If I operated a company and was looking at moving into an area, and found out that the local government had the power to shut down companies based on some arbitrary definition of "terrible", I'd think more than twice about going there. Why should I invest in opening a new store if someone can get a bug up their ass and get the local city council to shut me down because I'm "terrible"? Even the best companies have customers who think they are terrible.

The government should not be in the business of defining "terrible" (in the context of this discussion), they should allow customers to decide. I much prefer the situation I'm in where I decided a long time ago that Dish Network was terrible and I dropped them, rather than have my city council decide to keep me from being able to choose their service should I want it.

No, dejure or defacto is quite relevant when talking about whether a government is granting a monopoly or not. Defacto monopolies exist when only one company decides to compete. Dejure means only one company is ALLOWED to compete. If the franchise in that city is exclusive, then there is a dejure monopoly granted by the government. If the franchise is non-exclusive it is defacto.

Not just that it was a monopoly but a dejure monopoly. As in:

Monopoly player 1 (Comcast) is attempting to purchase the monopoly franchise from monopoly player 2

If the franchise is not exclusive, then it is not a "monopoly franchise".

Yes, and they've already defined that a cable company called "Charter" can have access. Comcast is buying that franchise, not trying for a new one.

It is not illegal for one company to decide it will not compete with another in a certain region when the decision is a simple one based on simple economics. The name "Walmart" has come up in other places in this discussion. Walmart chooses locations to build stores based on expected return on investment. It is not illegal for them to decide not to build in an area that already has a large number of other low-price stores, it is a simple business decision based on economics.

Second, each company's decision not to compete with the other has no binding on any other company that wishes try to compete. Therefore, it is not anti-competitive. You cannot force a company to compete in a market it does not want to, so you cannot prohibit one from making the decision not to. So, you cannot force Walmart to build in your town to compete with existing markets, and it is not illegal for the other markets to exist.

What WOULD be illegal and anti-competitive would be if Comcast (or TW) decided to drop rates to below cost to drive competitors out of a market they wanted to compete in.

I'm sorry that your hatred for Comcast blinds you to simple business economics and drives you to insult those who try to educate you.

So you're saying that the evil rich 1% of the residents of the city who would "vote" for Comcast and keep the service they have would be enough to keep Comcast in the area? They'd have to buy an AWFUL lot of cable services to do that. While Comcast's prices for service are high, I don't think a 1% saturation would keep them in the black.

A very nice argument, but completely off the mark. Comcast isn't asking to build anything, they're buying the license (franchise) from Charter who has already done all of that. It will be very hard to justify not allowing the transfer based on anything you've said.

I live in a town that tried to keep Walmart out. As long as the land use laws are being applied evenly and fairly, Walmart had no grounds to sue anyone. What they wound up doing is following the land use laws and building one of their "local markets" -- small versions of the megastores.

We have yet to see the "tornado". So far, two groceries have closed. One was marginal and in direct competition with a non-Walmart large store that always had better prices anyway. The other was a chain that closed several stores because the whole chain went bankrupt. That included a store ten miles away from the closest evil Walmart that was the main grocery in that town.

Unless you know the content of the Wooster/Charter franchise agreement, you don't know the government has given them a local monopoly.

So, of course, it is better for the consumer to have NO company in their area.

No, it is not. They aren't keeping anyone else from competing, they've just made a reasonable business decision that it would not be profitable for one of them to compete with the other in an already built area, or to try building out at the same time. It's not profitable for two companies to build out the same area and wind up with only half the potential customers. Fixed costs are the same, spread over half the customers, meaning the prices go up. Your desire to be able to choose would mean that everyone would pay more for the same service, not less.

It is not bragging to state a simple fact, which arose not because of some conspiracy but because of simple business economics.

Your city council is an ass, and it is your responsibility to get them voted out if you don't like them.

So if a city council decides to issue an exclusive franchise, or to issue only one franchise, for a cable television system they are BAD BAD BAD for creating a monopoly, but if they try to keep the only cable company that wants to be in their town out they are GOOD GOOD GOOD for "having a say in what goes on within the city?" How is the former action not "having a say in what goes on within the city"?

Of course, this city council doesn't have a say, it is the city manager who decides. And he's really got very little to decide, it is a transfer of an existing contract, not the creation of a new one.

Neither company has a dejure monopoly. Comcast has already purchased the license.

No, if you RTFA you'll see that the city manager has the say and can ignore the council if he wishes.

In response, the Council voted 8-3 to urge Worcester's city manager to let the company's license request die. The deadline for the decision is Wednesday, but the manager is not bound by the vote of the Council.

TFA also says that if the license transfer request "dies", Comcast will simply appeal the decision and will almost certainly win. The city has already granted a franchise to Charter and as long as Comcast follows the franchise agreement the city has no reason to refuse the transfer. And if the city manager tries to keep Comcast from taking over from Charter, that means there will be no cable operator (and one less broadband ISP) in that city, a fact that the residents may take great umbrage at. As in, they elect the city council that caused their TV and internet to go away.

Are you saying that ISIS was a credible enough threat to cause the Iraqi army to "run away" during the 2004-2011 timeframe that the article says the weapons were found? I don't recall hearing about ISIS or ISIL or whatever until mid-2014.

