I still don't see the point. Provider A made the investment, and has to charge provider B enough to still be profitable. But they have to charge end-customers even more, because otherwise provider B would not have a sustainable business. So in other words, you've artificially increased the cost to the end-customer, just for the sake of giving provider B a job mimicking provider A.

In your second scenario, where provider A is fully prohibited from selling to the end-customer, how is the network situation any better than now? Provider A still has captive customers... instead of me and you, the captive customers are providers B, C, D, and E. What incentive does provider A have to upgrade their network? I don't see how it's any better than now.

And in this situation you're still imposing an artificially high cost on the consumer. What value-add does provider B give the end-consumer? If it's actually *worth* the extra charge, then there's no need to prohibit A from dealing with end-consumers, because presumably they'd choose B anyway. And if it's not worth it, then you're forcing the end-consumer to pay extra for a service that isn't worth it.

The only real competition is when multiple companies have multiple lines going to your house, and you can totally switch your business between them. For things like water, sewer, and maybe electricity, the costs are so high that it can't realistically happen. But for internet, look, we already have coax cable and copper phone. Why not add another fiber? The costs obviously aren't that high for running a little cable -- as Google showed in their deployments. So let them compete from the very ground up.

It's not a non-sequitor, that's when the conclusion does not logically follow from the premise. What I did was apply your logic to another situation. Unless you can articulate a reason why the wedding band doesn't make a difference, but race does, then it's fair to assume the logic must be the same in the two situations.

My phone (Nexus 5) isn't rooted and I can record calls. Different apps work on different phones apparently. I'm using "Call Recorder" right now.

Why did you switch from "breasts" to "breastfeed"?

The breasts are fundamental to sexual reproduction because they play a part in sexual attraction, which leads to sex, which leads to babies.

Breastfeeding is not.

No, he said that he couldn't whether the 7% difference was significant, not that there was no significance to his findings. He said "What it does show, even with such a small sample, is that in the underlying population there's almost certainly no huge gap between people's opinions of black women vs. white women breastfeeding in photos."

He's right about that.. if there was a huge gap between opinions on black vs white breastfeeding, then even with that sample size there would be a clear difference.

It seems like you (and other posters here) have a double standard about the conclusions here. You are accepting the conclusion from the original article saying that there IS a statistically significant difference in opinions, even though they presented no evidence of it. You accept is so thoroughly that you're ready to toss the "white male privilege" card. Why is that?

There is a difference, one is wearing a ring and one isn't. People are judging the picture as a whole and there are lots of factors that go into that judgment besides whether the person approves of breastfeeding in general.

If it makes no difference to alter factors like marital status between the two pictures, then it must also make no difference to consider factors like race, so you must think the whole issue under discussion is nonsensical.

You want to make it so that if Google goes to a new city and builds an awesome new fiber network, that AT&T gets to least that network from them? Why should AT&T upgrade anything if they can just wait for Google? But why would Google upgrade anything if they're doing all the investment and then AT&T gets equal benefit?

Yes, the dot com crash and 9/11 happened. I don't blame Democrats for that. Do you blame Republicans?

There's no doubt that most of the increased deficit under Obama was due to economic factors beyond his control. At the same time, the recovery was also beyond his control. Much of it was IN SPITE of Obama's policies. Did you see the widely covered "letter to the editor" from a Canadian who is confused about why we voted in so many Republicans even though under Obama we have all these great things? It's all over Facebook and the news. Here: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blog...

It's hilarious. Everything the guy talks about is stuff Obama has fought AGAINST. Record corporate profits... Democrats feel pain and start crying when corporations make record profits. Remember all the "windfall tax" crap? And "clawing back" bank bonuses, etc? Oil production... Democrats are against offshore drilling, fracking, shale oil, exploration in Alaska and the arctic, Keystone XL (oh, and putting tighter regulations on trains carrying oil, which is only being done because there's no pipeline..), all the talk of killing subsidies for oil and gas, etc.

I mean it's really a joke how Democrats like to give Obama credit for things he had nothing to do with or actively fought against. I don't get it. I wouldn't do that for a Republican because I have at least a smidgen of intellectual honesty.

Right, right, because the man taking his wife's last name is soooo common in black culture, Hispanic culture, and Asian culture. Must be because of whitey! idiot

If you read the article about the poll question, it was designed to measure racism. So of course the questions are probing racist sentiments. It's not racist to find out if someone is racist, that doesn't make sense.

