taught in those college courses? Hint: It wasn't someone who had taken those college computer courses...
First, this report doesn't match up with other estimates of the changes in temp from following/not following the Paris targets.
Bert Bolin, former chairman of the IPCC, notes that if Kyoto were fully implemented, twenty-five years later the global temperature would be cut “by less than 0.1 degree C, which would not be detectable.” Lomborg estimates that the world climate will increase by 1.92C by 2094 if nothing is done. If Kyoto is fully followed, it will take six more years to reach the same temperature.
Second, for many countries, it's not clear if an increase of 2 degrees is a net positive or negative.
William Cline and William Nordhaus, separately, have estimated the cost of warming of 2.5C (4.5F) to be about 1 percent of the U.S. GDP. Actually, though, Nordhaus calculated the cost at only 0.25 percent and then guessed, on the basis of unmeasured sectors, that the total might be as high as 1 or 2 percent. Interestingly, both Cline and Nordhaus explicitly ignored potential benefits from a warmer climate. Other economists agree that the benefits, at least to the United States and probably to most northern countries, outweigh the costs. Robert Mendelsohn of Yale University and his colleague James Neumann found that, on net, the United States would gain around 0.1–0.2 percent in GDP for the moderate warming (2.5C) likely to occur by 2060.
Third, they use a 3% discount rate for the sutdy, which skews it towards spending more now instead of later. A Typical Discount Rate would be in the 6-12% range.
Interesting you have that impression, because the according to the Obama State Department, there was never a signed written agreement.
See their letter to Congress about it, specifically how the JCPOA "is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document".
Do you have a reference for what was the "written agreement signed by the US Secretary of State in his capacity as official government representative" you're talking about?
What Iran nuclear agreement? Genuinely curious how this is seen outside the United States. Do foreigners not understand that a verbal political commitment with a U.S. President isn't binding on the country, nor on a future President? That this "agreement" wasn't signed by either side, didn't comply with U.S. law to be anything resembling a Treaty, and was described by the Obama State Department as not even being an executive agreement?
So now that we've established you don't care about individuals, nor their rights and that you're only rebuttal is to call people names, I think we're done here. I feel no need to read any further replies from you.
Let me summarize for you why this "news article" is stupid:
Gossip != news
Gates statements != much evidence about Trump
The only reason anyone has even heard about this is because of Gate's accomplishments in areas not related to Trump, nor politics. This is the/. equivalent of actors testifying in front of Congress about medical matters because they played one on TV. Who cares?
No, that's not "inconvenient for society". Society isn't a person, it's an abstract concept. Blowing up my house with me in it is a specific attack on me and my individual rights.
Funny how now that your mott argument of "what customers want" has been defeated, you're retreating to a new bailey argument of "so everyone should be able to buy whatever they want."
Yes, everyone should be able to buy the car they want, free of federal government restrictions. No, they shouldn't be able to indiscriminately kill other people. Buying the car they want doesn't indiscriminately kill other people, regardless of alarmist global warming ideas about fuel economy standards for vehicles. The people in our national government have been granted no power to arbitrarily restrict what kinds of cars people purchase.
Also, the regulations don't restrict the number of internal combustion cars, they just require manufacturers to pay electric car makers and/or give away EVs at a loss (among other options) in order to improve their fleet average.
Source? How about the summary? "Obama-era fuel economy standards." Any of the linked articles?
Raising the CAFE MPG number doesn't relate to air quality. Neither do attempts to limit "greenhouse gasses", which are the emissions changes in the regulations.
Yes, yes it is. See, we have this thing called a "market" and people demonstrate what they want by what they individually decide to spend their own money on. If people didn't want something different, the government wouldn't have to prevent them from being able to buy it.
Fuel efficiency has trade-offs in cars. Many people don't want to make the trade-offs required to eke a tiny bit more MPG from a vehicle. As far as pollution goes, the regulation in question has nothing to do with air quality.
Yes, when the government tells companies they aren't allowed to sell their customers what their customers want in their products, then yeah, they "point the finger".
If the government told Elon Musk that he couldn't sell battery-powered cars unless they had a 2,000 mile range, then yeah, he'd "point the finger" as well.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's a natural monopoly, how come I have four different hard-wired ISP options (Cable, two fiber offerings, one DSL) at my suburban house? Did someone forget to send them all the memo?
It's typically only a monopoly if at some point the government prevented any competition to allow their favored choice to have all the customers. Nothing "natural" about that.
Whatcha smoking? California is losing households as more people move out every year than move in. You may be thinking that people being born and/or importing illegal immigrants are signs of a State being desirable compared to other States, but they aren't.
Right, because a "Tekesy" driver would never shoot a passenger in self-defense.
Hence one of the reasons why you don't have the option to buy stuff from Amazon and have it delivered to Norway without using a 3rd party intermediary re-shipper and why consumer prices in United States are 33.77% lower than in Norway.
Because it is. Every regulation tells us what we can't do or what we have to do in order to do business. When you add them up, they're onerous and they prevent people from getting what they want.
Adults aren't little children. We're capable of making decisions based on what the risks are. If you're worried about cheap Chinese products on Amazon, then there is a simple solution, pay attention to the listed Manufacturer and don't buy one! Why the need to use force to prevent the other 250,000 people who want to from buying one?
