Or take most of the Metroid games, an unmotivated player who likes finishing sidequests will finish Metroid Prime in 50 hours, but can be finished in 5-10 if you know what you are doing and as little as an hour and a half if you are speed running it. And it's a sheer blast, too.
You know, some of us actually like wandering the world scanning in vain on a pixel hunt (but not too much, though lots of people do, I can't finish anything Final Fantasy, it's too many random encounters, Zelda has just the right formula for most people inclined to adventures I think).
I did read your post, you are arguing semantics. The what-it-does-or-does-not-regulate arguments don't matter, my point covers such regulation period. Yes, it's not arguing for mandatory "net neutrality" but even so, look at what it's trying to do.
Telling a company you must treat all content the same is no different than saying this food product must have X amount of Y. When I said there is only one type of regulation, I was using the modern definition of regulation. But in fact the classical definition, the one used in the Constitution for instance, would be worded today as "well-regulated" e.g. maintained well and functionally. ISPs have every right to regulate their networks in this manner as they please (within the context of IP networking, by dropping packets, routing rules, prioritizing packets, linking with other individuals like households and other ISPs and who or who not to link with, etc). All individuals (including companies) need to regulate how they use their resources, this is necessary to keep costs down (monetary costs or otherwise). You are claiming that the government must use violent regulation to tell companies how to best keep their resources they own well-regulated. This claim makes no sense:
Only the consumer is able to say what is best for them, and only the ISP is able to say what is best for them, and if they both happen to agree that you want what the other has to offer is more valuable than what you are giving up, and perform a voluntary exchange. No where in this process is any 3rd party involved, and it follows no 3rd party has any legitimate ability to change the transaction terms. You are not in a position to tell other interested parties what they may or may not exchange.
There is no one "in charge of the Internet," it is the foremost free institution in the world, each individual has a say over their infrastructure they control, and no one may control any one else's. Net neutrality breaks the tradition of network freedom that the Internet has historically operated under, and tells people how they must exchange with each other in order to do so lawfully: you must treat content a certain way. This breaks the tradition of using engineering to solve problems and not a threat of violence. It's like declaring spam illegal with the can-spam act, it's pointless and something better solved with the right engineering, not government power.
Oh sure, government regulations have a crippling effect on competition, or diminish the threat of competition. But don't imply that competition is necessary or that we somehow force it, redundant resources to provide the same service is not economical, nor would a free market choose competition in the case of services like Internet or electricity.
We don't need competition, we need more threats of competition which the government often unintentionally removes, and we need true private property in the communications industry as you point out, not this government-controlled licensing scheme.
You are terribly over-examining this. There is only one type of regulation, and it's the type that requires violent intervention or the threat of some sort of power if you want to enforce it. Telling ISPs what they cannot do is regulation, period. You are in no position to say what is best for the consumer or the ISP.
The only possible recourse (and a far better one I think) would be perusing them for fraud: They are offering Internet access, which implies unfiltered access, where packets are not modified by the ISP (but they may be prioritized or even dropped for network reasons, that's how IP and TCP was engineered).
Well, communism implies central planning, one person telling everyone else what they demand, and that's no good, because even if you could accurately forecast what everyone wants you have no way to calculate what is the correct production structure to satisfy them. Capitalism, on the other hand, uses profit as the method of economic calculation, as the means of balancing demands with supplies: Profit means you can introduce more supply to that area, and a loss means that those resources would be better served elsewhere.
With that in mind, you can't put "people before business," within a context of individual rights it's the same thing.
A "need" is just a highly-ranked want, saying we "need food" is the same thing as saying "I want food above all else if I want to survive" or something like that (since survival is typically the highest-ranked want of all).
Just electricity? There is also labor, system administration, networking (you have to download the messages from other networks, of course), hardware, other capital costs (storage space), customer service, and legal costs, and probably other weird things that I can't even imagine. It is relatively cheap, yes, but not so cheap that it's a priority when only 1% of your customer base is using it.
