Hey dope. The Senator (former Senator Ted Stevens, D-AK) who said the internet was "like a series of tubes" was referring to the fact that it has a finite throughput from any point A to any point B, which means that more traffic is likely to slow any individual packet down. The only way to relieve this pressure is to replace the infrastructure with new infrastructure with a higher capacity. Stevens was right.
So you're saying that when evaluating a statement, the context is revelatory of what was actually meant? Like, for example, when a law refers to "objects"? I'm in complete agreement. Apparently some others here on
Luckily for Stripe, they're not beholden to some government definition of what they, as a corporation, decide NOT to process transactions for. Upper receiver, lower receiver, high power magnets,Shirts with sexual innuendo, Hello Kitty paraphernalia. Their terms of service, their call.
Unfortunately for that theory, payment processing companies, banks, and other similar outfits are opening their mail and seeing inquiries from government agencies about their relationship with Certain Firms. Not that it's being implied that there's anything wrong with doing business with Certain Firms, oh heavens no, they're just, you know, asking questions. And so, most of those questioned outfits decide that doing business with Certain Firms is more trouble than it's worth and drop them.If you're government and wanting to cut off the oxygen to Certain Firms with minimal fuss and expense, what nicer, cleaner way than to just kind of casually glance in their financial institutions' direction and watch them scatter?
You are not misremembering, at one point WSJ published a lot of insightful business and economic commentary, and kept politics contained in the opinion pages. Now political narrative dominates all aspects and as a result business and economic aspect suffer. I stopped reading it for this reason - profit has no ideology, moment you view data through a lens of politics is the moment you stop noticing opportunities.
I've read the WSJ daily for decades and have yet to detect a conservative editorial bias on the non-opinion pages. It's the only readable paper any more because it does actual reporting and isn't puffed up with fluff and torn-from-the-AP-feed canned drivel.
Nice strawman. It's not about "the world ending" or "higher taxes" or "world government" at all. I don't know how you people twist a bit of warming into crap like that. We're burning fossil fuels, creating carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas, and it's causing warmer temperatures. Those warmer temperatures will cause economic losses, so to cut our losses we should cut carbon dioxide emissions by generating electricity from non-fossil fuel sources.
Limiting carbon emissions carries its own severe economic impact, yet that seems to be the only one the climate change believers want considered as a solution. There have been numerous proposals that would work to cool the planet if that's what we want to do, and do it at much lower cost and without limiting carbon output. Primum non nocere.
Yeah, it's not a constructive attitude to take. But, if I'm convinced that global warming is going to wipe out the human race, then anyone who is arguing on the other side is directly contributing to the extermination of humanity, and that's not going to endear me to them. And in a broader sense regarding "liberals", tolerant people can't be expected to be tolerant of intolerance. Same with religion - if I'm convinced that anyone not worshipping God is helping the devil to destroy the world, then I'm not really going to be sympathetic to atheists or other religions. Of course to someone who disagrees with me on any of these positions, I'm just some nutjob. But if I'm right, well, what otherwise outrageous actions are acceptable in order to save the world?
That's the "He was coming right for me!" defense, in which the actual threat doesn't matter, it's how you perceive it. I have a certain amount of sympathy for that in a life-or-death situation, but not in circumstances where there's lots of time for cool reflection. Taking the animus to the extreme where people want their opponents muzzled, imprisoned, or dead, as some have, isn't going to advance things, it's going to engender a war.
And reliability, and maintenance costs, and bandwidth costs, and probably things I'm overlooking as an outsider to the jobs.
That's enough to make it a complex system with multiple solutions for local minima.
And probably most important: taxation and regulation. Those have a profound effect on the bottom line.
That was my thought. I don't even understand why the Koch brothers care. They don't have a dog in this fight. Why on earth go to the trouble of opposing net neutrality? I wonder if they walk around city parks slapping ice cream out of little kids' hands. It's not like they want the ice cream for themselves, they just don't want anybody else enjoying their treats.
The whole thing also flies in the face of the usual conservative talking points, that they're pro small business. Well, you eliminate net neutrality and new, small, innovative players who can't afford to pay for the "fast lane" suffer. There is no idealogical reason for conservatives to oppose net neutrality. It's simply a knee jerk reaction, libs are for it so we must be against it!
I don't know what conservatives think, because I'm not one, but I know that the prospect of the FCC getting its nose under the tent in regulating the internet fills me with dread. As for the Koch brothers, maybe they're thinking the same. And slapping ice cream out of toddler's hands is Michelle Obama's thing, is it not? Makes them fat.
Clearly they dont get the concept of net neutrality because I dont know a single person who is opposed to this
They exist, and I've talked to them. With a little more thought on the subject, I may become one of their number. Like Pauline Kael, you live in a rather special world: "I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know."
Isn't that their whole ideology, that the world isn't fair?
And isn't their opponents' crie de guerre,"leveling the playing field"?
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion
