What part of beneficial for both of us don't you understand? Both parties will be able to eat more total food. The less productive group will still be eating less, but more than if they didn't trade at all.

There is no situation in which it's bad to permit people to trade. Again, mathematical theorem.

So let me get this straight, in 1776 the Founding Fathers got together to protest the mass poverty and bad British tea, and started NASA so we could lob said tea into space. It eventually made us so rich we became the best developed country on the Earth and now we're exploring how to cultivate tea and coffee on Mars.

Uh huh. If it were that easy to create developed nations, we'd be going into third world countries handing out space programs, not rice (and all the less lovely stuff our foreign aid props up)

Science is a process, the process of coming up with a hypothesis and experimentally testing it in controlled conditions.

Saying we should take less money from people doesn't make you an "enemy of science." If anything, it makes you a champion of the dismal science (you know, economics).

Um, what do think you're doing when you download a torrent?

What do you think you're doing when you request a webpage?

How in the world does comparative advantage not exist in a place like Brazil? To say there's no comparative advantage is so statistically improbable you may as well get hit by an asteroid. A million times.

You know what comparative advantage is, right? If it takes me $5 to produce an apple and $4 to produce an orange, and it takes you $2 to produce an apple and $1 to produce an orange; that's comparative advantage: Even though you produce both fruits by far and away cheaper than I do, you produce oranges at an opportunity cost 2x cheaper, and so Economics says we will trade, and it will be beneficial for both of us to do so.

You're not supposed to produce everything as cheap as your neighbors, it's actually bad thing to do that. Even if your neighbor produces literally everything below the cost of domestic production, so long as the two entities have different opportunity costs for different goods, it's still more beneficial to outsource stuff and trade. Economists call this comparative advantage and it's a mathematical theorem.

FCC loves coming up with (and misimplementing) excuses to exercise authority, news at 11.

If someone says they're going to deliver a package and they're not, that's fraud.

If you pay for a certain level of service and your ISP doesn't deliver, that's also fraud.

No public policy, no Net Neutrality necessary.

Can anyone name ONE Net Neutrality issue ever that this would have prevented?

The big one everyone seems to point to was the Cogent/Netflix/Verizon issue, which was not "last mile", and so wouldn't have been solved by this bill (assuming the bill can actually do everything it says it can). That issue wasn't even a Net Neutrality issue, it was a peering dispute over a pipe that just happened to be a heavy carrier of Netflix traffic.

This seems entirely populist, why would they wait until now, after Republicans took control of congress, to bring it up? This is just like the Republican's repeated ACA/Obamacare bills, yes, it's dealing with something bad, but the bill isn't going anywhere, and it wouldn't even be a bill if they were in power. It's grandstanding.

Also, the bill seems to grant the FCC powers over commerce. Um, yikes. Who here wants the FCC examining your purchases and checking your router table configuration over it?

I don't even know where to start on how dangerous this is. This is populism straight up, tyranny of the majority, screw any minority/individual's rights.

When any group of people can hold a vote and force someone out of their house - or take away their property or life - that's plain wrong.

No, Net neutrality is a routing policy about how to prioritize packets that people can choose to implement.

Using the government to mandate it upon everyone, under threat of legal action, whether it's a good solution or not, is an entirely different issue.

Mod parent up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

After 2001-09-11 when the entire aircraft fleet was grounded, we saw a rise in sunlight (and temperatures).

This might be the first time I've ever heard anyone suggest that no lines at a government facility are a bad thing.

The Internet is a proper noun.

They have a network of some sort; it is effectively not the Internet.

You can't say "We provide Internet access!" and then deny access to a range of TCP/UDP port numbers. You might be able to say "Web connectivity!" (and I have no problem with this), but not Internet.