Unions are democratic

If I don't have a choice about whether to join or not, the fact that you hold an election to decide who gets to be in charge doesn't make it democratic.

I don't have a beef with unions. I have a beef with any organization that is permitted to count me as a supporter and garnish my paycheck without even asking whether or not I would like to be a member. I don't care if you're saving baby unicorns. If you are, you should have no problem convincing me to join.

That's not even a relevant example.

According to you, poor people 'have to live' in benighted places where airplanes fly over them. Having an airport next door reduces property values. Whether or not you think it's stupid, and whether or not poor people fly has nothing to do with it.

Arguably, plopping down an airport will create more affordable housing, which is just the positive way of spinning "lower property values." If you don't want the noise, you can buy your way out, just like if you don't want to live in an apartment building, you can buy your way out. All of these things are luxuries. As you said, it's not like having airplanes flying over you is particularly terrible, if you grew up living with it.

But questions like yours are certainly open to dispute for any number of reasons. I'm merely pointing out that "justice" has got nothing to do with any of those reasons, because there is no "just" way to build an airport. You're just talking about serving one group of people's interests over another, and your basis for doing so is that they are poorer. If you put your airport in the middle of a bucolic planned community, you're going to destroy a lot more value than if you put it somewhere that values aren't all that high to begin with, so you're technically doing more economic damage. Is that "just"? It neither is nor isn't. Justice doesn't enter into it. It's purely a question of serving one group of people's legitimate self-interest over another's.

You keep using that word "justice." I do not think it means what you think it means.

If by "economic social justice" you mean "ways I believe that I should spend your money" and if by "unjust" you mean "bad because it is not how I would allocate your resources," then maybe.

But "justice" is the application of law to achieve a fair, reasonable, and consistent outcome. If your neighbor gets fined $100 for leaving trash on the street and you do the same thing but don't get fined, that's unjust.

Enabling or subsidizing somebody else to have access to something that they do not currently have may be altruistic or philanthropic and it may even be a good idea, but it's got nothing to do with justice. "Social Justice" might have meant something once, but it's been hijacked in pursuit of so many agendas (because everybody likes Justice, right?!?) that it's about as meaningful as the names of laws, where you regularly see things like "The American Equal Opportunity And High Paying Jobs For Everyone Act" that does nothing like what the title says.

Can you cite a source for this? Typically the 'subsidies' I see reported for the fossil fuel industry are tax breaks on capital investment and heavy machinery that are available to all businesses. Not saying there aren't outright subsidies, but I am curious what exactly you are talking about and where the 72 billion number comes from.

It may "seem like" but it isn't.

You can always, ALWAYS look for another job. So what if it takes months? You don't have to quit your current job to look for another one. Nobody is "mostly" or even "a little" forced to work anywhere. You don't have a right to your job any more than the person who doesn't have a job yet has a right to your job. If you can't find a new one, that's an unfortunate combination of your skill set and experience, your location, and your willingness to work for somebody else's terms. Alternatively, you can go into business for yourself. OH IT'S SO HARD YOU NEED SO MUCH MONEY AND INVESTORS you say. BS. I did, and I didn't have any of those things.

The employment market stats do not concur with "what you see."

When labor unions manage to get themselves hundreds of millions of dollars over many years that's OK, but god forbid an employer post a job with terms you don't like.

Your grasp of history is nearly as bad as your grasp of current events. Unions certainly corrected for an imbalance of power that favored management. Particularly in the mid-19th century, things were pretty bad because there was such an oversupply of labor in the US. But a lot of that was corrected not by labor unions but by government regulations on the length of the work week and overtime.

It is drearily common for anti-business agitprop spewers such as yourself to compare the present day labor market with a totally unregulated, pre-union market, and say "LOOK HOW BAD THINGS WERE" as if the fact that industry, without any restrictions on it, behaved badly, is enough to condemn them for all time. You know what I took away from reading about robber barons and lack of any labor laws on overtime? That any group of people, sufficiently empowered and without some combination of market or legal force to oppose them, will abuse the system to their own advantage. The likelihood for this goes up as the group gets larger and less directly connected to the people they employ. Unions are absolutely no different than big corporations in this respect.

I'm ambivalent about your smug sensationalism. You sound like the kind of person who blames his own poor choices on the world, like you deserved a better go at things, and you've bought into a total BS version of everything from industrial history to the Great Depression to the Great Recession to justify your own pathetic anger.

Of course not -- but would you honestly advise a government agency trusted with secure data to perform their work that requires that data while connected to a public wifi hotspot, regardless of the encryption used?

