We all know how the government handles the interpretation of laws. Just look at the tax code.
...I'm not sure how this is relevant to the rest of your argument. The tax code is quite complicated, but if you take the time to read it, it is blatantly biased in favor of the extremely wealthy and of corporate entities. But that's not interpretation. That's the law, as it's written.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't understand that "the internet is not.com".
These people will become enlightened once the rest of us stop coddling them.
Annualcreditreport.com is a non-Governmental organization, set up in response to demands from the government that consumers get annual free access to their credit reports.
Wherein lies the problem. It should have been a governmental organization. Then again, the entire process of credit reporting needs much heavier regulation than it currently receives. We would not see nearly the problems with identity theft and blatantly-wrong, willfully-uncorrected credit report details if the government were managing the process.
Antiprofit, unfortunately, for those doing 1) and 2) -- because the entrenched politicians who're doing quite well by the current system would have to be the ones to make the change.
Hmm, yes. I think in this case it's both -- it is a legal monopoly, in that government support has been specifically given to one entity, but it's also a natural monopoly, in that the network having been built, the barrier to entry has become so high that competition wouldn't just "happen" through the actions of the free market. Either way, it's stupid & pointless for the government to fund a monopoly, and then let that monopoly stand, without making sure to set strict limits on its business practices, prices, standards, and minimum service levels.
Nationalization would be a good option, though really I think it should happen under more local control; municipalities seem better keyed in to how to handle their own local districts. On the government expenditures point, though, it's not as bad as it seems, or at least, not as bad as the alternative. Keynesian stimulus (such as building out new fiber infrastructure) would do a lot to help fix that unemployment rate (which, recession or no, is still officially nearly in double-digits, which means unofficially it's far beyond), and that's screwing over the young people right now.
Hold on. A natural monopoly is a condition in which the barrier to entry in a market (the capital required to build infrastructure, for instance) is such that market-based competition is strongly discouraged from developing naturally. I think that's definitely the case in a situation with an entrenched bit-delivery infrastructure, provided it's an alternate private company that's trying to come in. Comcast would be happy to take a loss for a while to make sure they starve out anybody else who wants to build their own infrastructure.
Municipalities are a great solution to this situation, because they don't need to worry about being profitable or satisfying shareholders. They can take on five years' expenditure on an unprofitable proposition, and still come up ahead, because their goal is to provide cheaper cable service, not to make money. I think that's an important difference that makes municipal cable still a great idea, without meaning that infrastructure isn't a natural monopoly.
In other words, government is great at providing competition to natural monopolies, because government's job is to provide services to taxpayers, while a corporation's job is to provide profits to shareholders by way of providing services to customers.
Why can't we privatize some of the infrastructure?
The infrastructure is already private. It's owned by Comcast, Time Warner, Qwest (well not any more), etc. What you're talking about is actually public-alizing, also known as "nationalizing" or "socializing", and it's an excellent idea in the case of natural monopolies. That's because markets only work when there's competition, and a natural monopoly is a field in which the barrier to entry is so high that there will effectively never be enough competition to produce lower prices and high-quality services. So, the free market is simply powerless in the face of something like fiber-optic infrastructure.
The kind of neighborhood-fiber-network thing you're talking about, that's municipal broadband. It's a great idea. Just last week/. had an article about part of why this doesn't happen: even where there is the will (such as the city of Philadelphia), the current broadband provider(s) will stop at nothing to maintain their monopoly--including major lawsuits to prevent the municipal broadband project from taking off, even when it's overwhelmingly popular and would result in city-wide savings within around five years.
I think it's unlikely that a bunch of local monopolists are going to start poaching on each other's territory. What I suspect would happen, even if the official monopoly (which should never've been granted) were revoked, is that they'd be perfectly happy to continue with spheres of influence in which they can each gouge their own customer bases.
The real issue here is that building infrastructure like this requires such a huge amount of capital that it's a natural monopoly. There's really no way for competitors to come in without a huge investment in laying their own lines that is very much at risk and only serves to lessen their own profit margins. The real government fail here isn't recognizing a monopolist (since the nature of the business is such that one is bound to emerge) -- it's not making sure to regulate that monopolist effectively.
the most intelligent of our species are not necessarily the ones reproducing the most (or in some cases at all).
