The idea is that you provide meta-data along the way (I know this person through school, this person is a good friend, etc).

"I personally think this is bad news bears all around. The infrastructure is already spread thin - at least judging by my internet speeds and costs. Last thing we need is a flux of new subscribers that are low-income (read: jobless or underemployed) who have all the time in the world to suck up my precious bandwidth."

Comcast is a monopoly in most places, and monopolies tend to purposely restrict supply in order to justify raising prices. A giant influx of customers that would force it to pile money onto building more infrastructure would be a good thing.

http://www.cringely.com/2011/07/bandwidth-caps-are-rate-hikes/ is a good article with numbers that shows how Telcos are purposely raising prices and restricting access even as their own costs go way down.

"Let's not argue about giving everyone a car based on cost, because it's pathetic when compared to things that already exist. The right to a home, the right to a job, the right to medical care and the right to a family ... those are the ones that are expensive.

And you know what ? We're simply not able to pay for them. Seriously, if you raised taxes to 100%, and *somehow* this didn't affect the economy, we wouldn't be able to pay for what we currently have. So it's going to disappear"

Numerically, that isn't true. In the Netherlands for example, everyone has access to cheap and high quality medical care, generous family support and free pre-school, access to massive job-retraining programs that have kept unemployment below 4% even in recessions, as well as access to generous crime-free public housing projects. And they do it all with efficient government and slightly higher taxes, while maintaining a smaller debt burden as a percent of GDP and faster GDP growth over the last 20 years. More on topic, they also have faster and cheaper internet!

Conservatives spend so much time fighting the ghosts of hippies from the 70's that they fail look around and realize that other countries have largely solved the public policy problems facing this country and have done so in ways that made their countries stronger. But unfortunately, a lot of the political establishment is more interested in acting tough and serious than they are in actually solving problems.

"True freedom of speech really doesn't exist anywhere in the world today"

You can use whatever words you want, but the point of public policy is to broadly improve living standards for society at large. There could be some disagreement as to the proper degree of reliance on market forces to get there, but I don't have any patience for anti-social douchebags who claim that the material welfare of the population at large isn't as important as preserving their warped definition of liberty.

A conservative is somebody who stays up at night because somewhere, some poor person might be getting something they don't deserve.

Eh. Every country that has better broadband than us does it via extensive government intervention. Our internet is more expensive and slower, by a considerable margin, than most other countries in the OECD, even when you just look at dense cities. The best internet in the country is in Utah, where government has just rolled out their own fiber. Markets are great, but they don't really work with utilities. Monopolies, network externalities, economies of scale, etc.

" If internet access is a right, food is a right, a car is a right, a home is a right, a job is a right and so on."

The horrors!

Seriously, rights don't exist in and of themselves. They're just things that society has decided are important and should exist for everyone. In the revolutionary era, freedom of speech was all that we could afford to give to everyone. But as society has gotten richer, they've decided to expand the universe of things that everyone is supposed to have (FDR's "freedom from want", to give an example). This is a good thing! Now, it's possible that this particular way of trying to improve the living standards of the poor is going to have unintended consequences, but that's the argument you need to make.

That aside, Comcast is a monopoly in most of it's markets, and the capital costs are too high for that to realistically change. Regulators are necessary to keep them from purposely restricting investment and access and reaping monopoly profits.

Cite?

Speaking as a Bayesian, I don't see how that really solves anything.

Just to be clear, that's pronounced "Amer-i-ka Kras-i-v-ya". The p and B make rrr and v sounds, which the backwards R and N make "Ya" and "ii" sounds. "The backwards N is often written as a u but makes an 'iii' sound" always tortured me in Russian class...

You'll get well-balanced candidates if the system encourages it. Jungle primaries will do it.

Even with perfect turn-out, it still screws over the median voter. Let's naively assume that political views are naively evenly distributed along some ideology score from -1 to 1, with Democrats being those below zero and Republicans being above zero.

In a primary system with full turnout, you'd expect the winners to reflect the median Democrat and median Republican, with ideology scores of -.5 and .5. The Median voter would prefer someone with an ideology score of zero.

There was a good discussion on this at Yglesias's blog. To quote "adamnvillani". http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/12/third-parties/#comment-112436835 .

"If I were to only vote for candidates that I agreed with 100%, then in every election I would have to write in my own name. Every time you vote for a person, you're exhibiting at least a certain amount of strategic behavior.

I disagree with your statement beyond that, though. Democracy is not every person or every small interest group splintering into the People's Front of Judea vs. the Judean People's Front and then complaining about the system when they don't cross the same vote threshold that a combined PFJ/JPF party would have garnered.

Real democracy acknowledges that we're a pluralistic society with a broad range of views, and that for the government to do anything worthwhile, people who hold opposing views on certain issues are going to have to work together. If you have a minority viewpoint that you want to advance, you do so by convincingly arguing your natural allies of the worthiness of your position and working with them, not by alienating them and poisoning the well by helping to get worse alternatives (like Bush) elected."

Yes there is. There are three types of polls you'll in the United States: LV (Likely Voter), RV (Registered Voters), and A (Eligible Adults). And it makes a really big difference. Take a look at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/06/jobapproval-obama_n_726319.html.

The latest poll, a poll of Likely Voters, has Obama at 46-53 approve disapprove. Another poll, a poll of eligible Adults, shows Obama at 47-46 approve disapprove. That's a 7 point difference in disapproval!

The gap between LV and RV polls is known in polling circles as the "enthusiasm gap", and it tends to be a lot higher in mid-terms then presidential elections. The gap has consistently favored Republicans for the last 30 years, mainly because Rich people are much more likely to turn out then poor people.

There's a supreme court ruling that the districts need to be contiguous. Still, why do it randomly? We could do it by income! http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/05/AR2010020501446.html