Selling used books and furniture? Not a need.
Imposition of rules doesn’t matter to people like you. As long as the rule-makers favor your ideology, you’re happy to legislate the country into a series of five year plans that will clearly do a great job of planning pricing. Because ideology trumps facts.
When you’re a lefty.
June 12, 2015.
Don’t be silly. FCC rulings are just right-wing illusory fundamantalism.
All of this “no one needs the internet” shit sounds a lot like when Fox News was trying to outrage people by saying 98% of poor people had refrigerators, what do they have to bitch about?
People ask what the benefit of giving control of the internet to 5 companies is, and others just chime in with “hey, you can technically survive just fine without the internet” - yeah, well, we can survive without plumbing too. How does it make society better if we got rid of it?
Actually, it is. Ever heard of Adam Smith? Would you like a long list of free-market Nobel prize winners? Some links to papers by said Nobel winners that give scientific rationale for free markets?
In fact, the case for free markets got even stronger in the late 20th and early 21st century, as we learned more about dynamical systems, complexity, and information theory. Those sciences explain quite well why society cannot and should not be ‘planned’, and why regulations imposed from the top down always have unintended consequences.
Look at nature. Do you see any central planners? We see lots of distributed ‘economies’ like ant hills, flocks of birds, and other complex systems, and yet none of them have a super-intelligent overseer controlling them - they all work from the bottom up. There’s a very good reason for that - because that’s where all the information is. You would think that if central planning were more efficient than bottom-up processes, evolution would have pushed living systems towards increasing central control. But in fact it goes in the other direction.
Economies are just like ecosystems - they have their own feedback mechanisms, they rely on bottom-up processes yet have large-scale emergent properties. If you map the connections in an economy, you get something very similar to a map of the internet - or of the human brain. Immense complexity utterly opaque to central planners who think they can steer such a complex thing by tweaking a few aggregate emergent properties.
Central planners and regulators should take some lessons from ecologists, who learned a long time ago that if you try to override nature and ‘scientifically’ plan an ecosystem from the top down you are going to be doomed to failure, or at least to dealing with severe unintended consequences.
And this is one of the biggest arguments against Net Neutrality. The big brains at the FCC and the people who consult for them are simply not capable of knowing the ‘correct’ form of the internet. Freezing an evolved structure in place because it’s ‘just right now’ is bound to screw you at some time in the future.
I can remember when people on the left went into a panic when the internet was first opened for commercial use. They were sure that it was the end - that businesses would just destroy the whole thing. Because businesses are bad. I was at planning sessions where the EFF pushed for licensing of web programmers, because if you let just anyone program on the internet it will be absolute chaos, because regulation is the only thing that keeps the chaos away. Thank God those people had their regulatory impulses squashed then.
Anyway, if you need some remedial reading on the science behind capitalism, I’d be happy to provide you a reading list. And no right-wing Hannity bullshit, either. I can give you a long list of serious papers by serious people. Not drivel by Marx and Engels and their fellow travelers in that particularly murderous clown car.
Neutrality is not central planning. It’s the opposite - it’s saying “no 5 companies will be the gatekeepers of this new emerging market that rules the world”
Wanting those 5 companies to have complete power over who can or cannot access the market at all is far closer to the actual practical effects of central planning than neutrality is.
Having a rule does not mean “central planning” - the government is doing the opposite of restricting the internet, it’s saying that by rule everyone has access to everyone else. The idea that you can somehow improve on “everyone can put a product or service on the market, and anyone else in the world can find them” by giving the power to restrict that to a handful of companies is bizarre.
This is honestly just a dogmatic insistence over and over again that government = bad, regulation = bad, with consideration of the actual situation.
You guys both ignored a question I’ve asked several times: Will you at least admit this decision will most likely be bad for the average consumer?
Are you calling me a liar? Because that’s just not cool.
It is the AT&T Real Yellow Pages published by Dex dated 12/2017. NO, I’m not interested in sending you a PM.
Praise “free markets” all you want. The simple fact is that the internet, ISPs and Comcos aren’t free markets in any way, shape or form. So all your lauding doesn’t mean shit. They are public utilities and need to be regulated as such. With extreme prejudice.
No. The ‘experiment’ was imposing rules on an evolved system, because the planners thought they could do better. If you don’t want to ‘experiment’, the answer is to leave the system alone. The status quo was not this regulation. The status quo is the sum total of the internet infrastructure that has evolved organically over several decades without such imposed rules. Since the internet has been the greatest economic success story perhaps in all of history, I’d say the status quo should get the benefit of the doubt, and people who want to change it have the burden of proof.