That may be true to some extent, but keep in mind that it's entirely too easy to use perceived intelligence as a proxy for economic status. (Particularly in that, if you're the kind of person who worries about this, you've already identified your background pretty well, which is going to bias your judgments of others' intelligence levels.) Anyway, it is absolutely a universal human truth that (with rare exceptions, like emperors with harems or w/e) higher socioeconomic status correlates with lowered reproduction rates. People with the security to raise one or two children and expect them to survive, will plan their families and limit childbirth.
There are plenty of smart people having babies; I wouldn't worry about intelligence being selected out of our population. At least, no more than has already been done by the advent of sedentary farming lifestyles as opposed to hunter-gatherer lifestyles.
The answer to rat control is very simple -- housing owners and operators need to pay for trash receptacles with heavy lids. You don't need rat poison, you don't need to worry about The Rat That Never Forgets, you just need to put something on top of the food that a 1.5-lb animal can't lift.
There's really no concern about the Smart Rat Gene getting into the wild.
natural selection doesn't favour long memories, it favours large effective reproduction rates.
Rats CERTAINLY have that part down. They're very, er, efficient reproducers, to the point where the female rat's first-response disaster strategy (where "disaster" includes "I heard a loud noise" or "my food tastes like garlic today") is "Well, eat the young, we'll have more later."
There's an interesting tidbit (I think I came across it in The Selfish Gene) that suggests that you can determine a species' reproductive-evolutionary strategy according to males' testicular size proportional to the rest of their bodies. Species that favor lots of reproduction, don't put much effort into 'em, fire-and-forget, tend to have substantially less paternal involvement in care, which means less pair bonding between mothers and fathers, which in turn means more promiscuous mating and (for the males) a race between who's got the most & the fastest sperm. So, you want bigger balls if your lady friend is sleeping around.
Long story short, check out a rat's nads sometime. They're GINORMOUS.
Yeah, that sounds perfectly reasonable. I just worry about closing post offices in rural areas where there may not be another for a good fifty miles, or such.
This payment is to cover the costs of the USPS for sending absentee ballots to troops overseas, to cover the costs associated with the discounted rates for non-profits, etc.
I mean, to me that just sounds like payment for services rendered. It'd be the same if it were a private contractor providing those services, only the fees would be higher, since there'd have to be an offering to the shareholders over and above the actual cost of providing the service.
The USPS needs to retrench -- close a ton of Post Offices, reduce deliveries, etc.
That would probably improve the balance sheet some, sure. But personally I'd rather hold the line on the USPS upholding a standard of service, even if the cost is slightly higher. We've seen in privatization of mail services and other services that the first thing that happens is the marginal areas (and people) get cut out of the service entirely. It improves shareholder value, but it's detrimental to living standards, and I don't really think the tradeoff is worth it. Now, maybe that airplane only needs to come to rural Montana four times a week instead of five, but I think a widespread retrenchment in the service offering shouldn't really be an option.
Noonan is claiming that since Democrats don't have the same reverential passion for the Dear Leader that the Republican majority of yesteryear did, therefore America is out of ideas.
Not so. There are plenty of people who have well-thought-out, believable responses to our current problems--social, economic, and political. It's just not in the interest of either major party to represent those ideas. So progressives lose faith in our leaders, because our leaders aren't radical enough. Consider Joe Lieberman -- planning to filibuster a health-care reform bill that's supported by 80% of the population, by a FORTY-POINT MAJORITY of his OWN constituents. And why? A lot of reasons -- he's Sen. Lieberman, I-Aetna; he's trying to spike the Dems who failed to drive him out of office thanks to his name recognition; he's playing both sides; he's a dick. But please, don't tell me I've lost hope in America because I've lost faith in Joe Lieberman's ability to do anything non-self-serving.
False. The U.S. Army has almost-never built its own equipment. All the way back to the early 1800s they subcontracted the weapons-making to private U.S. companies or individuals.
Pardon me. They used to build and staff their bases themselves, and those were cheaper and better. Now they are built and serviced by private contractors, costing more, and exposing under-trained civilians to battlefield conditions.
