Consumer devices aren't designed in a vacuum. There has to be a place to sell them. If someone came up with the idea for a really wonderful music player 10 years ago and it took 10 years to have the device produced in all its perfection, it would be a flop. iPod owns the market. So we have had a succession of modestly successful devices that weren't perfect but made it to market.
Software is often the same thing. You sell a distributor on a product and they want it for Christmas. Come October, you are going to ship a product. Period. Miss the window and you have a failure. It doesn't matter how great or perfect the product would have been - you missed the window and the time for it has past.
You have to be able to put up with a level of defect in a product and deliver it in a reasonable period of time. If you can't deliver it, it isn't going to sell because it isn't on the shelf. Doesn't matter how perfect it might have been. Are fewer defects better? Yes, but not at the expense of the marketing plan.
Actually, this is extremely simple. How many OGG files are there on the average Joe's computer? Zero. How many web sites sell downloadable music files in OGG format? A few, probably. How many popular software products do anything at all with OGG format files? Zero, I believe.
So we have a pretty unpopular format with a niche following.
Now we have the decision between a 64K chip and a 128K chip in a given device. Or some similar trade-off on ROM space and maybe RAM space. Is it worth the expense of moving to the 128K chip to support OGG? Nobody is going to be able to sell that one.
Is there a device with enough ROM space available to fit OGG in at the supposed near-zero cost the parent claims? Maybe. But there isn't any real interest. Certainly not on a feature-to-feature comparison chart. They are going to use that ROM space to add features that count to the Average Joe, not the niche OGG market.
The whole intent of districts in the Chicago area are to assemble the required number of black voters into a single district so a black candidate can be elected for that district.
Same thing happens for Hispanic voters as well.
This is how minorities get completely disproportional representation in government. It is to "right the wrongs" that have been done to these minorities. Of course it continues to enslave them by pretty much requiring them to live in substandard housing and in areas not well served commercially. If these people moved out of their ghettos they wouldn't have any representation at all.
The problem with any "fair" districting is that is specifically doesn't address the situations that people are trying to address. Why do we have oddly-shaped districts? Because this allows minorities to have "their own" representative. Supposedly this is to help correct for the years and years of slavery and oppression of the minorities by the Evil White Majority.
So you cannot have any fair way of computing districts because it would then lead right back to oppression of the minorities.
Good explanation, except you left out the part about "and elect a member of the House of Representatives". Since it is the House that really controls the budget process, this is incredibly important and not just a matter of political party power. This is how the members of the House are chosen. It has very little to do with electing a president which is somehow what people are focusing on.
One small problem - what about the House of Representatives? These are folks that are elected by their "district" which is what this is all about.
No, there really aren't many more important issues. Because most of the real business of the government of the US is done by the House of Representatives. And getting people that would actually represent people might be a good thing.
Unfortunately, the current situation pushes things towards electing the properly connected people. So we end up with lawyers and such that have networks of friends through all levels of government.
As soon as they figure out how to do 100GB/sec wirelessly we will see that. How many homes are in a 10km circle? What speed is WiMAX? How much does each house get then?
Mass use of wireless for general Internet access is pointless and a waste of time. It can help some data services in mobile applications but it isn't ever going to be practical for more than a few users at time. When you get your 500th customer that is downloading movies you can now give everyone 100K/sec or so.
There is one primary reason why the treaty allowing criminal prosecution of US citizens by foreign governments, including supposedly international war criminals. The first thing is any drunken sailor in a foreign port immediately gets prison time in the foreign country. Any soldier accused of a crime is automatically found guilty, just as their own citizens are.
The only way this treaty makes sense is after all US forces are withdrawn to the US. No foreign bases. No foreign support.
Of course this means there is no more South Korea, just Korea. A few other places would end up with some different governments. But it would end a lot of pretty useless "aid" to these places and force them to deal with their own problems. You can't say that anyone really wants the US to have a military presence outside of the US today anyway, so it would be a pretty popular move.
Then, after all the troops are home, that treaty could be signed. Then any US citizen accused in a foreign country would absolutely be a criminal.
The problem is that health care deals with lifestyle choices. You can choose to do things that will result in needing more health care or you can choose not to do these things. If you remove all personal responsibility for these choices by removing all costs for health care from individuals, they will make choices that are not connected to their health consequences.
