It disgusts me whenever someone says the world changed after 9-11 and we had to take the actions we took. Even If a 9-11 size event is the price of living with the civil liberties so precious to me, then I am willing to accept the risk of living in such a country. I would much rather draw straws every decade, knowing I could be one of the 3,000 of 3,000,000 that could die in exchange for not have to be under surveillance day and night; not have to submit to degrading, humiliating, and possibly dangerous search techniques at the airport and other public places; and not having to endure the myriad other abuses of my rights big and small, seen and unseen. But that scenario is far from reflective of reality. At least someone trading liberty for security got something in return; as so often is the case, we traded our liberties and got NOTHING in return.
The biggest mistake after 9-11 was not the action we took, it's that we took any international action at all. We'd be much safer today if we had, instead of launching more wars and imperialist action, turned inward and secured our homeland as best we could (knowing we will never be truly 100% safe, but striving to live in happiness and prosperity despite that), and divested ourselves in the very activities that draw such aggression: our foreign bases, support of Israel, and corporate controlled neo-colonialism.
Whereas copyright tends to focus on protecting artists' ability to make money from their work
Nope. Stop right there. It may be said that it is supposed to do as such, but today we see copyright being used by PUBLISHERS to control the artists and restrict users. Copyright as it is today is immoral, and no one has an obligation to recognize it as legitimate. We're all free to disregard it as much as we can reasonably get away with without personal harm from the enforcers in government who slavishly back the copyright cartels at the expense of our freedom and culture.
I'm not advocating full command economy, I just want the government to intervene in areas that market forces have proven to be unreliable at best, and destructive at worst, in addressing. People aren't going to make the right decisions themselves, it requires some form of coercion or incentives.
I feel just as strongly in my convictions that the path you would have us take stems from an equally myopic morality and will be just as disastrous. It takes no great leap of faith to understand the science behind our energy future, and the facts are not debatable for the most part. All that is uncertain is how great the calamity will be, and how soon it will come.
I don't want any scrap built, ramshackle vehicle made by some yahoo in his garage to be traveling on the roads that I too must drive on. I'm glad you can't just throw together some experimental, possibly dangerous, vehicle and drive it. If you want a CNG car you can buy one, several automakers produce versions of cars with such systems and they are far safer and more efficient (not to mention cost effective) than anything you or I could build on our own.
Because such a course of action will yield the greatest short term profits for many people. This is the only course of action that could be expected, it's as natural and expected of corporations as breathing is for humans. This behavior cannot be divorced from the system that created it, because they are one and the same.
You're starting from the assumption that energy production and distribution should be, or must be, the domain of private enterprise alone. This isn't the only way things can work. It's simply too dangerous (look at Japan), dirty (look at the Gulf of Mexico), and important to put in the hands of a capitalist framework that is willing to cut corners to make more profit. I'd rather have the entire sector in control of an entity run by experts with the full resources of the nation at their disposal and no board of directors or shareholders to answer to but only the people, and the nation that they too are part of and wish to see prosper. There is no such thing as a patriotic corporation, nor a corporation interested in protecting the environment or public safety. To the extent that they do is only because they are compelled to by The State or public outrage--and the later only after some terrible calamity has stricken our geography or population.
The problem with HFCS is not so much what it is or how it's used but how ubiquitous it is in our food supply. It's probably in at least half of every food product the average person eats on a daily basis. It's not just the obvious sources like soda and sweet snacks; it's in ketchup, bread, orange juice, nearly anything that comes in a box or bag.
That being said, int he same store that you can buy those things are also food products that are safe and healthy and not for much more money. It's mostly a matter of being willing to prepare your own food and not rely so much on precooked and preprocessed sources. It's much easier to cook spaghetti with marinara with premade tomato sauce, but you could spend a few more minutes to make your own from tomatoes and spices. It's choices like that, we make them every day. We trade a few minutes, even a few seconds, of convenience for our health. It's slowly killing us, and people aren't going to stop doing it by themselves, sadly. Something has to stop them. I wish it could be a matter of education and personal choice but that's simply not going to work. We need a force strong enough to mandate that this junk is taken out of our food, and that starts with removing the influence of the corporations that produce those chemicals and additives on the government agency that is supposed to regulate what they get to put in our food.
