Listening to folks like the commenters here, it is clearly impossible for BofA to do this - everyone who owns a home has been impacted by Countrywide. If their home wasn't financed through Countrywide their neighbor's was and the drop in value of their neighbor's home tanked their home's value.
Roughly, according to National Association of Realtors, there are about 80 million single-family homes in the US today. The average value of all of these homes was around $170,000 and is now more like $100,000. Just having BofA pay every homeowner in the US $70,000 - all 80 million of them - would be 5.6 trillion dollars. If you blame banks for this mess, that is about what it would take. They don't have it.
One flaw with this is the banks may have participated, but the real problem is the bond rating agencies like Moody's. They are the ones that rated bonds backing subprime mortgages as AAA investment-grade bonds. Those bonds were then invested in by pension funds, municipalities and school districts. We haven't seen all of these bonds default yet, but they are going to - because the underlying mortgages are valueless and the rating agencies knew it. That pretty much means a lot of bankrupt pension funds, municipalities and school districts. Anyone that invested in AAA bonds exclusively is likely to get hit with this.
We haven't even seen the beginning of the collapse yet, but it is coming.
I would be looking at the FCC to operate far more like the FAA does. The FAA is an advocate for air travel and only takes a regulator role when absolutely unquestionably necessary.
Also, the FAA rulemaking is really done by the airlines and aircraft manufacturers.
Which means the rules are going to be written by Comcast, Verizon and Google.
Nobody ever advertised 10Mb dedicated bandwith. They always weaseled with terms like "up to" and "burst". You want 10Mb dedicated bandwith? You are going to pay a lot more for it. Just get a business account.
But don't blame them for overselling. They sold "burst" bandwidth, not dedicated. So has every other ISP in the world so far.
Oh, and by the way, they don't have 10Mb for everyone in your neighborhood. Once Netflix gets beyond maybe 20% penetration in a neighborhood it will be worthless because the network capacity between the head end and the neighborhood node (for cable) or between the head end and the DSLAM (DSL) simply doesn't exist to cover even the 3-4Mb/sec that Netflix needs. Does. Not. Exist. Will not exist without a massive change to the infrastructure which will likely take a very long time to build out, if it is ever done.
Why do you not want Google to be charged? Do you not believe it is a choice between charging Google and charging you? It is, and assuming that ISPs are successfully blocked from charging Google, Netflix, ESPN, and so on and so forth they will most certainly be charging the customers.
All of the large ISPs have been in a market-share building mode where they were willing to take a few losses that may or may not have been made up for in other areas simply to gather in more customers. The result is of course to drive others from the market which has pretty much been done 100% now.
So with market-building at an end they are looking to make up revenue that has been ignored and even actively left behind. End result is that they are going to be getting more money from somewhere. One possibility is to charge big feeders into their network. The other option is to charge customers more with the sure knowledge that some of them will drop the service. But most of them will stay because there aren't really any alternatives left.
Personally, I think I would rather Google and anyone else with deep pockets pay for the next round of network buildout rather than having it coming from my wallet.
That might actually (and finally) make it impossible to hire workers that can only be paid in cash right now - because they can't get a bank account in most places.
Of course I just direct them to Bank of America that has a special "illegals" program for opening accounts for people that otherwise can't have bank accounts. It is great for drug dealers, undocumented immigrants and thieves looking to launder money. Thanks, BofA, you're a great help.
There probably is no real privacy issue with the data collected. However, what Google did was collect a huge amount of data that makes them the vendor of choice for marketing data on WiFi routers and other wireless devices.
You see, they know all about what people have in their homes and what manufacturers have what penetration in specific geographic areas. So you can see that perhaps D-Link is used more affluent neighborhoods where NetGear is preferred in lower priced apartments. This information is worth millions and you can be sure that Google is selling it.
Collecting this wasn't a mistake no matter how much protesting might be done about it. Collecting packets was absolutely necessary for their mission. It also informed them (and their data customers) how much encryption is being used on these routers. All of this is extremely valuable information and (was) utterly unavailable any other way.
So now we have all participated in Google having something else to sell. I for one thing they should be subjected to 100% taxation on these ill-gotten gains.
As a Kindle 2 owner I can tell you the same hooks exist on the Kindle 2 cover. It is the same design and the construction of the cover is such that it would be very, very difficult to electrically isolate the two hooks and continue to have the hooks firmly attached to the cover.
Now the new K3 lighted cover is a completely different animal and it sounds like they decided to address the lack of a light with the K3 by having it power an external light. Unfortunately, the K3 unlighted cover is pretty much the K2 cover design - makes sense because the two devices are nearly identical.
Except someone missed the part about the power being connected through the cover hooks. I'm leaning towards the black coating being intended as an insulator and it is failing. As expected - the cover hooks get a huge amount of wear.
