I've been using, supporting and promoting FreeBSD for decades. Sadly, now that I'm aware of this change to the "Code of Conduct", I no longer can, nor will.
The old Code of Conduct was fine. In contrast, this newer version comes across as taking sides in the culture war for the sake of taking sides and virtue signaling someone's proclamation of who they support.
While looking into where this update came from, I did find this note from a quarterly status report, "Anne Dickison, our Marketing Director, has been overseeing the efforts to rewrite the Project's Code of Conduct to help make this a safe, inclusive, and welcoming community." From what I can tell, she's used her position in the FreeBSD Foundation to push this through. There was no public discussion nor debate on it by the members of the FreeBSD community before the change.
If you look at my pre-NN repeal comments on the subject, I made the point several times that repealing NN doesn't repeal all the other regulations which existed pre-NN (like the one at issue in this case) which were what had solved these kinds of problems before.
Did you even read the second paragraph of the summary? The Judge ruled that it was against current regulations and that the FCC repealing Net Neutrality doesn't affect the regulations this is in violation of.
Did you even read the Judge's ruling? It stated Net Neutrality being repealed didn't matter in terms of if this was against the law or not, because of the other regulations which applied which aren't net neutrality.
If you can't follow the logic, at least try and keep from making a fool of yourself about it.
Wow, it's almost like the FCC repeal of Net Neutrality rules didn't end the Internet, nor enforcement of stuff like this. Amazing, wonder who might have predicted that outcome?
FreeBSD already has Linux binary compatibility, but that's helped a lot by the fact that the FreeBSD team has access to the source and can even re-use some of the code if they want.
So if you want similar functionality for MS Windows, a big step would be having a copy of the code to build it from, but not 100% necessary. There is a lot of API documentation out there, so as Microsoft forces programs to actually use documented features and not take shortcuts (currently in the name of security), it's likely to be more feasible to just drop in an executable and have it run.
It would be a good secret project for someone like Dell to try, in order to announce one day that they are switching all their computer sales and their new OS was windows compatible with software. It would only save them $25/computer and they may have some legal expenses as a result, so they may not see it as worthwhile.
It turns out this 'officially' the 18th mass shooting this year
I'm not saying you aren't sincere in what you've heard, but it's also difficult to have a sensible conversation when one side is constantly spreading lies and propaganda. There haven't been 18 shootings this year, unless you count things like an accidental discharge from a cop's pistol which hurt no one.
According to the article: 1. He wasn't planning on making a profit on them. He was going to sell them for a nominal cost. 2. He never actually sold any of them. They were intercepted by customs before he ever even got the disks. 3. He runs a massive computer recycling business. Ordering a set of disks from China and selling them to his recycling customers is the equiv. of what you're saying, it's just scaled up to match the scale of the number of computers and customers he deals with. His goal was primarily to make it easier for his customers to recycle Dell computers.
The best solution for these type of used computers is to simply restore Windows yourself
So let's say you know someone who is recycling used computers with valid OEM licenses and following this exact process and you need the Windows OEM install media to restore windows on the machine. Now, you can go to Dell's web site and download and burn one for free, or you have a friend who has done that already and he gives you a copy of it for you to use.
Should your friend in that situation then go to jail for giving you a copy to use to restore the computer with a valid license with? 'Cause that's what this case is about.
It's easier to make the argument that "If the pro-gun lobby was a little more powerful, those kids would be alive." as not only do more guns = less crime, but if the anti-gun lobby hadn't convinced the Feds to prohibit guns at schools, maybe a teacher would have been close enough and armed to stop the shooter before he shot so many people. There weren't nearly this many school shootings before guns were illegal on campus. If the government is going make some place a "gun-free" zone, then they need to be more responsible for keeping people safe there. Instead, they just create a "no defenders allowed" zone.
The massive mortgage interest deduction cut the g'parent is referring to is that instead of only being able to deduct interest on the first million dollars of your mortgage, if you buy a new house (so doesn't apply to a home you already owned), you can only deduct the interest on the first $750K of your mortgage.
Suffice it to say, the group of people that change applies to is tiny and those same people all got a bigger tax cut in other ways than this change will ever cost them.
First, my links included both spending and revenue over time. Your comment makes no sense in that regard. Can't you do the simple math to get the deficit at the time? If not, the same site has a link in the menu to produce a deficit graph for you. This isn't difficult.
Second, You appear to be confusing income tax rates with revenue. The two aren't the same thing.
