Thank god the government is here to tell private companies what they can and cannot do. The FCC spent $336M of your money last year on such activities.
> During the last two decades, the FCC has manufactured the idea that the electromagnetic spectrum used by wireless devices is scarce. Spectrum auctions became another way to restrain trade. Deep pocket operators, like AT&T and Verizon Wireless, overbid for spectrum and then pass along high costs to the consumer in the form of $40 monthly fees and cryptic calling plans. It's a longer conversation, but with the right network architecture, smart devices can be programmed to share huge swaths of spectrum without interfering with other users. If we do it with Wi-Fi for data, we can certainly do it for phone calls.
"Notoriously thin-skinned, he does not have to pick up the phone and bellow at those who publish and broadcast something he does not like. His vast resources often translate into less-than-critical coverage.
Mr. Slim declined through his spokesman and son-in-law, Arturo Elias, to be interviewed for this article."
I'd feel better about that graph if it wasn't so horribly spun. The vertical scale is showing a delta from the original value, not the value. It looks like an exponential explosion in spending when it's actually about 3.5x since 1970.
Honestly, if I were an investor and a startup tried to sell me that chart, I'd walk out of the room.
The broader point is valid, though. Education policy in the US sucks. But the details matter a whole lot -- we're spending on the wrong things (tests, security) and not on the things that are known to make a difference (e.g. teacher salary -- make it competetive with other professions and you'll get better teachers). It's far more complicated than the libertarian "Gov'mnt spending bad, hur, hur, hur." line.
No need to ridicule libertarians like that. There are different kinds of libertarians, different movements, and not all have such simple ways of thinking. At least libertarians invite criticism in the field of inflated government spendings.
I thought libertarians were a fringe group of idiots until someone on HN said they were libertarian while saying something sensible. It's been hard to fight the habit of ignoring them. It doesn't help that the Koches and their institute are cited in the stupid babbling of the more vocal ones.
Usually mass-media use the worst examples of libertarians to make fun of the whole concept/idea behind it. That's a common fallacy used to fight different kind of groups, when they are not mainstream and opposed to the current "approved way of thinking".
To be fair: the source of this discussion was a verifiably distortionist graph produced by a very mainstream libertarian think tank. To my mind, you're simply arguing the converse fallacy. The fact that there are smart people who hold any given opinion doesn't mean that the group associated with that opinion is worthy of praise.
Basically: Hayek being "right" about something doesn't make the Cato institute "not true libertarians".
It's not just about being worthy of praise. I am just making the point that "libertarian" is a too generic term to put everything and everyone in a single bag. There are anarcho-libertarians, libertarians who support the idea of a balance between government and private investment, and many other variations.
I think the only generic you can say about libertarians is that : they care about freedom of property and consider government intervention in private affairs with criticism. Beyond this point, the commonalities disappear, and there is a wider range of opinions among libertarians than in any other political group out there. There is no real "dogma", while Von Mises and Hayek are more or less recognized as Thought leaders for some of them.
I did not claim, by the way, that Hayek was "right" about anything, I just wanted to show one of the figureheads of some parts of the movement. Getting a Nobel Prize does not mean anything to me, and I personally feel very strongly that the recent Economy Nobel Prize Jo Stiglitz does not know what he is talking about (he's just an old school Keynesian, and even Keynes himsel admitted in being wrong later in his life). Stiglitz has a clear political agenda that has nothing to do with actual economic sense.
I didn't get my previous view of libertarians from mass media. I've seen people who I'm pretty sure are libertarian in this very thread arguing intelligently against extremist views. They usually go unchallenged outside HN, which is how people get a bad impression.
Libertarianism isn't well-served by letting anarchists call themselves libertarian unchallenged. I would like to see more of what I see on HN out in public view.
The ad proves the old maxim true: "Everyone's a reactionary against something they know about."
Nearly all of the companies listed in this ad were heavy donors to the Obama administration. Now they understand what their donation got them.
Everyone in the Internet industry feels extreme pain when these regulations are proposed, and rightly so. SOPA is an insane example of a bankrupt government flailing about.
However, the same commentariat thinks that regulation is somehow "necessary" in medicine, law, or energy.
("<Calamity-of-the-day> could have been prevented if we just had more rules on the books! Surely the evil profit-making corporations would cut every corner they could, just to make a buck! It's not like taking it in the shorts every single day in the press will hit their stock price!")
Once you've tasted government intervention in your industry, you'll want some mouthwash.
Its simple to think that regulation is good and bad if you generalize and say that no industry should/should not be regulated just because it causes inconvenience.
Regulation should be in place to put safeties into a system. What i mean by that is don't let people "cheat" too much. By cheating the reasonable bounds of the system the whole system would suffer (people dying, civil liberties slashed or financial systems collapsing).
That said industries you would want tight regulation on is in the food or medical industries.
Nothing is black and white but always varying shades of grey.
Then, entrepreneurs will be motivated to build schools because they can earn a profit based on enrollment. As with all private enterprises, they will be forced to compete on quality of service.
These schools will also be judged on the performance and caliber of their eventual alumni classes.
I am willing to wager that at least 30% of this board went to a private college. Why do we need the government running our schools, as well? To standardize a curriculum?
Electronics companies use the Underwriters's Lab to certify their products. I'm sure schools can have something similar.
> During the last two decades, the FCC has manufactured the idea that the electromagnetic spectrum used by wireless devices is scarce. Spectrum auctions became another way to restrain trade. Deep pocket operators, like AT&T and Verizon Wireless, overbid for spectrum and then pass along high costs to the consumer in the form of $40 monthly fees and cryptic calling plans. It's a longer conversation, but with the right network architecture, smart devices can be programmed to share huge swaths of spectrum without interfering with other users. If we do it with Wi-Fi for data, we can certainly do it for phone calls.
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704594804575649141727853232.html