Some of us already knew that Iraq had WMD because we heard the reports at the time, and we read the papers when the yellowcake that didn't exist was sold to Canada.

I've seen this story in so many places that what this Howie Katz fellow does or doesn' t know seems to be irrelevant.

The article I linked talked about $2.4 million from NIH. A second article said that the Fenway group was working with NIH but didn't list the amount. But of course, taxpayer dollars from the SBA are still taxpayer dollars.

The POINT is, which you are deliberately ignoring, that PRIVATE MONEY can just as easily fund this kind of "research", and it doesn't have to take taxpayer dollars to get companies to make these products, it only requires that there will be a market. If there is no market nobody is going to make them anyway, so throwing taxpayer dollars down the toilet to design this stuff is a waste of money. And when the grant recipient uses the money for other things, as the stories report, it is fraud as well as waste.

You are free to research ass condoms all you want. Go for it. Get Bill Gates to pay for it. It doesn't take public money to do it. Your freedom to conduct this research is not hindered by a failure of the NIH to fund it. In fact, your freedom to do research is ENHANCED when the government isn't funding it. The well-known federal ban on stem cell research is a ban on FEDERALLY FUNDED stem cell research using other than the existing lines.

And anyone else can look at that list and agree. Right-handed chimpanzees, why fat girls cannot get dates, that drunk men might coerce women into unprotected sex, that's all ridiculous research. I understand why you cherry-picked one item on the list. It's because you have a hot-button disease that you can tie it to. Anyone who objects to public funding for this kind of research must be -- gasp -- a homophobe! That's why you ignored all the other examples I gave and focused on this one.

But the fact remains, a lot of money is wasted, and even the grant you are supporting could be done just as well by funding only through private sources. And finally, the freedom to do that research is not limited.

No, they don't. They need to give reasons, but nothing says they have to be good reasons. All they have to do is get by the granting agency. When money is involved, you don't think that people can make up all kinds of "good" reasons to spend public money on something? You seem to be able to do it for the one grant you selected to defend. And nothing says that this research cannot be done without public money being thrown at it, which is the main point. Why SHOULD public money go into designing the next product a large corporation will try to sell -- and then probably fail because nobody wants it?

Your freedom to do research does not mean the taxpayer has to fund it, any more than your freedom to carry a gun means the taxpayer has to buy you one.

Isn't it amazing what you can find when you actually look at what is happening?

Here's something that Trojan could never come up with on its own, plus a bunch of other stuff. I bet it is a revelation that male fruit flies prefer hot, sexy younger female fruit flies, and who could have guessed (or really cared) that it was because old hag fruit flies don't have as much female hormones to attract them. (Headline: "Female fruit flies suffer from menopause, film at 11!") Perhaps most useful of all: most chimpanzees are right handed. The manufacturer of chimpanzee scissors is ecstatic to get that information to help his business.

The NIH is also dumping almost a quarter million dollars into industry to get them to develop more products that they could have paid for with a pittance of their current profits and will be selling for a goodly amount of money. Do you really think the taxpayer should have to pay a company to develop a product that apparently nobody wants because no company is currently producing it already?

Would you like to know why fat girls can't get dates? Was there really any question that drunk men sometimes try to coerce women into unprotected sex?

Should we mention the CDC?

Among them: spending $1.75 million over seven years on a "Hollywood liaison" whose job was to help movie and television studios develop accurate plot lines about diseases. To pay the position, the CDC tapped into an account that was supposed to be used to develop responses to bio-terrorism.

Yes, a movie being more accurate about a disease is a good way to respond to a biological agent. And God knows that the movie industry couldn't have paid for someone to help them make movies more accurate.

Defend the NIH for the right things it does, but don't let that blind you to the stupid stuff it does. And don't let it confuse you into thinking that "freedom to perform research" requires public tax dollars. If you look at this article, which I believe is talking about the same Origami product my first link is, you'll note:

Also supporting innovative condom research is the Gates Foundation's Grand Challenge Explorations grants, a commitment of $100M to encourage scientists to expand the pipeline of ideas to fight our greatest health challenges.

So the idea that private money cannot fund "freedom of research" is just ridiculous.

And studying a Peruvian brothel was the only and correct way to find out. Right. I'm sorry, but there is a difference between studying something in a reasonable way and doing it frivolously.

I used a fictional example. It's done during discussions a lot. It was meant to represent an entire class of wasted money and didn't need to be specific. Most people, I wager, got the idea. I'm sorry that it offended you.

I've written the truth all along here. You just don't agree with it. That happens. Calling someone a liar because you disagree with his opinions is rather trite. Or perhaps you disagree that studying why paperclips link up in the box would be a waste of money? Is that it?

Well, we can disagree about that. I'd say that "before the fact", studying a large player in the ocean environment is a good idea. YMMV.

And to do that they have to spend US dollars studying brothels in Peru. Right. You're stretching things quite a distance here. Peruvian brothels are such a considerable source of the AIDS epidemic, right?

No, you're right, I didn't have to make things up, I just had to wait for you to provide examples for me.

That is hardly an excuse to waste limited resources on useless or trivial research. No matter how much the spenders want to pretend, tax revenue will always be a limited resource and wasting it will always be bad.

But that's not the point I replied to. What I was pointing out is that "freedom to do research" doesn't depend on the taxpayer funding that research. You didn't respond to that, so I assume you agree.