I don't care if I'm called a communist or a fascist or a Nazi or whatever, government needs to have stricter control on what companies are allowed to put in food, because individuals making their own choices about what to buy are simply not punishing those companies enough for what they are doing to our health.
Which is why public policy should be directed to intercede. The public is short-sighted, like the markets that supply their fuel and "choose" which technologies to pursue. We can see the storm coming on the horizon, but when you've got so many people looking straight up, seeing the sun and proclaiming there's no danger it's hard to react to a future that many experts know is coming.
We can either make tough choices now that will lead to a somewhat painful but tolerable transition period, or wait and do the same things in haste and agony. The people saying we should do nothing are doing so mostly out of an ideological mistrust of government doing anything, but they are going to be very regretful when they realize the markets failed to see and prepare for a future that experts and government DID predict, and could have prevented or at least vastly reduced the severity of.
We are in for a bleak future, because a small section of society has a vested interest in doing nothing and they have fully convinced roughly half of us that doing anything about it is an affront to their liberty. They'll pay in the end, we all will.
The "good" old fashioned liberals are today's economic conservatives. No thanks, they've done enough damage to the world. Social democrats are the good liberals these days. Libertarians are just scary in their slavish devotion to market solutions as the be all end all tool for every problem.
I cancelled my cable and Netflix and now just torrent everything I want to watch (set up to automatically grab new episodes as soon as they hit the tracker) and stream stuff when available and I don't mind the lower quality. Get something like a Mac mini and a nice IPS display and you're set. It does so much more than a set top box and a TV, it's brilliant, and so much cheaper than paying for all those services that we don't really need anymore.
I'm setting my parents up with the same system. I'm not sure why more people don't do this.
How long before advances in scanning and 3D printing will allow for any object to be analyzed and recreated so cheaply that it replaces traditional manufacturing processes? And then the next step is to cut out the scanning and just make originals from digital schematics. It's probably an inevitability that such an industrial revolution will happen, but I'd really like to see it in my life time; I'll likely live another 60 years even disregarding medical advancements so I think I just might. It's also interesting to think about the restructuring society will be forced into with such advancements. The hilarious parody of the music industry's anti-copying ad, "You wouldn't download a car." might somewhat resemble reality as the traditional power structures of capitalism, finance, and industry struggle for life in their death agony. In a world where every village has a Star Trek-like replicator, there's going to be a lot of pissed off robber barons and Shenzhen factory bosses.
This is a pretty cool demonstration of the technology, but it's just a toy right now. In its mature state it's going to make quite a lot of people nervous and angry. If we thought adapting to an age where information; books, music, movies, ideas, can be replicated and distributed at virtually no cost, we are going to be in for quite the shock when the same paradigm (or one like it, as raw materials will still need to be mined, grown, produced, etc) is brought to physical, tangible objects.
I shouldn't have to comment why using both the former Soviet Union and France as examples of the same political system (or even similar ones) is absurd, but I guess I have to. France is still a capitalist nation. You're free to choose your own profession, where you live, go to school, you can even start a business if you like. They are a moderate Social Democratic welfare state, and consistently have ranked higher on the Human Development Index than the US does, and the difference is even more striking when the new inequality adjusted metric is used. The Soviet Union was always more of a totalitarian dictatorship than it was communist or socialist. It serves as a great example of why totalitarianism is bad and costly in terms of human lives.
France has their problems of course, all political system will, but their (and countries like them) choices on what to emphasize seems more rational and human-centric than in the US. It's hard to argue against things like a shorter work week, more rights for workers and women--with respect to maternity leave--and more vacation time for actually enjoying life...unless of course you're a member of the class that benefits from workers being kept poor, desperate, and working harder and longer than they should have to. There is not an irrational fear of tackling problems collectively in most of the world like there is in the US. There's a lot of good things to be said about individualism and hard work, but the free market isn't going to fix some problems; it just isn't profitable for anyone to fix them. If you resign yourself to only using that one tool (a market solution), you're going to have to ignore a lot of problems (or redefine them so they're no longer considered problems like you've done with inequality) simply because you don't have any way in your limited world view of even acknowledging them.
