The draft from the EPA addresses all of that. I'd encourage you to read it.
In short, even IF CO2 is a pollutant (and the statue defines terminology in ways that make that questionable), the law specifies the ways in which pollutants are to be regulated.
Obama's regulation acted outside of the ways the law provides for regulation of pollution.
The Clean Power Plan, when compared against the law on the books, was clearly illegal from the beginning.
If a president doesn't have the backing of the rest of the country, well maybe that's good or bad on any particular issue, but it's reality. He can't legally just dictate policy on his own.
What happens if the president can't convince the country to back him on something good? Then he has to try harder to convince them.
(And maybe, just maybe, he might want to reconsider his own position in the process if he finds himself so out of touch with the general perception)
There were no requirements build into the Paris Agreement, which is partly why it was such a bad deal.
Had there been requirements, Obama would have had to get the rest of the country involved to agree to the requirements. He didn't want to bother speaking for the entire United States, or even the entire US government, so they left out any requirement.
The Paris Agreement was largely a request that countries around the world make up goals for themselves and then write the goals down.
So yeah, the whole thing was a joke, more of a vision board exercise than anything substantial.
No, it's not a punishment to not receive special treatment.
It means one has to sink or swim on his own without the scales tipped in his favor. It turns out society has other things to spend money on, and giving handouts to solar companies isn't the best way to go about making policy decisions.
Coal is dying. Let it die. We don't need to divert society's resources into making sure the inevitable happens: it's already inevitable.
So the Trump administration isn't going to illegally punish those who would have been hurt under the CPP, the ones who brought suit to prevent those penalties and were making a successful case that they couldn't have those burdens imposed on them without at least legal authority.
Just because this administration isn't going to punish one group doesn't mean it's going to punish a different one.
They key is that it wasn't a consequence of their words.
All too often lately there's been this sense that words are magic, that they carry their own power to manipulate and control the world.
We need to always keep fact in mind. Here we'd remember that words are mere symbols without power or meaning except for that projected by the interpreter.
Someone hearing the words "Kill yourself!" first has to attach that meaning to those words before deciding in his own mind to act. They aren't the words that caused the killing, but the victim's own decisionmaking process.
Congress cannot give agencies blank checks to do whatever they want. Yes, they can direct that agencies fill in the details of policies, but the policies have to originate in congressional action, passed by law. The granting of discretion has been abused, but even so it's not unlimited.
Regulators are required to show that their actions are the result of legal mandates. They have to show that they were, in one way or another, ordered to come up with the regulation that they propose.
If an agency is going back and forth on a regulation, it's a sign to the courts that the agency is operating outside of law, and the regulation may be found to be void.
In this case they're not undoing the Network Neutrality provisions just because they want to, but because they can show that they have a mandate by law to correct the error committed by the previous commission. If they can't rationally demonstrate that, then the action will be struck down.
Slashdot needs to give its readers more context in these posts about regulation feedback. Specifically, it needs to emphasize that in the US regulatory process, this comment phase is not voting. The numbers don't really enter into it.
The regulator has to address issues raised in comments, but that's about counting issues, not comments. An issue with one comment is to be addressed just as an issue brought up by a thousand comments.
The FCC is subject to the laws our representatives pass. THAT's where we give the marching orders. This regulatory process is only about seeing to it that the commission implements the laws handed to it.
So where's the data? Well, the FCC has provided it openly and publicly. Anyone who doesn't see the data isn't looking for it, and I'd include both this senator and reporting about his remarks in it. Certainly, we should be suspicious of any news source highlighting this senator's lack of awareness without also covering the other senator's familiarity with the data.
When you watch the video of the exchange, Markey was being given data he was asking for. He just ignored it.
Markey says there's no data that Network Neutrality hurts investment, while Pai responds by pointing to the data saying it does. Markey doesn't do anything to say why he'd ignore the facts Pai is bringing out; he simply restates that it doesn't exist.
Elsewhere in the hearing another senator runs with the data provided by the FCC, pointing out that analysis shows broadband investment was harmed by the Open Internet Order while identifying issues with the NYT analysis saying otherwise.
We need to be clear here that Markey was ignoring information that didn't suit his conclusion. He was cherrypicking.
And elsewhere in the hearing was a senator emphatically SUPPORTING the FCC justification. Slashdot could have mentioned both sides of this issue, but instead seems to cherrypick the side it prefers.