Now this doesn't mean that all health care is dealing with choices people make. But things like lung cancer are a consequence of smoking. If you smoke, you will likely get lung cancer and may need a lung transplant. Expensive procedures if you are going come out alive. Why should someone else pay when we tried to convince you for years to stop smoking? Does your choice to continue to smoke not have any consequences for you, just for everyone else?
Anyone not keeping logs - primarily to deal with situations like this - isn't going "help" at all.
The Internet is full of criminal behavior and ISP's shield their criminal customers all the time. Why would you be surprised at this? Even if they did get an IP address out, their ISP would certainly refuse to disclose any details until they are ordered to by the court. And then enough time may have gone by where they can simply say they no longer have that information.
There are many layers to go through and most of them aren't going to cooperate willingly. Even in the case where abusive and even criminal activity is taking place. If your ISP wants to keep you as a customer, they are going to defend you against all comers. And so far the ISPs have figured out it is better to shield their customers than not.
The problem is that resumes do not get comments like "don't hire because of obnoxious comments" scribbled on them. The resume just gets dropped in the trash. Someone assigned to review resumes is given a stack of them and returns a much smaller stack saying "look at these". That's pretty much the process in any company over 10 people.
You want to find out the reason a resume was dropped in the trash by some anonymous reviewer of resumes? Good luck. HR may not even know. The stack went to the department head who farmed it out. A smaller stack came back and when the department head was done there were but three.
Hoping to find out a reason for a resume getting trashed is pointless. If you got through an interview and they decided on a different candidate, good luck finding out a reason there as well. HR knows well what to say there - nothing. How a "no" decision was arrived at isn't necessarily told to HR (as in NAAA NAAA NAAA I'M NOT LISTENING!!!!) so they can't slip up and accidently tell the candidate something they should not know.
Getting hired isn't a process by which you get to find out reasons why you did badly and improve on those points in the next round.
Today in most employment situations you have at least five candidates for a position. You are looking for reasons not to hire four of them. So it has nothing to do with investigating rumors or checking things out.
It comes down to there being a hint, the slightest whiff of something not right and you toss the resume in the trash. Where this came from doesn't matter. What does matter is that you just saved the company and everyone involved in the interview process hours and hundreds if not thousands of dollars interviewing someone.
Of course something like this would be a serious impedement to getting hired.
On the Internet it is pretty much a one-way mirror. There are things that can be done to track down an IP address, but apparently in most cases the "account holder" isn't responsible for anything. If the RIAA can get an IP address but has to give up the case because they don't have a person, these folks aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
As it almost always is, anonyminity is as good as the person is. If they use the same username in multiple places and disclose their real identity in one of them, it's over. If they blab that they got away with this to other people someone might turn them in. Other than that, they are pretty much home free.
Yes, you can get away with anything on the Internet if you remain anonymous.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to compete with free. Once "free" is out in the marketplace (as it is today), it is pretty much impossible to compete with.
When free is available, why pay? That is the question.
The only answer is to withold "free" and force payment. If everyone pays, then the price can be adjusted to something that the product is worth. Of course, today Adobe and most of the professionals using it consider it worth the $600.
Of course the people that have it without paying disagree. It is worth $0 to them and they happily pay that price. Similarly, if you got to choose the price you would pay for food you would choose something less than what it costs today. Unfortunately, free isn't an option there, or at least not practically. So the power of complete price choice doesn't exist for food. It does for software, music and movies today.
1% isn't going to do anything except make some people feel good. We need to move the industrial base back to around 1920 or 1930 to have a real effect. This means something like taking 90 of 100 factories spewing filth into the atmosphere and shut them down. Completely. Forever.
If we're right that CO2 causes warming rather than warming causes CO2.
If we're right, we will have saved billions of people. A little lower standard of living but living all the same. The alternative is death for billions of people. Guessing on the wrong way to jump will almost certainly kill a lot of people. So far nobody seems willing to make that call. Funny thing that.
The problem is the global warming folks continue to say that it isn't important that we know, just that we do something to make it stop. What? Well, certainly stop the US from throwing all those gasses into the atmosphere. Beyond that, it gets a little sketchy.
The key is if you believe that (a) Man is in control of the environment and if we all pull together we can make things right again and (b) anything we do that will put the planet closer to a prisine state (without humans) the better, you can easily see that by focusing on (b) you don't need any additional knowledge. Just get rid of Man's influence and everything will be good again.
