Most of them achieve a monopoly at the city or municipality level of government. They also make use of state and city laws/regulations to squash any potential competition. In a lot of the US it's still a state sponsored monopoly, just enforced at a different level of government.

I was young when the breakup happened but I certainly remember it's fall out. I have no idea why you think the government would need to set rates just because it forced the separation of the various corporate divisions. In most civilized areas that's known as a straw man argument.

If internet services and cable access services where separate there's no reason to believe a new monopoly would form. Much like dial up before you would be able to pick any ISP you wanted for your internet needs. Local monopolies for cable providers would likely continue because of the nature of the municipal agreements in place but internet service would have no such restrictions. In fact it would be nearly impossible to impose such a restriction. It would be like your town telling you what VPN provider you must use.

Beyond that not everyone is lucky enough to live somewhere like you. In my area (We would consider 20,000 a largish city) we have exactly one cable company (spectrum formerly TWC) and a phone company that couldn't offer reliable DSL if their lives depended on it. We have no competition, we have no choices. We pay top dollar for bottom of the barrel service. If I cancel my cable service and keep my internet it would actually make my bill higher.

What we do have is a local company trying to roll out fiber to home one town over (An ex dialup turned business provider). Because of the anti competitive nature of the cable industry they are being blocked, bullied, and sued at every turn. How dare they offer people a service they want!

There is an additional issue. Not only are cable companies operating as state sponsored monopolies but since the deregulation of the late 90's they also tend to own both the means of production and the means of distribution. This gives them an increasingly powerful incentive to use internet services as a weapon against their competitors. That is what's driving the relatively new need for something like NN. I'm not sure if NN is the answer but I would whole heartedly support another Ma Bell'esq forced breakup of cabled companies from their ISP's and possibly from the media creation portions of the companies. You should be paying to lease a line from your cable company (or phone company, or fiber company, or local service district) and getting ISP service from a separate unaffiliated company of your choice.

Just for some education on beer styles. The primary difference between Ales and Lagers is in both the strain of yeast used and what temperatures they ferment best in.

Ales are less cold tolerant, are most active on the top of the wort, and produce more fruity esters.

Lagers are far more cold tolerant, are most active on the bottom of the wort, and produce a cleaner "crisper" beer. Lagers are then left post fermentation in a 40 degree or cooler chamber for a couple weeks. A process which has come to be known as lagering.

Both beers come from the same base ingredients and either can be hoppy or not. In fact the hoppiest beers we have today tend to be IPA's, which are ales incase the A didn't make that clear.

I've had an echo and two echo dot's around the house for several months. I keep the full size echo in the kitchen and it's incredibly useful. Just the voice controlled music is almost worth the price of admission but being able to set timers and convert measurements while your hands are covered in food is absolutely awesome.

The first dot mainly plays music in my living room but the second I use as an alarm clock and music player in my bed room. It's really nice not to have that bright LED screen glaring at you all night and the first time you check the time in the middle of the night with out opening your eyes you'll never want to go back.

Two changes I would like to see that would make the echo's even better are named timers (chicken 20 minutes, potatoes 10 minutes, etc..) and the ability to control other echos (like Sonos speakers).

I normally don't respond to AC's but as stated above. Current traffic control devices will incorporate a digital communication system in the future (including flag men). Even without autonomous cars that is already in the works. As to driving safely on ice, an autonomous vehicle will be able to respond to the situation in a variety of ways. It will have knowledge of road conditions well in advance of the hazard and can redirect, suggest stopping, or otherwise respond before it encounters the hazard directly. That's one of the advantages they will have over human drivers. Beyond that do you think a human who stops their car to "chip ice" off the road (what ever that means) wouldn't cause a traffic jam. I live in a rural heavy snow area. Believe me humans cause all kinds of traffic jams.

This is a bit short sighted. The number of problems caused by autonomous cars will be inversely proportional to the number on the road. There will be a critical mass beyond which insurance companies will begin charging extravagant fees for a manually operated vehicle. Autonomous vehicles will communicate with each other. They will know miles in advance when there is an accident, construction, or other hazard and be capable of responding accordingly (including re-routing if possible). Imagine a Network of cars alerting other vehicles behind them about road conditions, say an icy spot. Your car would then essentially have a map of areas to apply more caution in. They will be capable of monitoring for wild life with heat and infrared sensors. Grid lock on roads will be virtually eliminated because cars will be able to tell each other what they are about to do before they do it. Issues with reading signs are a non starter. Once adoption begins to pick up you will quickly see digital information systems added to existing road signs. All of this tech exist right now and most of it is mature. It just hasn't been put together yet. In about 20 years people will be complaining about how manual drivers are always causing accidents and issues with traffic flow.

