181–190 of 329 posts
The whole net neutrality saga just exposed the deep regulatory capture between ISPs and the FCC (the Republican Commissioners at least). Pai's argument for repealing net neutrality was that it wasn't a Federal government concern. That was originally what prompted California to institute these rules. But suddenly it wasn't a state issue either. Weird . The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world…
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IME politics is based around clusters of concrete conclusions like "abortion should be legal". All arguments and abstract principles (like "states rights") are deployed and discarded opportunistically in the service of the fixed conclusions.
I wish people were more honest about it, but is it even bad to care more about political outcomes than arbitrary details about the structure of the government? Like is there any reason that normal people should have a first principles opinion on the exact distribution of responsibilities between two levels of government?
Of course it's not bad. What's bad is degrading the role of truth in political debates by selectively invoking states rights or federal rule as sacred principles, only to be abandoned or reaffirmed depending on the needs of any given debate.
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This has been my experience as well along both sides of the axis. If you're not "Lets Go Brandon" or whatever the equivalent is on the left, you usually are reasonable and have valid opinions. Even more so, we usually share the same ideals just have different ways of getting there. There isn't huge division out there. Just two camps of dicks with most of us in the middle.
Quoted post unavailable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IME politics is based around clusters of concrete conclusions like "abortion should be legal". All arguments and abstract principles (like "states rights") are deployed and discarded opportunistically in the service of the fixed conclusions.
I wish people were more honest about it, but is it even bad to care more about political outcomes than arbitrary details about the structure of the government? Like is there any reason that normal people should have a first principles opinion on the exact distribution of responsibilities between two levels of government?
Concretely, I prefer power to be decentralized to the most local and smallest group of people that is feasible. (Feasible is doing a lot of work in that sentence; I acknowledge.) In the limit, the smallest group of people is a single individual.
Even if a more powerful federal government would be likely to decide “my way” on Friday April 22, 2022’s three most important topics to me, I’d still want that decision to be as local as possible because, over the course of my life and my children’s lives, I think we get better decisions and outcomes from more local decisions where the people affected know the people discussing and deciding.
The whole net neutrality saga just exposed the deep regulatory capture between ISPs and the FCC (the Republican Commissioners at least). Pai's argument for repealing net neutrality was that it wasn't a Federal government concern. That was originally what prompted California to institute these rules. But suddenly it wasn't a state issue either. Weird . The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world…
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't support this, but I can try to steel man this position. Largely it comes with the idea that use = cost, and that infrastructure has limited capacity and is therefore zeroish sum. For example, a common idea is that we should tax trucks more than other cars because they cause a large amount of damage to our roads. Following that logic, the companies that encourage users to consume more bandwidth should be charg…
The road-tax is neutral, it doesn't matter what goods you transport. Imagine charging the producers of the most transported goods to pay a fee in addition to the road-tax and otherwise blocking their goods being transported for the rest of the month. Net neutrality asks the internet to work how road taxes work. You pay for a certain bandwidth (a truck) and you can transport whatever goods you want with that. It doesn…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't support this, but I can try to steel man this position. Largely it comes with the idea that use = cost, and that infrastructure has limited capacity and is therefore zeroish sum. For example, a common idea is that we should tax trucks more than other cars because they cause a large amount of damage to our roads. Following that logic, the companies that encourage users to consume more bandwidth should be charg…
The solution for that is already in place – charge for bandwidth. If users pay $30 for 100 Mpbs or $60 for 500 Mpbs etc., and on top of it there are caps on total data consumed, where does the idea of further segmenting and prioritizing traffic even come from?
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I'm not American, but I ran into this issue while discussing with some people living in the US (foreigners no less) and it's crazy how much they bought into the ISP propaganda. They're not stupid people, but they got convinced that they can't check their email because their neighbour is on Netflix and this is all Netflix's fault. When you hear the same argument repeated in the same way, it's always an indicator that…
"Brainwashing has caused people to believe in network congestion caused by high bandwidth usage."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has been my experience as well along both sides of the axis. If you're not "Lets Go Brandon" or whatever the equivalent is on the left, you usually are reasonable and have valid opinions. Even more so, we usually share the same ideals just have different ways of getting there. There isn't huge division out there. Just two camps of dicks with most of us in the middle.
Quoted post unavailable.