Comment Re:Dick Cheney (Score 1) 216
Dick Cheney has a pacemaker...
Had. He has a transplanted heart now.
Dick Cheney has a pacemaker...
Had. He has a transplanted heart now.
It is nothing of the sort. It is the best fucking economic system yet devised by man, despite the recent abuse of it by government and corporations.
If it's subject to abuse, and it is (and has been for centuries), and because of those abuses, can drive the world economy to its knees, which was within several hours of happening in 2008, how again does it make it the best fucking economic system yet devised by man?
If I was going to put my trust in the best fucking economic system yet devised, I'd want to make sure that it could indeed negate the abuse. That's yet to occur.
The problem here is that the telecommunications tends towards natural monopolies. The costs of rolling out large area copper or fiber means the market will almost inevitably favor those who get in early.
That's like claiming parcel delivery tends towards natural monopolies because laying new asphalt is cost-prohibitive.
If you forcibly separate the infrastructure providers (road construction) from the service providers (UPS, Fedex, etc), then you have beneficial competition with very little downside.
You don't actually believe that, right? Because the post you quoted in order to throw up that strawman has absolutely no connection whatsoever. Trying to show a relationship between a utility creating an infrastructure to move its product to market, and then charging to recoup that cost and UPS or FedEx using a publicly provided infrastructure, and charging a fee to move a parcel to cover the labor and overhead (and part of that overhead is the taxes that help pay for the roads they use) in order to do that is about a disingenuous as they come. I'll leave it up to you to supply the reason why it sounded like a good argument at the time you posted.
How exactly is a group known as "government" going to be any better or fairer than a group labeled "mafia" or "cartel" etc? Why do you assume that simply because a group has a label of "the state" it is going to be any better than another example above?
Because it doesn't operate in its own interest, it operates in the interest of others.
The government you are so fond of has for the most part granted and perpetuated monopolies especially in the telco arena....
This makes me wonder if the reason why Libertarians are so convinced of the soundness of their own principles is because they live largely unencumbered by the realities of everyday life.
There is good discussion to be had on whether limiting political speech or paid for speech leading up to an election is good or bad in balance.
Indeed. And this doesn't even begin to address the role of the press, at least here in the US. In the name of competitive coverage, the idea of allowing political hucksters to influence the electorate (and I'm referring to the Karl Roves, James Carvilles, and Grover Norquists and their agents and controllers, not so much the candidates themselves) for a week before the election, and even as polls are still open across the US is incredibly irresponsible. Restricting sloppy reporting is not censorship. Enforcing higher standards of reporting and accuracy, while actually paying more than lip service towards it's implied mission of creating an informed electorate would go along way toward redeeming the abysmal job our news media has performed over the past 30-some-odd years.
So in other words, he tendered his public/private debts.
And those who traded with him rendered his tender.
Furthermore, ads perpetuate the idea that life's purpose is to work your ass of so you can consume an endless stream of useless (and sometimes actively harmful) crap. They do their part in making people waste their lives chasing after a winning lottery ticket for the benefit of the 1% at the top who run the lottery. They feed various neurosis and addictions to manipulate people into spending their hard-earned cash to try and fix imaginary problems by illogical means of buying an unrelated product.
An ad campaign is basically information warfare. People disliking them is simply their self-protection instincts at work.
...and yet we're here, at an Ad-supported site, posting away and using bandwidth which has to be paid for by some means.
While I agree that advertising can do more harm than good when it trades on someone's already fragile self-worth, there are forms of advertising which are not soul-sucking or promoting conspicuous consumption (I'd also submit that a lot of useless consumption is based on point-of-sale impulse or what your neighbors or family have bought, not what someone saw on TV). Sandwich boards and overhead business signs are advertising. And PSA's and pro-bono non-profit ads do good. So it's not all evil.
"I am, therefore I am." -- Akira