In fact, the senator bringing analysis showing a decrease in broadband investment following the Open Internet Order goes farther, not only bringing a counter claim but also showing where the other analysis went awry. This is supportive of the FCC's position that there is a real cost to micromanaging internet service providers, as used to be the bipartisan consensus.
If you read the FCC's proposal, which I'll link below, you'll see that it's about getting the FCC out of micromanaging the Internet itself while promoting stronger privacy protections for consumers.
Quoting from the proposal: Historically, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) protected the privacy of broadband consumers, policing every online company’s privacy practices consistently and initiating numerous enforcement actions. When the Commission reclassified broadband Internet access service as a common carriage telecommunications service in 2015, however, that action stripped FTC authority over Internet service providers because the FTC is prohibited from regulating common carriers.
We propose to return jurisdiction over Internet service providers’ privacy practices to the FTC, with its decades of experience and expertise in this area.
In the US the notice and comment process isn't about voting or voicing opinion. It's about identifying specific concerns and then making sure they've been accounted for in finalized regulations.
Since this isn't a voting process, giving more people time to comment is not a relevant goal.
In short, since the notice and consent process is about identifying problems, it doesn't matter whether one person or one thousand bring up an issue. It's still only one issue. If a thousand people mention the one issue, then it's only a waste of resources as workers have to sort through and identify the duplicate comments.
All in all, the FCC is on the right side here, and the special interests trying to make political hay out of the formal process are at best misleading the public.
I really wish more Americans knew how these elements of their government actually worked.
That internet access has become necessary to function in our modern world would be quite the surprise to people I know who function in our modern world without bothering with internet access.
We really need to avoid accepting that claim as true, both because it's simply not, and because it's a bit self-fulfilling: if we accept it as true that internet access is necessary, then it pushes toward people and companies assuming that there is internet access, leading to it becoming harder to function without.
Kind of like how people are "forced" to give their money to AT&T in the form of payments for services? Or "forced" to use phones compatible with AT&T's networks?
Give me a break.
Arbitration is just another form of using neutral third parties to settle disputes, one that can be less expensive and more practical than resorting to US courts, so these contracts specify that means of settling any disagreements that come up.
It's just a feature of the service AT&T is offering here, and customers can take it or leave it.
The problem with your perspective here is the impossibility of identifying the one "with all the money."
Businesses have all the money? No, they try to serve customers who have all the money. But wait, they work to get money, so I guess it's employers who have all the money? Hm, no, employers are just businesses, who are serving customers, who I guess have all the money.... and on around.
In reality nobody "has all the money" but instead the exchange of money shows how we work for each other to mutual benefit. We each set prices for the money and labor that we hold by placing a value on it that seems right to each of us individually.
Much of this criticism was actually covered in the paper. The complaints therefore seem overblown.
For example, here's footnote 14: "The Seattle Minimum Wage Study surveyed over 500 Seattle business owners immediately before and a year after the Ordinance went into effect. In April 2015, multi-site employers were more likely to report intentions to reduce hours of their minimum wage employees (34% versus 24%) and more likely to report intentions to reduce employment (33% versus 26%). A one-year follow-up survey revealed that multi location employers were more likely to report an actual reduction in full-time and part-time employees, with over half of multi-site respondents reporting a reduction in full-time employment (52%, against 45% for single-site firms)."
The paper excluded chain locations for a few reasons, including the issues of an employer with one foot in and one foot out of the affected region, but generally concludes that with reasons to suspect both effects on the exclusion of chains, "Our employment results may therefore be biased towards zero."
Remember, the rules that were recently rolled back were themselves a rollback of previous privacy protections that were arguably much better.
The FCC and FTC are in the process now of restoring the privacy regulations dismantled over the past few years.
Yes, it's unfortunate that this has gotten so complicated, such a story of double and triple negatives. In short, though, Congress and the president worked to undo the previous undoing of privacy rules. It's part of an effort to make internet privacy regulations stronger, not weaker.
The workers and their employers think there is more productivity. Since they're the ones with skin in the game here, I'm happy to defer to their judgments.
Remember, from this polling it is exactly productivity that is leading them to prefer work over vacation. The workers want to get stuff done so they don't fall behind on vacation, and they want to show their employers that they're being productive.
It's all well and good to recognize that sometimes vacation leads to higher productivity, but that's not always the case. Employers and workers have a common interest here of finding the balance between work and vacation that leads to productivity, so let's let them find it.