So the Uncle Sam Postal Service has a monopoly over your mailbox.
This doesn't impact my life at all. Other shippers are fully able to pick up or deliver from my doorstep. Non-USPS carriers are allowed to handle urgent letters. Regardless, (1) private industry would either provide no coverage or substandard, overpriced coverage in rural areas; and (2) the USPS hasn't taken a taxpayer dime in over twenty years, so I don't see what the problem is.
I'm familiar with the argument; I just haven't reviewed the evidence closely enough to determine that legalized abortion is actually a significant variable here. The real issue is the availability of means to limit childbirth, so a more significant factor ought to be ready access to contraception of all kinds. The people who would most stand to benefit from not having kids right now (young and poor) are the ones who are least likely to have ready access to an expensive medical procedure, legal or not.
That's why I suspect that abortion per se may be correlated, but not causally.
NB I support legalized, free abortion on demand, but not because of hoped-for impact on crime.
Mmmmm.... I think that's an awfully fine distinction, between saying "it's not the free market, it's abuse of the court system"... that's being abused by a market participant pursuing its benefit under every avenue available to it under the free market.
Granted that the GP's point could have been better made by stating that the freedom of the market is often inversely proportional to the economic power of its strongest participants.
I haven't looked at the chapter closely yet, though every time it comes up I wonder if decreasing ice cream prices and putting more cops on the streets also lowers the crime rate. Or perhaps eating more peanut butter sandwiches and putting more cops on the street... you get my drift?
Slashdot Mirror
The DMCA started with the best of intentions.
Sorry, you lost me there.
We all know how the government handles the interpretation of laws. Just look at the tax code.
...I'm not sure how this is relevant to the rest of your argument. The tax code is quite complicated, but if you take the time to read it, it is blatantly biased in favor of the extremely wealthy and of corporate entities.
But that's not interpretation. That's the law, as it's written.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't understand that "the internet is not .com".
These people will become enlightened once the rest of us stop coddling them.
Annualcreditreport.com is a non-Governmental organization, set up in response to demands from the government that consumers get annual free access to their credit reports.
Wherein lies the problem. It should have been a governmental organization.
Then again, the entire process of credit reporting needs much heavier regulation than it currently receives. We would not see nearly the problems with identity theft and blatantly-wrong, willfully-uncorrected credit report details if the government were managing the process.
Antiprofit, unfortunately, for those doing 1) and 2) -- because the entrenched politicians who're doing quite well by the current system would have to be the ones to make the change.
That said, I absolutely want this to happen.
Hmm, yes. I think in this case it's both -- it is a legal monopoly, in that government support has been specifically given to one entity, but it's also a natural monopoly, in that the network having been built, the barrier to entry has become so high that competition wouldn't just "happen" through the actions of the free market. Either way, it's stupid & pointless for the government to fund a monopoly, and then let that monopoly stand, without making sure to set strict limits on its business practices, prices, standards, and minimum service levels.
Nationalization would be a good option, though really I think it should happen under more local control; municipalities seem better keyed in to how to handle their own local districts. On the government expenditures point, though, it's not as bad as it seems, or at least, not as bad as the alternative. Keynesian stimulus (such as building out new fiber infrastructure) would do a lot to help fix that unemployment rate (which, recession or no, is still officially nearly in double-digits, which means unofficially it's far beyond), and that's screwing over the young people right now.
Hold on. A natural monopoly is a condition in which the barrier to entry in a market (the capital required to build infrastructure, for instance) is such that market-based competition is strongly discouraged from developing naturally. I think that's definitely the case in a situation with an entrenched bit-delivery infrastructure, provided it's an alternate private company that's trying to come in. Comcast would be happy to take a loss for a while to make sure they starve out anybody else who wants to build their own infrastructure.
Municipalities are a great solution to this situation, because they don't need to worry about being profitable or satisfying shareholders. They can take on five years' expenditure on an unprofitable proposition, and still come up ahead, because their goal is to provide cheaper cable service, not to make money. I think that's an important difference that makes municipal cable still a great idea, without meaning that infrastructure isn't a natural monopoly.