Third, you seem to believe DNC propaganda about the recent tax bill. It lowered taxes for 80% of people from what they would have had to pay. It will continue to benefit everyone as long as the Democrats in the Senate don't manage to block making permanent the portions which currently expire, which is what the GOP has proposed and would have included in the first place, except they couldn't convince enough Democratic Senators to vote for it to get past the 60 vote cloture threshold.
You seem to have missed the part where spending constantly increases. It's not like they're saying "we really need to spend this much now, but we're not going to increase it any more than is needed to cover more people and inflation."
But you're right about one thing, there aren't enough people in the United States who actually want the federal government to stop spending more and even level out the spending to convince the politicians to do that. That's the only thing that makes any part of the spending "untouchable".
We don't measure the cost of anything else based on how much our overall economy has grown, why is that uniquely relevant to how much government costs us?
It makes sense to spend more if we have more people. It makes sense to adjust for inflation, because things cost more in general. So the measurement is Per capita, i.e. per person, in constant dollars, i.e. adjusted for inflation.
Congress controls the budget. When there is a Republican President and a Democratic Congress, Congress spends more, but they work with the President to fund some of his priorities.
When there is a match between Congress and the President's party, they spend more.
So a more accurate statement would be that Democrats always spend more. Republicans also spend more, except when there is a Democratic Party President.
Oh, and it's completely a spending problem. Revenue (i.e. taxes) per capita in constant dollars has also increased 3x over the last 60 years and is at record highs, despite the occasional dip based primarily on how the economy is doing and tax law changes. It's just that as much as the federal government has increased tax revenue over the years, Congress has managed to spend even more. So let's work on cutting the spending, or at least slowing down the growth!
The headline is a lie. The Trump Administration hasn't proposed firing anyone. If you look at the story this story is based on, it says "248 forecasting positions". Reading further, the agency currently has more open forecasting positions than that. So basically, if this 5% cut to their budget was fully implemented, they simply wouldn't get to hire as many new people. Oh, the drama!!!
You're worried about where the cuts will happen? Let's read the underlying WP article some more and see if we can figure out how they decided that:
Its justification is the 2016 Weather Service Operations and Workforce Analysis that found “there is a mismatch in some areas [of the Weather Service] between workforce and workload” and “that the current distribution of staff across the country can evolve.”
Oh, you mean they did a study back when Obama was President and looked at where stuff could get streamlined and realigned and are basing this budget proposal on that? How sinister!!!
This is much ado about nothing. The only travesty here is that they aren't proposing to cut more. Why, this proposal will take the NWS almost back down to the budget level they had in 2015, when they couldn't get anything at all done!!!
It's a well-known argument that if you decide to define the relevant market small enough, you can come up with a monopoly anywhere. For example, virtually everyone is a monopoly supplier of their specific exact set of skills and life experience.
What's relevant to economic analysis are monopolies in markets people are actually seeking to purchase in, defined by the boundaries of complementary and substitutable goods. The "desktop OS" market is already too limited for that. "Enterprise laptops and desktops" shrinks it even further. Even then, both are still not monopolized by Microsoft, as alternatives exist and are actually purchased by enterprises.
Defining a market as the market for Microsoft products, then saying Microsoft has a monopoly in that market isn't a real monopoly, but that's where you're headed with your constantly shrinking definition of the market for operating systems. Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on operating systems, sorry.
In terms of competitive pricing and monopolistic pricing, what you really mean are competitive pricing and profit-maximizing pricing. i.e. the theory is that a monopoly can increase their price until it maximizes profits, rather than having to meet competitor's prices.
The flaw in attempting to argue Microsoft is able to move all the way to a profit-maximizing price is two-fold: 1. Microsoft's PC OS division revenues dropped $4 billion/year (down ~25%) during the windows Vista and 8 debacle from 2010-2015. Obviously their product quality level significantly impacted their ability to sell their product. That trend continued with windows 10, with them being forced to move away from the default mobile tiled/layout and actually cater to the desktop market, more evidence they have to respond to consumer wishes because consumers have alternatives. 2. Microsoft went so far as to give away their new product (Windows 10) as a free upgrade for years. If you think "free" is the profit-maximizing price level rather than closer a competitive price level, well... you're wrong. Is "free" monopoly pricing? If Microsoft could get away with profit maximizing price levels because their customers didn't have alternatives, they'd be pricing a lot higher than they are. Instead, they charge what they can without driving customers to competing products, the definition of a competitive price. They can charge more sometimes because of more perceived customer benefits from running MS Windows over alternatives, not because of a monopoly.