According to this methodology, the U.S. has more poverty than Mexico does.
Do you really think that passes the smell test? If so, you've never been to Mexico.
Their poverty measurement is based on "half the median household income of the total population" of the country. As a result, the richer a country is, the higher the absolute level of wealth under which someone is considered "poor". So you can be non-poor in one country while living in a dirt floor concrete-walled shack, but "poor" in the U.S. in an air-conditioned apartment with TV and Internet.
Yeah, the people who walk miles carting jugs to get their daily dose of clean water probably feel so sorry for you with your "lifelong student loans, horrible salary" and "money for computers and phones just to stay in society". Consider your personal riches the next time you turn on a faucet with running water.
You saw the letters PPP, right? Meaning parity in what you can purchase...
The Feds only make 18 cents per gallon of gas. Compared to that, the State of CA makes 58 cents a gallon. The gas station (Chevron only owns 5% of their branded stations) makes 3-5 cents a gallon in profit. Chevron makes maybe 10 cents a gallon in profit, assuming they refine the crude and distribute the gas.
So the city should sue themselves and the State of CA first, since they're the ones actually profiting from gasoline sales.
Not a baby boomer, but if the summary given is accurate, this whole book is full of more B.S. than even Piketty was pitching.
Baby boomers aren't much for deregulation and the other statistics given are just as stupid. One example: The U.S. has the third-highest poverty rate? Not in any absolute sense. If you use the World Bank's poverty threshold of $1.90/day PPP, basically nobody in the U.S. is under the poverty rate unless they refuse any help at all from anyone. If you take the U.S. centric threshold of household poverty, then you can be poor in the U.S. and still 2.5 times as rich as the median world household.
Who do you think originally came up with the information taught in those college courses? Hint: It wasn't someone who had taken those college computer courses...
First, this report doesn't match up with other estimates of the changes in temp from following/not following the Paris targets.
Second, for many countries, it's not clear if an increase of 2 degrees is a net positive or negative.
Third, they use a 3% discount rate for the sutdy, which skews it towards spending more now instead of later. A Typical Discount Rate would be in the 6-12% range.
For more info, read the Encyclopedia of Economics on the topic.
No, the point is that there was no treaty.
Don't sell the domain? Make your own copy of the html documents in question and publish them elsewhere? Publish a copy from the backups you kept?
These are simple solutions which don't require you to rely on a third-party to do stuff for you for free...
Interesting you have that impression, because the according to the Obama State Department, there was never a signed written agreement.
See their letter to Congress about it, specifically how the JCPOA "is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document".
Do you have a reference for what was the "written agreement signed by the US Secretary of State in his capacity as official government representative" you're talking about?
What Iran nuclear agreement? Genuinely curious how this is seen outside the United States. Do foreigners not understand that a verbal political commitment with a U.S. President isn't binding on the country, nor on a future President? That this "agreement" wasn't signed by either side, didn't comply with U.S. law to be anything resembling a Treaty, and was described by the Obama State Department as not even being an executive agreement?
Yes, Pluto is still a planet.
So now that we've established you don't care about individuals, nor their rights and that you're only rebuttal is to call people names, I think we're done here. I feel no need to read any further replies from you.
Let me summarize for you why this "news article" is stupid:
Gossip != news
Gates statements != much evidence about Trump
The only reason anyone has even heard about this is because of Gate's accomplishments in areas not related to Trump, nor politics. This is the /. equivalent of actors testifying in front of Congress about medical matters because they played one on TV. Who cares?
No, that's not "inconvenient for society". Society isn't a person, it's an abstract concept. Blowing up my house with me in it is a specific attack on me and my individual rights.
Funny how now that your mott argument of "what customers want" has been defeated, you're retreating to a new bailey argument of "so everyone should be able to buy whatever they want."
Yes, everyone should be able to buy the car they want, free of federal government restrictions. No, they shouldn't be able to indiscriminately kill other people. Buying the car they want doesn't indiscriminately kill other people, regardless of alarmist global warming ideas about fuel economy standards for vehicles. The people in our national government have been granted no power to arbitrarily restrict what kinds of cars people purchase.
Carbon dioxide != air quality
Also, the regulations don't restrict the number of internal combustion cars, they just require manufacturers to pay electric car makers and/or give away EVs at a loss (among other options) in order to improve their fleet average.
Source? How about the summary? "Obama-era fuel economy standards." Any of the linked articles?
Raising the CAFE MPG number doesn't relate to air quality. Neither do attempts to limit "greenhouse gasses", which are the emissions changes in the regulations.
Yes, yes it is. See, we have this thing called a "market" and people demonstrate what they want by what they individually decide to spend their own money on. If people didn't want something different, the government wouldn't have to prevent them from being able to buy it.
Fuel efficiency has trade-offs in cars. Many people don't want to make the trade-offs required to eke a tiny bit more MPG from a vehicle. As far as pollution goes, the regulation in question has nothing to do with air quality.
You don't even know what the word "cite" means, do you? Here's a hint.
Yes, when the government tells companies they aren't allowed to sell their customers what their customers want in their products, then yeah, they "point the finger".
If the government told Elon Musk that he couldn't sell battery-powered cars unless they had a 2,000 mile range, then yeah, he'd "point the finger" as well.