WTO is going to prevent any sort of taxation like you are thinking. Also, the first thing that would happen is that those workers wouldn't be working for a US company - they would be working for a subsidiary, which they probably are already.
If the subsidiary was going to be taxed, then the workers would be working for a wholely separate company that just happened to have its owners be the same group out of the Cayman Islands.
No, sorry, there is no getting away from the fact that there will be no resurgence of US jobs, US workers or US anything. It is like trying to stop a tidal wave with a teacup. The winds have changed and factories are not going to be based in the US any longer. Period.
What can be done? Very little. The US has far too many regulations to allow for any collection of natural resource like mining on a big scale. We also aren't going to be building things that simply cannot be built elsewhere at less cost. So there are creative works and there are patents (which everyone else is going to ignore). I think the end is we are all working for the government and there simply isn't anything else.
Can't impose tariffs as we signed onto the WTO. Bush tried with Belgian Steel and got smacked for it. No, we aren't going to be able to tariff our way out of this mess.
Maybe dropping out of WTO would be a start, but I don't see that happening. I suspect any attempt like that would result in China (who we sponsored to join the WTO) suggesting that we owe them a lot of money and they might want it back now... unless of course we stay in the WTO.
I think it is clearly a race to the bottom and right now the US is falling behind. Lots of other places are way, way further along towards the bottom of the barrel than the US is. It does seem that our journey in that direction is going to be pretty unpleasant.
If you are asking for the Department of Justice to open a new branch called "Fair Profit and Revenue Board" with real penalties attached to violations I think you are one teensy step from the Soviet command economy.
Putting such a thing under SEC wouldn't do a thing - SEC doesn't close companies down and jail violators, they fine them miniscule amounts. You don't get any real results without it being under DoJ.
It might have to be a new cabinet level department because you would probably need a full-time accountant for every 10 companies. To be really effective you would have to have this for every company operating in the USA, not just those based in the USA. Otherwise the loophole of choice would be to move the company to a PO Box in the Cayman Islands.
At that point I guess they could have their own prisons which, likely as not, would be quite full. Have to show people they mean business, right?
Nope, sorry. Not going to happen. Profits aren't going to be judged from the outside, ever. Might as well get used to that.
Yes, there is the possibility today for an ISP to "double dip". Except we are rapidly reaching the point where the market share building justification for low prices and acceptable losses are coming to an end. Most ISPs aren't going to be to happy about raising residential rates to match what businesses have been paying for years, except the revenue offset is going to come from somewhere.
We can stand together and say "Charge us more, but don't charge Netflix or Google - we like them". Or we can say "Keep our rates low and do whatever you like to someone else".
You can say the ISPs are getting enough and they should not be allowed any more profits. Unfortunately, that way likes the Soviet-style command economy. You aren't going to be able to tell anyone they don't deserve any more profits. It is possible to restrict where they can obtain revenue though. But it will be a choice between your bill and Google's soon.
Which would you prefer? Having the money come from your wallet or Google's? Make no mistake about it, that is the only choice you get.
So far, the only arguments I have seen have been overwhelming in favor of voting for no more revenue for the ISPs. Yes, and we can vote for ice cream every day and ponies.
I guess you have a choice. You can post supposedly private information ala Todd Davis and get some points for bravery. Or you can wait and see if someone does it for you showing clearly that you are an idiot for trusting your bank, wife, co-worker or whomever leaked the information.
Simple answer today: trust no one. Someone you trust will publish your secrets.
I believe the proper term is Sharia law, not Islamic. You can find all sorts of charming references about Sharia and rape on the Internet and I'm not going to dump them all out here.
One that is very common and enforced in at least Pakistan and Iran is the requirement that a woman have four witnesses to a rape or else she is charged with adultery.
While I haven't seen any reference to specifically "forgiving" a brother after a rape, there are certainly ample references to situations where a woman's family is expected to kill her because of a rape. Rape is assumed in most cases to be the woman's fault which leads to women being kept as virtual prisoners in their homes and being covered head to toe when they are allowed outside.
No, Sharia law isn't the rule in all Islamic countries as you don't see women being stoned to death in Egypt or Turkey. But increasingly in non-Islamic countries Sharia law is being given precedence over local laws for violations between Muslims. This is happening in the US, Australia, Germany and the UK.
Ah, but there is always the risk that for both personal and government matters that someone will decide to take any semblance of privacy away. For their own ego purposes.
Think of your credit card statement. What possible point would there be to publishing this? Well, if I did it it would be to prove to everyone that I, and perhaps I alone, had the power to access such things. Who knows who might be next? The fact that it might cause you irrepairable harm would be beside the point.
These days, nobody has any "right" to any sort of privacy other than that which is granted them by potential leakers. Which isn't much. You can hope that your privacy will not be violated because you are but a simple cog in the great machine and your neighbor will instead be chosen. Faint hope it may be, but it is all you have.
