When there is an "economic crisis in the viability" of some particular activity, economics says you stop doing it. It isn't that hard. Well, until you get a government mandate that says that the activity must be performed, in which case it becomes well nigh impossible. So the "crisis" is one of politics, not economics.
It's mainly that I'm old, crotchety, and set in my ways, at least TV-wise. I have channels that I watch, and it is currently more clunky to get the same content on the Roku than it is to flip to a channel, and at least some of them appear to have lower quality streams OTT.
Yeah, I have cable TV service and a Motorola QIP DVR. I don't watch a lot of broadcast stuff, but I do watch some, and since I'm not that close to the city it looks like reception is iffy. Like I said (or meant to say), once the stuff I watch on cable is covered well enough on OTT services, I'll likely switch. I do have a Roku and watch some stuff there with mixed results.
Good point, and I did consider that, but I have a DVR, so I need MOCA to keep working. Getting my own MOCA-enabled router would be expensive, and I suspect it would be quite a bit of grief to get VZ to work with it, so I'm back to suffering with the fee. If it seems like the OTT services are sufficient in quantity and quality to ditch the DVR, I'm sure I'll reconsider.
Verizon decided they could charge me a monthly "maintenance fee" for my old router because I didn't want to buy a refurbished but newer one from them. The more paranoid side of me suspects that the newer router is mainly to make it easier to monitor my usage, or at least provide a conduit to funnel more of my money to them, so I'll pass. Of course, my other option, Comcast, is arguably even more evil, so I suffer with it. It would be really nice if there were more alternatives.
Let he who doesn't try to reduce his tax bill cast the first stone.
If consumers have alternatives they can decide to go with a competitor if they don't like a particular policy, and the problem fixes itself. Setting policies which encourage or at least don't hinder competition is much more likely to be effective than setting policies to try to control things, as the supposed bad actors will always find ways around the latter.
Rajant has some serious wireless mesh technology you might want to check out, though it may be overkill for this application. https://www.rajant.com/
Perhaps...
It looks like they have a 3.10.0-862 kernel and a 4.14.0-49 kernel-alt.
The government regulation catechism is common enough, but that doesn't make it true. And I believe we've already established that we aren't talking about an unfettered free market. I didn't even mention Medicare and Medicaid which are major market distortions.
As long as most of the money goes though insurance, there is little incentive for providers to pay attention to the few demands for pricing information. There are exceptions, of course. Some providers have decided not to accept insurance and either provide fee-for-service or subscription plans. They were put at a serious disadvantage by schemes like the ACA which tried to force everyone into the health insurance pigeon hole.
Trade unions like the AMA are supposed to ensure that their members meet certain standards, so why not let them do that? Or a medical provider can provide credentials which individuals or organizations can verify, and we can base our decisions on that, so some other criteria of our choosing.
How is it unrestrained free enterprise when you agreed with at least some of the restrictions I listed? Government is really good at setting up bureaucracy, wasting lots of money in the process, but really bad at preventing bad things from happening.
I agree that my argument about insurance wasn't the best; I'm not expert enough on the topic to put together a great argument quickly. I will say that the insurance model is there to mitigate risk, so it is not surprising that it does a bad job when it is transmogrified into a system for funding services. If people pay for more of their medical services out of pocket, they will demand that prices be made clear. It is easy to ignore costs when "someone else" is paying (even if you eventually end up paying through premiums.)
The AMA is quite capable of going after anyone claiming to be a member as fraud; it doesn't need a government monopoly to do that.
Quite corrupt, I agree, but that has nothing to do with "unrestrained free enterprise", which we don't have. If we had that, health care provisioning would not be tied to employers and their selection of insurance plans due to government mandates and tax incentives that distort the market. If we had that, I could do proper comparison shopping for medical goods and services based on price and quality. If we had that, I could research what drugs would best treat my condition(s) and buy them without having to go through an agent for a government supported monopoly on medical services. The list goes on. Medicine in the US is about as far from "unrestrained" as you can get without having Single Payer.
The poo one?
If all else fails, lower your standards.