So what you're saying is that you just keep narrowing your definition of the market Microsoft supposedly has a monopoly on until you can try and make a case for it.
Guess what, Microsoft doesn't control the price there either, because alternatives exist (and are used). Yeah, most companies have sunk costs and other considerations for wanting to stay Windows if it's not too expensive, but if Microsoft started charging $1000 per MS Windows license, almost every company would switch to an alternative (and here's the key point) rather than just stop using a laptop/desktop, because alternatives do exist. Plenty of large enterprises actually offer non-MS options for employees who prefer them.
So Microsoft doesn't control the pricing, they have to take into account what their customers are willing to pay without them going to the competition instead.
And I don't need to "find" an economist, I just need to look in the mirror to see one. Your desperation in losing this debate is showing....
So you're saying Microsoft controls the prices of all desktop operating systems? Funny, it seems like they only determine their own product price, like every other non-monopoly. Otherwise, it seems Mac OS X. Linux, etc... would have different pricing. Try again.
You actually think we need to force everyone who styles hair to spend $12,000 on 1,000 hours of classes in order to reduce the the amount of burnt hair from curlers? It's not that complicated.
How about if a hair stylist burns people's hair, people just grow the hair back out and tell their friends to stop using that particular hair stylist? Seems like a much smaller waste of time and money.
Yeah, this reminds me of arguments about online vs. local sales tax. Why not argue for removing the local sales tax in order to compete better, rather than arguing for taxing the online purchases?
In regards to what is defined as a monopoly, I gave you a link to a dictionary. Please provide some evidence or link to something which shows the word monopoly means something different. Otherwise, you're just talking about your own personal definition, which may mean something to you, or some obscure some-people-use-it-this-way definition, but it isn't what the rest of the world typically means by the word. You talk about monopoly price, but again, the linked source states explicitly "A monopoly price is set by a monopoly. A monopoly occurs when a firm is the only firm in an industry producing the product, such that the monopoly faces no competition."
To answer your second question, yes, I'd prefer the opportunity for legal electrical distribution competition. That way if it makes financial sense for two market participants to make an electrical distribution deal, they legally can, while if it doesn't benefit them, they don't have to. It's called freedom. If it's truly a natural monopoly, then we'll be right where we are with the regulators preventing it, but with the bonus that if they try to make too many monopoly profits, or their customer service sucks too bad, or whatever the issue becomes, someone can decide it's worth competing with them. If it's not a natural monopoly (and in at least some cases, it's not, like where someone puts in a local solar or gas plant to serve a specific need and wants to sell the excess to their neighbors), then people will benefit. What's wrong with consenting adults making market decisions about what they want for themselves?
Microsoft has a monopoly in enterprise desktop computing. It isn't a 100% market share, but it's enough.
If it isn't 100% market share, if it's not exclusive, if there is more than one place you can get it, then by definition it's not a monopoly. You may need to revise your terms to be clearer about what you mean, as the word monopoly has a specific definition. Perhaps you mean something like "market leader", instead?
In terms of being granted a distribution monopoly, you can get a legal overview here, but while the process varies a little from State to State and the Feds get involved if it goes interstate, you can't compete in the market because the Public Utility Commission (PUC) in the State must permit your actions first and they set your prices for you. While some PUCs allow competition in generation, AFAIK, none allow actual competition in distribution.
I'm sure T-Mobile will use some weasel words in their terms on conditions to say they aren't responsible for anything beyond the lost wireless service time.
The thing which will argue against that is in your example of the security guard only able to lose his job, to better fit the circumstances the security guard would have agreed to require a secret code (say, a PIN) to validate visitors and instead he told the burglars to come right in, no code required, let me open the door for you. That may still get him in trouble as an accessory, because at that point he's actively assisting the criminals against what he agreed to do as his job.
T-Mobile, as represented by their employees, took a proactive measure to assist the criminals in violation of what they had agreed with the customer to do. Damages directly attributable to that action have a decent shot at an equitable remedy where T-Mobile has to make the guy whole, i.e. pay for his losses.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using, supporting and promoting FreeBSD for decades. Sadly, now that I'm aware of this change to the "Code of Conduct", I no longer can, nor will.
