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Donald Trump could dismantle net neutrality

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Donald Trump could dismantle net neutrality

#191

Post by CalChris »

bmelton wrote: post #166
CalChris wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice try, but regulation in the context of mstodd's post ( regulation takes away freedom ) is: the action or process of regulating or being regulated It's a gerund of regulate . Your misreading would allow that regulation(s) take away freedom but laws and Constitutional Amendments don't. And that's just gibberish.

To put a more fine point on it, generally speaking, an action that is subject to an adversarial system, is debated upon in plain view, is subject to pressure by consistuents, and is voted upon by the body populace, especially where the bar is as high as a constitutional amendment, tends to be less restrictive than a rule imposed by a regulatory agency that carries the effective force of law. Naturally, there are exce…

Nah bro, I was just saying that Regulation takes away freedom is simplistic libertarian drivel because it kinda just like is.

Re: Donald Trump could dismantle net neutrality

#192

Post by crdoconnor »

hristov wrote: post #164
crdoconnor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/53260835850816716... "Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media."

He tweeted that four days after the election. Again, I was correct to say that removing net neutrality was not part of his election platform.

"He never said he was against net neutrality" is what you said.

Re: Donald Trump could dismantle net neutrality

#193

Post by sgnelson »

nerfhammer wrote: post #183
phailhaus wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger problem is that the EC is a winner-takes-all system. If California has 55 EV's, and Candidate A wins by 1%, why do they get all 55 votes? Nearly half the state voted for Candidate B! I have found that the debate on the EC has been over a false dichotomy: either have the EC, or have a popular vote. What about distributing electoral votes based on percentage?

A state can choose to allow this on its own. A couple do: Nebraska and Maine.

but even this still has issues. Such as, what are the electors based off of, state wide popular vote? What about rounding, up or down? Each congressional district (for states with more than 1 congressional district, and how about the other 2 electoral votes? At-large, a hybrid approach, what else?), Some predetermined electoral districting? etc.

And even with that question answered, this doesn't necessarily fix the problem, as it's still quite easy to have the electoral college votes not match the popular vote. So what's the real point of the modern electoral college? It just makes for a more complex, less precise, less democratic system overall.

Re: Donald Trump could dismantle net neutrality

#194

Post by notahacker »

CalChris wrote: post #109
throwaway729 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because it lets people who don't live on the coasts have a say too I'm from the midwest and I still don't understand this sentiment. Why should the power of your vote depend on where you choose to lay your head down at night? That seems extremely anti-democratic to me. It's not that people who don't live on the coasts shouldn't have a say. It's that if someone wins a popular vote by 2 million fucking votes , then t…

> We already have the senate. The house also favors less populous states, even if not by design. The Electoral College also favors less populous states. Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress So Wyoming gets 3 electors for a population of 584,153 o…

For Presidential elections the electioneering arithmetic is significantly more complex than voters per elector though, and doesn't evenly favour states of any particular size.

Ultimately what matters is percentage swing to the other major party for the state to change electoral vote, scaled by the size of the state and realistic probability of the swing actually happening.

Wyoming might have fewer voters per elector than Florida, but as solidly Republican as states get there's not much point in paying it any attention beyond the primaries, whereas the priorities of a few thousand Cuban exiles in Florida can shape foreign policy because they frequently play a major role in determining the eventual president. And a smallish electoral bribe in the form of investment allocated to populous areas of large states Michigan and Wisconsin would, for better and for worse, probably have swung it for Clinton.

California is at the rougher end of both scales, both under-represented per head and unlikely to change hands. But you'd also probably be less likely to be ignored in a pure popular vote election if you lived in Wyoming, especially if you were amongst the minority of Wyoming residents willing to vote for either party depending on the individual candidates' programmes.

Re: Donald Trump could dismantle net neutrality

#195

Post by bmelton »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #173
bmelton wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And if they're wrong and they fail Fair point, but worth noting that they could fail for many reasons that have nothing to do with your central thesis.

In theory they could also fail because they're wrong about something else , but whose problem is that? Either they can figure out how to have competition without regulation, or they can't and we need network neutrality.

Not trying to get involved in the debate around net neutrality, but you'd have to have criteria around what is success and what is failure. Depending on how you measure it, there are very few government programs that couldn't be simultaneously cast as either a success or failure depending on which criteria were chosen after the fact.

Clearly, those in favor will point out its positives and discard its negatives, and vice versa.

The point, I think I'm making, is that for those opposed to net neutrality, maybe some would be less opposed if success and failure were clearly defined, and whatever regulations enacted were the least and most tailored amount of regulations meant to specifically prevent the previously defined failure states. Giving broad and ambiguous authority over something like "the internet" is fraught with both wonder and peril, and until and unless "good" and "bad" are quantified, it seems unfair to castigate "the other side" as shills, or ignorant (not that I'm suggesting that you've done that, but it's definitely been done).