To say that we don't live in an age of inequality, however you want to measure it, is profoundly ignorant, especially considering your claimed background. How could you not have noticed that you had to go to school in the ghetto, while other kids, just because they were born to different families, had nicer schools and safer neighborhoods? Inequality is all around you, it's so ingrained in our society and culture that you can't even see it. Many Americans, it's a widespread phenomenon, simply don't notice or believe it's inevitable and impossible to change. They're like the fish who, spending his entire life underwater, doesn't even notice that it's all around and always has been. Worse still are the people who actually laud inequality as a triumph of our economic system. It is lifted to heights not just as the way the world is, but how the world should be. It's especially depressing and frustrating when this sentiment comes from the have-nots. Perhaps it's a form of Stockholm syndrome or they've just been conditioned to accept that they don't deserve better, but it is not, indeed it never has been, an inevitable outcome of any natural laws. Things are this way because people choose them to be, and we can choose a different way just as easily.
Of course change would require a realignment of values, ideals, and priorities, and doubtless new problems would be created, but the ones that would be swept away would be far worse than anything we would have to grapple with under a more socialist economic system.
Not just a little more, immensely more, astronomically more, and that absolutely and unequivocally IS socially toxic to society. Enormous wealth inequality is, by itself, intrinsically bad and should be reduced as much as is practically possible. And you keep defending the rich by saying it's not personal income it's corporate income. What's the difference? When one person commands the use of billions of dollars and another only a few hundred or thousand, that's inequality, and that the billions are not actually "owned" by the person spending it but by a corporation is a semantic difference of little actual consequence to the state of the world. You're close to arguing that rich people don't exist, only wealthy corporations, which would be absurd.
Income inequality does matter, it's harmful to society, it creates a more highly stratified society which has been shown by sociologists to be linked to an increase in violence, crime, stress related diseases (just being in a lower class is bad for your health, even if all your biological needs are fully met), and lower levels of happiness--and that's independent of absolute income, and it's also controlled for countries with considerably better social safety nets and public health care.
Some degree of wealth redistribution is necessary for society, and we are well below the point where more would be too much. Things that aren't normally thought of as wealth redistribution are good starts like a truly comprehensive national health care system (doing away with the insurance industry as we known it) and fully funding higher education for qualified students. Those two things are so uncontroversial in most of the world that they are taken for granted by most in the West with few exception. I haven't even started to name the more elaborate and powerful measures that could be taken such as negative income taxes and basic incomes. Inequality is a huge problem and it's getting worse, fortunately the solutions are well known, tested and proven in many other countries, and could be implemented tomorrow if the political will was there.
I do understand what you are saying. You think that massive and increasing inequality is acceptable as long as there is a rising standard of living (as measured in various ways) for everyone. I reject this idea. EVEN IF the poor are better off than they used to be (which I am not convinced of either), it's still not acceptable to me that so much wealth is in the hands of so few. Even if the poorest person lived like a millionaire but there were people making 1000x that I'd still find that situation unacceptable. Such massive inequality is socially toxic all by itself, regardless of relative differences and increases in wealth and standards of living.
Bringing everyone up isn't the primary goal, more equality is. I believe a rise in equality must be balanced so that it doesn't come at the cost of negative growth (you could make everyone equal by making everyone poor and that is just as undesirable as having poor and ultra-rich). A sign of success would be that the poor and middle class were growing more, and the richer are staying where they are or having their incomes reduced slightly for a time.
Left-wing die hards ARE the ones cursing him! Obama is not a leftist, he is a socially moderate pro-business Democrat. Look at his handouts to the media industry (appointments of industry insiders to high positions in his administration) and favorable treatment to business with tax (they practically let GE write their own tax code). Even the much derided "socialist" Obamacare was in actuality a massive government give away to insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Real socialized medicine reform wouldn't have allowed those two players to have a seat at the negotiating table, it's impossible to balance their interests (profits) with the idea of covering everyone because the people in most need of care are the least profitable to insure. He does no better on foreign policy. He hasn't closed Gitmo, has made no real progress divesting us in the Iraq or Afghanistan adventures, and has in fact added a third mid-East country to our list of active military engagements; Libya--although that is only in an air-war capacity, similar to America's involvement in the war in the Balkans under Clinton.