Paying for itself means that it will generate revenue proportional to the cost of implementing and maintaining it. For any government program to do this is unusual (and this is not always a criticism -- the government is in the business of governing, and it's unreasonable to assume that every or even many sectors of governing will generate revenue).

But "helping us do our jobs" by having WiFi available everywhere is completely orthagonal to this. Will they be replacing government office networks with free, public Wifi? Of course not. Do you want YOUR SSN and government records floating around the local DMV on a public wireless network?

It's been said that big telcos and other ISPs oppose these kinds of things and that's the chief obstacle. Of course they oppose it: the government offering for free what was previously the province of the marketplace to offer is going to drive out private business, since hardly anyone can afford to compete with the government. "But no private company is offering city-wide Wifi!" you say? Could it be that hardly anyone is willing to pay for these services? Business travelers will have subscriptions to Wifi hotspots using a service like Boingo, but not enough people are going to pay to use Wifi in the park. Some will, sure. Not anywhere near enough to make it worthwhile -- and that's why ISPs don't offer it.

It's conceivable that the small city or town exists where it's cheap enough to roll out something like this and worth it to the locals to fund it such that you could have a successful municipal Wifi service. That would be the exception to the rule. You'd think a bigger city would more easily be able to do it, but bigger cities also have more free wifi spots already available, and regular broadband is generally cheaper and better in an urban area anyway.

An interesting point, but is that bad?

I prefer GSM to CDMA precisely because the rest of the world uses it. I'm not sure how that could be a factor in an anti-trust case though (not saying it couldn't, I'm just not sure how it could be).

That's nothing but speculation by the author to the effect of 'AT&T doesn't need the spectrum it says it needs!' It's also quite biased, blaming AT&T because 'overall network investment' would go down (meaning AT&T alone would invest less than AT&T and T-mobile separately) -- well, duh, that's the point of economics of scale.

He also appears to be bashing AT&T because AT&T is only speculating that it can reach 80% of the US population by the end of 2012, rather than a higher number. Wow. Only 4 out of 5 people in the entire continental US? This is supposed to be bad? So let's see if T-Mobile significantly expands its reach in the same time frame. I'll bet you five bucks that it won't, because Deutsche Telecom already indicated that it doesn't want to invest more in the US market. It's possible that they'll change their mind since they have $4 bil more with which to do it, but $4 billion isn't a huge amount when you're talking about nationwide wireless broadband coverage.

This is not some predatory takeover. AT&T isn't going to drop nearly 40 billion dollars to buy T-Mobile unless T-Mobile has something it wants. A customer base alone isn't worth that when the customer loyalty factor is so close to zero.

Maybe AT&T will fail to compete well even if it got additional spectrum. They're a big business and big businesses screw up all the time. If they do, I'll go to their competitors, just like everybody else would. But I fail to see the bugaboo that our government is protecting us from in this case. If Verizon and Sprint didn't exist, then I would.

There is an awful lot of 'thank god AT&T was denied by the FCC' and 'this is just AT&T trying to be a monopoly again' as if AT&T's purchase of T-Mobile would somehow result in a monopoly of the sort that AT&T used to have on land lines. Some then go on to say that AT&T is nothing but 'business class wankers with a huge sense of entitlement,' which sounds to me more like the wireless market than the wireless providers.

At the risk of stating the tremendously obvious, a monopoly is when one company controls the whole market. This is very obviously not the case for wireless phones. 'Well,' you might say, 'a handful of corporate juggernauts are no different than a monopoly!' Actually, they're entirely different, because you have several large corporations all competing with each other. Let's look at why we ended up in this situation:

Wireless customers:

• want to take their phones anywhere in their home country and not pay extra. Remember roaming charges? Now you worry about those internationally, but being able to take your phone anywhere in the US and pay the same rate is a huge improvement over where we were ten years ago.
• want to pay the same whether they use 1 gigabyte a month of data or a 100, even though there is only a fixed amount of spectrum available
• have little to no loyalty to their provider: they will switch over to another if they think they can get a better deal, which is not possible in a monopoly

The old Ma Bell of POTS has got nearly nothing to do with AT&T today for the very simple reason that you don't have the same issue where everybody has got to share one set of copper. This issue hasn't gone away entirely, but it's more relevant to the ISP side of AT&T, and that hasn't got anything to do with the T-mobile deal.

AT&T is having a hard time competing because they need more spectrum. T-Mobile is having such a hard time competing that they decided they'd rather just get out of the market than make the necessary investment to compete with Verizon and AT&T. Deutsche Telecom, who owns T-Mobile, decided that an outright sale to their competitor was in their best interests, so they agreed to the sale.