Problem is, the planet has had long periods where it was completely uninhabitable by air-breathing mammals. It was this way without any human influence because we weren't here yet. So the "pristine Earth" idea falls apart pretty quickly. When it does it is absolutely necessary that we know what is cause, what is effect and how our actions are going to change things.
But right now the "pristine Earth" folks are winning out. Too bad this is as much of a religion as the Moonies are.
We currently have two observations: mean temperatures increasing and CO2 levels increasing. That is about it - nobody has any really good proof of why either of these things are happening.
There is currently a great deal of conjecture that the temperatures are increasing because of the CO2 and there are some indications that the two may be causally linked. But no proof. There are plenty of good reasons why the CO2 would increase due to higher temperatures.
The political Left and enviromentalists wans to combine two things: (a) the temperature is probably (or even certainly) increasing because of the CO2 levels, and (b) Man is responsible for the higher CO2 levels. Therefore, Man must reduce CO2 levels or else. The problem is, there isn't any proof that the CO2 is causing the temperature increase or that reducing CO2 emissions would make any difference in the temperature. If the CO2 is coming from increased temperatures (rather than causing it) decreasing man-made emissions would have zero effect. It might make things worse as far as the climate is concerned. Nobody knows what effect it might really have on the climate.
It should be noted that reduced particulates being put into the atmosphere would be good and with that would come reduced CO2 emissions. Nobody has any argument about that.
On an international crises level there are things that could be done to curb CO2 emissions and, to some extent, reduce particulates. An easy thing would be to cut international air travel and maybe all air travel but not air cargo. Another is gasoline rationing with WW II-style ration books. In the US this could force a resurgence of public transportation and rebuild cities, but it would take time to do that.
We could also just put a moratorium on building coal-fired generating plants and begin to phase out the ones we have. So cities become darker at night and people stay home more. Less air conditioning - this is a very recent addition to the environment and humans have been living in warm areas for a very long time without it. Life would be a little less pleasent but still livable.
Unfortunately, nobody is proposing any of the above because nobody sees things as a crises needing immediate action except for a few doomsayers. But many people would like to see some some kind of open-ended uncontrolled experiment with reducing CO2 in ways that seem to push economics in certain directions. Directions that seem to favor certain businesses.
Unfortunately, nobody can say for certain (a) if their solutions are real solutions and (b) what the side effects might be. Mucking about with the environment on a planetary scale has been being done for a while now without any knowledge behind it. Wouldn't it be nice to actually know something before jumping in with both feet? Like knowing if CO2 is a cause or effect? Like even if CO2 is a causative factor, is it the root cause? And finally, are we at the beginning of a cooling period or a warming period in planetary cycles? Because if we guess wrong and ham-handedly try to twist the global thermostat we could end up finding we like the new setting even less than where we are today.
You misunderstand how things work. If 1,000 people went to a cable TV provider office and demanded access to only EWTN, just EWTN and nothing but EWTN... they wouldn't be able to have it. There are contracts that specificy things like "every customer will get a basic cable package and Nickelodeon will be included in this basic cable package." Nickelodeon then gets a fee per cable subscriber. Period.
If the cable companies want to sell channels a-la-carte they are going to have to renegotiate every contract they have with basic channel providers. With completely different terms. Why would Nickelodeon want to do that? They are perfectly happy with the present situation and if Comcast isn't, well tough.
Similarly, if someone goes into their cable company and specifically says they do not want BET that's too bad. If enough people decided they didn't want BET and BET wasn't being compensated for it, BET wouldn't even be in business any longer. A lot of the marginal channels wouldn't be because the only thing that keeps them going is the way basic cable is charged for.
And BET would get the NAACP and ACLU on their side to sue Comcast or whomever for discrimination. And BET would be back in the lineup on every single subscriber's TV.
No, the only way to do this is by government mandate. A new regulation that is handed down so Comcast, Cox and everyone else can go to Nickelodeon, BET, EWTN and all the others to say they have to have a new agreement and different terms. And BET can't sue Comcast because it isn't their decision.
Bet this wipes out EWTN (Eternal Word TeleVision), BET and quite a few others that very very few people want but managed to make it into the lineup. Bet you didn't even know what EWTN was before this and have never, ever watched it. Those channels are going to go bye-bye with this type of arrangement. Good or bad? I don't know. But I know that if EWTN was relying on real subscribers for income they wouldn't be around.
While it would be nice to block all Muslim travelers to the US, it isn't going to fly with the more PC folks. "Racial profiling" would be shouted out everywhere, even if it is far closer to "religious profiling".