I voted for him the first time. I wanted a real left-wing president to bring the US back on course after so many years of disastrous right-wing imperialist policies that nearly brought our economy to the point of utter collapse, increased inequality to points nearly as high as our nation has ever seen in its history, and squandered the good will of the world that we had just barely started to win back.
Obama is NOT a socialist, and that's a shame, because that's what the US needed. It is what we still need.
Many places do charge for water that way, I've lived in places like that (in California, if you can believe it), but that's beside the point. Water is a tangible, physical good. The cost to deliver more water scales with how much water you need to deliver. Delivering more bandwidth UP TO CAPACITY costs nothing more. Expanding capacity does cost more, and businesses have been reluctant to do so not because of regulation or inability to act but because they chose to instead oversell their capacity and reap record short term profits.
The two sentences in my sig aren't meant to be related. I'm sorry that you made the mistake in feeling that they were. They are two separate issues, although they exist within the same general sphere of problems. The free market failure is actually the failure of deregulated gangster capitalism that dominates America and the world today. Copyright being theft refers to the ever extending copyrights that shackle our culture by keeping works locked up that should long ago have become public domain and part of our common cultural heritage. Two separate sentences, two separate thoughts. No mush thinking, on my part at least.
You are mixing up two separate ideas, but they are somewhat related.
Usage based billing is what you described; the treatment of an internet connection as a stream of consumable goods--data. But data is neither consumed nor is it manufactured, so usage based billing does not make logical sense. The more data that is used up to capacity costs the ISP nothing, and when they get to capacity that must be because they have a lot of subscribers, so they can afford to expand. Capacity thus will always be slightly ahead of demand if the ISP has planned properly and is diligent about rolling out upgrades to their infrastructure. In their greed, they instead chose to oversell their capacity, knowing that most customers don't use anything close to what they are promised by the ISP. They COULD use some of their profits to expand capacity, but they are instead choosing to pursue a legislative solution, simply getting government to allow them to charge by usage instead of selling an unlimited connection at a certain speed. This is what we see happening in Canada.
Net neutrality would stop the ISP favoring one content source (usually their own or a company's that has paid them for a fast track) over another (their competitors or companies that haven't paid for priority treatment for their data). The most obvious case would be where an ISP is also a content creator/provider, like what you mention. They realize that, absent any government regulation forbidding them from doing so (Net Neutrality Legislation), they can simply slow down any traffic from Netflix for example, but allow their own video on demand service to reach subscribers at full speed and with no bandwidth cap. Real net neutrality legislation would force them to treat all bits of a certain type the same, regardless of their source and destination. This would NOT stop ISPs from implementing QOS, as it is widely criticized as doing. Different categories of data can be given different priority, as long as data WITHIN each category is treated the same. So all streaming video is treated the same, but streaming video can be treated differently from VOIP (which requires lower latency and thus a higher priority).
Your line of thinking explained in point one seems to suggest that you will always take the opposing position to members of the left. Do you truly hold the opinion that anything a socialist or even a Marxist says is automatically wrong, because they are members of the left without even looking at the substance and reasoning underlying their position? You might find yourself voting against your own self interest if you place 100% faith on party or ideological labels in determining your position.
Net neutrality, the real conception of it (which the FCC ruling is not btw) is hard to argue against. It simply means trading a theoretically deregulated market for a deregulated market in practice. It is a paradox, because if you are a man of the right, which I assume you are, you have to take a stance that is ideologically opposed to your usual thinking (regulation is always bad and detrimental to the free market) in order to cause an outcome that agrees with your underlying ideology (the market should be an even playing field for business and consumers).
There is nothing even close to the "fairness doctrine" in net neutrality, not in intention nor in practice, EVEN IF some on the left who truly want to shut up your team think so. They will be sorely mistaken when they realize net neutrality does nothing to advance their goal of stifling political speech from members of the right. As a member of the extreme left in the US, and proudly a social democrat, I think that's a terrible goal to have, and it's completely incompatible with the core beliefs of my political ideology.
I'm a democratic socialist through and through, pink and then red on the inside (the deeper you go, like a nice steak), but we actually could find a lot to agree on disregarding some economic issues--which probably earned me being marked as a foe. I am in 100% agreement with your conception of crime, for example.