People like to throw around competition as a core concept of capitalism but that's just marketing, really. In some cases competition would actually be harmful, for instance, it makes no sense to have multiple lines delivering electricity or for that matter Internet service to the same household, especially when there are other unconnected places that would be much better served with a connection. It would be redundant and a waste of natural resources that, again, would be put to better use providing new service to people, or more likely, serving an entirely different function in a different industry altogether.
Putting resources to work where they are most urgently demanded: That is "capitalism in action."
Who ever said they would be charging less? That is naivety or a blatant false statement.
It's a matter of priority. An ISP (or any business for that matter) has limited resources and needs to decide how to allocate them to maximize satisfaction (that is, profit). Cox, my ISP, has decided that other needs are more pressing. For example, I noticed my speed just went up, and they did in fact increase my speed. I don't know if it's related but the point is things like the extra speed isn't free, and they decided there is a better use of the resources currently going to Usenet service, due to demand.
International law that it seems all the other countries are guilty of too, then, because they seem to support it. Additionally, the constitution is the supreme law of the land, "international law" doesn't mean anything. Unless it is a treaty properly ratified by the senate, then there has to be an injured party who files a claim with the supreme court. So far as I know the Iraq and Afghanistan governments are not complaining (and I'm not sure that the former governments were signatories to any treaties with us).
If you are talking about a deceleration of war, congress never issued a deceleration of war (and hasn't since WW2), they only continue to fund the military.
I don't like the wars either, but really? Your logic is a rather bad abuse of the Constitution that has implications beyond the war.
Explain to me how it is "illegitimate and illegal?" The Constitution, by definition the authority on what is legal, grants the power to use the military. If you disagree with this "war" that's one thing, but don't make up invalid reasons to make yourself feel good.
Even if it weren't a universal truth, of course a society does, your "market homeostatic mechanism" has decided that it exists, read the Constitution and the Deceleration of Independence. We call it "liberty," "individual rights," "fundamental rights," or "unalienable rights" depending on who you ask (among other terms). Though, it follows that everyone has the free will, though not the right, to do whatever they are physically capable of doing (initiating violence) because everything operates within the greatest context of the physical universe.
We recognize that everyone owns themselves (otherwise we could exercise free will over other people). In the context of our society, cells don't own themselves, nor do planets, plants, etc. By extension we own not only our body but whatever we produce or lay claim to, and can further do things like voluntary exchange.
All your explanation does is try and justify why whatever happens, happens, as if whatever choices we make don't matter to overall prosperity or individuals ("in the long run, we're all dead") and in that sense isn't very insightful. I find it rather shallow too, the best I can do is compare the massive failure of society until the 18th century and failure around much of the world today to produce prosperity, and the rise of brutal dictatorships, to the spread of cancer in a body. At the best it explains society, but that's just sociology, it doesn't effectively tell us what will happen or say anything about choice and consequence. (I would say it has to do with interest rates and protection of property and rule of law, these things were nearly non-existent under feudalism and when the church banned loans with interest, saying it was exploitation, and only Jewish bankers could make loans with interest. Today loans with interest are banned under Islam and the most industrialized Islamic country is... Turkey.)
My point is that if you care about the decisions people make, and about alternatives, and you can rank those alternatives, then you can logically conclude with those axioms what will maximize prosperity among individuals - individual rights, from which you can further deduce laws of economics, minimum wage hurts production which increases costs, unemployment, and real prices, for instance.
But what "the populace wants" isn't necessarily what is good for them. Many people will insist on smoking, but surely it isn't good for them. What you are ignoring is an even greater context of individual rights in which societies and governments operate. A person may choose to smoke, however a person may not demand that no person shall work below a certain rate, to enforce that requires violence. An initiation of violence is unacceptable since no crime has been committed in an entirely voluntary transaction between someone wanting to work for free and someone offering that position.
No, for a healthy economy, you need output of stuff that people want. Period. It has nothing to do with jobs or small green pieces of paper. If you can find people willing to do the work for free, unpaid, that's good for them (by virtue of the fact that if it wasn't, they wouldn't be asking for it), and that's good for their employer who has just lowered a cost of production. There is absolutely nothing wrong with unpaid labor and everything wrong with penalizing the people who seek it out.
