If the net neutrality repeal vote goes through
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This is Day 13 without Net Neutrality. I will be posting in this thread every day until all the doom and gloom that the left promised would happen actually does happen. Remember, we were told our internet will now come in packages and we will have to pay every time we dl something or post on a forum. As of today that has not happened. So far they are liars. We'll see how tomorrow goes.
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*Sigh*
OTL I swear I'ma start reporting that guy some day. ANYWAYS. Scrotie: rather than keep on keepin' on (since I'm starting to lose track of the internested superquotes @_@), I'ma try and address shorter points in specific. Mostly because the thread here has gone from lighting my Anger Fuse to actually being an interesting debate I'm glad to partake in during slower stretches at work. " I'll grant the general point here; I got a little wrapped up in my grandiosity on this one. Suppose the idea I was trying to get across is that a governmental structure, or some other democratically elected body, are going to be closer to the general will of any given subsection of the populace than will be any possible corporate entity, whose will can be summed up with the words "FEED ME", except the food is money. I'm certainly not arguing that governmental structures can do no wrong, that is clearly and evidently not even remotely the case. The point concerning Tyranny of the Majority is valid; I actually despise the two-party system in this country and am fully on board with the notion of dismantling the current governmental structure pretty much completely and replacing it with an entirely new system. People forget that the American democratic governmental system is old; we were one of the first 'modern' democratic systems in the world and our governmental mechanisms are showing their age. It is, perhaps, time for an update. Never going to happen without a revolution, a'course, but that doesn't stop me from wanting it no matter how much the idea triggers conservatives. " Am I? How many corporations were felled with fire after sinking the entire world economy in the wake of the mid-oughts housing collapse and the huge recession it caused? Even then, that's an isolated case and I'll grant that I'm not as informed on this issue as I could be, but I maintain both that there are fewer laws ensuring the fair and honorable conduct of corporate entities than there are ensuring the fair and honorable conduct of ordinary citizens, and that corporate entities have vastly more power to simply shrug off, wade through, or outright ignore what laws there athat do apply to them. Ordinary citizens have no power at all to resist enforcement of the law; corporate entities of sufficient size consider "The Law" something that can be negotiated with or potentially browbeaten, just like anything else. How often have we heard stories of large corporations doing something blatantly illegal, then paying whatever fine or penalty their blatantly illegal action incurs without batting an eye and simply writing it off as "cost of doing business"? The fact that this is possible at all - that these entities consider ignoring the law to simply be another transaction they can opt to make or not as they choose - is both horrific and terrifying, ne? " How does a successful company remain successful without growing? I concur that decentralized competition between small to medium-sized businesses, by the current modern scale of Business Size at least, would be ideal (provided that decentralized competition is managed and enforced by a separate body or bodies with no profit motive that cannot be swayed by bribery or lobbying without severe consequences), but no corporate entity I have ever seen, read about, heard of, or encountered is ever willing to constrict its own growth for the sake of remaining more agile in the marketplace. Every single cotton-pickin' one of them wants to get bigger bigger BIGGER, make more more MORE money, and shoot for being the next Google or Microsoft or Pepsi or whatever. Once you get to that stage, there's not really any collapsing you can do that isn't perceived as heinous, given how many jobs you have to cull to go back down the scale. Not to mention the damage such a thing does to one's shareholders, given that downsizing is seen as 'Failure' in this current environment. And even then, some things just don't work well unless applied at a global scale. Every region having its own different Pepsi is fine; every region having its own Google is less useful, and every region having its own Microsoft is less useful yet. This thread started as a Net Neutrality thread, and the modern internet is probably the best example of something that should be protected by law and regulation because it needs to be huge and monolithic to be the Internet. Every region having its own unique region-specific Internet, all of which compete with one another, defeats the entire purpose of the Internet. Without a free, globally available and universal Internet? There is no Internet. " Well, in the case of ISPs post-Pai, Big Telecom strangles their competition by dishonorably utilizing their Last Mile position to prevent competing organizations from equally and fairly accessing the market in the first place without paying exhorbitant fees designed specifically to either bleed them dry and force them into bankruptcy or to price them off the Internet so that Big Telecom can have that playground all to themselves for their universally sub-standard offerings and bro-deal partnerships with whatever oversized company they arbitrarily decide gets to 'win' the market. Y'know, all those things Pannra keeps claiming we're lying about in his dumbass "This is Day [X]..." posts. That said, yeah. Otherwise? Companies will purchase other, smaller entities their competitors rely on
Spoiler
"Oh, you guys rely on Materials Supplier [X] to get the raw material you need to build your competing product? Well guess what - we just bought Materials Supplier [X]. Now you can pay us for the privilege of competing with us, or - and this is the ideal solution here - you can go and get f'ckin' bent. Teach you to muscle in on our market..."
Spoiler
"Okay, little competitor guy, here's how it is. We're buying out your investors' shares in your company, which you can't prevent us from doing. Once we have a controlling interest in your company, we're shutting it down. Literally everybody is fired, with prejudice. Y'all can go to hell, this is OUR market"
This does make the assumption on my part that the CEOs/upper management teams of very large corporate entities are basically all high-functioning psychopaths, collective predators protecting their " Intellectual property laws are a sticky morass of lunacy. It's very easy to see the reason for the concept of intellectual property. Consider: a spunky inventor with a great idea creates a little company based around selling his cool idea. With IP laws, he gets to do just that, which drives the true engine of capitalism - the idea that if you're clever and talented, and you create something that makes people's lives easier, better, safer, or more fun, then you can profit from that creation and make your own life better. This is the core idea that makes capitalistic society work, and it's the reason communistic societal models always fall apart. Capitalistic society is the one model we have so far where someone has a definitive stake in improving society. Without IP laws, though? The spunky inventor makes his great idea, then Big Corporate buys one, reverse engineers it, turns around production of their own model in a month, undertakes an advertising drive that swamps the original creator's little company before it has a chance to really get its foot in the door, and absorbs all the sales for this cool new idea. The Big Corporate predator company has effectively stolen the spunky inventor's work without paying a dime for it and deprived the inventor of any of the enrichment any right-thinking person would tend to reasonably agree that he's entitled to for creating the thing in the first place. He created it; he's entitled to benefit from his creation. That said...yeah. IP laws in this country/the world today are a hoary mess that've been turned around completely and corrupted to run completely counter to their original intent; i.e. protecting small entities from the depredations of large corporate concerns which can otherwise steal whatever ideas they like freely. IP, trademark, and copyright law in this country desperately needs reform. But then again, so does just about literally everything else. So what else is new, eh? :P She/Her
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" Why? It takes nothing to ignore his daily proclamation that he neither understands what could happen, and the timeline in which it would happen if companies that largely monopolize their respective markets choose to do so. Thanks for all the fish!
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" It's an eyesore, mostly. Heh, besides. Wouldn't be the first time someone's stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality got under people's skin, would it? She/Her
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" Most of Off Topic is an eye sore. Current top topics are about Trump (the effigy of an eye sore if it could have one), flat earth (only an eye sore if it hurts to see the internet used to make people more stupid), and Windows 10 (self explanatory). I say let them waste their time posting nonsense and ignore it. Thanks for all the fish!
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" Because I think that at the moment, he makes a fair point. Nobody knows what the future holds, and I support his right to protest the Facebook insanity that took place. At the moment I am open to either possibility—no doom and gloom, or eventually doom and gloom. Daily posts will eventually constitute spam, which makes either outcome for nought. Besides, it’s childish to the max. Devolving Wilds
Land “T, Sacrifice Devolving Wilds: Search your library for a basic land card and reveal it. Then shuffle your library.” |
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"The idea doesn't trigger me, nor would I expect it to trigger many of the "anarchocapitalists" and minarchists who are further right (economically) than I am. I mean, I still have a huge, practically overflowing respect for the Constitution and its creators relative to the time it was created, and I'd expect any replacement to lean heavily on some elements of its design. However, it's important to understand that the methods to coerce and defraud others evolve with technology, and that keeping on top of latest innovations in that field requires a dynamic set of laws that changes over time. The US started off pretty good in that department (yeah, okay, slavery, but we fixed that eventually), but it really hasn't kept up. In a more practical sense, I'm a strong advocate of instant runoff voting (IRV) as a necessary step towards a multiparty system. The minimum number of competitors to make competition effective is three; as I've said before, general elections in the US are a bad joke, primaries are the only votes that matter, and those are thoroughly controlled by the party establishment. "I'm going to walk this one back. My core belief is that American corporatism is done (as in "mission accomplished") with Phase 1 — deregulating laws that should exist via the Republicans — and moved on to Phase 2 — regulating would-be competitors and/or labor via the Democrats. I mean, technically some corporate malfeasance is still prohibited, but that's mostly the corporatists policing themselves — kind of like a Mafia boss saying his people can't deal drugs near schools, but elsewhere is still A-OK. For the record, I'm not sure there should have been a law against what caused the housing crisis; failing business strategies needn't be illegalized, because the businesses that perpetrate them bankrupt themselves. Government needn't render verdicts the economy renders itself. What is absolutely intolerable is the massive taxpayer-funded bailout of said banks. I can maybe, maybe understand a need to bailout the industry in a general sense, but under no circumstances should those banks, the ones who caused the crisis, have been given such funds — why