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It disgusts me whenever someone says the world changed after 9-11 and we had to take the actions we took. Even If a 9-11 size event is the price of living with the civil liberties so precious to me, then I am willing to accept the risk of living in such a country. I would much rather draw straws every decade, knowing I could be one of the 3,000 of 3,000,000 that could die in exchange for not have to be under surveillance day and night; not have to submit to degrading, humiliating, and possibly dangerous search techniques at the airport and other public places; and not having to endure the myriad other abuses of my rights big and small, seen and unseen. But that scenario is far from reflective of reality. At least someone trading liberty for security got something in return; as so often is the case, we traded our liberties and got NOTHING in return.
The biggest mistake after 9-11 was not the action we took, it's that we took any international action at all. We'd be much safer today if we had, instead of launching more wars and imperialist action, turned inward and secured our homeland as best we could (knowing we will never be truly 100% safe, but striving to live in happiness and prosperity despite that), and divested ourselves in the very activities that draw such aggression: our foreign bases, support of Israel, and corporate controlled neo-colonialism.
Whereas copyright tends to focus on protecting artists' ability to make money from their work
Nope. Stop right there. It may be said that it is supposed to do as such, but today we see copyright being used by PUBLISHERS to control the artists and restrict users. Copyright as it is today is immoral, and no one has an obligation to recognize it as legitimate. We're all free to disregard it as much as we can reasonably get away with without personal harm from the enforcers in government who slavishly back the copyright cartels at the expense of our freedom and culture.
I'm not advocating full command economy, I just want the government to intervene in areas that market forces have proven to be unreliable at best, and destructive at worst, in addressing. People aren't going to make the right decisions themselves, it requires some form of coercion or incentives.
I feel just as strongly in my convictions that the path you would have us take stems from an equally myopic morality and will be just as disastrous. It takes no great leap of faith to understand the science behind our energy future, and the facts are not debatable for the most part. All that is uncertain is how great the calamity will be, and how soon it will come.
The problem is, a lot of the people on one side of the debate don't even accept the premise that the train exists at all.
I don't want any scrap built, ramshackle vehicle made by some yahoo in his garage to be traveling on the roads that I too must drive on. I'm glad you can't just throw together some experimental, possibly dangerous, vehicle and drive it. If you want a CNG car you can buy one, several automakers produce versions of cars with such systems and they are far safer and more efficient (not to mention cost effective) than anything you or I could build on our own.
Because such a course of action will yield the greatest short term profits for many people. This is the only course of action that could be expected, it's as natural and expected of corporations as breathing is for humans. This behavior cannot be divorced from the system that created it, because they are one and the same.
History will show who was right. I'm prepared to be judged for, in my zeal, doing too much. Are you prepared to be judged for doing too little?
You're starting from the assumption that energy production and distribution should be, or must be, the domain of private enterprise alone. This isn't the only way things can work. It's simply too dangerous (look at Japan), dirty (look at the Gulf of Mexico), and important to put in the hands of a capitalist framework that is willing to cut corners to make more profit. I'd rather have the entire sector in control of an entity run by experts with the full resources of the nation at their disposal and no board of directors or shareholders to answer to but only the people, and the nation that they too are part of and wish to see prosper. There is no such thing as a patriotic corporation, nor a corporation interested in protecting the environment or public safety. To the extent that they do is only because they are compelled to by The State or public outrage--and the later only after some terrible calamity has stricken our geography or population.
The problem with HFCS is not so much what it is or how it's used but how ubiquitous it is in our food supply. It's probably in at least half of every food product the average person eats on a daily basis. It's not just the obvious sources like soda and sweet snacks; it's in ketchup, bread, orange juice, nearly anything that comes in a box or bag.
That being said, int he same store that you can buy those things are also food products that are safe and healthy and not for much more money. It's mostly a matter of being willing to prepare your own food and not rely so much on precooked and preprocessed sources. It's much easier to cook spaghetti with marinara with premade tomato sauce, but you could spend a few more minutes to make your own from tomatoes and spices. It's choices like that, we make them every day. We trade a few minutes, even a few seconds, of convenience for our health. It's slowly killing us, and people aren't going to stop doing it by themselves, sadly. Something has to stop them. I wish it could be a matter of education and personal choice but that's simply not going to work. We need a force strong enough to mandate that this junk is taken out of our food, and that starts with removing the influence of the corporations that produce those chemicals and additives on the government agency that is supposed to regulate what they get to put in our food.
I don't care if I'm called a communist or a fascist or a Nazi or whatever, government needs to have stricter control on what companies are allowed to put in food, because individuals making their own choices about what to buy are simply not punishing those companies enough for what they are doing to our health.
Which is why public policy should be directed to intercede. The public is short-sighted, like the markets that supply their fuel and "choose" which technologies to pursue. We can see the storm coming on the horizon, but when you've got so many people looking straight up, seeing the sun and proclaiming there's no danger it's hard to react to a future that many experts know is coming.
We can either make tough choices now that will lead to a somewhat painful but tolerable transition period, or wait and do the same things in haste and agony. The people saying we should do nothing are doing so mostly out of an ideological mistrust of government doing anything, but they are going to be very regretful when they realize the markets failed to see and prepare for a future that experts and government DID predict, and could have prevented or at least vastly reduced the severity of.
We are in for a bleak future, because a small section of society has a vested interest in doing nothing and they have fully convinced roughly half of us that doing anything about it is an affront to their liberty. They'll pay in the end, we all will.
The "good" old fashioned liberals are today's economic conservatives. No thanks, they've done enough damage to the world. Social democrats are the good liberals these days. Libertarians are just scary in their slavish devotion to market solutions as the be all end all tool for every problem.
I cancelled my cable and Netflix and now just torrent everything I want to watch (set up to automatically grab new episodes as soon as they hit the tracker) and stream stuff when available and I don't mind the lower quality. Get something like a Mac mini and a nice IPS display and you're set. It does so much more than a set top box and a TV, it's brilliant, and so much cheaper than paying for all those services that we don't really need anymore.
I'm setting my parents up with the same system. I'm not sure why more people don't do this.
How long before advances in scanning and 3D printing will allow for any object to be analyzed and recreated so cheaply that it replaces traditional manufacturing processes? And then the next step is to cut out the scanning and just make originals from digital schematics. It's probably an inevitability that such an industrial revolution will happen, but I'd really like to see it in my life time; I'll likely live another 60 years even disregarding medical advancements so I think I just might. It's also interesting to think about the restructuring society will be forced into with such advancements. The hilarious parody of the music industry's anti-copying ad, "You wouldn't download a car." might somewhat resemble reality as the traditional power structures of capitalism, finance, and industry struggle for life in their death agony. In a world where every village has a Star Trek-like replicator, there's going to be a lot of pissed off robber barons and Shenzhen factory bosses.
This is a pretty cool demonstration of the technology, but it's just a toy right now. In its mature state it's going to make quite a lot of people nervous and angry. If we thought adapting to an age where information; books, music, movies, ideas, can be replicated and distributed at virtually no cost, we are going to be in for quite the shock when the same paradigm (or one like it, as raw materials will still need to be mined, grown, produced, etc) is brought to physical, tangible objects.
Yes, I would download a car...if I could.
I shouldn't have to comment why using both the former Soviet Union and France as examples of the same political system (or even similar ones) is absurd, but I guess I have to. France is still a capitalist nation. You're free to choose your own profession, where you live, go to school, you can even start a business if you like. They are a moderate Social Democratic welfare state, and consistently have ranked higher on the Human Development Index than the US does, and the difference is even more striking when the new inequality adjusted metric is used. The Soviet Union was always more of a totalitarian dictatorship than it was communist or socialist. It serves as a great example of why totalitarianism is bad and costly in terms of human lives.
France has their problems of course, all political system will, but their (and countries like them) choices on what to emphasize seems more rational and human-centric than in the US. It's hard to argue against things like a shorter work week, more rights for workers and women--with respect to maternity leave--and more vacation time for actually enjoying life...unless of course you're a member of the class that benefits from workers being kept poor, desperate, and working harder and longer than they should have to. There is not an irrational fear of tackling problems collectively in most of the world like there is in the US. There's a lot of good things to be said about individualism and hard work, but the free market isn't going to fix some problems; it just isn't profitable for anyone to fix them. If you resign yourself to only using that one tool (a market solution), you're going to have to ignore a lot of problems (or redefine them so they're no longer considered problems like you've done with inequality) simply because you don't have any way in your limited world view of even acknowledging them.
To say that we don't live in an age of inequality, however you want to measure it, is profoundly ignorant, especially considering your claimed background. How could you not have noticed that you had to go to school in the ghetto, while other kids, just because they were born to different families, had nicer schools and safer neighborhoods? Inequality is all around you, it's so ingrained in our society and culture that you can't even see it. Many Americans, it's a widespread phenomenon, simply don't notice or believe it's inevitable and impossible to change. They're like the fish who, spending his entire life underwater, doesn't even notice that it's all around and always has been. Worse still are the people who actually laud inequality as a triumph of our economic system. It is lifted to heights not just as the way the world is, but how the world should be. It's especially depressing and frustrating when this sentiment comes from the have-nots. Perhaps it's a form of Stockholm syndrome or they've just been conditioned to accept that they don't deserve better, but it is not, indeed it never has been, an inevitable outcome of any natural laws. Things are this way because people choose them to be, and we can choose a different way just as easily.
Of course change would require a realignment of values, ideals, and priorities, and doubtless new problems would be created, but the ones that would be swept away would be far worse than anything we would have to grapple with under a more socialist economic system.
Not just a little more, immensely more, astronomically more, and that absolutely and unequivocally IS socially toxic to society. Enormous wealth inequality is, by itself, intrinsically bad and should be reduced as much as is practically possible. And you keep defending the rich by saying it's not personal income it's corporate income. What's the difference? When one person commands the use of billions of dollars and another only a few hundred or thousand, that's inequality, and that the billions are not actually "owned" by the person spending it but by a corporation is a semantic difference of little actual consequence to the state of the world. You're close to arguing that rich people don't exist, only wealthy corporations, which would be absurd.
Income inequality does matter, it's harmful to society, it creates a more highly stratified society which has been shown by sociologists to be linked to an increase in violence, crime, stress related diseases (just being in a lower class is bad for your health, even if all your biological needs are fully met), and lower levels of happiness--and that's independent of absolute income, and it's also controlled for countries with considerably better social safety nets and public health care.
Some degree of wealth redistribution is necessary for society, and we are well below the point where more would be too much. Things that aren't normally thought of as wealth redistribution are good starts like a truly comprehensive national health care system (doing away with the insurance industry as we known it) and fully funding higher education for qualified students. Those two things are so uncontroversial in most of the world that they are taken for granted by most in the West with few exception. I haven't even started to name the more elaborate and powerful measures that could be taken such as negative income taxes and basic incomes. Inequality is a huge problem and it's getting worse, fortunately the solutions are well known, tested and proven in many other countries, and could be implemented tomorrow if the political will was there.
I do understand what you are saying. You think that massive and increasing inequality is acceptable as long as there is a rising standard of living (as measured in various ways) for everyone. I reject this idea. EVEN IF the poor are better off than they used to be (which I am not convinced of either), it's still not acceptable to me that so much wealth is in the hands of so few. Even if the poorest person lived like a millionaire but there were people making 1000x that I'd still find that situation unacceptable. Such massive inequality is socially toxic all by itself, regardless of relative differences and increases in wealth and standards of living.
Bringing everyone up isn't the primary goal, more equality is. I believe a rise in equality must be balanced so that it doesn't come at the cost of negative growth (you could make everyone equal by making everyone poor and that is just as undesirable as having poor and ultra-rich). A sign of success would be that the poor and middle class were growing more, and the richer are staying where they are or having their incomes reduced slightly for a time.
Left-wing die hards ARE the ones cursing him! Obama is not a leftist, he is a socially moderate pro-business Democrat. Look at his handouts to the media industry (appointments of industry insiders to high positions in his administration) and favorable treatment to business with tax (they practically let GE write their own tax code). Even the much derided "socialist" Obamacare was in actuality a massive government give away to insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Real socialized medicine reform wouldn't have allowed those two players to have a seat at the negotiating table, it's impossible to balance their interests (profits) with the idea of covering everyone because the people in most need of care are the least profitable to insure. He does no better on foreign policy. He hasn't closed Gitmo, has made no real progress divesting us in the Iraq or Afghanistan adventures, and has in fact added a third mid-East country to our list of active military engagements; Libya--although that is only in an air-war capacity, similar to America's involvement in the war in the Balkans under Clinton.