The folks who want regulation are the ones doing the experimenting. They’re the ones who want to impose a change on the system. The rest of us are happy letting the rules of the market work as they have been working, or perhaps intervening to fix the market if we think it has broken down due to monopoly or other factor.
It’s the tinkerers and the fine-tuners who think they are smarter than the collective wisdom of the market who are the ones doing the experimenting.
If someone came to you with a plan to ‘fix’ an ecology by eliminating cruel predators, or by shipping animals from one continent to the other for ‘balance’, or through some other artificial means to ‘improve’ an adaptive complex system, and you said that this was a bad idea, would you be guilty of ‘experimenting’ by NOT agreeing to an intervention? Just who do you think would be doing the experimenting here?
Why would that even matter? Sometimes what is bad for the average consumer is good for the marketplace, which is itself far more important than mere people.
Good luck with that.
Too bad, because as best I can tell, admitting that the outcome is uncertain at best seems the position best supported by the evidence. Maybe there *will *be some positives as a result. The people in the best position to know would be the strategists at Comcast and their counterparts at other major ISPs who no doubt have decade-long marketing strategies planned around this newly deregulated environment.
I’m not sure you can just redefine the terms that casually in order to bolster your position. The ones doing the experimenting will be the providers, testing what traffic they want to let through at high-speed (for a fee) and what traffic they want to make low-priority or even block altogether. They will be ones changing the system which seemed to be working pretty well up to now.
Yeah, well, good luck locking the barn door after the horse has fucked your wife.
What fine-tuning are you talking about? “Let all traffic through equally” seems coarse by definition.
Your analogy is irrelevant because I haven’t said this was a bad idea. I’m content saying it’s a risky idea, and the people saying it’s a good idea have no real basis for doing so, unless they stand to personally profit because they work for or have shares in a major ISP. It’s not clear to me how a mere user of the internet is likely to benefit, but I’m prepared to be surprised.
Which looks like a custom printing service. Hardly the universal delivery it once was.
Sigh. It covers three counties, with more than a million population. Doesn’t sound custom, to me.
Bullshit. Smith was talking about mercantilism, he has very little math, and there was nothing scientific about his findings as we understand science.
Same thing with the entire body of economics. It’s as much a “science” as sociology - sure you can make predictions based upon past trends, sure you can create mathematical models which might appear to “prove” one thing or the other… but it doesn’t. It’s a large body of work which is contradictory, basic “rules” being violated all the time - for example, according to economists, increasing the supply of money relative to the amount of goods produced increases inflation.
But…
No it doesn’t. At least, it did not post-2008. And this basic “law” of economics is… or was… considered as fundamental as gravity, an assumption upon which mountains and mountains of theory and papers were written and based upon.
Papers that are now useless, or need revision.
So, sorry Sam, but you’re incorrect. Economics is a faith-based activity upon which the practitioners create models which prove which the particular economist thinks to be happening. Unlike science, especially the hard sciences, there are no fundamental rules (speed of light, chemical reactions, etc) upon which the the entire edifice is founded upon.
Here’s a popular article about this very issue: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-laws-of-economics-dont-exist/274901/
Emphasis added.
So we need to YET AGAIN repost the abuses growing within the system before net neutrality occurred?
Just musing, what are the chances that by 2030 there will be some regional ISP that gobbles up smaller providers in some significant part of the U.S., say California or Texas, and then finds they can make more profit not in selling internet service (which I personally think is essential, at least for commerce), but in selling internet service futures, i.e. they’ll provide a guarantee of one quadrillion* highest-priority RTP packets on the day of the Super Bowl to the highest bidder. The company finds manipulating traffic levels to create artificial shortages allows them to bump prices, selling more bandwidth at premium pricing. In the deregulated marketplace, new terms are invented like “packet contingency swaps” and “transport tranche opportunities” to describe deals that are complicated and a bit shady. Investors love it because profits keep going up, until eventually an inevitably, there’s a collapse.
The Internet Enron, basically. I’m kind of looking forward to it, truth be told, because gloating is fun-happy-time for me. I just hope this message board or its descendant is still accessible at the time.
*or whatever number seems huge but feasible
Ok, so regulations = central planning.
And Bricker said he was in favor of eliminating the net neutrality regulation, unless problems arise, he would be open to new regulations to fix whatever problems arise.
Which, by the transitive property of leftism, means that if any ISP abuses the end of net neutrality, Bricker is then in favor of a Soviet-style centrally planned economy.
Solid logic, through and through.
Ooh, three counties. Out of an entire nation.