Every time technology makes another leap forward, we have to reclaim the Fourth Amendment, and often we have to reclaim the entire Bill of Rights, because technology gives [the authorities] powers that were not envisioned by the Founding Fathers.
...Or we could just make the airlines responsible for their own security, then they could decide whether they want the scanners and what types of searches to preform, without running into constitutional issues that the government has.
Property protection doesn't involve regulation, certainly not regulating content which is most of their job now. Protection is enforced by the courts, perhaps prosecuted with the help of a specialized beau, like how different divisions of the FBI specialize in different crimes, the FCC would investigate those "jammers" that would violate a broadcaster's right to their frequency.
That would be theft, it's no different than knocking over your neighbor's house with a bulldozer, you just can't do that. That's what the FCC was created for, not for regulating content, not for auctioning off entire blocks of spectrum like they are now, and not "licensing" wavelengths with annual licenses and terms on their use.
That's pure speculation, and not the case anywhere in the world, certainly not when radio was first starting. The FCC was created as a standards body so broadcasters wouldn't accidentally step on each other's toes so to speak, there was never any problem with private property rights in broadcasting. If frequencies can (or could, rather) be bought and sold just like any other product (land), there is absolutely no reason why a few companies would own the spectrum. There might be a few that own a particular frequency across the country, or a large range of bandwidth somewhere, but to expect the entire spectrum to be exclusive to a variety of broadcasters is like saying Wal-Mart will eventually own all the land in the world, it's ignorant, not to mention impossible.
Carter and Nixon killed the economy (or Woodrow Wilson and FDR, with the Fed, income tax, and gold standard, if you want to go back even farther), it took Bush and Obama to drive the nails into the coffin with reckless spending. (And just to be clear, government can't, strictly speaking, "resurrect" an economy, they can stop bleeding the nearly dead patient, however, by cutting spending).
The major difference I see is conservatives are in favor of net-freedom, whereas slashdotters tend to be for net-neutrality (pro-regulation, even if staunchly opposed to any form of regulation on speech anywhere else). On the other hand, slashdotters are far more likely to be against intellectual property, a definitively anarcho-capitalist/libertarian position (neither liberal nor conservative).
Wealth is subjective, and people value goods differently. Thus there can be a "drain on the economy" in the sense you can create and destroy wealth (voluntary exchange which creates wealth, and war/violence that destroys wealth). What Coward is wrong about is that you can drain the economy of a certain dollar value: An economy transforms inputs (land, labor, capital, consumables) into more highly valued outputs, and in the end, money isn't an input.
What harm have monopolies actually ever done? They have dramatically lowered the price of commodity goods like steel and oil by making distribution more efficient, or failing that, collapsing out of irresponsibility. Name any such trust that hasn't imploded on itself within a decade. Regional monopolies such as telecoms exist because it's more efficient to wire yourself to someone who doesn't already have high-speed Internet than try and compete with someone who is already established - Anti-trust there would mean fewer, not more, people get their high-speed Internet. How about these software monopolies? Strictly speaking, there is no right to "intellectual property" (it exists only due to law), so if you are arguing for anti-trust regulations for Microsoft (who already has a monopoly on the distribution of certain products depending on their creative contents in the form of copyright, or on their ideas in the form of patents), you are arguing two wrongs make a right - It could be true, but very probably isn't, since you are focusing on the wrong issue entirely: don't impose regulations on them, take away their state-granted monopolies over their patents and copyrights.
Wow, the UN declared it a human right, it must be so! There is also a right to education, a right to a job... wow!...Where's my right to a unicorn?
People like FDR and his wife mostly wrote and championed the UN declaration of human rights, you know, along with FDR's second bill of rights containing things like a right to "decent housing" and "job with decent wages." Again, these "rights" are not really rights, but entitlements that must restrict or violate other people's rights in some fashion, and for that reason cannot be derived from the fundamental human right of ownership of one's self.
So-called "moral rights" are not and can not be derived from basic human rights. Destroying something you own might get you into trouble with the government because of the existence of the law but that doesn't change your human right to do so, it's no different than censorship.