I think the rule is simple: extraordinary claims that the US is not involved require extraordinary proof they they are not. Certainly when something bad happens, anywhere in the world, it is a safe assumption that the US is behind it.
Yes, this means that when someone stubs their toe in Mali that they are cursing the US for placing the rock in their way.
Personally, I think the right approach is utter and complete isolationism. The US should refuse all international trade and contacts and pull all military forces back. Period. Over the next 50 or 60 years the US can rebuild their manufacturing base and do just fine without the rest of the world. No more claims of imperialism. No more claims of currency manipulation. No more security theater because no more international travel.
It is likely as not where things are headed anyway. It would feel better if the US did it before the rest of the planet decided to make that decision for the US.
Future scientists? Oh, you mean Asian students that are pushed so hard bytheir parents they commit suicide at alarming rates.
For the rest of the US population the young people are told every day in popular culture media that to be smart is a waste of time, to aspire to be nothing more than a drug dealer with lots of jewelry and cash, and to stop wasting their time in school that will never teach them anything.
There will be no more future scientists. We have 30% real unemployment and those jobs are never coming back because they aren't needed. Oh, they were needed when everyone was spending money they got from a housing bubble but now the roots of the economy are showing through. There are no more jobs and there will not be any time in the near future. The government may have to support these people that are out of work, and that is going to be a huge drag on everything.
So I wouldn't worry about NSF grants. I would worry a lot more about a shrinking military which is the only government jobs program there is right now.
They were in a market share building mode where losses, even system-wide losses were acceptable. They can't operate like that forever and now that the market share has been built it is time to convert over to a revenue generating model.
Remember when Google was free? Oh, it is still free for ordinary users but they get ads and the ads are not at all free. Google went from a bunch of computers operating on charity to a multi-billion dollar operation after they built market share and "presence".
You are thinking of a model where building market share is the goal. The major carriers have market share now, so they need to change strategy.
When building market share you can operate with some users at a loss with the hope the loss is made up for by other users. You can even run the entire operation at a loss for a while just to get users or subscribers.
When that period comes to an end you better hope that people view your service as a "utility" or a necessity. Then you have them. Sure, they can jump to a different service but everyone has been market share building, so everyone is going to be looking for revenue. The customers will come back, eventually.
So, are we all convinced that the mobile Internet is now a necessity and should be a utility? Right, that is exactly the marketing view of it.
The problem with this thinking is that the mode all of the operators have been in is market share capture. In order to build market share they were willing to do almost anything including operations at a loss. So what if 50% of your customers are costing you money if it is made up for by the other 50%? And, you are dominating in the market place?
Well, it may very well be time to pay for what they have built up. Market share is nice, but it doesn't pay in the end. And with usage going up they may lose market share because of network congestion anyway. So how to retain customers and increase revenue?
Simple answer is of course to just raise monthly rates. The problem with the flat-rate charging is that some users are way, way over consuming while others are way, way under consuming. This works out more or less OK until you have some new killer application that everyone wants to use. Should that occur - and I don't think it has yet - the operator is left with an unusable network and operating at a severe loss.
So just raising everyones monthly rate is probably not the right answer. It would shift customers around until everyone has their increases and makes people unhappy with network congestion.
A much better way is self-limiting for the users so congestion doesn't happen. You drive this by charging for things that load up the network more than for things that do not. Google is no problem, watching a movie is. Plugging the EVO phone into an HDMI monitor to watch a movie is a huge load. Texting is almost nothing and can be ignored.
So you have a whole new plan coming down where some things (applications, services) cost and others are included in the new low, low monthly rates. But the idea of flat-rate bandwidth on wireless cell networks is gone.
Unfortunately the FCC has proven more often than not to be an advocate of communications rather than a regulator of it. Same as the FAA in many ways - if the airlines suffer the FAA isn't doing their advocacy job.
So it is very unclear what the FCC might actually do that would harm a major ISP like Comcast when there was a public outcry.
A large part of the problem is that the whole artifical monopoly which isn't tariffed like the telephone companies were but instead enforced through franchise agreements. There is no law that says there can only be a single cable provider but there are agreements in place that a municipality will contract with one and only one provider. The franchise agreements do get renewed but the scale of the physical plant that is required pretty much eliminates the possibility of a new player coming in and taking over the installed system - they would need to come in with a newly built head end. Sure, the municipality owns the cables, the nodes and the amplifiers (more or less), but the franchise agreement specifies how this equipment can be conveyed to someone else. And it isn't simple.
But nobody would make the investment in any of the physical plant without some sort of agreement that said how they were going to get paid for it all.
So whatever laws you might like are going to have to first of all not contravene existing franchise agreements. Nationwide. Each one independently negotiated with each municipality. Because should a law be proposed that nullifies some part of a franchise agreement in Chicago but not in Phoenix there is going to be nothing but trouble.