So long as communication is only one way I agree that it adds some protection. At least in this one case. Number stations are a prime example of this sort of thing. Assuming your partner responds to your broadcast with a wireless transmission of their own and that such transmissions are being monitored it wouldn't take long to establish communications patterns in the radio broadcast themselves however. If they are recording broadcasts from multiple locations (Hey, lets put all those emergency repeaters across the country to good use!) then triangulation becomes fairly simple. The people involved would need to use separate transmission mediums that can't be cross correlated to effectively isolate themselves from one another. Other wise if one of you becomes a target as soon as some one looks at the data and says "Hey, these two encrypted stations appear to be communicating in response to one another" the white vans start roaming your neighborhood.

Lets first make the assumption you can find a safe device to begin with. Once you bring strong encryption into the picture the transmission medium is un-important. You must assume all encrypted traffic will be public, HAM certainly is. Either your encryption is strong enough to deal with the public scrutiny or it's no more effective than your "Tin foil hat" solution.

That said it is difficult to say that any telecommunications device is actually secure. The hardware it-self could be configured to make breaking encryption performed on it easier. Simpler yet to allow access to any communication or storage pre-encryption.

Once we fall into that rabbit hole though you had best be prepared to make your own chips to put in your home brewed HAM equipment because it's turtles all the way down.

I don't think your very familiar with the Libertarian Party. The only way they become more GOP like is if your looking at a purely economics based platform.

Libertarian's are typically small government. They adopt those policies from the standpoint of personal liberty though. They believe you should have the right to smoke, believe, say, or sleep with whatever or whomever makes you happy so long as the consequences of your actions are mainly yours to bare.

The Libertarian social platform is far more leftwing than the Democrats (if you can even call Dem's left wing these days). What they typically are not is progressive. Libertarians were the first political party in the nation to adopt same sex marriage as an issue, in the 70's. I'm not that old and I've been around long enough to have heard Democrats call them insane for it.

That said it would be against Libertarian philosophy to use the power of the government to punish say a caterer for refusing to cater a same sex marriage. That is usually where the Dem's and Libertarians part ways.

SMS verification is a form of 2fa. Not all 2fa is SMS based. In fact SMS is generally regarded as weakest and least desirable form of 2fa. TOTP is much better and can be done with a phone based client like Google's. I use a combination of TOTP, hardware token based 2fa depending on what the site supports. All sites should be prodded to support hardware token based 2fa.

Read about FIDO U2F to better inform yourself of the options that exist and where things should be heading.

This is of course all baseless theory since it has no grounding in fact.

If you where to create a simulation advanced enough to create sentient inhabitants (likely as a byproduct of it's full purpose) it stands to reason that it would be based off tech far in advanced to our own current levels. Even now we are working on developing systems that move beyond simple binary decision making. I would imagine the system having a rule keeping AI with the universal physic programed into it and allowing all other AI's in the environment to grow organically (so to speak).

As you said, assuming for a moment free will can and/or does exist it's entirely plausible under some theories of the universe that a middle ground could as well.

For instance some people now theorize the entire universe could be a giant computer simulation. In such an environment some decisions could be left to free will while others are hard coded (not that I actually believe we are all sims). We can theorize the purpose of such a system would be to ensure some specific conditions in the sim are met.

Even in a far more likely base organic reality it's feasible that some processes may be genetically hard coded into our actions while others are not.

I've given this matter a lot of thought and I believe what we see is the result of people generally being unable to accurately and easily understand complex issues outside their field of expertise. When this occurs it seems to be human nature to defer to a trusted authority when forming ones opinions.

We see this in all sorts of issues like climate change (I see it equally on both sides of the debate) where the majority of people are arguing from "facts" that are given to them instead any real understanding of the science. Their knowledge in the area is only deep enough to allow them to parse the opinions of the trusted authority.

For most of modern history the US government has been considered a defacto trusted authority on legal matters. When a congressman doesn't talk about an issue or just regurgitates some talking points their constituents take that as everything they need to know about the issue.

I think it's always been this way. The change has been in trustworthiness of our "Trusted Authorities" and the ease with which dissenting opinions can be presented with equal ease.

The reply wasn't in regards to the definition of fascism. You said that Hitler was the archetypal fascist. I explained to you why that is wrong. It doesn't matter how you define fascism Mussolini is the archetypal fascist. On a side note I don't believe the party name of one of the three WWII axis powers is in any way shape or form archaic. Unless they don't teach WWII in history classes any more. Do you believe Nazi is archaic?