'Workfare' or make-work has its own issues too. It's a direct intervention into the labor market, and it's going to have a distinct impact on wages, though the exact impact will depend on the details thereof.

Part of this all comes back to the Calvinist views on work and morality - aka the "Protestant Work Ethic". If you're not hard working and industrious, you're a lazy shiftless no-gooder, and you deserve all the bad things that happen to you, and you're not one of those who has been chosen to be saved by God. We got rid of that last part, but we've incorporated the rest. And it's served our society very well for the most part. I think we're approaching the point where it's outlived its usefulness though, in the face of declining fertility rates, increasing efficiency, and ever expanding automation. Two hundred years ago, you could expect to earn a living simply by dint of being an able-bodied adult male, no education required. Those days are long since passed.

Eventually, the solution is going to be something like a guaranteed/minimum basic income, which would take the place of all the existing poverty and social programs. Everyone would get it (no income limits), and you could use it however you like. Want more money? Work on top of that. You could even eliminate the minimum wage, since no one would be 'forced' to work. We're not where we'd need to be yet in order to really make that work, but at some point, that's probably the best solution once labor enters a post-scarcity state due to the advance and prevalence of automation.

How many of those CEOs actually started the company, and put in that risk? A CEO is by no means the originator or owner of the company, after all. How many just came along after, and were hired to run things, only to make ridiculous amounts of money even if they wrecked the company in the process? That's what's ridiculous.

For every Steve Jobs, there's a lot more John Scullys. Carly Fiorina was certainly no Bill Hewlett or Dave Packard.

It's because most people today tend to grossly misunderstand what socialism is, and what "market capitalism" is.

An actual "Socialist" would want to do something like nationalize all the major telecom companies.

Market Capitalism, on the other hand, relies on the Government acting as arbiter and enforcer of basic rules of fair competition, because that is a core requirement. When Adam Smith was alive, Socialism hadn't even been thought up yet. Instead, you had the government (generally run by a Monarch/Nobility) granting exclusive privileges or outright monopolies to certain individuals or corporations, like giving the East India Company a monopoly on the import of tea.

Sound familiar?

This is what we're having the argument over, here - whether or not the government will act to encourage competition and curb monopoly abuses, or whether it will let the status quo of monopolistic preferences and abuse continue. Nobody's even remotely talking about nationalization.

Yes - and agricultural considerations are also a big deal for Japan. I'd be curious to know what they asked for in exchange for this.

Correct. He's not talking about applying these rules only to Mobile Broadband, he's differentiating this proposal from some of the FCC's earlier proposals, which would have exempted mobile internet, and only applied to landline service.

IBM used to stand for International Business Machines. Now it apparently stands for "It's Been MBA'd."

I know that if and when I move next, one of my primary considerations will be "What kind of internet access is available here, and who is the provider". When I last did in 2008, that was a major consideration in buying in the current town (Cox/Fios both available) as opposed to the next county (Comcast only).

I think we can reasonably agree that the government, as a proxy for society as a whole (which is what government is, and why it is important that government be representative of the people), ought to have some say in how you raise and treat your children. For instance, you can't abuse your children, starve them to death, or refuse to educate them. That question was settled a long time ago. What's changing is the definition and degree of what constitutes that, and that's the conversation we should be having - like whether allowing your children outside unsupervised constitutes abuse or neglect (it should not).

Because not everyone can get vaccinated, for health reasons. For instance, a child that is too young to receive the vaccine can still contract, and die from, a disease like measles. Others have weakened immune systems, or medical allergies, that may make it difficult to immunize them. These people rely on herd immunity, where enough other people are immunized that the disease can't gain a foothold and spread. If one child in a classroom isn't vaccinated, they're not going to catch it from their classmates, but when 5 or even ten children in a classroom aren't vaccinated, the risk increases dramatically.

It's called inflation. It's why if my pay remains constant, year after year, I'm making less money, because that money won't buy as many things. If it cost $1 million to buy a drone last year, and the government spent $100 million on drones, they bought 100 drones last year. If they spend the same amount next year, when the price of drones goes up to 1.1 million each, they're only buying 90 drones. Now, maybe you think that we shouldn't buy that many drones, or any drones at all, but that's another argument.

For one thing, Comcast/ATT/etc can no longer claim that crappy DSL is a viable alternative, so in many areas, they are now officially a broadband monopoly. We've always known that they were, but they've maintained the fiction under the old rules. No more. This could have impacts on both mergers like the proposed Comcast/TWC one, as well as on the hopefully impending reclassification of ISPs under Title II of the Communications Act.

Pushing for state/local regulation blocking Google Fiber/etc? They're doing that anyway. Title II/Common carrier won't make them more likely to do it. If anything, Title II/Common Carrier would help protect Google and any other would-be competitors from *exactly* those sorts of shenanigans, by requiring things like equal access to rights of way and utility poles, as Google themselves noted in their comments to the FCC. No, the existing incumbents have no incentive to compete, any more than they did before, right up until the point where someone new comes into the neighborhood. Funny how quickly the incumbents in Austin started offering vastly better options once Google started building out. A lot of it really will depend on the details. Title II contains a lot of stuff, and the FCC doesn't have to implement all of it for internet service. A lot of it would probably help, and some of it might cause more problems than it solves. Hopefully the FCC does it intelligently.

I have a 25mb download here, but I have to pay for a business-class account at something like $110 per month. On the upside, I do get better service and other benefits, since I do actually use it to run a server, but I'd certainly be much happier if it were better/cheaper. For that kind of price today, in a major metropolitan area, I would expect at least 100-300mb down if not more.

Randall Munroe did, for one. Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/504/

Possibly the better analogy would be if you had a safe in the closet in your house. They have a warrant to search the house, and that warrant covers the safe (or they get a specific warrant to search the safe). The question then becomes whether they can compel you to open the container, or provide the passcode. With a safe, though, they can always threaten to physically break it (no safe is completely secure, they're rated by how long it takes to break them). With robust encryption, that's generally not plausible (or even possible). Furthermore, what happens if you produce the wrong password - either deliberately or because you forgot? What if the data locks/erases/irretrievably scrambles when the wrong code is put in? At worst, they can hold you in jail for Contempt of Court, dependent on the judge. I suppose a lot of it comes down to how good of a job you (and your lawyer) can do of convincing a judge that you really did forget, or get it wrong, rather than did it deliberately. I know I can barely remember my home router's password, or any number of other ones. Hopefully I'm never in that situation.