These posts are full of circular reasoning like 'AT&T's service is so shitty, they would just screw up T-Mobile' when the biggest impediment to AT&T improving the quality of its service is more spectrum. Or maybe, like most people, you preferred the 'smaller company' feel of T-mobile; this is natural, but the things wireless customers want (to use huge gobs of data cheaply) are not conducive to smaller companies. If there's been consolidation, it's because we've demanded it, because we feel entitled to the unlimited usage that these companies were foolish enough to offer. Maybe you think that foolishness means your entitlement is justified, but it doesn't change the reality that more usage needs more bandwidth and more bandwidth means more spectrum.

I am an AT&T customer and I fit my own description here. I have no particular loyalty to them. If I got a better deal from Verizon or Sprint I'd probably change. But I'm annoyed that they're losing billions of dollars because the FTC decided that they'd be a monopoly in a market with at least three major competitors and several other minor ones. Instead of paying to get new spectrum and increase their capacity, they're paying through the nose to get nothing. The winners: politicians (who always win in anti-trust matters because of how easy it is to hearken back to the real monopolies of 100 years ago even when the analogies are paper-thin), lawyers, and probably Deutsche Telecom for having the win-win of getting a bucket of money no matter what happened.

And to those who say AT&T was going to raise prices anyway: so what? They can't raise them on you in the middle of your contract and if your contract is up, you (like me) can walk. As a small business owner I don't care a lot for big businesses in general, but I'm sure glad I"m not in the wireless telecom business. As Louis CK says, we're the whiniest, most entitled, most self-important customers on the planet. We bitch when we get a dropped call but we certainly don't feel any gratitude when we're in a pickle and our smartphones find us a cab, a restaurant, or a map. We take it for granted. I would've preferred that my wireless provider gain access to additional spectrum. So long as I have two or three other choices, they most they can ever screw me for is one billing cycle, and they haven't done that yet -- unlike Worldcom, which did all the time back when I first got cell service.

This is nothing but FUD. Yucca Mountain has got next to nothing to do with nuclear weapons and you aren't going to get on a 'watch list' by asking about it. It's been studied and discussed and studied all over again dating back to 1978. The proposed storage facility is for spent fuel from nuclear reactors. You can't use this stuff to make nuclear weapons. That doesn't mean you want to hand it out at parties, but it's a basic radioactive storage problem first, and a security problem no more so than storing any other hazmat.

Yucca Mountain has been declared safe and a great site for exactly what the US wanted to do with it numerous times, but it suffers from a huge case of NIMBY. Nobody, state or Federal, wins votes by announcing that they've found a great spot to put all their spent nuclear reactor fuel. It doesn't matter if all the spent nuclear fuel in the country could fit in a football field and it doesn't matter if it's the best place in the entire country for it. The only thing that matters, like all political boondoggles, is whether anybody with clout is going to suspend cover-your-ass mode and actually try to solve the problem -- and Obama's answer, like most politicians, has been a resounding 'no.' This is usually followed up by some squirming and an admission to the effect of 'actually, all this stuff is fine where it is! We are so much smarter than we were in 1978. Those crazy kids back then thought we should bury this stuff in a mountain! Naaaaah.'

As someone who actually deals with this stuff every day, no, most merchants will try to avoid raising their prices if they can help it, because this isn't an across-the-board raise. What you had for a while was a completely variable transaction fee depending on the type of card used -- a regular, no-frills credit card might be 1% while a rewards card might be 3%. While there is a point at which a merchant will pass a fee increase on to a customer, it's naive to think that it's a simple cause-and-effect. Price increases are very difficult in some industries, particularly if the competition is larger (and can therefore negotiate lower rates).

As a general rule, businesses will of course try to pass increased cost of operation on to their customers, but to assume this happens in every industry or that it happens automatically would be 'retarded.' But then I work with merchants who are regular people and not evil millionaires as you (and others) seem to feel that somebody who busts their ass far beyond a 40 hour work week and doesn't have any unemployment protection -- most every small business owner -- are somehow evil vultures trying to rob you.

If credit cards were 'useless crap' then it wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar industry.

This is simply not the case (or if it is, ditch your annual fee card). The merchant pays the transaction fees on rewards cards, not the cardholder. Some banks do issue annual fee cards withe ven higher rewards, and there you have to do the math to make sure you're coming out ahead.

Many banks are now charging for bill pay as they had other revenue streams closed down by Congress.

Though in my experience it's a flat monthly charge and not a per-transaction fee. Given that they have to pay postage, it's not really surprising.

They will probably either call it something else (a 'convenience fee' for online payment) or else just exempt NYS. Or it's possible that they're not subject to it if they aren't an NY corporation, though I think they have offices in NY and so most likely wouldn't be exempt.