If you were Jewish and ran into a neo-Nazi, would you invite them to your house? Do KKK members regularly visit Black churches in the South? So what would be wrong with telling Muslim's they aren't wanted? Especially when we have mosques in the US that preach how it is the duty of every Muslim to kill infidels - like the other people outside the mosque that live in the US.
Muslim? Go visit somewhere else. You see, we can't tell the "radical fundamentalists" apart from the "moderate Muslims" that supposedly are in the majority. It's like the old rule of treating every gun as if it is loaded.
The US so far hasn't been doing much in this area and it certainly high time we start. $1 entrance fee would easily pay for lots and lots of border inspectors.
Then the government better step in an take over, because under those rules nobody is going to want to play. This is precisely the sort of move that has happened before and any company that isn't forced to stick it out just folds up and goes home.
This is how copper mines in (I believe) South America were just abandoned. The companies that owned them were subjected to enough hostile regulations (or so they thought) that it was a better move finacially to just fold up and take what they had rather than try to contine to operate.
So sure, you can tell companies they have to be "socially responsible" and support competitors (not just competition, but actually providing services to competitors) and the result will be in some cases the company decides it is better to not service that country any longer. The harsher you make the regulations, the less likely any investor will consider operating in that country an acceptable risk.
If T-Mobile's facilities are being used to compete with them, then there isn't anything that can be done about their refusing to support and supply a competitor. Phone companies have been beaten up by selling their services cheap in bulk only to find a competitor is taking their customers away by reselling service. They do not need to enable, support or supply competitors.
It's like negotiating a bulk discount with McDonalds only to open a hamburger stand in their parking lot. Sure you got a good price from them. But how long do you think they will keep supplying you with hamburgers?
I think the VOIP folks that are using the facilities of their competitors to compete with them are about to run out of hamburgers.
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Consumer devices aren't designed in a vacuum. There has to be a place to sell them. If someone came up with the idea for a really wonderful music player 10 years ago and it took 10 years to have the device produced in all its perfection, it would be a flop. iPod owns the market. So we have had a succession of modestly successful devices that weren't perfect but made it to market.
Software is often the same thing. You sell a distributor on a product and they want it for Christmas. Come October, you are going to ship a product. Period. Miss the window and you have a failure. It doesn't matter how great or perfect the product would have been - you missed the window and the time for it has past.
You have to be able to put up with a level of defect in a product and deliver it in a reasonable period of time. If you can't deliver it, it isn't going to sell because it isn't on the shelf. Doesn't matter how perfect it might have been. Are fewer defects better? Yes, but not at the expense of the marketing plan.
Actually, this is extremely simple. How many OGG files are there on the average Joe's computer? Zero. How many web sites sell downloadable music files in OGG format? A few, probably. How many popular software products do anything at all with OGG format files? Zero, I believe.
So we have a pretty unpopular format with a niche following.
Now we have the decision between a 64K chip and a 128K chip in a given device. Or some similar trade-off on ROM space and maybe RAM space. Is it worth the expense of moving to the 128K chip to support OGG? Nobody is going to be able to sell that one.
Is there a device with enough ROM space available to fit OGG in at the supposed near-zero cost the parent claims? Maybe. But there isn't any real interest. Certainly not on a feature-to-feature comparison chart. They are going to use that ROM space to add features that count to the Average Joe, not the niche OGG market.
You are assuming gerrymandering is bad.
The whole intent of districts in the Chicago area are to assemble the required number of black voters into a single district so a black candidate can be elected for that district.
Same thing happens for Hispanic voters as well.
This is how minorities get completely disproportional representation in government. It is to "right the wrongs" that have been done to these minorities. Of course it continues to enslave them by pretty much requiring them to live in substandard housing and in areas not well served commercially. If these people moved out of their ghettos they wouldn't have any representation at all.
The problem with any "fair" districting is that is specifically doesn't address the situations that people are trying to address. Why do we have oddly-shaped districts? Because this allows minorities to have "their own" representative. Supposedly this is to help correct for the years and years of slavery and oppression of the minorities by the Evil White Majority.
So you cannot have any fair way of computing districts because it would then lead right back to oppression of the minorities.
Good explanation, except you left out the part about "and elect a member of the House of Representatives". Since it is the House that really controls the budget process, this is incredibly important and not just a matter of political party power. This is how the members of the House are chosen. It has very little to do with electing a president which is somehow what people are focusing on.
