It is impossible to have socialism at the state government level because states are not permitted to levy tariffs or control immigration.

You can't have socialism without both of those. If a state were to offer free healthcare paid for by taxes, then the unemployed who need healthcare would just travel to that state, while employers would move to other states where taxes are lower. That doesn't mean that single-payer healthcare can't work - just that it can't work in the context of a US state. In a country like Canada you can't just move there for six months to have your cancer fixed, and anybody from outside of Canada selling goods there is subject to tariffs which are intended to help ensure that the cost basis for producing those goods is somewhat comparable.

I've heard the whole laboratory for experimentation argument about the role of the federal/state governments, but it really only allows for experimentation on fairly minor things and for the most part is just a race for the bottom. Look at what companies do when they negotiate their taxes while threatening to move operations.

Only time can clear you of it. The most you can do is put a protest letter in your file, which everybody will ignore. Everybody who accesses your credit report plans on behaving just like Comcast did in this call anyway, so the fact that you stood up to them is hardly going to inspire them to give you a nice deal.

Nah. They will point to the fact that some areas of business are just natural monopolies. Don't get me wrong - regulatory capture makes it even worse than it would be otherwise, but even though it is fairly free from regulation and many of the last mile problems I don't see 47 companies offering satellite cable.

The corporations are doing what they always do - charge whatever the market will bear. Regulation is required anytime you have a monopoly, no matter how it got there. Obviously regulation that encourages competition so as to minimize the need for future regulation should be preferred.

I'd argue that the best solution is to break up the vertical integration. Have a traditional utility (cost-plus basis) own the last mile wires. Then let anybody sell services over them. The service providers would not be allowed to own the utilities, but otherwise they would be free from regulation. The utilities would just charge you a monthly fee to maintain the lines, and would charge a flat rate to anybody renting rack-space to provide services - they wouldn't be in a position to choose winners/losers/etc.

The idea is that regulation of some things is necessary, but we should try to structure regulation so that we minimize its scope.

I suspect your score is indeed lower, and that companies will take that bad report into account (and ignore your protest letter).

Your credit history doesn't just impact your ability to get loans - it also impacts the interest rate you pay on those loans. So, disputed charges can cost you real money - quite a bit of it if you're talking about a mortgage.

Big companies don't care whether you had a legitimate reason to dispute a charge. When they want to impose some illegal contract change on you they don't want you legitimately disputing their charges either.

My point was more that I can understand the logic behind the approach. I just tend to not favor those kinds of approaches. I'd rather change society so that somebody who can never get a job doesn't starve to death in the first place. Another improvement would be changing privacy law such that nobody has a clean reputation, forcing companies to resort to hiring people with bad reputations. I think as a society we need to get to a point where anybody can pull up a video of their boss getting dressed in the morning and not really care enough to bother to do so.

While I think that the laws around Copyright need massive reform, I do have a problem with the "not our job to plug loopholes" mentality.

It is impossible to create a law free of loopholes. The law is static, and people are not. There will always be a way around the letter of the law, and that means that a country that forces itself to be bound by the letter of the law basically ends up not being ruled by laws at all.

What the Supreme Court needs to do is issue a ruling that says, "We find that the tax shelter employed by Acme Corp to be completely legal and compliant with IRS guidelines. Nevertheless, we fine it $1B anyway just to prove the point that companies should pay taxes, a figure that is 3x higher than what they would have paid if they just took the marginal rate times their gross revenue without applying any deductions at all." Sure, it would be arbitrary and capricious, and that is the point. Lawyers would then realize that if they pushed things too far, they could end up getting their heads lopped off, so to speak, and that would lead to moderation, which is what makes laws work well.

I know a judge who gave a presentation on ethics in his area of practice to a room full of lawyers. He said that the theme of 95% of the Q&A was around identifying just how much a lawyer could push the rules before they'd get sanctioned. It would be like walking up to a police officer and asking them if you'd get pulled over for going 60 in a 55 zone, then asking if 65 was ok, then if 70 was ok, and then if 69.5 was ok, and so on. There was really no interest in just doing the right thing for its own sake.