It's important to be careful with accounting as all too often reports can be skewed by hiding funny math in accounting assumptions.
Here, for example, it's not actually a cost that vacation isn't taken. If the worker didn't value the vacation time enough to take it, then it didn't have value in the first place, and seeing the worker let it go is really just a reflection of the lack of value.
It's like a person declining an offer of dog food because he doesn't have a dog: that's not a cost; it's a lack of benefit.
The substantial difference is on the other side of the ledger, though. Workers who work more provide value to society, making more food, providing more customer service, and building more cars for the rest of us. There is no cost to a worker not taking vacation, but there IS a benefit to a worker who's more productive because he stays on the job.
It needs to be emphasized: this is not a voting process.
In the US regulatory process, a regulator like the FCC is bound to follow the laws passed by our representatives in Congress. Once the chambers pass a bill, that's the end of the vote counting, and the rest is implementing the legislation as passed.
At this point in the regulatory process, a regulator is to address concerns that are brought up regardless of how many people voice each concern. It doesn't really matter whether five people or five hundred bring up a concern: it's still just one concern.
Sure, it's a bad thing that peoples names were false attached to these comments. It bears some investigation. But let's be clear that since this isn't voting, it's not like the scheme will have screwed up a vote. The outcome will be just as legitimate even if everyone submitting duplicate comments--honest or not--wasted federal resources in deduplicating them.
Netflix wanted to make its money by shoving too much through their end of the pipe (well, through the peering partner), more than the pipe they purchased could handle. It's not Comcast's fault that Netflix was overloading the pipe, and as a non-Netflix subscriber I wouldn't want Comcast spending too much money to upgrade Netflix's end of the pipe.
Slashdot Mirror
The draft from the EPA addresses all of that. I'd encourage you to read it.
In short, even IF CO2 is a pollutant (and the statue defines terminology in ways that make that questionable), the law specifies the ways in which pollutants are to be regulated.
Obama's regulation acted outside of the ways the law provides for regulation of pollution.
The Clean Power Plan, when compared against the law on the books, was clearly illegal from the beginning.
Bingo.
If a president doesn't have the backing of the rest of the country, well maybe that's good or bad on any particular issue, but it's reality. He can't legally just dictate policy on his own.
What happens if the president can't convince the country to back him on something good? Then he has to try harder to convince them.
(And maybe, just maybe, he might want to reconsider his own position in the process if he finds himself so out of touch with the general perception)
There were no requirements build into the Paris Agreement, which is partly why it was such a bad deal.
Had there been requirements, Obama would have had to get the rest of the country involved to agree to the requirements. He didn't want to bother speaking for the entire United States, or even the entire US government, so they left out any requirement.
The Paris Agreement was largely a request that countries around the world make up goals for themselves and then write the goals down.
So yeah, the whole thing was a joke, more of a vision board exercise than anything substantial.
Not much.
Mainly they get to keep some of the money they earn by providing goods and services to consumers, just like everyone else, which is hardly a subsidy.
No, it's not a punishment to not receive special treatment.
It means one has to sink or swim on his own without the scales tipped in his favor. It turns out society has other things to spend money on, and giving handouts to solar companies isn't the best way to go about making policy decisions.
Coal is dying. Let it die. We don't need to divert society's resources into making sure the inevitable happens: it's already inevitable.
You're making quite the leap here.
So the Trump administration isn't going to illegally punish those who would have been hurt under the CPP, the ones who brought suit to prevent those penalties and were making a successful case that they couldn't have those burdens imposed on them without at least legal authority.
Just because this administration isn't going to punish one group doesn't mean it's going to punish a different one.
It means more fairness under the law, not less.
They key is that it wasn't a consequence of their words.
All too often lately there's been this sense that words are magic, that they carry their own power to manipulate and control the world.
We need to always keep fact in mind. Here we'd remember that words are mere symbols without power or meaning except for that projected by the interpreter.
Someone hearing the words "Kill yourself!" first has to attach that meaning to those words before deciding in his own mind to act. They aren't the words that caused the killing, but the victim's own decisionmaking process.
That's not quite how the US government works.
Congress cannot give agencies blank checks to do whatever they want. Yes, they can direct that agencies fill in the details of policies, but the policies have to originate in congressional action, passed by law. The granting of discretion has been abused, but even so it's not unlimited.
Regulators are required to show that their actions are the result of legal mandates. They have to show that they were, in one way or another, ordered to come up with the regulation that they propose.