Yeah, right.
One small problem - what about the House of Representatives? These are folks that are elected by their "district" which is what this is all about.
No, there really aren't many more important issues. Because most of the real business of the government of the US is done by the House of Representatives. And getting people that would actually represent people might be a good thing.
Unfortunately, the current situation pushes things towards electing the properly connected people. So we end up with lawyers and such that have networks of friends through all levels of government.
As soon as they figure out how to do 100GB/sec wirelessly we will see that. How many homes are in a 10km circle? What speed is WiMAX? How much does each house get then?
Mass use of wireless for general Internet access is pointless and a waste of time. It can help some data services in mobile applications but it isn't ever going to be practical for more than a few users at time. When you get your 500th customer that is downloading movies you can now give everyone 100K/sec or so.
There is one primary reason why the treaty allowing criminal prosecution of US citizens by foreign governments, including supposedly international war criminals. The first thing is any drunken sailor in a foreign port immediately gets prison time in the foreign country. Any soldier accused of a crime is automatically found guilty, just as their own citizens are.
The only way this treaty makes sense is after all US forces are withdrawn to the US. No foreign bases. No foreign support.
Of course this means there is no more South Korea, just Korea. A few other places would end up with some different governments. But it would end a lot of pretty useless "aid" to these places and force them to deal with their own problems. You can't say that anyone really wants the US to have a military presence outside of the US today anyway, so it would be a pretty popular move.
Then, after all the troops are home, that treaty could be signed. Then any US citizen accused in a foreign country would absolutely be a criminal.
The problem is that health care deals with lifestyle choices. You can choose to do things that will result in needing more health care or you can choose not to do these things. If you remove all personal responsibility for these choices by removing all costs for health care from individuals, they will make choices that are not connected to their health consequences.
Now this doesn't mean that all health care is dealing with choices people make. But things like lung cancer are a consequence of smoking. If you smoke, you will likely get lung cancer and may need a lung transplant. Expensive procedures if you are going come out alive. Why should someone else pay when we tried to convince you for years to stop smoking? Does your choice to continue to smoke not have any consequences for you, just for everyone else?
Anyone not keeping logs - primarily to deal with situations like this - isn't going "help" at all.
The Internet is full of criminal behavior and ISP's shield their criminal customers all the time. Why would you be surprised at this? Even if they did get an IP address out, their ISP would certainly refuse to disclose any details until they are ordered to by the court. And then enough time may have gone by where they can simply say they no longer have that information.
There are many layers to go through and most of them aren't going to cooperate willingly. Even in the case where abusive and even criminal activity is taking place. If your ISP wants to keep you as a customer, they are going to defend you against all comers. And so far the ISPs have figured out it is better to shield their customers than not.
The problem is that resumes do not get comments like "don't hire because of obnoxious comments" scribbled on them. The resume just gets dropped in the trash. Someone assigned to review resumes is given a stack of them and returns a much smaller stack saying "look at these". That's pretty much the process in any company over 10 people.
You want to find out the reason a resume was dropped in the trash by some anonymous reviewer of resumes? Good luck. HR may not even know. The stack went to the department head who farmed it out. A smaller stack came back and when the department head was done there were but three.
Hoping to find out a reason for a resume getting trashed is pointless. If you got through an interview and they decided on a different candidate, good luck finding out a reason there as well. HR knows well what to say there - nothing. How a "no" decision was arrived at isn't necessarily told to HR (as in NAAA NAAA NAAA I'M NOT LISTENING!!!!) so they can't slip up and accidently tell the candidate something they should not know.
Getting hired isn't a process by which you get to find out reasons why you did badly and improve on those points in the next round.
Today in most employment situations you have at least five candidates for a position. You are looking for reasons not to hire four of them. So it has nothing to do with investigating rumors or checking things out.
It comes down to there being a hint, the slightest whiff of something not right and you toss the resume in the trash. Where this came from doesn't matter. What does matter is that you just saved the company and everyone involved in the interview process hours and hundreds if not thousands of dollars interviewing someone.
Of course something like this would be a serious impedement to getting hired.
On the Internet it is pretty much a one-way mirror. There are things that can be done to track down an IP address, but apparently in most cases the "account holder" isn't responsible for anything. If the RIAA can get an IP address but has to give up the case because they don't have a person, these folks aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
As it almost always is, anonyminity is as good as the person is. If they use the same username in multiple places and disclose their real identity in one of them, it's over. If they blab that they got away with this to other people someone might turn them in. Other than that, they are pretty much home free.
