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Nationalize the internet

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Re: Nationalize the internet

#41

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #32
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, friend. Welcome to the site. I see you're new here, so I thought I'd let you know why you're being downvoted. Your post isn't very substantive. You express your opinion, but you don't explain the thought processes behind your opinion. When combined with the snarkiness, it just wasn't a productive comment. If you haven't yet, read up on the Hacker News Guidelines[1], that may help when posting something somewha…

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

They were new. It's important to teach people these things instead of just deleting every comment that is bad. It's on all of us to maintain this site's culture, it's not just the mods' job.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Noted.

Re: Nationalize the internet

#42

Post by jayd16 »

gonational wrote: post #26
jayd16 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that why America's private healthcare system costs more than any other country and yet we do not have any where near the top outcomes? What statistics are you cherry picking to make your argument?

Government interference is precisely the cause of our high medical costs (for instance, what do you think would happen to the price of Doritos if the government required everyone to purchase one bag of Doritos every week?). Second to that is the government interference in farming (specifically, corn subsidies, which have led to an increase of corn products our food, resulting in higher inflammation levels in humans a…

Medical costs were skyrocketing before the mandate and that growth has slowed since ACA passage. Your Doritos thought experiment isn't based in reality.

Edit: because its so silly: A better parallel would be a world where everyone needed Doritos. In this world if you found yourself in a situation where you needed Doritos and didn't have it, you could check into a 7/11 and get a bag at the outrageous price of $5.00 for one of those little lunch ones. Thanks to Reagan, your Doritos needs cannot be turned down by 7/11 even if you can't pay. Everyone else has to pay for your overpriced Doritos.

Does it make sense to buy cheap Doritos insurance now instead of the high cost of Emergency Doritos?

Re: Nationalize the internet

#43

Post by jnordwick »

rayiner wrote: post #21

> Conventional wisdom has been that private industry is better equipped to handle things than the government. Deregulation has been the agenda of baby boomer conservatives. And it has failed. It has failed the environment. It has failed the airline industry. It has failed education. It will fail the internet. The biggest trend in administrative law over the last few decades has been reductions in the degree to which…

Most Americans have an outdated notion of European and Asian economies and how they have changed in the last few decades (to great success too). They still think of Europe as universally more regulatory and less economically free, but in reality many countries have had some great outcomes because they have abandoned t their old tendencies in some cases.

I would really like to read a roundup of how other countries have wired themselves up and have states model the successful policies. Some of the policies might work well for an area geographically and demographically similar to a smaller county, and I'm okay with that. There is a lot to be said for forgoing a national policy and instead allowing 50 smaller policies. Economies of Scale doesn't seem to apply to government actions as well as private actions. Instead you seem to get Grift of Scale instead.

Re: Nationalize the internet

#44

Post by grizzlylabs »

The government screws up something simple.... net neutrality... so let's give the whole darn thing to government!

The Government screws up the VA Hospitals so let's give them our entire health system!

Has there ever been a situation that the government screws up and someone doesn't gets the bright idea to double down?

Re: Nationalize the internet

#45

Post by rayiner »

astrodust wrote: post #34
ams6110 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember the monopoly ATT "ma bell" when a long distance call to friends or family was so expensive that it was reserved for emergencies or very special occasions? Maybe they weren't actively hostile in their pricing but compared to today when you can talk to anyone in the world for no cost, it's not something I'd want to return to.

Data services back then like frame relay were so slow they could barely carry a single voice conversation over them. Long distance switching involved physically connecting together circuits over vast distances, the equipment involved was fantastically expensive and extremely intricate, in many cases all mechanical. So yeah, it was stupidly expensive to make long distance calls because the equipment itself was stupidl…

Technology has helped bring down the cost, obviously. But a big part of the reason long distance was so expensive was because government regulations forced AT&T to use its long-distance service to subsidize local service: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/r....

Re: Nationalize the internet

#46

Post by dailyvijeos »

Maybe not because it’s a confederation of peers. As for ISP’s, Australia is not a good example because it’s poorly run, which it doesn’t have to be.

Instead, perhaps a GSE value-for-money internet, TV and mobile provider that’s a non-profit, customer-first, no-nonsense, doesn’t gouge people no matter their zipcode, and upfront about privacy and pricing. That way, where monopolies / oligopolies form and rural customers miss out, there is an alternative at a reasonable price. It’s like single-payer for connectivity that’s not the only game in town.

Less extreme, more practical and better run than the post office... more like a credit-union. Heck, make it partially employee- and/or customer-owned so people care.

Re: Nationalize the internet

#47

Post by legulere »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #30
aaron-lebo wrote: post #8

I genuinely struggle to understand proposals like this. The current political system is broken - the FCC is symptomatic of that. In what world does it seem like a good idea to give more power to that broken system?

People seem to make proposals to increase government power and control while thinking optimistically of how the best possible government could use that power, rather than thinking about how a much worse government could abuse that power. Even when the current government is one you like, you should always think carefully about agreeing to give them more power, and consider what happens when (not if) that government be…

The alternative is that big corporations like Facebook and Google will control the internet, which seems way worse.

Re: Nationalize the internet

#48

Post by grizzlylabs »

jayd16 wrote: post #18
wslh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments inflate agency costs ad infinitum without increasing the QoS. This is not a law but based on statistics around the major countries.

Is that why America's private healthcare system costs more than any other country and yet we do not have any where near the top outcomes? What statistics are you cherry picking to make your argument?

How do you measure outcomes? The rich in Canada come to the States.

Re: Nationalize the internet

#49

Post by orf »

gonational wrote: post #26
jayd16 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that why America's private healthcare system costs more than any other country and yet we do not have any where near the top outcomes? What statistics are you cherry picking to make your argument?

Government interference is precisely the cause of our high medical costs (for instance, what do you think would happen to the price of Doritos if the government required everyone to purchase one bag of Doritos every week?). Second to that is the government interference in farming (specifically, corn subsidies, which have led to an increase of corn products our food, resulting in higher inflammation levels in humans a…

How do you juggle that option with the fact that other countries with much more government intervention (or entirely government led, like the NHS) have much cheaper healthcare, and better outcomes.

If everyone mandated that you had to buy dorritos, it's in dorritos interests to put the price up. But if the government produced the dorritos, and the government isn't a for profit business, it's in their interests to keep the prices as low as possible, at cost.

There was this great thread I saw on /r/libertarian, where someone posted some images about the NHS. It was supposed to make 'socialised medicine' look terrible by showing an obese guy costing the NHS £200 a day for a bed while refusing to reduce their diet - "hey look with socialised medicine you are paying for this guy! How bad is that!!!"

However it backfired when all everyone was talking about was how it only cost £200 a day for a bed.

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