The old Code of Conduct was fine. In contrast, this newer version comes across as taking sides in the culture war for the sake of taking sides and virtue signaling someone's proclamation of who they support.
While looking into where this update came from, I did find this note from a quarterly status report, "Anne Dickison, our Marketing Director, has been overseeing the efforts to rewrite the Project's Code of Conduct to help make this a safe, inclusive, and welcoming community." From what I can tell, she's used her position in the FreeBSD Foundation to push this through. There was no public discussion nor debate on it by the members of the FreeBSD community before the change.
Fortunately, there are other *BSDs out there.
If you look at my pre-NN repeal comments on the subject, I made the point several times that repealing NN doesn't repeal all the other regulations which existed pre-NN (like the one at issue in this case) which were what had solved these kinds of problems before.
Did you even read the second paragraph of the summary? The Judge ruled that it was against current regulations and that the FCC repealing Net Neutrality doesn't affect the regulations this is in violation of.
Did you even read the Judge's ruling? It stated Net Neutrality being repealed didn't matter in terms of if this was against the law or not, because of the other regulations which applied which aren't net neutrality.
If you can't follow the logic, at least try and keep from making a fool of yourself about it.
Wow, it's almost like the FCC repeal of Net Neutrality rules didn't end the Internet, nor enforcement of stuff like this. Amazing, wonder who might have predicted that outcome?
FreeBSD already has Linux binary compatibility, but that's helped a lot by the fact that the FreeBSD team has access to the source and can even re-use some of the code if they want.
So if you want similar functionality for MS Windows, a big step would be having a copy of the code to build it from, but not 100% necessary. There is a lot of API documentation out there, so as Microsoft forces programs to actually use documented features and not take shortcuts (currently in the name of security), it's likely to be more feasible to just drop in an executable and have it run.
It would be a good secret project for someone like Dell to try, in order to announce one day that they are switching all their computer sales and their new OS was windows compatible with software. It would only save them $25/computer and they may have some legal expenses as a result, so they may not see it as worthwhile.
I'm not saying you aren't sincere in what you've heard, but it's also difficult to have a sensible conversation when one side is constantly spreading lies and propaganda. There haven't been 18 shootings this year, unless you count things like an accidental discharge from a cop's pistol which hurt no one.
The reality is that the U.S. Homicide rate is at a 51-year low, gun homicides are down 49% in the last 20 years and gun crime has also been cut in half over the last 20 years.
According to the article:
1. He wasn't planning on making a profit on them. He was going to sell them for a nominal cost.
2. He never actually sold any of them. They were intercepted by customs before he ever even got the disks.
3. He runs a massive computer recycling business. Ordering a set of disks from China and selling them to his recycling customers is the equiv. of what you're saying, it's just scaled up to match the scale of the number of computers and customers he deals with. His goal was primarily to make it easier for his customers to recycle Dell computers.
So let's say you know someone who is recycling used computers with valid OEM licenses and following this exact process and you need the Windows OEM install media to restore windows on the machine. Now, you can go to Dell's web site and download and burn one for free, or you have a friend who has done that already and he gives you a copy of it for you to use.
Should your friend in that situation then go to jail for giving you a copy to use to restore the computer with a valid license with? 'Cause that's what this case is about.
It's easier to make the argument that "If the pro-gun lobby was a little more powerful, those kids would be alive." as not only do more guns = less crime, but if the anti-gun lobby hadn't convinced the Feds to prohibit guns at schools, maybe a teacher would have been close enough and armed to stop the shooter before he shot so many people. There weren't nearly this many school shootings before guns were illegal on campus. If the government is going make some place a "gun-free" zone, then they need to be more responsible for keeping people safe there. Instead, they just create a "no defenders allowed" zone.
The massive mortgage interest deduction cut the g'parent is referring to is that instead of only being able to deduct interest on the first million dollars of your mortgage, if you buy a new house (so doesn't apply to a home you already owned), you can only deduct the interest on the first $750K of your mortgage.
Suffice it to say, the group of people that change applies to is tiny and those same people all got a bigger tax cut in other ways than this change will ever cost them.
First, my links included both spending and revenue over time. Your comment makes no sense in that regard. Can't you do the simple math to get the deficit at the time? If not, the same site has a link in the menu to produce a deficit graph for you. This isn't difficult.
Second, You appear to be confusing income tax rates with revenue. The two aren't the same thing.