Also, I didn't bring up affirmative action in response to the article. I responded to your comment about "how dare someone question whether racism exists" -- that's much more general than the article, where racism against black IT pros is the subject.

I think what I said could apply to any country, not just the US. But regardless, I agree with your main point that small businesses are hurt by this. I think corporate taxes should be abolished completely. Charge taxes to the people who make up the corporation. That can be income tax, sales tax, capital gains tax, etc. Each country does it however they want. If you live in America, you pay taxes in America regardless of where you earned the money. If you buy something in China, you pay Chinese sales tax regardless of where you live.

It simplifies stuff a lot, and that's effectively what happens anyway. Only people pay taxes, corporations just pass them on.

I was assuming there would be massive deflation in the parts of the economy that have been hyper-optimized. Kind of like what has happened with computers in the last 30 years... a $300 computer that outperforms a 1980s supercomputer, etc.

Essentially all of our costs for necessities today comes down to human labor. There is no real cost to uranium if it were mined and refined by self-replicating, self-repairing robots -- you don't pay robots. There is no real cost to building a nuclear power plant. There is no real cost, therefore, to electricity. Except that people are involved. If no people were involved and it just happened magically in the background, electricity would be completely free.

When labor becomes worthless, what that means is that everything we have today that is a product of human labor is essentially free, or close to free.

But there are some things that can't be replaced, because as humans we innately value other humans. If I'm at a bar, I would rather hear the original band instead of a cover band (there are exceptions). But I would rather hear a cover band than a CD of the original band.

That's the backbone of the service economy I'm talking about in your vision of the future. When human labor is worthless, that means we don't have to waste our time working on stuff we don't like doing -- because that stuff is worthless.

I'm proposing that there will never be a time when a person, any person, is completely without value just because their labor is worthless when it comes to producing physical goods. There are some really broad services, like sex and beauty and companionship, that ensure that as long as we have tokens that represent value, you'll be able to earn them in some way if you want, and you'll have things to spend them on if you want. Even begging provides value.

In this society, money still serves a purpose. We'd still use it to let people know who the winners and losers are. The winners can spend their money on other winners... if I have lots of money, I'll hire the most beautiful dancers to entertain me at my free dinner in my free house. If I'm poor, then I eat with my poor friends at my free dinner in my free house.

Yes, because affirmative action is an overtly racist government program. You're linking to a bunch of individual racist incidents, like a political exit poll that asks questions that offended some people. Considering that the poll was designed to *measure racism*, it's kind of stupid to even count that as being racist in and of itself, don't you think?

What??

Are you being deliberately dense? I actually feel sorry for you because I think you have a problem.

To Christians, what Jesus said matters more than what the Old Testament said. That's what we're talking about, remember?

Pre-Jesus, many sins had physical, temporal punishments prescribed for them. So if you did X, you got Y. Example: if you commit adultery, you get stoned.

Post-Jesus, it's "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Jesus changed it up so that punishments for sins are meted out by God himself, after you die. So yeah, basically there's no punishment. And yeah, in post-Jesus times, Christians believe you can live a life of 100% sin and be completely evil, and then at the last minute you truly repent and ask forgiveness, and you are actually forgiven by God and nothing bad happens to you! As long as the repentance and stuff is real... but don't worry, only God knows if it's real. It doesn't matter if other people believe you or not.

This stuff is really basic. You clearly know jack squat about Christianity, or you have an actual mental problem like I said above.

How do you not know this stuff? Do you not live in a Western culture?

You're making the classic mistake (perhaps deliberate) of attributing the budget solely to the president. Sure, Obama has brought down the deficit.. but the only reason we had a sequester and a slowing of government spending was Republican obstruction in the House.

Look at Obama's accomplishments from when Democrats controlled the House and Senate.. Obamacare, huge expansion of Medicaid, massive increases in food stamps (by removing eligibility requirements like having children). We saw a tremendous increase in the national debt from those years.

Republicans spend money for war, but wars end and the money stops flowing. They also like tax cuts, which "cost" more long term, but at least a huge part of the population gets something tangible for it... and let's be honest, it's easy for Democrats to raise taxes again when they regain control, or just let the cuts expire.

Social programs like Medicaid don't end, or even shrink, without intervention. And it's politically difficult to cut them because due to their nature, lots of people become dependent on them once they're in place. Even with Republicans controlling Congress, we're not going to see big changes in social programs.