I voted for him the first time. I wanted a real left-wing president to bring the US back on course after so many years of disastrous right-wing imperialist policies that nearly brought our economy to the point of utter collapse, increased inequality to points nearly as high as our nation has ever seen in its history, and squandered the good will of the world that we had just barely started to win back.
Obama is NOT a socialist, and that's a shame, because that's what the US needed. It is what we still need.
Many places do charge for water that way, I've lived in places like that (in California, if you can believe it), but that's beside the point. Water is a tangible, physical good. The cost to deliver more water scales with how much water you need to deliver. Delivering more bandwidth UP TO CAPACITY costs nothing more. Expanding capacity does cost more, and businesses have been reluctant to do so not because of regulation or inability to act but because they chose to instead oversell their capacity and reap record short term profits.
The two sentences in my sig aren't meant to be related. I'm sorry that you made the mistake in feeling that they were. They are two separate issues, although they exist within the same general sphere of problems. The free market failure is actually the failure of deregulated gangster capitalism that dominates America and the world today. Copyright being theft refers to the ever extending copyrights that shackle our culture by keeping works locked up that should long ago have become public domain and part of our common cultural heritage. Two separate sentences, two separate thoughts. No mush thinking, on my part at least.
You are mixing up two separate ideas, but they are somewhat related.
Usage based billing is what you described; the treatment of an internet connection as a stream of consumable goods--data. But data is neither consumed nor is it manufactured, so usage based billing does not make logical sense. The more data that is used up to capacity costs the ISP nothing, and when they get to capacity that must be because they have a lot of subscribers, so they can afford to expand. Capacity thus will always be slightly ahead of demand if the ISP has planned properly and is diligent about rolling out upgrades to their infrastructure. In their greed, they instead chose to oversell their capacity, knowing that most customers don't use anything close to what they are promised by the ISP. They COULD use some of their profits to expand capacity, but they are instead choosing to pursue a legislative solution, simply getting government to allow them to charge by usage instead of selling an unlimited connection at a certain speed. This is what we see happening in Canada.
Net neutrality would stop the ISP favoring one content source (usually their own or a company's that has paid them for a fast track) over another (their competitors or companies that haven't paid for priority treatment for their data). The most obvious case would be where an ISP is also a content creator/provider, like what you mention. They realize that, absent any government regulation forbidding them from doing so (Net Neutrality Legislation), they can simply slow down any traffic from Netflix for example, but allow their own video on demand service to reach subscribers at full speed and with no bandwidth cap. Real net neutrality legislation would force them to treat all bits of a certain type the same, regardless of their source and destination. This would NOT stop ISPs from implementing QOS, as it is widely criticized as doing. Different categories of data can be given different priority, as long as data WITHIN each category is treated the same. So all streaming video is treated the same, but streaming video can be treated differently from VOIP (which requires lower latency and thus a higher priority).
Your line of thinking explained in point one seems to suggest that you will always take the opposing position to members of the left. Do you truly hold the opinion that anything a socialist or even a Marxist says is automatically wrong, because they are members of the left without even looking at the substance and reasoning underlying their position? You might find yourself voting against your own self interest if you place 100% faith on party or ideological labels in determining your position.
Net neutrality, the real conception of it (which the FCC ruling is not btw) is hard to argue against. It simply means trading a theoretically deregulated market for a deregulated market in practice. It is a paradox, because if you are a man of the right, which I assume you are, you have to take a stance that is ideologically opposed to your usual thinking (regulation is always bad and detrimental to the free market) in order to cause an outcome that agrees with your underlying ideology (the market should be an even playing field for business and consumers).
There is nothing even close to the "fairness doctrine" in net neutrality, not in intention nor in practice, EVEN IF some on the left who truly want to shut up your team think so. They will be sorely mistaken when they realize net neutrality does nothing to advance their goal of stifling political speech from members of the right. As a member of the extreme left in the US, and proudly a social democrat, I think that's a terrible goal to have, and it's completely incompatible with the core beliefs of my political ideology.
I'm a democratic socialist through and through, pink and then red on the inside (the deeper you go, like a nice steak), but we actually could find a lot to agree on disregarding some economic issues--which probably earned me being marked as a foe. I am in 100% agreement with your conception of crime, for example.
You should watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc