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Comment Re: Invisible hand (Score 4, Insightful) 536

Another problem are price controls.

Often the local franchise authority (set up by the city or state or county) sets prices for services.

If the price is set too low, then the cable company can't legally charge enough to pay for the infrastructure to reach certain customers, even if those customers are willing to pay more to get service.

Comment Re:OK, but... (Score 1) 89

Fortunately, for that purpose, we have Pol Pot, Staline, Mao, Leopold II of Belgium, Ismail Enver, Kim Il Sung and few others. It is about time racism cease, Germans are not the only one who have perform massive killings in the 20th century.

Introducing other names doesn't help much IMO because it ignores the source of their power: great numbers of people looking for some kind of messiah to step in and solve all their problems -- the 'total' in 'totalitarianism' as Hitchens pointed out.

Hitler with his silly hair cut and ridiculous mustache would have died in obscurity if there hadn't been millions of followers willing to give up their individuality and put their faith in a national savior.

Comment Re:Regulations are all bad in the long term (Score 2, Informative) 347

Yes, the 1935 law absolutely blocked innovative package delivery services such as UPS and FedEx from even getting start..... Er, wait a minute!

Actually regulation did hold back FedEx. You're just looking at the wrong law. You need to reference instead the Civil Aeronautics Authority Act of 1938 that created the Civil Aeronautics Board.

The board was essentially dissolved after the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978.

After deregulation, express air services spread across the country.

Comment Re:We neeed COMMUNISM now (Score 1, Troll) 54

I blame a democracy that believes politicians should be responsible for the economy.

Politicians don't care if kids' teeth fall out as long as they can go on about how many sugar jobs they created to get re-elected.

And the first Iraq war might not have happened if the public didn't expect Bush Sr to do something about a recession created by Saddam's invasion of Kuwait.

We actually killed people in an effort to reduce the unemployment rate and stabilize oil markets, all because the public thought the president was responsible for the recession and was responsible for fixing it.

Comment Re:Search Neutrality? (Score 1) 375

He doesn't mean that there's a barrier to entering the search engine business. He means Google itself, having so much power, is a gate-keeper, deciding through their search results what sites deserve to be found quickly by average users and which sites do not.

Google does discriminate. It must. There's only a finite amount of screen space on a user's device or display so a decision must be made to prioritize certain sites over others.

Some site even pay for that prioritization.

Comment Re:Authority (Score 1) 234

The legal theory is the delegation of powers. Congress delegated the power to write legislation within a certain scope, breadth, and depth, to the executive branch of government, authorizing it to set up an agency to manage same.

The question, though, is does that delegation extend beyond the term of the current congress?

It seems it would be unconstitutional to legislate away the law making power of future congresses.

Comment Re:$28 million is a lot! (Score 1, Interesting) 204

You're missing a few things:

First, spending this borrowed money might employ a few people in town, but it also means less money is available to employ other people in the town (demand is reduced for some jobs while increased for others).

Second, the article shows that operating costs are over $11 million per year and that revenues aren't enough to cover those costs.

That puts revenues at nearly $170/month/subscriber and still money must be taken from the general fund to help pay for the system.

Comment Re:Not surprising.-- Universal Service Fee (Score 1, Flamebait) 94

If this was a Libertarian Paradise, you probably would pay $500 dollars a month for landline service while someone in a densely populated urban area would pay $5 a month.

Why would that be so bad?

People that want rural living should pay for rural living and should not force urbanites to subsidize their quiet, peaceful life on the farm away from the noise of the city.

The US government has spent the past 50+ years using subsidies and regulations encourage people to get out of the cities.

What has it accomplished except to gut cities and spread asphalt everywhere?

Comment Re:Discussion is outdated (Score 3, Interesting) 492

I have to agree, but it's too bad in some ways, IMO.

I used to get so much joy programming the metal or tinkering with the assembly that came out of the compiler.

Doing that is still possible, but it doesn't pay the bills.

The dream of abstraction is a bit of a nightmare for those that like to get into the guts of the machine.

GPU programming is another example, though Mantle allows the programmer to get a bit closer to the hardware.

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