Third, you seem to believe DNC propaganda about the recent tax bill. It lowered taxes for 80% of people from what they would have had to pay. It will continue to benefit everyone as long as the Democrats in the Senate don't manage to block making permanent the portions which currently expire, which is what the GOP has proposed and would have included in the first place, except they couldn't convince enough Democratic Senators to vote for it to get past the 60 vote cloture threshold.
You seem to have missed the part where spending constantly increases. It's not like they're saying "we really need to spend this much now, but we're not going to increase it any more than is needed to cover more people and inflation."
But you're right about one thing, there aren't enough people in the United States who actually want the federal government to stop spending more and even level out the spending to convince the politicians to do that. That's the only thing that makes any part of the spending "untouchable".
We don't measure the cost of anything else based on how much our overall economy has grown, why is that uniquely relevant to how much government costs us?
It makes sense to spend more if we have more people. It makes sense to adjust for inflation, because things cost more in general. So the measurement is Per capita, i.e. per person, in constant dollars, i.e. adjusted for inflation.
Here's federal government spending per capita in constant dollars. You'll notice it only levels out or decreases when there is a Republican Congress and a Democratic President.
Congress controls the budget. When there is a Republican President and a Democratic Congress, Congress spends more, but they work with the President to fund some of his priorities.
When there is a match between Congress and the President's party, they spend more.
So a more accurate statement would be that Democrats always spend more. Republicans also spend more, except when there is a Democratic Party President.
Oh, and it's completely a spending problem. Revenue (i.e. taxes) per capita in constant dollars has also increased 3x over the last 60 years and is at record highs, despite the occasional dip based primarily on how the economy is doing and tax law changes. It's just that as much as the federal government has increased tax revenue over the years, Congress has managed to spend even more. So let's work on cutting the spending, or at least slowing down the growth!
The headline is a lie. The Trump Administration hasn't proposed firing anyone. If you look at the story this story is based on, it says "248 forecasting positions". Reading further, the agency currently has more open forecasting positions than that. So basically, if this 5% cut to their budget was fully implemented, they simply wouldn't get to hire as many new people. Oh, the drama!!!
You're worried about where the cuts will happen? Let's read the underlying WP article some more and see if we can figure out how they decided that:
Oh, you mean they did a study back when Obama was President and looked at where stuff could get streamlined and realigned and are basing this budget proposal on that? How sinister!!!
This is much ado about nothing. The only travesty here is that they aren't proposing to cut more. Why, this proposal will take the NWS almost back down to the budget level they had in 2015, when they couldn't get anything at all done!!!
It's a well-known argument that if you decide to define the relevant market small enough, you can come up with a monopoly anywhere. For example, virtually everyone is a monopoly supplier of their specific exact set of skills and life experience.
What's relevant to economic analysis are monopolies in markets people are actually seeking to purchase in, defined by the boundaries of complementary and substitutable goods. The "desktop OS" market is already too limited for that. "Enterprise laptops and desktops" shrinks it even further. Even then, both are still not monopolized by Microsoft, as alternatives exist and are actually purchased by enterprises.
Defining a market as the market for Microsoft products, then saying Microsoft has a monopoly in that market isn't a real monopoly, but that's where you're headed with your constantly shrinking definition of the market for operating systems. Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on operating systems, sorry.
In terms of competitive pricing and monopolistic pricing, what you really mean are competitive pricing and profit-maximizing pricing. i.e. the theory is that a monopoly can increase their price until it maximizes profits, rather than having to meet competitor's prices.
The flaw in attempting to argue Microsoft is able to move all the way to a profit-maximizing price is two-fold:
1. Microsoft's PC OS division revenues dropped $4 billion/year (down ~25%) during the windows Vista and 8 debacle from 2010-2015. Obviously their product quality level significantly impacted their ability to sell their product. That trend continued with windows 10, with them being forced to move away from the default mobile tiled/layout and actually cater to the desktop market, more evidence they have to respond to consumer wishes because consumers have alternatives.
2. Microsoft went so far as to give away their new product (Windows 10) as a free upgrade for years. If you think "free" is the profit-maximizing price level rather than closer a competitive price level, well... you're wrong. Is "free" monopoly pricing? If Microsoft could get away with profit maximizing price levels because their customers didn't have alternatives, they'd be pricing a lot higher than they are. Instead, they charge what they can without driving customers to competing products, the definition of a competitive price. They can charge more sometimes because of more perceived customer benefits from running MS Windows over alternatives, not because of a monopoly.