Since when was crying off limits? Lemme guess, Hillary cried as a publicity stunt too? Gimme a break, let's argue the issues at hand and not decoy with this stupid stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Or take most of the Metroid games, an unmotivated player who likes finishing sidequests will finish Metroid Prime in 50 hours, but can be finished in 5-10 if you know what you are doing and as little as an hour and a half if you are speed running it. And it's a sheer blast, too.
You know, some of us actually like wandering the world scanning in vain on a pixel hunt (but not too much, though lots of people do, I can't finish anything Final Fantasy, it's too many random encounters, Zelda has just the right formula for most people inclined to adventures I think).
I did read your post, you are arguing semantics. The what-it-does-or-does-not-regulate arguments don't matter, my point covers such regulation period. Yes, it's not arguing for mandatory "net neutrality" but even so, look at what it's trying to do.
Telling a company you must treat all content the same is no different than saying this food product must have X amount of Y. When I said there is only one type of regulation, I was using the modern definition of regulation. But in fact the classical definition, the one used in the Constitution for instance, would be worded today as "well-regulated" e.g. maintained well and functionally. ISPs have every right to regulate their networks in this manner as they please (within the context of IP networking, by dropping packets, routing rules, prioritizing packets, linking with other individuals like households and other ISPs and who or who not to link with, etc). All individuals (including companies) need to regulate how they use their resources, this is necessary to keep costs down (monetary costs or otherwise). You are claiming that the government must use violent regulation to tell companies how to best keep their resources they own well-regulated. This claim makes no sense:
Only the consumer is able to say what is best for them, and only the ISP is able to say what is best for them, and if they both happen to agree that you want what the other has to offer is more valuable than what you are giving up, and perform a voluntary exchange. No where in this process is any 3rd party involved, and it follows no 3rd party has any legitimate ability to change the transaction terms. You are not in a position to tell other interested parties what they may or may not exchange.
There is no one "in charge of the Internet," it is the foremost free institution in the world, each individual has a say over their infrastructure they control, and no one may control any one else's. Net neutrality breaks the tradition of network freedom that the Internet has historically operated under, and tells people how they must exchange with each other in order to do so lawfully: you must treat content a certain way. This breaks the tradition of using engineering to solve problems and not a threat of violence. It's like declaring spam illegal with the can-spam act, it's pointless and something better solved with the right engineering, not government power.
Oh sure, government regulations have a crippling effect on competition, or diminish the threat of competition. But don't imply that competition is necessary or that we somehow force it, redundant resources to provide the same service is not economical, nor would a free market choose competition in the case of services like Internet or electricity.
We don't need competition, we need more threats of competition which the government often unintentionally removes, and we need true private property in the communications industry as you point out, not this government-controlled licensing scheme.
You are terribly over-examining this. There is only one type of regulation, and it's the type that requires violent intervention or the threat of some sort of power if you want to enforce it. Telling ISPs what they cannot do is regulation, period. You are in no position to say what is best for the consumer or the ISP.
The only possible recourse (and a far better one I think) would be perusing them for fraud: They are offering Internet access, which implies unfiltered access, where packets are not modified by the ISP (but they may be prioritized or even dropped for network reasons, that's how IP and TCP was engineered).
Well, communism implies central planning, one person telling everyone else what they demand, and that's no good, because even if you could accurately forecast what everyone wants you have no way to calculate what is the correct production structure to satisfy them. Capitalism, on the other hand, uses profit as the method of economic calculation, as the means of balancing demands with supplies: Profit means you can introduce more supply to that area, and a loss means that those resources would be better served elsewhere.
With that in mind, you can't put "people before business," within a context of individual rights it's the same thing.
A "need" is just a highly-ranked want, saying we "need food" is the same thing as saying "I want food above all else if I want to survive" or something like that (since survival is typically the highest-ranked want of all).
Just electricity? There is also labor, system administration, networking (you have to download the messages from other networks, of course), hardware, other capital costs (storage space), customer service, and legal costs, and probably other weird things that I can't even imagine. It is relatively cheap, yes, but not so cheap that it's a priority when only 1% of your customer base is using it.
