Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old;
Seek what they sought.
Basho
Earlier One-Off Post: The GOP Post-Election Agenda and Bill O'Reilly's Opinion: A Critique
Image of the Day
Rant of the Day I
Proponents of Net Neutrality say the telecoms have too much power. I agree. Everyone seems to agree that monopolies are bad and competition is good, and just like you, I would like to see more competition. But if monopolies are bad, why should we trust the U.S. government, the largest monopoly of all? We’re talking about the same organization that spent an amount equal to Facebook’s first six years of operating costs to build a health care website that doesn’t work, the same organization that can’t keep the country’s bridges from falling down, and the same organization that spends 320 times what private industry spends to send a rocket into space. Let’s try a thought experiment–think of an industry that has major problems. Public schools? Health care? How about higher education, student loans, housing, banking, physical infrastructure, immigration, the space program, the military, the police, and the post office? What do all these industries and/or organizations have in common? They are all heavily regulated or controlled by the government. I don’t like how much power the telecoms have. But the reason they’re big and powerful isn’t because there is a lack of government regulation, but because of it. Government regulations are written by large corporate interests which collude with officials in government. The image of government being full of people on a mission to protect the little guy from predatory corporate behemoths is an illusion fostered by politicians and corporate interests alike. - Joshua SteimleRant of the Day II: The Arrogant Puffery of Obama, China Carbon Emissions Agreement
I really do wonder if, in the entire history of preposterous displays of despotic statecraft, there has been anything so ridiculous as two men on opposite sides of the world, two men with a weak hold on power, two men who can barely claim to represent anyone, signing a piece of paper that purports to control the global climate by tightening the regulatory noose around the respective population’s neck sometime in the next 15 years.
It’s times like this when the regular news really does read like the Onion.
As for the policy and science behind the idea, consider how much these two masterminds do not know. The following just gets us started. They don’t know for sure in what way the climate is changing in departure from normal patterns, whether that change is on net a bad thing overall, whether and to what extent human activities are causing the change, the precise relationship between cause and effect, the precise kind of policy response that is required to reverse the change, whether the benefits of that policy will exceed its costs even if there were a way to measure it, whether that policy is actually realizable and enforceable, and whether there is any real test available to discern success from failure regarding this new policy. - Jeffrey TuckerMinimum Wages and Technological Changes
I was intrigued by a conservative blog link off Facebook which was entitled "McDonald’s is About to Destroy the Minimum Wage". I thought maybe they had licensed Momentum Machine or similar technology; actually it was more of an automated cashier (self-checkout); see a related YouTube video below. I'm a huge fan of self-service checkouts what are routinely at places like Home Depot and Wal-Mart. As a bachelor, I often have just a few grocery items in my shopping cart vs. parents with overfilled carts; the self-service checkout is better than a typical supermarket express lane--quite often there's a cluster of say 6 counters. I'm typically out within 2 or 3 minutes.
I view this more as a customer convenience than as a labor-saving mechanism. For instance, one of my pet peeves at a restaurant is waiting for the waitress to take an order or to pay the check. It isn't hard to imagine how technology could improve--e.g., the restaurant rotates specials or is out of a particular menu item; see the following excerpt.
From CNN Money:
Panera Bread (PNRA) is the latest chain to introduce automated service, announcing in April that it plans to bring self-service ordering kiosks as well as a mobile ordering option to all its locations within the next three years. The news follows moves from Chili's and Applebee's to place tablets on their tables, allowing diners to order and pay without interacting with human wait staff at all.
In a widely cited paper released last year, University of Oxford researchers estimated that there is a 92% chance that fast-food preparation and serving will be automated in the coming decades.
Delivery drivers could be replaced en masse by self-driving cars, which are likely to hit the market within a decade or two, or even drones. In food preparation, there are start-ups offering robots for bartending and gourmet hamburger preparation. A food processing company in Spain now uses robots to inspect heads of lettuce on a conveyor belt, throwing out those that don't meet company standards, the Oxford researchers report.
Cisco CEO vs. the Statist Plots To Muck Up the Internet AKA "Net Neutrality"
This little video does a good job debunking the idea that the Big ISP's like Comcast in its kerfuffle with Netflix (hiding behind net neutrality) are the bad guys. Here's another account of the dispute and still another. (I'm more on the side of Comcast on the technical details; in my view, the amount of traffic used by Netflix and its customers strains capacity and distribution, and they should pay for the costs of related expansion. The issue is that most exchanges are based on roughly balanced flows between parties, but Netflix is sending a megaload of content to its customers, and bigger ISPs are tougher about wanting to charge more when the exchange is one-sided. There was a time when Netflix distributed through multiple vendors and ports to an ISP, but now it is essentially cutting out the middleman and is blasting a ton of content through one or very few ports, which one writer analogizes as attaching a fire hose to the network. It doesn't want to pay extra fees for unbalanced flows between networks and hence is misleadingly using "net neutrality".)
The Next Generation and Our University System
Facebook Corner
(Reason). The best use of the FCC in the modern world is to hold a pillow over its face until it stops twitching. Once gone, it won't be available as a bludgeon for ignorant (or opportunistic) politicians to use to inflict damage on a world they don't understand (or don't respect).
This is how the elitist politicians and bureaucrats win. They find an area where people are unhappy, even people who believe that government needs to stay out of their lives because the government mucks things up, and they promise to fix that one area of unhappiness, if the people will just give them the power to fix it. Once the government has that power, they will keep that power whether it has fixed the problem or not, and innovation, investment, and improvement will just get that much more difficult.
You are concerned that the ISPs have too much power? Well, there are at least a handful of ISPs, but there is only one federal government. And the ISPs do not have taxing power or the ability to use force.
The elitists in The Capital do not want net neutrality--they want net control. Please don't give it to them because you can't download pictures of kittens as fast as you'd like.
I call it the vicious cycle of corruption. "Net neutrality" is a pushing on-a-string rationalization for bureaucrats and censors. They are generally characterized by their incompetence and organizational inertia, they focus on obsoleted knowledge and concepts, and there will inevitably be regulatory capture, as crony ISPs seek to exploit government power for competitive advantage against smaller, innovative companies.
Choose Life
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Lisa Benson via IPI |
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| Courtesy of the original artist via Patriot Post |
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| Courtesy of Eric Allie via Townhall |
Glen Campbell, "Hey, Little One"