In other words, government is great at providing competition to natural monopolies, because government's job is to provide services to taxpayers, while a corporation's job is to provide profits to shareholders by way of providing services to customers.
Why can't we privatize some of the infrastructure?
The infrastructure is already private. It's owned by Comcast, Time Warner, Qwest (well not any more), etc.
What you're talking about is actually public-alizing, also known as "nationalizing" or "socializing", and it's an excellent idea in the case of natural monopolies. That's because markets only work when there's competition, and a natural monopoly is a field in which the barrier to entry is so high that there will effectively never be enough competition to produce lower prices and high-quality services. So, the free market is simply powerless in the face of something like fiber-optic infrastructure.
The kind of neighborhood-fiber-network thing you're talking about, that's municipal broadband. It's a great idea. Just last week /. had an article about part of why this doesn't happen: even where there is the will (such as the city of Philadelphia), the current broadband provider(s) will stop at nothing to maintain their monopoly--including major lawsuits to prevent the municipal broadband project from taking off, even when it's overwhelmingly popular and would result in city-wide savings within around five years.
I think it's unlikely that a bunch of local monopolists are going to start poaching on each other's territory. What I suspect would happen, even if the official monopoly (which should never've been granted) were revoked, is that they'd be perfectly happy to continue with spheres of influence in which they can each gouge their own customer bases.
The real issue here is that building infrastructure like this requires such a huge amount of capital that it's a natural monopoly. There's really no way for competitors to come in without a huge investment in laying their own lines that is very much at risk and only serves to lessen their own profit margins. The real government fail here isn't recognizing a monopolist (since the nature of the business is such that one is bound to emerge) -- it's not making sure to regulate that monopolist effectively.
Wow. Flamebait (and GP a troll) within ten minutes of commenting.
Guess somebody didn't like hearing that.
(Go ahead, mod me down, my karma can soak your mod points.)
So, if you're adult, male, white, middle-class, christian, heterosexual, well-educated, you're fair game.
Fair game for what? Is there some kind of slur or bigotry used against this group?
"Privileged?"
It seems like people who have all the privilege in the world tend to be the most uncomfortable & defensive whenever anyone brings it up.
Nah. Iceweasel.
the most intelligent of our species are not necessarily the ones reproducing the most (or in some cases at all).
That may be true to some extent, but keep in mind that it's entirely too easy to use perceived intelligence as a proxy for economic status. (Particularly in that, if you're the kind of person who worries about this, you've already identified your background pretty well, which is going to bias your judgments of others' intelligence levels.) Anyway, it is absolutely a universal human truth that (with rare exceptions, like emperors with harems or w/e) higher socioeconomic status correlates with lowered reproduction rates. People with the security to raise one or two children and expect them to survive, will plan their families and limit childbirth.
There are plenty of smart people having babies; I wouldn't worry about intelligence being selected out of our population. At least, no more than has already been done by the advent of sedentary farming lifestyles as opposed to hunter-gatherer lifestyles.
True. But you don't get your electricity from digging through your neighbor's garbage.
(I'm guessing.)
Hi, rat-infested portion of a city resident here.
The answer to rat control is very simple -- housing owners and operators need to pay for trash receptacles with heavy lids. You don't need rat poison, you don't need to worry about The Rat That Never Forgets, you just need to put something on top of the food that a 1.5-lb animal can't lift.
There's really no concern about the Smart Rat Gene getting into the wild.
natural selection doesn't favour long memories, it favours large effective reproduction rates.
Rats CERTAINLY have that part down. They're very, er, efficient reproducers, to the point where the female rat's first-response disaster strategy (where "disaster" includes "I heard a loud noise" or "my food tastes like garlic today") is "Well, eat the young, we'll have more later."
There's an interesting tidbit (I think I came across it in The Selfish Gene) that suggests that you can determine a species' reproductive-evolutionary strategy according to males' testicular size proportional to the rest of their bodies. Species that favor lots of reproduction, don't put much effort into 'em, fire-and-forget, tend to have substantially less paternal involvement in care, which means less pair bonding between mothers and fathers, which in turn means more promiscuous mating and (for the males) a race between who's got the most & the fastest sperm. So, you want bigger balls if your lady friend is sleeping around.