People like to throw around competition as a core concept of capitalism but that's just marketing, really. In some cases competition would actually be harmful, for instance, it makes no sense to have multiple lines delivering electricity or for that matter Internet service to the same household, especially when there are other unconnected places that would be much better served with a connection. It would be redundant and a waste of natural resources that, again, would be put to better use providing new service to people, or more likely, serving an entirely different function in a different industry altogether.
Putting resources to work where they are most urgently demanded: That is "capitalism in action."
Who ever said they would be charging less? That is naivety or a blatant false statement.
It's a matter of priority. An ISP (or any business for that matter) has limited resources and needs to decide how to allocate them to maximize satisfaction (that is, profit). Cox, my ISP, has decided that other needs are more pressing. For example, I noticed my speed just went up, and they did in fact increase my speed. I don't know if it's related but the point is things like the extra speed isn't free, and they decided there is a better use of the resources currently going to Usenet service, due to demand.
International law that it seems all the other countries are guilty of too, then, because they seem to support it. Additionally, the constitution is the supreme law of the land, "international law" doesn't mean anything. Unless it is a treaty properly ratified by the senate, then there has to be an injured party who files a claim with the supreme court. So far as I know the Iraq and Afghanistan governments are not complaining (and I'm not sure that the former governments were signatories to any treaties with us).
If you are talking about a deceleration of war, congress never issued a deceleration of war (and hasn't since WW2), they only continue to fund the military.
I don't like the wars either, but really? Your logic is a rather bad abuse of the Constitution that has implications beyond the war.
Explain to me how it is "illegitimate and illegal?" The Constitution, by definition the authority on what is legal, grants the power to use the military. If you disagree with this "war" that's one thing, but don't make up invalid reasons to make yourself feel good.
Even if it weren't a universal truth, of course a society does, your "market homeostatic mechanism" has decided that it exists, read the Constitution and the Deceleration of Independence. We call it "liberty," "individual rights," "fundamental rights," or "unalienable rights" depending on who you ask (among other terms). Though, it follows that everyone has the free will, though not the right, to do whatever they are physically capable of doing (initiating violence) because everything operates within the greatest context of the physical universe.
We recognize that everyone owns themselves (otherwise we could exercise free will over other people). In the context of our society, cells don't own themselves, nor do planets, plants, etc. By extension we own not only our body but whatever we produce or lay claim to, and can further do things like voluntary exchange.
All your explanation does is try and justify why whatever happens, happens, as if whatever choices we make don't matter to overall prosperity or individuals ("in the long run, we're all dead") and in that sense isn't very insightful. I find it rather shallow too, the best I can do is compare the massive failure of society until the 18th century and failure around much of the world today to produce prosperity, and the rise of brutal dictatorships, to the spread of cancer in a body. At the best it explains society, but that's just sociology, it doesn't effectively tell us what will happen or say anything about choice and consequence. (I would say it has to do with interest rates and protection of property and rule of law, these things were nearly non-existent under feudalism and when the church banned loans with interest, saying it was exploitation, and only Jewish bankers could make loans with interest. Today loans with interest are banned under Islam and the most industrialized Islamic country is... Turkey.)
My point is that if you care about the decisions people make, and about alternatives, and you can rank those alternatives, then you can logically conclude with those axioms what will maximize prosperity among individuals - individual rights, from which you can further deduce laws of economics, minimum wage hurts production which increases costs, unemployment, and real prices, for instance.
But what "the populace wants" isn't necessarily what is good for them. Many people will insist on smoking, but surely it isn't good for them. What you are ignoring is an even greater context of individual rights in which societies and governments operate. A person may choose to smoke, however a person may not demand that no person shall work below a certain rate, to enforce that requires violence. An initiation of violence is unacceptable since no crime has been committed in an entirely voluntary transaction between someone wanting to work for free and someone offering that position.
No, for a healthy economy, you need output of stuff that people want. Period. It has nothing to do with jobs or small green pieces of paper. If you can find people willing to do the work for free, unpaid, that's good for them (by virtue of the fact that if it wasn't, they wouldn't be asking for it), and that's good for their employer who has just lowered a cost of production. There is absolutely nothing wrong with unpaid labor and everything wrong with penalizing the people who seek it out.