not simply give the funds instead to new startups, allowing them to rise up as the corrupt old banks implode? It's attrocious. "Of course they do. But we aren't counting on E Corp to see to it that they remain relatively small and nimble; we're counting on A Corp, B Corp, C Corp, and D Corp to see to that. Much in the same way that the Constitution doesn't count on the Executive to limit itself (even with vulnerability to elections), but has the Legislature and the Judiciary see to it... or at least, used to. As long as there's three or more separate corporations vying for marketshare in s single industry, that industry is pretty darn cheap to police from a taxpayer standpoint. A Corp will spend its own money to investigate C Corp malfeasance so it can publicize it and take their business. B Corp will actually make a better product, knowing that moneyed interests will work tirelessly to unveil flaws in their product. The invisible hand of rational self-interest does not inherently lead one towards serving the public good, but whenever we can reasonably count on it to do so, it sure does save taxpayer money. By the way, if you're wondering "why three or more?", the answer is that Whataboutism is logically valid when choice is a strict binary. (To use an example from the linked video: if Person A murdered one person while Person B murdered several, and you can only imprison one of the two, it's a valid defense of A to point out B is worse. This is because you don't have the choice of imprisoning both, or letting both free; that would make 4 possible choices.) "I feel you're (accidentally?) conflating a particular corporation with the industry it's in. Obviously, I wouldn't want the online search engine industry to fail, nor its labor forced into a different industry where they would require retraining to be market viable, nor would I want the net stock value of the industry to decline. But Google is NOT the search engine industry. I would like all of those things to happen to Alphabet, because the failure of a single corporation is NOT the failure of an industry, and the demand for a particular product, or for the labour that makes said product possible, doesn't mysteriously vanish when a particular employer goes the way of the dodo. I don't love seeing businesses fail for the sake of seeing businesses fail. I actually want them to thrive. But that won't happen if we're unwilling to let the outmoded persist. Evolution demands a culling of the weak. "You're already assuming a monopoly, in terms of the supplier. Unfortunately, this is somewhat common when the purchasing industry is also monopolized — if Industry 1's sole business is feeding parts to Industry 2, and Industry 2 is monopolized, the Industry 2 monopoly will usually pick a sole supplier from among Industry 1. If the new Industry 1 monopoly gives the Industry 2 monopoly troubles, they'll threaten to end the special relationship and in so doing hold the Industry 1 monopoly hostage. I call this trickle-down monopolization, and it's a serious challenge, because it essentially forces a new competitor in Industry 2 to simultaneously enter into and compete in Industry 1... and even if they succeed, you know have two companies in Industry 2 with full integration with Industry 1. This is a serious problem that requires smart anti-trust laws. To be honest I'm not quite sure how to fix it. "This isn't a real problem EXCEPT FOR intellectual property. Without IP laws, there's nothing stopping the next startup from copying the strategy precisely so they also get bought out, and the next, and the next, ad infinitum. Obviously the attempted monopolizer couldn't keep this up. Without some form of government intervention — such as saying the startup has a legal monopoly on a certain new and innovative process, and that buying the startup means buying those monopoly rights — there's no problem with buyouts. So basically this is another intellectual property issue. Which I think we agree is pretty fucked at the moment. "Here you're basically talking about pay-for-play bribery. Simply having wealth shouldn't translate into wielding the power of government; the only time it does is when the right palms are greased. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted. Last edited by ScrotieMcB#2697 on Dec 28, 2017, 12:03:06 AM
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This is Day 14 without Net Neutrality. I will be posting in this thread every day until all the doom and gloom that the left promised would happen actually does happen. Remember, we were told our internet will now come in packages and we will have to pay every time we dl something or post on a forum. As of today that has not happened. So far they are liars. We'll see how tomorrow goes. This isn't spam. Chill with the totalitarianism.
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This is Day 15 without Net Neutrality. I will be posting in this thread every day until all the doom and gloom that the left promised would happen actually does happen. Remember, we were told our internet will now come in packages and we will have to pay every time we dl something or post on a forum. As of today that has not happened. So far they are liars. We'll see how tomorrow goes.
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" This is Day 1 of 1453R's "Fed Up with Pannra's Spam" Repost Theater. Every day until I get tired of it, we will mock Pannra by quoting his daily spammy shitpost and pointing out that Neutrality is not officially repealed yet because people who know better than he does are putting up the Good Fight in the courts right now to block Ajit Pai ruining the Internet for everyone that isn't Big Telecom or Big Telecom's busom buddies, Old Media. As such, his "the left are idiots" spam is factually incorrect as well as off-target and serves only to annoy reasonable people. If you value Neutrality and the free Internet, play along! ***** Scrotie: working on it. There's a few interesting points you raised I want to take my time with answering and a couple of bits I'm doing some extra reading on before I post up again. She/Her
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