Re: Donald Trump could dismantle net neutrality

#196

Post by throwaway729 »

meric wrote: post #78
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they mean, this will not damage Trump, as it will be spun as a success, even as it causes damage to the average person. Probably applies to many, if not all, of his policies.

He has implemented zero policies and net neutrality is not a topic even currently discussed. It is strange to see people make up something they think is bad, accuse the person they don't like for doing it in the future despite having no indications whether that person will actually do it, and then say that persons supporters are stupid enough to support said action. I think most Trump supporters are watching closely…

> It is strange to see people make up something they think is bad

(Opposition to) net neutrality is not "made up".

> accuse the person they don't like for doing it in the future

People posting here like net neutrality completely independently of how they feel about Trump. You can go back way before Trump came on the scene and find HN threads in which the majority opinion is largely supportive of NN.

This isn't a "demonize Trump" sentiment, it's a "pro net neutrality" sentiment. And it always has existed as an extremely important issue for SV completely independently of Trump. For decades.

> despite having no indications whether that person will actually do it

...other than his word and the preference of relevant people on his transition team.

> and then say that persons supporters are stupid enough to support said action

No one ever said that voters supporting Trump were stupid. Just that abolishing net neutrality would hurt them.

E.g. it's possible that abolishing net neutrality would hurt a coal miner, but it's none-the-less in that coal miner's best interest to vote for Trump.

Re: Donald Trump could dismantle net neutrality

#197

Post by bmelton »

CalChris wrote: post #191
bmelton wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put a more fine point on it, generally speaking, an action that is subject to an adversarial system, is debated upon in plain view, is subject to pressure by consistuents, and is voted upon by the body populace, especially where the bar is as high as a constitutional amendment, tends to be less restrictive than a rule imposed by a regulatory agency that carries the effective force of law. Naturally, there are exce…

Nah bro, I was just saying that Regulation takes away freedom is simplistic libertarian drivel because it kinda just like is .

Is there nuance that can be added? Sure. Pretending one thing is the same as the other is not, in my opinion, a nuance that furthers the discussion.

It's really, really hard to equivocate the 13th amendment to, say, the EPA rules overturned by Michigan v EPA, or any of the other thousands of regulations imposed last year.

Re: Donald Trump could dismantle net neutrality

#198

Post by sgnelson »

ng12 wrote: post #175
throwaway729 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that was the goal, that's what the candidates would have campaigned for. And I think that would've been a good thing. Do you disagree?

I think this is one election where the Electoral College did it's job. One of the big issues Trump made this election was globalization. You know who benefits from globalization? People who live in metropolitan areas. Who pays the bill? People who live in small-town America. We are a federalist republic for this very reason -- to limit the ability of the majority to shoehorn the minority.

Just no. The US economy relies on Urban areas. This is where the vast majority of wealth, innovation, and knowledge is created (at a much greater rate per capita, than rural areas). This is only increasing in part due to how knowledge is created/shared with agglomeration effects (in cities) and due to globalization (small factories could support small towns, with the loss of these factories, small towns die.)

Small towns do not pay the bills. (Do you seriously think that small town America could afford to build and maintain the Eisenhower 4 lane highway that runs through the town? They can't.)

There is practically zero evidence that "Small town America" isn't dying a painful death these days. You don't have to like it, I certainly don't. (I live in a state that was "Small town America.") But wake up, small town America is dying, and there is almost nothing that can be done to fix it. But trying to somehow "punish" Urban areas certainly doesn't make any sense.

And finally, do you really believe that it's better that a minority has the ability to "showhorn" the majority? Why?

Re: Donald Trump could dismantle net neutrality

#199

Post by [deleted] »

Frondo wrote: post #170
xahrepap wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is anti-democratic by design . Founding fathers didn't want a democratic election for presidents. I think a good example of what the electoral college is: you have a sports tournament. The winner isn't the person who gets the most points in all the games. It's the person who wins the most games.

You know what, though? This isn't their world any more, it's ours. One of the mistakes they made that we're all still suffering from was in how difficult it is in practice to amend the US constitution. Even the late great Antonin Scalia felt this way--in some interview he gave somewhere, he said that, if given a magic wand and the ability to change the constitution, he'd simply make it easier to amend. Happily, there…

[deleted]

Re: Donald Trump could dismantle net neutrality

#200

Post by dingaling »

sxg wrote: post #63
lintiness wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if someone wins a popular vote by 2 million fucking votes, then they should probably win the election." what if she spent TWICE the money getting them?

That's a separate issue. Not saying it's right or wrong, but at the end of the day, she had more votes.

Indeed, but if it were based on raw votes then we'd probably not have had Mrs Clinton vs Mr Trump in 2016 because the timeline would have branched in 2000 based on the same metric.

It's an interesting example of arguing against a cause that's only relevant because of the effect it caused previously.

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