If an agency is going back and forth on a regulation, it's a sign to the courts that the agency is operating outside of law, and the regulation may be found to be void.
In this case they're not undoing the Network Neutrality provisions just because they want to, but because they can show that they have a mandate by law to correct the error committed by the previous commission. If they can't rationally demonstrate that, then the action will be struck down.
Slashdot needs to give its readers more context in these posts about regulation feedback. Specifically, it needs to emphasize that in the US regulatory process, this comment phase is not voting. The numbers don't really enter into it.
The regulator has to address issues raised in comments, but that's about counting issues, not comments. An issue with one comment is to be addressed just as an issue brought up by a thousand comments.
The FCC is subject to the laws our representatives pass. THAT's where we give the marching orders. This regulatory process is only about seeing to it that the commission implements the laws handed to it.
"merely because its discrimination is based on investment decisions"
At some point this framing of the word "discrimination" sort of devalues the concept.
When even logical business decisions are pushed under that umbrella, they serve as distractions from actual cases of bigoted discrimination.
The FCC proposal does cite its sources.
For example, the FCC points to this study: https://haljsinger.wordpress.c...
So where's the data? Well, the FCC has provided it openly and publicly. Anyone who doesn't see the data isn't looking for it, and I'd include both this senator and reporting about his remarks in it. Certainly, we should be suspicious of any news source highlighting this senator's lack of awareness without also covering the other senator's familiarity with the data.
When you watch the video of the exchange, Markey was being given data he was asking for. He just ignored it.
Markey says there's no data that Network Neutrality hurts investment, while Pai responds by pointing to the data saying it does. Markey doesn't do anything to say why he'd ignore the facts Pai is bringing out; he simply restates that it doesn't exist.
Here's the video clip: https://www.c-span.org/video/?...
Elsewhere in the hearing another senator runs with the data provided by the FCC, pointing out that analysis shows broadband investment was harmed by the Open Internet Order while identifying issues with the NYT analysis saying otherwise.
We need to be clear here that Markey was ignoring information that didn't suit his conclusion. He was cherrypicking.
And elsewhere in the hearing was a senator emphatically SUPPORTING the FCC justification. Slashdot could have mentioned both sides of this issue, but instead seems to cherrypick the side it prefers.
In fact, the senator bringing analysis showing a decrease in broadband investment following the Open Internet Order goes farther, not only bringing a counter claim but also showing where the other analysis went awry. This is supportive of the FCC's position that there is a real cost to micromanaging internet service providers, as used to be the bipartisan consensus.
I've made a clip on C-SPAN since this side doesn't get much coverage:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?...
If you read the FCC's proposal, which I'll link below, you'll see that it's about getting the FCC out of micromanaging the Internet itself while promoting stronger privacy protections for consumers.
Quoting from the proposal:
Historically, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) protected the privacy of broadband consumers, policing every online company’s privacy practices consistently and initiating numerous enforcement actions. When the Commission reclassified broadband Internet access service as a common carriage telecommunications service in 2015, however, that action stripped FTC authority over Internet service providers because the FTC is prohibited from regulating common carriers.
We propose to return jurisdiction over Internet service providers’ privacy practices to the FTC, with its decades of experience and expertise in this area.
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...
In the US the notice and comment process isn't about voting or voicing opinion. It's about identifying specific concerns and then making sure they've been accounted for in finalized regulations.
Since this isn't a voting process, giving more people time to comment is not a relevant goal.
In short, since the notice and consent process is about identifying problems, it doesn't matter whether one person or one thousand bring up an issue. It's still only one issue. If a thousand people mention the one issue, then it's only a waste of resources as workers have to sort through and identify the duplicate comments.
All in all, the FCC is on the right side here, and the special interests trying to make political hay out of the formal process are at best misleading the public.
I really wish more Americans knew how these elements of their government actually worked.
That internet access has become necessary to function in our modern world would be quite the surprise to people I know who function in our modern world without bothering with internet access.
We really need to avoid accepting that claim as true, both because it's simply not, and because it's a bit self-fulfilling: if we accept it as true that internet access is necessary, then it pushes toward people and companies assuming that there is internet access, leading to it becoming harder to function without.
Kind of like how people are "forced" to give their money to AT&T in the form of payments for services? Or "forced" to use phones compatible with AT&T's networks?
Give me a break.