So what you're saying is that you just keep narrowing your definition of the market Microsoft supposedly has a monopoly on until you can try and make a case for it.
Guess what, Microsoft doesn't control the price there either, because alternatives exist (and are used). Yeah, most companies have sunk costs and other considerations for wanting to stay Windows if it's not too expensive, but if Microsoft started charging $1000 per MS Windows license, almost every company would switch to an alternative (and here's the key point) rather than just stop using a laptop/desktop, because alternatives do exist. Plenty of large enterprises actually offer non-MS options for employees who prefer them.
So Microsoft doesn't control the pricing, they have to take into account what their customers are willing to pay without them going to the competition instead.
And I don't need to "find" an economist, I just need to look in the mirror to see one. Your desperation in losing this debate is showing....
So you're saying Microsoft controls the prices of all desktop operating systems? Funny, it seems like they only determine their own product price, like every other non-monopoly. Otherwise, it seems Mac OS X. Linux, etc... would have different pricing. Try again.
So head lice is such a health threat that a hair stylist license requires more time and training than a paramedic's license?
Sorry, any random Mom can pick up on head lice on someone's head.
You actually think we need to force everyone who styles hair to spend $12,000 on 1,000 hours of classes in order to reduce the the amount of burnt hair from curlers? It's not that complicated.
How about if a hair stylist burns people's hair, people just grow the hair back out and tell their friends to stop using that particular hair stylist? Seems like a much smaller waste of time and money.
Yeah, this reminds me of arguments about online vs. local sales tax. Why not argue for removing the local sales tax in order to compete better, rather than arguing for taxing the online purchases?
Because some group of people get paid as a result. "The knowledge" is just another example of a group of people trying to limit their competition with artificial legal barriers. But hey, we're making some progress. Just think, soon people in Arizona may be legally able to wash or blow dry someone's hair without spending $12,000 and 1,000 hours in school to get a license from the State in order to reduce competition for licensed hair stylists.
In regards to what is defined as a monopoly, I gave you a link to a dictionary. Please provide some evidence or link to something which shows the word monopoly means something different. Otherwise, you're just talking about your own personal definition, which may mean something to you, or some obscure some-people-use-it-this-way definition, but it isn't what the rest of the world typically means by the word. You talk about monopoly price, but again, the linked source states explicitly "A monopoly price is set by a monopoly. A monopoly occurs when a firm is the only firm in an industry producing the product, such that the monopoly faces no competition."
To answer your second question, yes, I'd prefer the opportunity for legal electrical distribution competition. That way if it makes financial sense for two market participants to make an electrical distribution deal, they legally can, while if it doesn't benefit them, they don't have to. It's called freedom. If it's truly a natural monopoly, then we'll be right where we are with the regulators preventing it, but with the bonus that if they try to make too many monopoly profits, or their customer service sucks too bad, or whatever the issue becomes, someone can decide it's worth competing with them. If it's not a natural monopoly (and in at least some cases, it's not, like where someone puts in a local solar or gas plant to serve a specific need and wants to sell the excess to their neighbors), then people will benefit. What's wrong with consenting adults making market decisions about what they want for themselves?
If it isn't 100% market share, if it's not exclusive, if there is more than one place you can get it, then by definition it's not a monopoly. You may need to revise your terms to be clearer about what you mean, as the word monopoly has a specific definition. Perhaps you mean something like "market leader", instead?
In terms of being granted a distribution monopoly, you can get a legal overview here, but while the process varies a little from State to State and the Feds get involved if it goes interstate, you can't compete in the market because the Public Utility Commission (PUC) in the State must permit your actions first and they set your prices for you. While some PUCs allow competition in generation, AFAIK, none allow actual competition in distribution.
I'm sure T-Mobile will use some weasel words in their terms on conditions to say they aren't responsible for anything beyond the lost wireless service time.
The thing which will argue against that is in your example of the security guard only able to lose his job, to better fit the circumstances the security guard would have agreed to require a secret code (say, a PIN) to validate visitors and instead he told the burglars to come right in, no code required, let me open the door for you. That may still get him in trouble as an accessory, because at that point he's actively assisting the criminals against what he agreed to do as his job.
T-Mobile, as represented by their employees, took a proactive measure to assist the criminals in violation of what they had agreed with the customer to do. Damages directly attributable to that action have a decent shot at an equitable remedy where T-Mobile has to make the guy whole, i.e. pay for his losses.