That's like saying that a Superbowl ad is only worth the money if lots of people click on it. Oh wait, you can't click on TV ads, and yet companies have considered them valuable for a long time.

The point is that from a marketing experience the XBox gets's MS's name out there. The 30-year-old playing games on the XBox goes into work and gets to make technology purchasing decisions. You want them to be thinking about MS.

So, even if the XBox just barely broke even, it might have value beyond the direct revenue. That is the sort of thing that MBAs tend to ignore - the intangibles. Will Virgin Galactic ever make money? I'm skeptical. On the other hand, might it lead more people to fly on Virgin Airlines? Quite possibly, even though no MBA could prove it.

I can certainly echo that, but the long-term effects are even worse. Companies that get into this mode end up doing layoffs and reorganizations so frequently that nobody stays in a role for a long time. Everybody adjusts to this, which leads to some really bad culture changes.

Any big company tends to get bureaucratic. The official way of getting things done tends to be slow as a result, but that doesn't have to be a problem since everybody learns how to navigate the bureaucracy. Employees can either use this knowledge to quickly jump through hoops when there is something urgent to be done, or to work around the system by calling in favors (and granting them in turn). A common term used in big companies is "influencing people" - reflecting that rarely does anybody have the actual managerial power to make something happen that they need to happen.

The problem is that once you have layoffs and frequent re-orgs the employees never develop this level of organizational knowledge. Heck, at work my IM contact list is still grouped by the names of departments that went away 5 years ago, though the people in the groupings are still strangely relevant today. When something needs to be done, people need to figure out how to get it done like they are new hires even if they've been around for 10 years. Also, nobody is in a position to ask for a favor - you never work with anybody in any particular role long enough to actually be able to "influence" them - everything gets done by the book.

Instead of focusing all that internal networking on figuring out how to get work done, the internal networking effort all goes into understanding what is going on (as you describe), and trying to gather intelligence on where the next cuts are coming. Relationship-building isn't about team interaction - it is about finding people who can help you find a job should you lose your own. Half the socializing at work ends up being with people who don't even work at the company any longer.

All of this is horrible for morale, and for productivity as well.

I'm not in favor of making Google take down search results, and I'm not in favor of affirmative action either for somewhat similar reasons.

I agree, but we still manage to get by without issuing federal licenses to tree owners.

I just don't see the need to regulate low-flying drones at all (1000'). I can see the need to come up with a more workable way to handle aircraft of any type including drones at higher altitudes, since a drone getting sucked into an engine can cause serious problems or death for hundreds of people. Frankly, the FAA's approaches aren't really adequate even for small aircraft, which is why the whole general aviation industry is dying out. They need to get past "see and avoid" which is basically just another way of washing their hands of doing anything to proactively prevent collisions.

Because every employer will treat you that way, and their money is still green?

Well, the choice is live with the problem or do something to help mitigate it.

That's the reasoning. I can't say I'm a fan of this approach, but fixing the root cause isn't really possible until we can control everybody's thoughts and actions.

Sure, but a drone's shape and materials will probably be less likely to cause damage than a baseball or other more common object flying through the air (like a tree branch).

The drone is designed to fly - it is going to be light and flimsy.

And that was my whole point. The problem is that in the meantime you still have to deal with the damage.

I'm not sure why they'd be waiting for the US to do it first, but sure.

Look at it the other way around. Suppose that somebody has reason to think that Google has been collecting private data about Germans illegally. They sue Google. Google says they don't have to produce any evidence to the court, since Google doesn't store any data or documents relevant to its German operations in Germany.

Allowing this kind of argument will just lead every single company everywhere to move all their records retention and datacenters around so that nothing relevant is stored in a country that it is relevant to. They could send the US paperwork to Germany, and the German paperwork to the US, for example, or move it all to some friendly shelter.

Courts don't like shell games, so they just tell the company that figuring out how to comply is its problem, and to produce the documents/etc.