If the net neutrality repeal vote goes through

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

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.

The Constitution is a landmark document that deserves respect, study, and praise...but what people forget is that the real genius of the Founding Fathers was that they bloody knew the thing wouldn't be able to stand in its original form for a thousand years. They created the Amendment system specifically to allow the core governing kernel of this country to adapt over time, trying to create a system where the government could never oppress or coerce the people (because the people were armed and could shoot the government in the face if they tried), but also a system where the people would never need to resort to bloody revolution in order to rebuild their government to suit the modern day they found themselves in (because the core document governing the government was amendable and could be altered to suit the day).

The Founding Fathers did not ever intend for us to enslave ourselves to whatever modern interpretation of "the original vision of the Founding Fathers" it's decided we're supposed to hew to. The Fathers, if we could Bill and Tedd our way into a conversation with them, would all likely remind us that they're all fucking dead now and how the hell do we realistically expect men who never dreamed of the way the world would evolve in two hundred and fifty years to accurately guide our country from the grave?

Change, reform, and evolution is integrated into the very core of the Constitution. The fact that the last Amendment proposed and enacted (discounting #27 because I'm not talking about Amendments that hung in the air for two hundred years dealing with nothing but paying legislators) was in 1971 is really kind of atrocious. The world has changed a great deal in fifty years. Perhaps we should look into changing with it?

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

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 don't vote in primaries despite knowing that primaries are just as, if not more, important than the general because I refuse to officially align myself with either of the bilge-spewing morasses of nitwittery that are the two dominant parties in the country as of now. Last time I checked one had to officially register as Dem or Repub to vote in a primary and my conscience won't let me do that.

That being said, instant runoff voting is pretty much exactly the sort of thing I'm hoping we can adopt for single-seat elections such as the Presidency. The 2016 election was a disaster that saddled us with a disaster because the Electoral College is an outdated, inefficient relic of the past that needs to be abolished as part of any political reform people voted either against Trump or against Hillary, based on who scared/disgusted them more. That is absolutely no way to run a godsdamned election.

My own ballot would've looked very, very different with IRV in effect - both the aforementioned would've been at the very bottom of it, with Hillary getting the nod over Trump simply because I'll take a criminal who knows the job over a criminal who doesn't know the job and who is also an assclown. Honestly I probably would've given the nod to Jill Stein, even though Green hates nuclear power because it has the word 'nuclear' in it and they don't understand that power plant reactors which are sited and constructed properly are one of the safest and cleanest sources of energy available to us. But all of that's a different discussion.

Nevertheless. Yes. IRV for single-seat elections, representational assignment for multi-seat elections (did you secure 9% of the vote? You get 9% of the seats) and any other method we can come up with that forces people to run based on being a person other folks want to trust with power, rather than "WE'RE LESS SCARY THAN THE OTHER GUY SO VOTE FOR US!"

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

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.

What little protections consumers realistically have at this point is of the bread-and-circuses sort; Big Corporate, as you said, policing itself to a degree and distracting people with catchy Internet campaigns and Super Bargain Sale events. A constant in the world is that people's lives are big enough for them; very few individuals in any given population are willing to step beyond their own immediate problems and put their weight into efforts to deal with larger issues. I'm as guilty as anyone else on that score; life is fuckin' exhausting enough most of the time without having to try and personally batter down Big Corporate's predatory nonsense.

That's why I wish we had a government with enough strength, backbone, and...'purity' is the wrong word, but it's the opposite of corruption so I suppose we'll go with it for now...to tell Big Corp where to bloody heckin' shove it. Ideally, we elect officials willing to fight our big fights for us. That's why we elected them in the first place, and if we can't rely on our government to protect us from threats to our peace, security, and right to seek happiness that are too big for any single individual to deal with alone, the hell good is it doing us?

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

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.

The bailouts were supposedly because "the sudden, uncontrolled dissolution of these institutions would have destroyed the world market and plunged us all into a worldwide Great Depression."

If this is the case it's vastly more worrisome than people think it is, because when you have a company that is not allowed to fail because it's gotten so big and so important that its failure would seriously damage the entire world? You have failed in ways previously unimaginable. The bailout should have been a sign that these entities need to be dissolved in a controlled way - they've already failed and earned the punishment of oblivion. If you need to control the fall then do so, but not by giving a second life to organizations which have explicitly Fucked Up Hardcore and which, by the very market laws one proposes to espouse, should be dead and gone by now.