Yes, you can get away with anything on the Internet if you remain anonymous.
Bank robbey costs nothing. The banks are insured.
Ever looked into piracy insurance?
Unfortunately, it is difficult to compete with free. Once "free" is out in the marketplace (as it is today), it is pretty much impossible to compete with.
When free is available, why pay? That is the question.
The only answer is to withold "free" and force payment. If everyone pays, then the price can be adjusted to something that the product is worth. Of course, today Adobe and most of the professionals using it consider it worth the $600.
Of course the people that have it without paying disagree. It is worth $0 to them and they happily pay that price. Similarly, if you got to choose the price you would pay for food you would choose something less than what it costs today. Unfortunately, free isn't an option there, or at least not practically. So the power of complete price choice doesn't exist for food. It does for software, music and movies today.
1% isn't going to do anything except make some people feel good. We need to move the industrial base back to around 1920 or 1930 to have a real effect. This means something like taking 90 of 100 factories spewing filth into the atmosphere and shut them down. Completely. Forever.
If we're right that CO2 causes warming rather than warming causes CO2.
If we're right, we will have saved billions of people. A little lower standard of living but living all the same. The alternative is death for billions of people. Guessing on the wrong way to jump will almost certainly kill a lot of people. So far nobody seems willing to make that call. Funny thing that.
Correlation is not causality. Sure, CO2 appears connected with temperature, but how?
Does a rise in temperature result in higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere? Yes, easily proven with high school chemistry.
Do increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere result in increased temperatures? Yes, again easily proven.
So which is happening. We don't know. Could be either or both.
The problem is the global warming folks continue to say that it isn't important that we know, just that we do something to make it stop. What? Well, certainly stop the US from throwing all those gasses into the atmosphere. Beyond that, it gets a little sketchy.
The key is if you believe that (a) Man is in control of the environment and if we all pull together we can make things right again and (b) anything we do that will put the planet closer to a prisine state (without humans) the better, you can easily see that by focusing on (b) you don't need any additional knowledge. Just get rid of Man's influence and everything will be good again.
Problem is, the planet has had long periods where it was completely uninhabitable by air-breathing mammals. It was this way without any human influence because we weren't here yet. So the "pristine Earth" idea falls apart pretty quickly. When it does it is absolutely necessary that we know what is cause, what is effect and how our actions are going to change things.
But right now the "pristine Earth" folks are winning out. Too bad this is as much of a religion as the Moonies are.
Yes, but...
We currently have two observations: mean temperatures increasing and CO2 levels increasing. That is about it - nobody has any really good proof of why either of these things are happening.
There is currently a great deal of conjecture that the temperatures are increasing because of the CO2 and there are some indications that the two may be causally linked. But no proof. There are plenty of good reasons why the CO2 would increase due to higher temperatures.
The political Left and enviromentalists wans to combine two things: (a) the temperature is probably (or even certainly) increasing because of the CO2 levels, and (b) Man is responsible for the higher CO2 levels. Therefore, Man must reduce CO2 levels or else. The problem is, there isn't any proof that the CO2 is causing the temperature increase or that reducing CO2 emissions would make any difference in the temperature. If the CO2 is coming from increased temperatures (rather than causing it) decreasing man-made emissions would have zero effect. It might make things worse as far as the climate is concerned. Nobody knows what effect it might really have on the climate.
It should be noted that reduced particulates being put into the atmosphere would be good and with that would come reduced CO2 emissions. Nobody has any argument about that.
On an international crises level there are things that could be done to curb CO2 emissions and, to some extent, reduce particulates. An easy thing would be to cut international air travel and maybe all air travel but not air cargo. Another is gasoline rationing with WW II-style ration books. In the US this could force a resurgence of public transportation and rebuild cities, but it would take time to do that.
We could also just put a moratorium on building coal-fired generating plants and begin to phase out the ones we have. So cities become darker at night and people stay home more. Less air conditioning - this is a very recent addition to the environment and humans have been living in warm areas for a very long time without it. Life would be a little less pleasent but still livable.
Unfortunately, nobody is proposing any of the above because nobody sees things as a crises needing immediate action except for a few doomsayers. But many people would like to see some some kind of open-ended uncontrolled experiment with reducing CO2 in ways that seem to push economics in certain directions. Directions that seem to favor certain businesses.