Property protection doesn't involve regulation, certainly not regulating content which is most of their job now. Protection is enforced by the courts, perhaps prosecuted with the help of a specialized beau, like how different divisions of the FBI specialize in different crimes, the FCC would investigate those "jammers" that would violate a broadcaster's right to their frequency.
That would be theft, it's no different than knocking over your neighbor's house with a bulldozer, you just can't do that. That's what the FCC was created for, not for regulating content, not for auctioning off entire blocks of spectrum like they are now, and not "licensing" wavelengths with annual licenses and terms on their use.
That's pure speculation, and not the case anywhere in the world, certainly not when radio was first starting. The FCC was created as a standards body so broadcasters wouldn't accidentally step on each other's toes so to speak, there was never any problem with private property rights in broadcasting. If frequencies can (or could, rather) be bought and sold just like any other product (land), there is absolutely no reason why a few companies would own the spectrum. There might be a few that own a particular frequency across the country, or a large range of bandwidth somewhere, but to expect the entire spectrum to be exclusive to a variety of broadcasters is like saying Wal-Mart will eventually own all the land in the world, it's ignorant, not to mention impossible.
Carter and Nixon killed the economy (or Woodrow Wilson and FDR, with the Fed, income tax, and gold standard, if you want to go back even farther), it took Bush and Obama to drive the nails into the coffin with reckless spending. (And just to be clear, government can't, strictly speaking, "resurrect" an economy, they can stop bleeding the nearly dead patient, however, by cutting spending).
The major difference I see is conservatives are in favor of net-freedom, whereas slashdotters tend to be for net-neutrality (pro-regulation, even if staunchly opposed to any form of regulation on speech anywhere else). On the other hand, slashdotters are far more likely to be against intellectual property, a definitively anarcho-capitalist/libertarian position (neither liberal nor conservative).
Wealth is subjective, and people value goods differently. Thus there can be a "drain on the economy" in the sense you can create and destroy wealth (voluntary exchange which creates wealth, and war/violence that destroys wealth). What Coward is wrong about is that you can drain the economy of a certain dollar value: An economy transforms inputs (land, labor, capital, consumables) into more highly valued outputs, and in the end, money isn't an input.
What harm have monopolies actually ever done? They have dramatically lowered the price of commodity goods like steel and oil by making distribution more efficient, or failing that, collapsing out of irresponsibility. Name any such trust that hasn't imploded on itself within a decade. Regional monopolies such as telecoms exist because it's more efficient to wire yourself to someone who doesn't already have high-speed Internet than try and compete with someone who is already established - Anti-trust there would mean fewer, not more, people get their high-speed Internet. How about these software monopolies? Strictly speaking, there is no right to "intellectual property" (it exists only due to law), so if you are arguing for anti-trust regulations for Microsoft (who already has a monopoly on the distribution of certain products depending on their creative contents in the form of copyright, or on their ideas in the form of patents), you are arguing two wrongs make a right - It could be true, but very probably isn't, since you are focusing on the wrong issue entirely: don't impose regulations on them, take away their state-granted monopolies over their patents and copyrights.
Wow, the UN declared it a human right, it must be so! There is also a right to education, a right to a job... wow! ...Where's my right to a unicorn?
People like FDR and his wife mostly wrote and championed the UN declaration of human rights, you know, along with FDR's second bill of rights containing things like a right to "decent housing" and "job with decent wages." Again, these "rights" are not really rights, but entitlements that must restrict or violate other people's rights in some fashion, and for that reason cannot be derived from the fundamental human right of ownership of one's self.
So-called "moral rights" are not and can not be derived from basic human rights. Destroying something you own might get you into trouble with the government because of the existence of the law but that doesn't change your human right to do so, it's no different than censorship.
Since when was crying off limits? Lemme guess, Hillary cried as a publicity stunt too? Gimme a break, let's argue the issues at hand and not decoy with this stupid stuff.