And you didn't think they would actually just pass a law forcing neutrality without things like must-carry and municipal access did you?
Yes, but if Kim Jong Il is hidden away in a deep bunker then the only important person in North Korea survives. I'll bet outside of a few high ranking friends who would also be in said bunker it really doesn't matter to Mr. Kim who else might or might not survive.
That is way MAD doesn't work with North Korea. Or Iran. It just doesn't matter if the civilian population survives or not. It's war, you see and there will be casualties.
But the actual uninhabitable part doesn't happen for a couple of hours after those very, very important 8 seconds.
And that is assuming that (a) everything is launched that is supposed to, (b) it goes where it is supposed to, and (c) it goes BOOM when it is supposed to.
Swift and certain punishment is possible with community support - make snitching mandatory and a penalty for not snitching. Without it crime will always be rampant and enforcement a joke like it is today.
With swift and certain punishment you might punish the wrong person. When it is a capital crime that is really a shame. But, when the alternative is housing people for 50 years and creating incredibly abusive environments in prisons is this really an alternative? Why are prisons so abusive? It might have something to do with people being there who have (a) lost any empathy for others and (b) have nothing to lose by abusing others. So you have beatings, killings and rapes. And, the enslavement of the weaker by the stronger. We could make sure that prisons were populated by strong, caring people or we could just not house them for so long.
With swift and certain punishment there would have to be clear penalties for not snitching or for ratting on the wrong people. OK, so you get in good with the neighborhood gang lord by ratting out someone else as the killer... but if you then are executed because of this (because it will eventually come out) it makes it plain to everyone there is no percentage in lying. Make the executions public and televised. Make other punishments equally swift and certain. And we start to take control away from the criminals.
Today I can buy a untracable gun and kill someone and be assured of never getting caught. OK, I have to do this away from a crowded public street with a police car on it, but the point is I can do this. So can anyone else. It happens every day and it isn't just because with 330 million people there are bound to be some killings. The point is that it is known that burglars and shoplifters aren't going to be caught and aren't going to do any time - so these are safe occupations. If a homeowner is killed the police have plenty of sympathy but little else. The witnesses will do nothing and there is no power to compel their compliance with law enforcement.
It is like auto accidents. Every year 40,000 people are killed and it is treated as a fact of life that is unpreventable. So we have 20,000 murders a year - down from 33,000 recently - and they are considered equally unpreventable and just a fact of life. Burglary? How about 2.3 million a year. Do you not think this is a problem?
The problem with the apparent disconnect between severe/harsh punishmet and deterrence is the delay between the act and the punishment. This is more or less mandated by the idea of a fair trial, the incredible backlog in the court system and the prosecution ability to schedule the trial after forcing the defendant to sit in jail for years.
Back in the 1800s and earlier there was a lot less foofaraw between a criminal act and the punishment. A thief was seen leaving the scene of the crime and 30 minutes later was in the stocks or being whipped. This acted as much more of a deterrent. Similarly, while some folks did get away with crime today we have a conviction rate of less than 20% for many crimes. If you kill someone your actual chances of being convicted and going to prison is rather small - unless you arrogantly brag about it or decide the law enforcement folks are too stupid to catch you. And murder is one of the highest rates of conviction there is.
Which is why burglary and shoplifting are so incredibly popular. You aren't going to get caught and if you do you will probably not ever serve a day in prison or jail because of it.
In some places I feel it would be far more appropriate if public executions were carried out immediately. And have a penalty of a year in prison for anyone that could be proven to have witnessed the crime and not reported it or come forward. In most communities there is a sense of just not wanting to get involved or being fearful of the repercussions of snitching. Society can't function very well with a "stop snitching" rule in place as it is today. As can be seen by the murder rates in the US - every major city has at least a murder a day in the metro area and most of these are unsolved. Why? Because nobody in the right mind is going to tell the police anything for fear of the murderer's friends retailiating.
So there is no more "hue and cry" and criminals are more or less free to go about their ways.
Amazon Prime is the answer to this. Free two-day shipping on everything for $80 a year. One heavy package that isn't shipped free covers it for the year. No taxes, no shipping charges.
Amazon and Walmart will truely be the only stores left in 10 years. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it is a fact that once you start comparing prices there is no point to going to a physical store other than Walmart for the cheap Chinese crap. Anything else you just buy online and usually from Amazon with Prime.
End result is there are no other stores left in the USA. This should be obvious to anyone with a smartphone and an Internet connection. If you are shopping using these tools then all you care about is price and the brick-and-mortar stores are never going to be able to complete.
This does mean that there will be vast swaths of empty parking lots with bulldozed stores soon. But that is the price we pay for only looking at price and ignoring customer service. But heck, I got the cheapest price, right?
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Listening to folks like the commenters here, it is clearly impossible for BofA to do this - everyone who owns a home has been impacted by Countrywide. If their home wasn't financed through Countrywide their neighbor's was and the drop in value of their neighbor's home tanked their home's value.
Roughly, according to National Association of Realtors, there are about 80 million single-family homes in the US today. The average value of all of these homes was around $170,000 and is now more like $100,000. Just having BofA pay every homeowner in the US $70,000 - all 80 million of them - would be 5.6 trillion dollars. If you blame banks for this mess, that is about what it would take. They don't have it.
One flaw with this is the banks may have participated, but the real problem is the bond rating agencies like Moody's. They are the ones that rated bonds backing subprime mortgages as AAA investment-grade bonds. Those bonds were then invested in by pension funds, municipalities and school districts. We haven't seen all of these bonds default yet, but they are going to - because the underlying mortgages are valueless and the rating agencies knew it. That pretty much means a lot of bankrupt pension funds, municipalities and school districts. Anyone that invested in AAA bonds exclusively is likely to get hit with this.
We haven't even seen the beginning of the collapse yet, but it is coming.
I would be looking at the FCC to operate far more like the FAA does. The FAA is an advocate for air travel and only takes a regulator role when absolutely unquestionably necessary.
Also, the FAA rulemaking is really done by the airlines and aircraft manufacturers.
Which means the rules are going to be written by Comcast, Verizon and Google.
Nobody ever advertised 10Mb dedicated bandwith. They always weaseled with terms like "up to" and "burst". You want 10Mb dedicated bandwith? You are going to pay a lot more for it. Just get a business account.
But don't blame them for overselling. They sold "burst" bandwidth, not dedicated. So has every other ISP in the world so far.
Oh, and by the way, they don't have 10Mb for everyone in your neighborhood. Once Netflix gets beyond maybe 20% penetration in a neighborhood it will be worthless because the network capacity between the head end and the neighborhood node (for cable) or between the head end and the DSLAM (DSL) simply doesn't exist to cover even the 3-4Mb/sec that Netflix needs. Does. Not. Exist. Will not exist without a massive change to the infrastructure which will likely take a very long time to build out, if it is ever done.
Just one of the nasty little downsides to IP TV.
Why do you not want Google to be charged? Do you not believe it is a choice between charging Google and charging you? It is, and assuming that ISPs are successfully blocked from charging Google, Netflix, ESPN, and so on and so forth they will most certainly be charging the customers.
All of the large ISPs have been in a market-share building mode where they were willing to take a few losses that may or may not have been made up for in other areas simply to gather in more customers. The result is of course to drive others from the market which has pretty much been done 100% now.
So with market-building at an end they are looking to make up revenue that has been ignored and even actively left behind. End result is that they are going to be getting more money from somewhere. One possibility is to charge big feeders into their network. The other option is to charge customers more with the sure knowledge that some of them will drop the service. But most of them will stay because there aren't really any alternatives left.
Personally, I think I would rather Google and anyone else with deep pockets pay for the next round of network buildout rather than having it coming from my wallet.
That might actually (and finally) make it impossible to hire workers that can only be paid in cash right now - because they can't get a bank account in most places.
Of course I just direct them to Bank of America that has a special "illegals" program for opening accounts for people that otherwise can't have bank accounts. It is great for drug dealers, undocumented immigrants and thieves looking to launder money. Thanks, BofA, you're a great help.
There probably is no real privacy issue with the data collected. However, what Google did was collect a huge amount of data that makes them the vendor of choice for marketing data on WiFi routers and other wireless devices.
You see, they know all about what people have in their homes and what manufacturers have what penetration in specific geographic areas. So you can see that perhaps D-Link is used more affluent neighborhoods where NetGear is preferred in lower priced apartments. This information is worth millions and you can be sure that Google is selling it.
Collecting this wasn't a mistake no matter how much protesting might be done about it. Collecting packets was absolutely necessary for their mission. It also informed them (and their data customers) how much encryption is being used on these routers. All of this is extremely valuable information and (was) utterly unavailable any other way.
So now we have all participated in Google having something else to sell. I for one thing they should be subjected to 100% taxation on these ill-gotten gains.
As a Kindle 2 owner I can tell you the same hooks exist on the Kindle 2 cover. It is the same design and the construction of the cover is such that it would be very, very difficult to electrically isolate the two hooks and continue to have the hooks firmly attached to the cover.
Now the new K3 lighted cover is a completely different animal and it sounds like they decided to address the lack of a light with the K3 by having it power an external light. Unfortunately, the K3 unlighted cover is pretty much the K2 cover design - makes sense because the two devices are nearly identical.
Except someone missed the part about the power being connected through the cover hooks. I'm leaning towards the black coating being intended as an insulator and it is failing. As expected - the cover hooks get a huge amount of wear.
WTO is going to prevent any sort of taxation like you are thinking. Also, the first thing that would happen is that those workers wouldn't be working for a US company - they would be working for a subsidiary, which they probably are already.
If the subsidiary was going to be taxed, then the workers would be working for a wholely separate company that just happened to have its owners be the same group out of the Cayman Islands.
No, sorry, there is no getting away from the fact that there will be no resurgence of US jobs, US workers or US anything. It is like trying to stop a tidal wave with a teacup. The winds have changed and factories are not going to be based in the US any longer. Period.
What can be done? Very little. The US has far too many regulations to allow for any collection of natural resource like mining on a big scale. We also aren't going to be building things that simply cannot be built elsewhere at less cost. So there are creative works and there are patents (which everyone else is going to ignore). I think the end is we are all working for the government and there simply isn't anything else.
Can't impose tariffs as we signed onto the WTO. Bush tried with Belgian Steel and got smacked for it. No, we aren't going to be able to tariff our way out of this mess.
Maybe dropping out of WTO would be a start, but I don't see that happening. I suspect any attempt like that would result in China (who we sponsored to join the WTO) suggesting that we owe them a lot of money and they might want it back now... unless of course we stay in the WTO.
I think it is clearly a race to the bottom and right now the US is falling behind. Lots of other places are way, way further along towards the bottom of the barrel than the US is. It does seem that our journey in that direction is going to be pretty unpleasant.
If you are asking for the Department of Justice to open a new branch called "Fair Profit and Revenue Board" with real penalties attached to violations I think you are one teensy step from the Soviet command economy.
Putting such a thing under SEC wouldn't do a thing - SEC doesn't close companies down and jail violators, they fine them miniscule amounts. You don't get any real results without it being under DoJ.
It might have to be a new cabinet level department because you would probably need a full-time accountant for every 10 companies. To be really effective you would have to have this for every company operating in the USA, not just those based in the USA. Otherwise the loophole of choice would be to move the company to a PO Box in the Cayman Islands.
At that point I guess they could have their own prisons which, likely as not, would be quite full. Have to show people they mean business, right?
Nope, sorry. Not going to happen. Profits aren't going to be judged from the outside, ever. Might as well get used to that.
Yes, there is the possibility today for an ISP to "double dip". Except we are rapidly reaching the point where the market share building justification for low prices and acceptable losses are coming to an end. Most ISPs aren't going to be to happy about raising residential rates to match what businesses have been paying for years, except the revenue offset is going to come from somewhere.
We can stand together and say "Charge us more, but don't charge Netflix or Google - we like them". Or we can say "Keep our rates low and do whatever you like to someone else".
You can say the ISPs are getting enough and they should not be allowed any more profits. Unfortunately, that way likes the Soviet-style command economy. You aren't going to be able to tell anyone they don't deserve any more profits. It is possible to restrict where they can obtain revenue though. But it will be a choice between your bill and Google's soon.
Which would you prefer? Having the money come from your wallet or Google's? Make no mistake about it, that is the only choice you get.
So far, the only arguments I have seen have been overwhelming in favor of voting for no more revenue for the ISPs. Yes, and we can vote for ice cream every day and ponies.
I guess you have a choice. You can post supposedly private information ala Todd Davis and get some points for bravery. Or you can wait and see if someone does it for you showing clearly that you are an idiot for trusting your bank, wife, co-worker or whomever leaked the information.
Simple answer today: trust no one. Someone you trust will publish your secrets.
I believe the proper term is Sharia law, not Islamic. You can find all sorts of charming references about Sharia and rape on the Internet and I'm not going to dump them all out here.
One that is very common and enforced in at least Pakistan and Iran is the requirement that a woman have four witnesses to a rape or else she is charged with adultery.
While I haven't seen any reference to specifically "forgiving" a brother after a rape, there are certainly ample references to situations where a woman's family is expected to kill her because of a rape. Rape is assumed in most cases to be the woman's fault which leads to women being kept as virtual prisoners in their homes and being covered head to toe when they are allowed outside.
No, Sharia law isn't the rule in all Islamic countries as you don't see women being stoned to death in Egypt or Turkey. But increasingly in non-Islamic countries Sharia law is being given precedence over local laws for violations between Muslims. This is happening in the US, Australia, Germany and the UK.
Ah, but there is always the risk that for both personal and government matters that someone will decide to take any semblance of privacy away. For their own ego purposes.
Think of your credit card statement. What possible point would there be to publishing this? Well, if I did it it would be to prove to everyone that I, and perhaps I alone, had the power to access such things. Who knows who might be next? The fact that it might cause you irrepairable harm would be beside the point.
These days, nobody has any "right" to any sort of privacy other than that which is granted them by potential leakers. Which isn't much. You can hope that your privacy will not be violated because you are but a simple cog in the great machine and your neighbor will instead be chosen. Faint hope it may be, but it is all you have.
I think the rule is simple: extraordinary claims that the US is not involved require extraordinary proof they they are not. Certainly when something bad happens, anywhere in the world, it is a safe assumption that the US is behind it.
Yes, this means that when someone stubs their toe in Mali that they are cursing the US for placing the rock in their way.
Personally, I think the right approach is utter and complete isolationism. The US should refuse all international trade and contacts and pull all military forces back. Period. Over the next 50 or 60 years the US can rebuild their manufacturing base and do just fine without the rest of the world. No more claims of imperialism. No more claims of currency manipulation. No more security theater because no more international travel.
It is likely as not where things are headed anyway. It would feel better if the US did it before the rest of the planet decided to make that decision for the US.
Future scientists? Oh, you mean Asian students that are pushed so hard bytheir parents they commit suicide at alarming rates.
For the rest of the US population the young people are told every day in popular culture media that to be smart is a waste of time, to aspire to be nothing more than a drug dealer with lots of jewelry and cash, and to stop wasting their time in school that will never teach them anything.
There will be no more future scientists. We have 30% real unemployment and those jobs are never coming back because they aren't needed. Oh, they were needed when everyone was spending money they got from a housing bubble but now the roots of the economy are showing through. There are no more jobs and there will not be any time in the near future. The government may have to support these people that are out of work, and that is going to be a huge drag on everything.
So I wouldn't worry about NSF grants. I would worry a lot more about a shrinking military which is the only government jobs program there is right now.
They were in a market share building mode where losses, even system-wide losses were acceptable. They can't operate like that forever and now that the market share has been built it is time to convert over to a revenue generating model.
Remember when Google was free? Oh, it is still free for ordinary users but they get ads and the ads are not at all free. Google went from a bunch of computers operating on charity to a multi-billion dollar operation after they built market share and "presence".
Same thing with the "mobile Internet" now.
You are thinking of a model where building market share is the goal. The major carriers have market share now, so they need to change strategy.
When building market share you can operate with some users at a loss with the hope the loss is made up for by other users. You can even run the entire operation at a loss for a while just to get users or subscribers.
When that period comes to an end you better hope that people view your service as a "utility" or a necessity. Then you have them. Sure, they can jump to a different service but everyone has been market share building, so everyone is going to be looking for revenue. The customers will come back, eventually.
So, are we all convinced that the mobile Internet is now a necessity and should be a utility? Right, that is exactly the marketing view of it.
The problem with this thinking is that the mode all of the operators have been in is market share capture. In order to build market share they were willing to do almost anything including operations at a loss. So what if 50% of your customers are costing you money if it is made up for by the other 50%? And, you are dominating in the market place?
Well, it may very well be time to pay for what they have built up. Market share is nice, but it doesn't pay in the end. And with usage going up they may lose market share because of network congestion anyway. So how to retain customers and increase revenue?
Simple answer is of course to just raise monthly rates. The problem with the flat-rate charging is that some users are way, way over consuming while others are way, way under consuming. This works out more or less OK until you have some new killer application that everyone wants to use. Should that occur - and I don't think it has yet - the operator is left with an unusable network and operating at a severe loss.
So just raising everyones monthly rate is probably not the right answer. It would shift customers around until everyone has their increases and makes people unhappy with network congestion.
A much better way is self-limiting for the users so congestion doesn't happen. You drive this by charging for things that load up the network more than for things that do not. Google is no problem, watching a movie is. Plugging the EVO phone into an HDMI monitor to watch a movie is a huge load. Texting is almost nothing and can be ignored.
So you have a whole new plan coming down where some things (applications, services) cost and others are included in the new low, low monthly rates. But the idea of flat-rate bandwidth on wireless cell networks is gone.
Unfortunately the FCC has proven more often than not to be an advocate of communications rather than a regulator of it. Same as the FAA in many ways - if the airlines suffer the FAA isn't doing their advocacy job.
So it is very unclear what the FCC might actually do that would harm a major ISP like Comcast when there was a public outcry.
A large part of the problem is that the whole artifical monopoly which isn't tariffed like the telephone companies were but instead enforced through franchise agreements. There is no law that says there can only be a single cable provider but there are agreements in place that a municipality will contract with one and only one provider. The franchise agreements do get renewed but the scale of the physical plant that is required pretty much eliminates the possibility of a new player coming in and taking over the installed system - they would need to come in with a newly built head end. Sure, the municipality owns the cables, the nodes and the amplifiers (more or less), but the franchise agreement specifies how this equipment can be conveyed to someone else. And it isn't simple.
But nobody would make the investment in any of the physical plant without some sort of agreement that said how they were going to get paid for it all.
So whatever laws you might like are going to have to first of all not contravene existing franchise agreements. Nationwide. Each one independently negotiated with each municipality. Because should a law be proposed that nullifies some part of a franchise agreement in Chicago but not in Phoenix there is going to be nothing but trouble.
And you didn't think they would actually just pass a law forcing neutrality without things like must-carry and municipal access did you?
Yes, but if Kim Jong Il is hidden away in a deep bunker then the only important person in North Korea survives. I'll bet outside of a few high ranking friends who would also be in said bunker it really doesn't matter to Mr. Kim who else might or might not survive.
That is way MAD doesn't work with North Korea. Or Iran. It just doesn't matter if the civilian population survives or not. It's war, you see and there will be casualties.
But the actual uninhabitable part doesn't happen for a couple of hours after those very, very important 8 seconds.
And that is assuming that (a) everything is launched that is supposed to, (b) it goes where it is supposed to, and (c) it goes BOOM when it is supposed to.
Swift and certain punishment is possible with community support - make snitching mandatory and a penalty for not snitching. Without it crime will always be rampant and enforcement a joke like it is today.
With swift and certain punishment you might punish the wrong person. When it is a capital crime that is really a shame. But, when the alternative is housing people for 50 years and creating incredibly abusive environments in prisons is this really an alternative? Why are prisons so abusive? It might have something to do with people being there who have (a) lost any empathy for others and (b) have nothing to lose by abusing others. So you have beatings, killings and rapes. And, the enslavement of the weaker by the stronger. We could make sure that prisons were populated by strong, caring people or we could just not house them for so long.
With swift and certain punishment there would have to be clear penalties for not snitching or for ratting on the wrong people. OK, so you get in good with the neighborhood gang lord by ratting out someone else as the killer... but if you then are executed because of this (because it will eventually come out) it makes it plain to everyone there is no percentage in lying. Make the executions public and televised. Make other punishments equally swift and certain. And we start to take control away from the criminals.
Today I can buy a untracable gun and kill someone and be assured of never getting caught. OK, I have to do this away from a crowded public street with a police car on it, but the point is I can do this. So can anyone else. It happens every day and it isn't just because with 330 million people there are bound to be some killings. The point is that it is known that burglars and shoplifters aren't going to be caught and aren't going to do any time - so these are safe occupations. If a homeowner is killed the police have plenty of sympathy but little else. The witnesses will do nothing and there is no power to compel their compliance with law enforcement.
It is like auto accidents. Every year 40,000 people are killed and it is treated as a fact of life that is unpreventable. So we have 20,000 murders a year - down from 33,000 recently - and they are considered equally unpreventable and just a fact of life. Burglary? How about 2.3 million a year. Do you not think this is a problem?
The problem with the apparent disconnect between severe/harsh punishmet and deterrence is the delay between the act and the punishment. This is more or less mandated by the idea of a fair trial, the incredible backlog in the court system and the prosecution ability to schedule the trial after forcing the defendant to sit in jail for years.
Back in the 1800s and earlier there was a lot less foofaraw between a criminal act and the punishment. A thief was seen leaving the scene of the crime and 30 minutes later was in the stocks or being whipped. This acted as much more of a deterrent. Similarly, while some folks did get away with crime today we have a conviction rate of less than 20% for many crimes. If you kill someone your actual chances of being convicted and going to prison is rather small - unless you arrogantly brag about it or decide the law enforcement folks are too stupid to catch you. And murder is one of the highest rates of conviction there is.
Which is why burglary and shoplifting are so incredibly popular. You aren't going to get caught and if you do you will probably not ever serve a day in prison or jail because of it.
In some places I feel it would be far more appropriate if public executions were carried out immediately. And have a penalty of a year in prison for anyone that could be proven to have witnessed the crime and not reported it or come forward. In most communities there is a sense of just not wanting to get involved or being fearful of the repercussions of snitching. Society can't function very well with a "stop snitching" rule in place as it is today. As can be seen by the murder rates in the US - every major city has at least a murder a day in the metro area and most of these are unsolved. Why? Because nobody in the right mind is going to tell the police anything for fear of the murderer's friends retailiating.
So there is no more "hue and cry" and criminals are more or less free to go about their ways.
Amazon Prime is the answer to this. Free two-day shipping on everything for $80 a year. One heavy package that isn't shipped free covers it for the year. No taxes, no shipping charges.
Amazon and Walmart will truely be the only stores left in 10 years. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it is a fact that once you start comparing prices there is no point to going to a physical store other than Walmart for the cheap Chinese crap. Anything else you just buy online and usually from Amazon with Prime.
End result is there are no other stores left in the USA. This should be obvious to anyone with a smartphone and an Internet connection. If you are shopping using these tools then all you care about is price and the brick-and-mortar stores are never going to be able to complete.
This does mean that there will be vast swaths of empty parking lots with bulldozed stores soon. But that is the price we pay for only looking at price and ignoring customer service. But heck, I got the cheapest price, right?