Nevertheless. For me, it's the knowledge that there were companies out there which specifically and with malice aforethought made decisions they KNEW would cause and/or exacerbate the crisis they all saw coming, simply because those decisions allowed them a burst of short-term profit. There were companies that were specifically planning on tanking and dissolving after making a quick surge of dirty money, so their top folks could walk off with a sweet profit while the world burned down behind them.

That is where any trust I ever had in the corporation as an entity or structure disappeared for all time.

If it were up to me? Those people would not be in prison. Those people would be dead, and their bodies hung in gibbet cages along Wall Street as a reminder that the market, like the government and like everything else, ultimately serves the people. You don't get to actively poison your own well to make a quick filthy buck then walk off scot free.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

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.

What you're not counting on in this bit is collusion. The government is not the only entity with which a corporation can make sweetheart deals; they can decide to collude with each other rather than compete with each other, usually in an attempt to get around regulatory burdens on their business or in an attempt to break up and destroy a mutual competitor they can't tackle on their own. Companies forced by other means to remain smaller than they want to be can ally with each other into an amalgam entity united in its desire to separate you from your delicious money by whatever means, legitimate or not, they can manage. When A Corp undertakes its mudslinging campaign against C Corp, perhaps D Corp decides to jump on the bandwagon? The two of them combine their efforts to drive their mutual competitor under, and then move on towards doing the same to B Corp despite B's superior offering.

"Work with me until we're the last man standing, then we'll fight it out and may the best man win" is a very common way to win the sort of multi-man brawl you're describing, at least in a combative standpoint. And since it's impossible to really legislate away collusion, I hold that what we need instead is a sort of Bill of Consumer Rights that enshrines the best protections we can manage for the consumer. We can't make every filthy trick Big Corporate uses to swindle us illegal, they invent new ones faster than we can make the old ones illegal. But perhaps we can instead try to foster a culture where trying to swindle your customers all the time is reviled instead of admired, ne?

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

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.)

Okay, I cheated and watched a little bit of that because it's Friday on Christmas week, half the office is out for the New Years Drinking Binge as it is, and damnit John Oliver is a topical video no matter the topic. I'm womanfully resisting the urge to get into another Trump diatribe here, there's a thread for that already up (it's your own damn fault for linking me to John :P), but in short: yeah, that makes sense. Though again, when you have three or more competing units attempting to secure the greatest possible share of a limited resource, you cannot discount collusion between two or more of those competing units as a possibility, and collusion throws all one's projections on the value of competition off.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

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.

This gets us back to the earlier point about bank bailouts and how deep the hole we've dug ourself into goes. Can Alphabet fail without taking the Internet with it? In the long term, yes. Provided we don't outright annihilate ourselves, humanity will rebound from virtually anything we do to ourselves. In the short term? I legitimately don't know. What free-market folks always handwave away is the damage that short-term instability and business churn inflicts on industries like health care (to resurrect an earlier subject by way of example). When your business is saving lives, is it truly responsible to force you to be aggressively experimental and constantly risk the failure of your business and thus the death of the people relying on it? Conservatives/free-market folks say yes, we can only get to the best possible healthcare system through free-market trial and error and the eventual failure of inferior models.

Other folks, myself included, believe that the smooth and stable operation of certain functions of society are too important to be left to the whimsical whims of the free market. health care is one of them. The Internet is another, given how non-negotiably critical it is to the day-to-day lives of so many millions of people. Such critical societal functions are ideally carried out by very large, stable organizations resistant to sudden fluxes in the market, in order to ensure that their vital service is not disrupted, but those are also the organizations which are least trustworthy and most likely to be looking for ways to fuck over literally everyone else.

The sheer size of Alphabet works against the consumer, but the stable performance of the Internet is critical for the consumer too. Rock? Meet hard place.

Fuck.

"

1453R wrote:

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.

I'm actually speaking from personal experience on this one. In my workplace, we used to have a very useful databasing tool that was super nice and helped us out a lot; we relied on it pretty extensively. A competitor in our field purchased the providers of this tool however, and after this was done the Corporate Overlords who run the joint decided that "we're neither paying these people money nor giving them a window into our business. We're discontinuing our contract for this tool; we're certain your team will rise to the occasion and continue to provide the same excellent level of service as before even without this databasing tool that was, for many of you, critical to the level of service you could offer."

Needless to say, I cannot do the same level of job I did before I lost my databasing tool. I do the best I can, and the company is making a (very sad limp-wristed bogus) effort to replace that tool with a homegrown alternative...but the fact remains. A competitor bought one of our tools and forced us to discontinue using it if we didn't want to pay them for the privilege. It's a 'tough luck bruh' situation, but it's also indicative of the general business climate as a whole. Don't like something? Don't care for the fact that a competitor in your field is doing better than you are for thirty years running in customer satisfaction polls? Buy the company doing the polling! Eliminate your competitor's ads in that publication! Simply purchase your way out of the problem, because who can be assed to do a better job, amiryte?!

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

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.

Frankly, it's sort of indicative of the problem as a whole; Corporate will do anything to game their way around any laws, regulations, ethical concerns, or anything else which gets in the way of making money. It's an impossible battle to win, no legislative body could ever keep up with all the ways Corporate Interest finds every day to abuse people, laws, or situations, but failing to fight that battle despite its futility is just as bad. Without IP laws, Big Corporate doesn't need to buy out their competitor if they don't want to; they just steal the product, out-advertise the little guy, and move on; we may get better product/services but we get none of the competition free-market folks claim is essential to keep things fair and balanced. And even then, once the company has driven their little competitor out of business they can discontinue the product they stole if they desire without penalty.

With IP law? As you said: they buy out a smaller competitor once, they don't have to worry about it again for a while.

It's infuriating. I cannot figure out a way to make Big Corporate play fair and stop fucking everything up all the time and it drives me absolutely bonko sometimes.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

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.

Government doesn't need to get involved here; Mr. Fortune 500 CEO can simply threaten to buy lawyers you can't beat to dismantle your company piece by piece in front of you if you don't back off, and there's nothing you can do about it. Obviously that's the sort of thing that should be illegal, but when Mr. CEO can purchase whatever politician he likes to amend the law as needed, or whatever judge he likes to simply dismiss the case, then the obvious illegality of strongarming someone like that is rather moot.

Ugh. And people wonder why I just flat-out don't trust Big Corporate folks.

"

1453R wrote:

The world has changed a great deal in fifty years. Perhaps we should look into changing with it?

Great argument leading up to here, but then what? Opposing blind change is 90% the reason I currently align myself right-of-center. What do you propose?

"

1453R wrote:

Last time I checked one had to officially register as Dem or Repub to vote in a primary and my conscience won't let me do that.

Then register libertarian. They’re the most likely to develop a strong enough platform to legitimately compete with the establishment, and the only clear path towards developing that platform is showing strong polls. Going independent or another third party (Green) is a cop out and weakens the chances of developing a legitimate third party.

"

CanHasPants wrote:

Great argument leading up to here, but then what? Opposing blind change is 90% the reason I currently align myself right-of-center. What do you propose?

Technically, not my job to propose a damn thing :P But in the interests of a good debate and considering the thread is supposed to be about Ne Neutrality, there's been talk in infosec and digital-activist circles (which I don't travel in, but you see a lot of weird things in your YouTube feed these days. Which is actually another worthwhile conversation for later) of a Digital Bill of Rights movement, essentially expanding the original Bill of Rights to include certain inalienable online rights an individual in this country has, given how huge and critical the Internet is to modern daily life. What that Digital Bill of Rights is, I don't know. Like I said, I don't run in infosec/digital activist circles. But the core idea seems quite sound, and also offers a model for what such a document should be. The original Bill of Rights was designed to ensure that the essential freedoms an American requires in order to be an American were beyond the ability of an organization to breach.

Frankly? Buzzing over the Bill of Rights again to refresh my memory here (everybody knows what the First and Second are, but not many other folks can recall #'s 3 through 10, can they?), there's a number of concepts in here that are easy to draw parallels to in modern Information-Age terms. The First Amendment is obvious - neither the government nor any organization bound by a Digital Bill of Rights is permitted to squelch, disrupt, or block access to content online. Speech is free and so is the Internet; if you're not actively breaking other laws with your website/blog/service/whatever, you can put it up online and ISPs have to allow their customers access to it. They're not allowed to silence you.

The Second and Third are less applicable to a Digital Bill of Rights, but the Fourth presents an interesting case as it essentially guarantees privacy and property. The government is not allowed to barge into your house and take all your stuff (and private citizens are also not allowed to do so, if for other reasons). I would posit that a Digital Bill of Rights assert in inviolable law that a person's data belongs to them, that this data has value and such value is ascribed to the person whose data it is, and that neither corporations nor governments can unlawfully seize, manipulate, or sell this valuable data without the person's consent. This would help with modern digital privacy concerns, and things such as Alphabet/Google putting "oh, also we reserve the right to datamine your computer and digitally stalk you in order to steal every last possible little byte of data we can about you to assemble into an Online Advertiser's Profile we can then sell freely to anyone we want" into every EULA attached to every product or service they offer.

The Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth don't look terribly applicable as they deal with ensuring that we don't have secret-police dragoon squads disappearing people (or at least making the best reasonable case we can that such is not occurring), but the Ninth, again, could make an interesting case in that it speaks to official protection of the strongest sort for 'natural' rights assumed by but not explicitly written into law - essentially a catch-all for "you're being an abusive douchenuckle, this is against the Digital Bill of Rights, you're arrested now". What I'm most interested in is the Tenth, though - the one that states "the federal government has only those powers specifically ascribed to it by the People through the Constitution, and no others".

This is Net Neutrality in a nutshell, right here. This is exactly what we need in a Digital Bill of Rights - a statement that ISPs have the purpose of providing Internet service and nothing else. They have no power to curate, control, restrict, or partition the Internet. They do not have the power to unfairly utilize their last-mile Gatekeeper of the Web status to dictate to their customers how those customers are allowed to utilize the Internet.

Going right back to the First Amendment and its obvious digital incarnation - Big Telecom does not have the power to tell me I can't go read The Angry GM's blog because Big Telco's CEO happens to be too Christian to believe tabletop RPGs are healthy for the immortal souls of their customers (as a purely hypothetical example, mind - though one they're perfectly allowed to do in the unprotected Internet Pannra keeps shilling for). A big ISP would have the powers and functions ascribed to it by a Digital Bill of Rights and no others.

That is, I believe, an important step in stopping this Neutrality issue from flaring up every few years.

Would that work as a starting point? :P

"

CanHasPants wrote:

Then register libertarian. They’re the most likely to develop a strong enough platform to legitimately compete with the establishment, and the only clear path towards developing that platform is showing strong polls. Going independent or another third party (Green) is a cop out and weakens the chances of developing a legitimate third party.

I'd rather not register for anything until there's an option worth registering for. Registering yourself as a dedicated fanatical member of the least offensive option available to you is not good practice, it's madness. I'm not a libertarian, a Dem, or a Repub. Why should I have to pay one of them, and be denied the ability to not support every single shitty boneheaded decision they make, simply for the 'privilege' of being ignored in the primaries instead of the generals?

We don't need more/different parties in the broken system we're currently stuck; we need to fix the system.

"

1453R wrote:

My own ballot would've looked very, very different with IRV in effect - both the aforementioned would've been at the very bottom of it, with Hillary getting the nod over Trump simply because I'll take a criminal who knows the job over a criminal who doesn't know the job and who is also an assclown.

In the context of your enemies, intelligence is a liability, not an asset. If the two presidential candidates are Loki and the Incredible Hulk, the correct choice is President Hulk. Yes, even with all the smashing.

"

1453R wrote:

A constant in the world is that people's lives are big enough for them; very few individuals in any given population are willing to step beyond their own immediate problems and put their weight into efforts to deal with larger issues. I'm as guilty as anyone else on that score; life is fuckin' exhausting enough most of the time without having to try and personally batter down Big Corporate's predatory nonsense.

That's why I wish we had a government with enough strength, backbone, and...'purity' is the wrong word, but it's the opposite of corruption so I suppose we'll go with it for now...to tell Big Corp where to bloody heckin' shove it. Ideally, we elect officials willing to fight our big fights for us. That's why we elected them in the first place, and if we can't rely on our government to protect us from threats to our peace, security, and right to seek happiness that are too big for any single individual to deal with alone, the hell good is it doing us?

Saying there will someday be politicians we can trust to do the right thing while we tend to anime and videogames is like saying someday there will be children we can trust to grow up right without any parenting. Do you really think you can get away with doing what the Boomers did — get wrapped up in your pursuits all day and pay no mind to politics — and not get Boomer results? Do you really think the reason we elect our polluticians is not a hiring decision, but because we trust them like we'd trust our spouses?

They will never have that backbone of "purity" you hope for. Ever. Unless we intend to be that backbone, by following what our politicians are doing and starting a meme jihad when the things we see don't please us.

It's just like every other hiring decision. Yes, hiring someone means you don't have to deal with the details and can rely on the expertise of someone with specialized knowledge you don't have. But you're naive if you think you needn't check up on them, that you can truly trust someone who hasn't proven themselves.

"

1453R wrote:

If it were up to me? Those people would not be in prison. Those people would be dead, and their bodies hung in gibbet cages along Wall Street as a reminder that the market, like the government and like everything else, ultimately serves the people.

Hey now, let's not go all Pol Pot on a motherfucker. Ease back on the classist genocidal ideations, comrade.

Otherwise mostly agree with you on bank bailout.

"

1453R wrote:

What you're not counting on in this bit is collusion.