Unfortunately, nobody can say for certain (a) if their solutions are real solutions and (b) what the side effects might be. Mucking about with the environment on a planetary scale has been being done for a while now without any knowledge behind it. Wouldn't it be nice to actually know something before jumping in with both feet? Like knowing if CO2 is a cause or effect? Like even if CO2 is a causative factor, is it the root cause? And finally, are we at the beginning of a cooling period or a warming period in planetary cycles? Because if we guess wrong and ham-handedly try to twist the global thermostat we could end up finding we like the new setting even less than where we are today.
You misunderstand how things work. If 1,000 people went to a cable TV provider office and demanded access to only EWTN, just EWTN and nothing but EWTN ... they wouldn't be able to have it. There are contracts that specificy things like "every customer will get a basic cable package and Nickelodeon will be included in this basic cable package." Nickelodeon then gets a fee per cable subscriber. Period.
If the cable companies want to sell channels a-la-carte they are going to have to renegotiate every contract they have with basic channel providers. With completely different terms. Why would Nickelodeon want to do that? They are perfectly happy with the present situation and if Comcast isn't, well tough.
Similarly, if someone goes into their cable company and specifically says they do not want BET that's too bad. If enough people decided they didn't want BET and BET wasn't being compensated for it, BET wouldn't even be in business any longer. A lot of the marginal channels wouldn't be because the only thing that keeps them going is the way basic cable is charged for.
And BET would get the NAACP and ACLU on their side to sue Comcast or whomever for discrimination. And BET would be back in the lineup on every single subscriber's TV.
No, the only way to do this is by government mandate. A new regulation that is handed down so Comcast, Cox and everyone else can go to Nickelodeon, BET, EWTN and all the others to say they have to have a new agreement and different terms. And BET can't sue Comcast because it isn't their decision.
Bet this wipes out EWTN (Eternal Word TeleVision), BET and quite a few others that very very few people want but managed to make it into the lineup. Bet you didn't even know what EWTN was before this and have never, ever watched it. Those channels are going to go bye-bye with this type of arrangement. Good or bad? I don't know. But I know that if EWTN was relying on real subscribers for income they wouldn't be around.
Japan requires payment of an exit fee. And they are very watchful over foreigners that overstay their visas.
Australia charges for a visa as well.
Just because the US has been unbelievably lax does not mean it should continue.
While it would be nice to block all Muslim travelers to the US, it isn't going to fly with the more PC folks. "Racial profiling" would be shouted out everywhere, even if it is far closer to "religious profiling".
If you were Jewish and ran into a neo-Nazi, would you invite them to your house? Do KKK members regularly visit Black churches in the South? So what would be wrong with telling Muslim's they aren't wanted? Especially when we have mosques in the US that preach how it is the duty of every Muslim to kill infidels - like the other people outside the mosque that live in the US.
Muslim? Go visit somewhere else. You see, we can't tell the "radical fundamentalists" apart from the "moderate Muslims" that supposedly are in the majority. It's like the old rule of treating every gun as if it is loaded.
You need an "electronic visa" to get in.
Try leaving Japan sometime. They charge to leave.
The US so far hasn't been doing much in this area and it certainly high time we start. $1 entrance fee would easily pay for lots and lots of border inspectors.
Then the government better step in an take over, because under those rules nobody is going to want to play. This is precisely the sort of move that has happened before and any company that isn't forced to stick it out just folds up and goes home.
This is how copper mines in (I believe) South America were just abandoned. The companies that owned them were subjected to enough hostile regulations (or so they thought) that it was a better move finacially to just fold up and take what they had rather than try to contine to operate.
So sure, you can tell companies they have to be "socially responsible" and support competitors (not just competition, but actually providing services to competitors) and the result will be in some cases the company decides it is better to not service that country any longer. The harsher you make the regulations, the less likely any investor will consider operating in that country an acceptable risk.
Everybody loses then.
If T-Mobile's facilities are being used to compete with them, then there isn't anything that can be done about their refusing to support and supply a competitor. Phone companies have been beaten up by selling their services cheap in bulk only to find a competitor is taking their customers away by reselling service. They do not need to enable, support or supply competitors.
It's like negotiating a bulk discount with McDonalds only to open a hamburger stand in their parking lot. Sure you got a good price from them. But how long do you think they will keep supplying you with hamburgers?
I think the VOIP folks that are using the facilities of their competitors to compete with them are about to run out of hamburgers.