Arbitration is just another form of using neutral third parties to settle disputes, one that can be less expensive and more practical than resorting to US courts, so these contracts specify that means of settling any disagreements that come up.
It's just a feature of the service AT&T is offering here, and customers can take it or leave it.
Slashdot blurbs are awfully biased these days.
The problem with your perspective here is the impossibility of identifying the one "with all the money."
Businesses have all the money? No, they try to serve customers who have all the money. But wait, they work to get money, so I guess it's employers who have all the money? Hm, no, employers are just businesses, who are serving customers, who I guess have all the money.... and on around.
In reality nobody "has all the money" but instead the exchange of money shows how we work for each other to mutual benefit. We each set prices for the money and labor that we hold by placing a value on it that seems right to each of us individually.
Much of this criticism was actually covered in the paper. The complaints therefore seem overblown.
For example, here's footnote 14: "The Seattle Minimum Wage Study surveyed over 500 Seattle business owners immediately before and a year after the Ordinance went into effect. In April 2015, multi-site employers were more likely to report intentions to reduce hours of their minimum wage employees (34% versus 24%) and more likely to report intentions to reduce employment (33% versus 26%). A one-year follow-up survey revealed that multi location employers were more likely to report an actual reduction in full-time and part-time employees, with over half of multi-site respondents reporting a reduction in full-time employment (52%, against 45% for single-site firms)."
The paper excluded chain locations for a few reasons, including the issues of an employer with one foot in and one foot out of the affected region, but generally concludes that with reasons to suspect both effects on the exclusion of chains, "Our employment results may therefore be biased towards zero."
The paper itself: https://evans.uw.edu/sites/def...
Remember, the rules that were recently rolled back were themselves a rollback of previous privacy protections that were arguably much better.
The FCC and FTC are in the process now of restoring the privacy regulations dismantled over the past few years.
Yes, it's unfortunate that this has gotten so complicated, such a story of double and triple negatives. In short, though, Congress and the president worked to undo the previous undoing of privacy rules. It's part of an effort to make internet privacy regulations stronger, not weaker.
The workers and their employers think there is more productivity. Since they're the ones with skin in the game here, I'm happy to defer to their judgments.
Remember, from this polling it is exactly productivity that is leading them to prefer work over vacation. The workers want to get stuff done so they don't fall behind on vacation, and they want to show their employers that they're being productive.
It's all well and good to recognize that sometimes vacation leads to higher productivity, but that's not always the case. Employers and workers have a common interest here of finding the balance between work and vacation that leads to productivity, so let's let them find it.
It's important to be careful with accounting as all too often reports can be skewed by hiding funny math in accounting assumptions.
Here, for example, it's not actually a cost that vacation isn't taken. If the worker didn't value the vacation time enough to take it, then it didn't have value in the first place, and seeing the worker let it go is really just a reflection of the lack of value.
It's like a person declining an offer of dog food because he doesn't have a dog: that's not a cost; it's a lack of benefit.
The substantial difference is on the other side of the ledger, though. Workers who work more provide value to society, making more food, providing more customer service, and building more cars for the rest of us. There is no cost to a worker not taking vacation, but there IS a benefit to a worker who's more productive because he stays on the job.
In short, it's a good thing that workers work.
It needs to be emphasized: this is not a voting process.
In the US regulatory process, a regulator like the FCC is bound to follow the laws passed by our representatives in Congress. Once the chambers pass a bill, that's the end of the vote counting, and the rest is implementing the legislation as passed.
At this point in the regulatory process, a regulator is to address concerns that are brought up regardless of how many people voice each concern. It doesn't really matter whether five people or five hundred bring up a concern: it's still just one concern.
Sure, it's a bad thing that peoples names were false attached to these comments. It bears some investigation. But let's be clear that since this isn't voting, it's not like the scheme will have screwed up a vote. The outcome will be just as legitimate even if everyone submitting duplicate comments--honest or not--wasted federal resources in deduplicating them.
It's unfortunate, the direction Slashdot has gone in the past few years.
Stories got more and more opinionated while the discussion got more and more, well, in line with the stories.
No, they didn't throttle the service.
Netflix wanted to make its money by shoving too much through their end of the pipe (well, through the peering partner), more than the pipe they purchased could handle. It's not Comcast's fault that Netflix was overloading the pipe, and as a non-Netflix subscriber I wouldn't want Comcast spending too much money to upgrade Netflix's end of the pipe.