Collision of this type will usually fall apart if it takes the form of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and it's both possible and likely cost-effective to create legal frameworks such that each competitor is incentived to betray an alliance rather than cooperate. For instance, reforming contract law such that the types of contracts that would enforce such cooperation are determined non-binding, while more conventional pay-for-service contracts are still held up as binding.

Remember: the only thing laws do (and therefore: the only thing government does) is change incentives do to threat of force. Good laws are cost-effective by bending our natural, baser instincts just enough to point them towards constructive ends, then letting the energy of self-interest do the bulk of the work. In essence, laws should be designed with the purely selfish as the end user.

"

1453R wrote:

This gets us back to the earlier point about bank bailouts and how deep the hole we've dug ourself into goes. Can Alphabet fail without taking the Internet with it? In the long term, yes. Provided we don't outright annihilate ourselves, humanity will rebound from virtually anything we do to ourselves. In the short term? I legitimately don't know. What free-market folks always handwave away is the damage that short-term instability and business churn inflicts on industries like health care (to resurrect an earlier subject by way of example). When your business is saving lives, is it truly responsible to force you to be aggressively experimental and constantly risk the failure of your business and thus the death of the people relying on it? Conservatives/free-market folks say yes, we can only get to the best possible healthcare system through free-market trial and error and the eventual failure of inferior models.

Other folks, myself included, believe that the smooth and stable operation of certain functions of society are too important to be left to the whimsical whims of the free market. health care is one of them. The Internet is another, given how non-negotiably critical it is to the day-to-day lives of so many millions of people. Such critical societal functions are ideally carried out by very large, stable organizations resistant to sudden fluxes in the market, in order to ensure that their vital service is not disrupted, but those are also the organizations which are least trustworthy and most likely to be looking for ways to fuck over literally everyone else.

The sheer size of Alphabet works against the consumer, but the stable performance of the Internet is critical for the consumer too. Rock? Meet hard place.

Fuck.

You allow the feels to cloud your thinking. End the cancer immediately (well, after making some quick common-sense precautions), hospitals have a bad time, maybe hundreds die. Or let it continue to fester, so the choice later involves thousands dying.

I was taught in high school — I'm beginning to think by an exceptional economics instructor — that money is not the root resource of economics. Time is. Personal economics is how one weighs the opportunity cost of what they could be doing with their time, and applies even if you're, say, on a deserted island. But meanwhile back in society, once you add economic specialization, money is the medium by which we trade the time one person spent working on something for the time someone else spends working on something else. I was taught that anything can be money, providing it can function as a broadly accepted symbol of the product of time — like conductivity, most things can be money, but some things are better at it than others.

Here's the thing though, my own addition: human life is a span of human time. How we spend our time is how we spend our lives. Which means all that Wall Street shuffling around of numbers is, in fact, the mass buying and selling of our lives.

So if you shift your focus from death to life, then it becomes clear: a bad economy when we could have a good one is equivalent to masses of people wasting their loves away in slavery for nothing. And each minute you spend that way is a part of your life you're never getting back. A death you live is arguably worse than a death you don't.

-----

There was some other stuff, but I don't want to go back and forth with you on things I'm pretty sure we don't agree on. For instance, I think your employer let themselves get blindsided by not planning for an alternative database solution ahead if time, and should have more aggressively counterbid for ownership of the database company.

This is Day 16 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. Why does the truth anger you so much?

"

pannra wrote:

It will be just like playing in 2015. Or 2014. Or any year before NN was implemented.

Bin

/e

t4t

This is Day 17 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. Why does the truth anger you so much?

This is Day 18 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. Happy New Year!

So I had grand plans of coming back and getting back into the swing of things, picking up with Scrotie, and enjoying myself after taking a break to go down south and have dinner with the grandparents...but y'know? Pannra's ceaseless trollspam is just fuckin' ruining the mood. I don't want to try and shout over that nitwittery anymore, it just isn't worth it.

So I'm done. He can have it. Yess Pannra, we're all dirty lying liars who lie because Big Telecom did not immediately go full Blade Runner on us the instant they scored the first blow of War for Free Internet 2017/18. We can't possibly have been worried about the future, rather than the immediately present fallout. Nah. We're all just stirring shit up for the jollies because we're not sensible right-minded fundamentalist rightwinger ultraconservatives who hate government and love business despite centuries of history showing that the one is no better for the Average Citizen than the other (anyone remember the East India Trading Company? No? Wiki it. It's illuminating). Also because our mommies never loved us.

Scrotie, it's been fun. I mean that, not often I get a proper debate anywhere. Have a good one my man, and I hope your holiday went well.

This is Day 19 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.