Long story short, check out a rat's nads sometime. They're GINORMOUS.
Yeah, that sounds perfectly reasonable. I just worry about closing post offices in rural areas where there may not be another for a good fifty miles, or such.
This payment is to cover the costs of the USPS for sending absentee ballots to troops overseas, to cover the costs associated with the discounted rates for non-profits, etc.
I mean, to me that just sounds like payment for services rendered. It'd be the same if it were a private contractor providing those services, only the fees would be higher, since there'd have to be an offering to the shareholders over and above the actual cost of providing the service.
The USPS needs to retrench -- close a ton of Post Offices, reduce deliveries, etc.
That would probably improve the balance sheet some, sure. But personally I'd rather hold the line on the USPS upholding a standard of service, even if the cost is slightly higher. We've seen in privatization of mail services and other services that the first thing that happens is the marginal areas (and people) get cut out of the service entirely. It improves shareholder value, but it's detrimental to living standards, and I don't really think the tradeoff is worth it. Now, maybe that airplane only needs to come to rural Montana four times a week instead of five, but I think a widespread retrenchment in the service offering shouldn't really be an option.
"The Postal Service has not received any taxpayer funding since the early 1980s." -- (source)
Yes, the USPS has fallen on very hard times, but then so has everyone else. I'm not too worried, whatever the scare scenario is.
All the time. It's why we don't have a three-fifths clause any more.
This.
Noonan is claiming that since Democrats don't have the same reverential passion for the Dear Leader that the Republican majority of yesteryear did, therefore America is out of ideas.
Not so. There are plenty of people who have well-thought-out, believable responses to our current problems--social, economic, and political. It's just not in the interest of either major party to represent those ideas. So progressives lose faith in our leaders, because our leaders aren't radical enough. Consider Joe Lieberman -- planning to filibuster a health-care reform bill that's supported by 80% of the population, by a FORTY-POINT MAJORITY of his OWN constituents. And why? A lot of reasons -- he's Sen. Lieberman, I-Aetna; he's trying to spike the Dems who failed to drive him out of office thanks to his name recognition; he's playing both sides; he's a dick. But please, don't tell me I've lost hope in America because I've lost faith in Joe Lieberman's ability to do anything non-self-serving.
False. The U.S. Army has almost-never built its own equipment. All the way back to the early 1800s they subcontracted the weapons-making to private U.S. companies or individuals.
Pardon me. They used to build and staff their bases themselves, and those were cheaper and better. Now they are built and serviced by private contractors, costing more, and exposing under-trained civilians to battlefield conditions.
So the Uncle Sam Postal Service has a monopoly over your mailbox.
This doesn't impact my life at all. Other shippers are fully able to pick up or deliver from my doorstep. Non-USPS carriers are allowed to handle urgent letters. Regardless, (1) private industry would either provide no coverage or substandard, overpriced coverage in rural areas; and (2) the USPS hasn't taken a taxpayer dime in over twenty years, so I don't see what the problem is.
I'm familiar with the argument; I just haven't reviewed the evidence closely enough to determine that legalized abortion is actually a significant variable here. The real issue is the availability of means to limit childbirth, so a more significant factor ought to be ready access to contraception of all kinds. The people who would most stand to benefit from not having kids right now (young and poor) are the ones who are least likely to have ready access to an expensive medical procedure, legal or not.
That's why I suspect that abortion per se may be correlated, but not causally.
NB I support legalized, free abortion on demand, but not because of hoped-for impact on crime.
Thank you :)
Mmmmm.... I think that's an awfully fine distinction, between saying "it's not the free market, it's abuse of the court system"... that's being abused by a market participant pursuing its benefit under every avenue available to it under the free market.
Granted that the GP's point could have been better made by stating that the freedom of the market is often inversely proportional to the economic power of its strongest participants.
I haven't looked at the chapter closely yet, though every time it comes up I wonder if decreasing ice cream prices and putting more cops on the streets also lowers the crime rate. Or perhaps eating more peanut butter sandwiches and putting more cops on the street... you get my drift?