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Comment Re:Good for greece (Score 2) 1307

The Greeks will never accept an exit from the Euro.

If the ECB et al don't prop up the Greek banks w/more Euros, there will be a defacto exit from the Euro. The Greek government will have to take over the banks, but they can't pay depositors in Euros that the banks and government don't have, so it seems they will have little choice but to issue IOUs (for the sake of convenience, let's call these "Drachmas") on some vague hope that the Government/Banks will some day be able to convert these to Euros. However, until and if that day comes, the "Drachma" will become the primary currency that Greeks use for internal trade and a primary form of payment to pensioners and government employees. How much a "Drachma" is worth is anyone's guess, but a market will develop and currency (excuse me, IOU) traders will establish a value.

It won't be anywhere near as smooth as California's issuance of IOUs was some years back though.

Comment Re:Hmm that sounds familiar (Score 1) 123

So, no routers? How does the second ISP enter the business when the cable/fiber is already connected to the first ISP? Does the utility run 1000 cables/fiber strands in case 1000 ISPs join (and who pays for the other 999 if only one ISP joins the program or for tearing up the streets when the 1001st joins)?

Suppose, there ARE routers on a cable based system allowing multiple ISPs to share access to the same cable -- how do you deal with the case where one ISP's customers swamp the network? Who controls the the cable modems (I assume the utility would have to in order to control the shared cable resource) and, if there were no charge or caps for bandwidth, why wouldn't every ISP request the max possible speed and highest QoS config for each of their customers?

What am I missing here?

Comment Re:Hmm that sounds familiar (Score 1) 123

It seems the public utility would need to charge for the bandwidth somehow. They could charge the ISP who could decide to pass it directly to customers based on usage or to amortize it across all customers. Alternatively, the public utility could either bill the customer directly or, more likely, require that the ISP collect it from each customer based on usage as a distinct named line item. Ultimately, the number of routers and other equipment the 'public utility' part of the system needs is somewhat dependent on how much data is flowing.

If there was no such charge from the public utility to someone, ISPs would spring up with very high "fixed charges" and only charge for data that egress and ingress the public utility portion (i.e., traffic the ISP actually had to accept or route outside the ISP). CDNs, NetFlix, et al would establish mini-data centers using these plans in every public utility area freeloading and putting an enormous asymmetric load that would be hard to plan for and would hurt service for all if not planned for.

Now, these charges could be pretty small and at cost for low bandwidth users but perhaps for very high bandwidth users the cost would be much higher (because such users are the ones most likely to require accelerating upgrades of hardware). If one likes progressive taxation, just think of it as an additional tax on the 1%.

Comment Re:Prime Scalia - "Words no longer having meaning" (Score 1) 591

If presented with a question, the lower courts must address it (even the Supreme Court must as well -- but they can simply, without additional comment, deny a cert petition so, in effect, they only have to address it in the most pedantic meaning of the word).

Sometimes addressing the question may consist of granting a summary judgement which precludes a trial, but the summary judgement includes a rational (sometimes little more than a rubber stamped copy of the movants' petition) for the decision and that decision will almost always involve interpreting the law (including case law). Obviously some of these interpretations are no-brainers (as in the example I gave), but they are interpretations nonetheless.

No (we hope) courts don't "arbitrarily" (re)interpret the law, but many cases do require subtle interpretations of the law and how it should apply even to facts that are not disputed by either party.

Comment Re:what is interesting is not that it won (Score 1) 591

You should read the cert petition (a copy of which can be found here). Then you would know that out of tens of thousands of pages of legislation and regulations related to the PPACA (some that have counted assert that there are over 11,000,000 words of regulations related to the PPACA and a little less than 400,000 words in the statute), only one regulation was being questioned and that was based on just a few words in the PPACA itself. The petitioners NEVER asked in this case that the PPACA be discarded.

Since you seem not to have yet mastered simple Google searches, the question presented in the cert petition was:

QUESTION PRESENTED

        Section 36B of the Internal Revenue Code, which was enacted as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ACA”), authorizes federal tax credit subsidies for health insurance coverage that is purchased through an “Exchange established by the State under section 1311” of the ACA.

        The question presented is whether the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) may permissibly promulgate regulations to extend tax-credit subsidies to coverage purchased through Exchanges established by the federal government under section 1321 of the ACA.

Comment Re:A small part of me (Score 1) 591

Is there ANYTHING then that you think the Federal government isn't allowed to do under the Constitution (except, of course, those things they are specifically prohibited from doing in the Bill of Rights for example).

Does the Constitution allow the Federal government to force you to buy and wear an Apple Watch because the general welfare will benefit both from increasing commerce and avoiding the loss of productive time pulling out one's cell phone to check the time? What if they just tax every human in the US the exact amount of an iPhone6 and a mid-range Apple Watch every two years and then purchase and give each such human an iPhone6 and a mid-range Apple Watch every two years?

There must be SOME limit or would you be good with just getting rid of all state and local governments and bodies such as local school boards and running it all from Washington?

Comment Re:A small part of me (Score 1) 591

No, the voters forced it on them -- you know, a democracy where people elect their representatives. The voters had just spoken and the drafters of the law were about to be forced to submit to the will of the voters (by losing their super majority) so they just crammed shit in hoping to fix it later.

Comment Re:what is interesting is not that it won (Score 1) 591

No one was asking them to ignore "99% of the text" or to toss the law out. They simply were asking for a few words to be interpreted correctly

The majority failed miserably and created a precedence that many defending their overreach will regret if recent revelations about Hillary Clinton's emails sink her in the general election. The next President is likely to appoint at least one justice that replaces one of the 'left leaning' block (Ginsburg comes to mind) and the court will have a right leaning majority which may use this new found power to interpret all sorts of laws rather than showing judical deference to the legislative branch and letting them fix them.

Comment Re:Prime Scalia - "Words no longer having meaning" (Score 1) 591

You should read the majority opinion -- at which time you will discover you couldn't be more wrong.

This decision decided that the traditional Chevron analysis wasn't applicable here and and instead invoked a less well developed legal theory and therefore didn't rely on the IRS's interpretation at all. They explicitly formed their own interpretation.

When analyzing an agency’s interpretation of a statute, we often apply the two-step framework announced in Chevron, 467 U. S. 837. Under that framework, we ask whether the statute is ambiguous and, if so, whether the agency’s interpretation is reasonable. Id., at 842–843. This approach “is premised on the theory that a statute’s ambiguity constitutes an implicit delegation from Congress to the agency to fill in the statutory gaps.” FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 529 U. S. 120, 159 (2000). “In extraordinary cases, however, there may be reason to hesitate before concluding that Congress has intended such an implicit delegation.” Ibid.

This is one of those cases. [...]

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