ComradeTaco

There is a functional limit for induced demand! But it effectively can't be reached in urban and suburban areas because cars scale really poorly. Cars don't scale well for three main reasons:

(1) Cost. Building roads and highways inflicts both huge upfront capital costs and maintenance costs. A typical highway line has a throughput of 2,000 cars per hour. (2) Real Estate. Building the level of roads necessary to meet induced demand+ would take up an extremely large amount of land that can only be used for vehicles. (3) Local Roads. Local roads can only absorb so much capacity and they have functional throughput limits. If you wanted to make them faster, homeowners couldn't have driveways.

If you really wanted to, you could possibly make a city where driving is king and there is effectively no congestion. It would just be absurdly expensive and hostile to everyone who doesn't have access to car.

Obamacare only reduced the growth of healthcare costs, it did not stop the growth. The approach that most democrats believe would reduce cost is single payer or Medicaid for all.

I always imagined that if you were stockpiling large amounts of gold in your home it was more of a survivalist thing than a risk management thing.

In a country scale crisis people would be selling all their valuables for fire sale prices to pay for essentials, including gold. A fiat reserve currency, like the Swiss Franc or the Pound would be easier to use, less likely to be stolen and more valuable then gold shavings.

If we're in the kind of crisis where all fiat money is useless, gold will be useless too. The only kind of thing that will have value are things that help you survive. A crate full of gauze pads and bandaids would be better than a whole stack of gold bullion in that situation.

I apologize for the sarcasm Dboreham, I usually try to make arguments in better faith. The anti-consumerism is just so obscene that I feel like a bit of absurdity is necessary.

I took a red eye flight that boarded only about 45 minutes after the security checkpoint for the terminal reopened for the morning. I sat right next to the Spirit Airlines counter, where I watched dozens of people place their bags on the spirit airlines baggage pricing stand. I tallied up the extra fees and Spirit just got away with an extra $4,000 that morning.

One of the only times I could say that I was thankful for flying American.

ISPs, like all corporations, always have the best interests of their customers as heart. In the unlikely event that an ISP abuses their position another ISP startup will immediately spring up and start a brand new network.

If you're at the executive level you likely have enough connections and savings that you can afford to occasionally fail without substantially affecting your quality of life.

Large bridges and elevated roadways generally have a factor of of at least Safety 2 to 3 times their maximum expected loads. Everything these days is, for good reason, overbuilt.

Even the Brooklyn bridge, partially because structural mechanics wasn't quite as well developed at the time, has a factor of safety of 6.

The comparison between shipping services and Uber/Lyft with broadband connections is absolutely absurd.

Hangouts has the infrastructure cost of a server and UPS warehouses and vehicles. An ISP has the infrastructure and maintenance costs of a buried or hung line to every single home it serves. Unlike an App or shipping company, it takes literal years to take a hard wired ISP to any sort of fruition. Building an ISP also means serving a concentrated market, where the bigger ISP can lower their prices until your new ISP goes bankrupt.

If you really wanted to break up the regional monopolies, you would force competitive bidding for all last mile connections and let companies do their own backbone infrastructure. It would introduce actually competition to a market where most consumers literally have no choice.

I am a structural EIT. Industry focus on safety is paramount. Seniority is very much respected so there are almost no young MBAs and they exist almost exclusively at the corporate level. Only a full engineer can legally stamp off on the final drawings and the accompanying calculations and I've never really seen a business type ever try to interfere in that.

I think he felt bad about the caterpillars being mashed up.

Jet Blue is generally very pleasant.

US Corporations pay an effective tax rate of 12.6%.[1]

http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/01/news/economy/corporate-tax-r...

I'd argue that it's not money in politics. The democrats and republicans get tons of money from tons of different interest groups and industries, yet the the only party that voted whatsoever for this bill were Republicans. The problem isn't the money, it's the ideology.

Hard won congressional seats will often sit out or sometimes even vote against their parties legislation but coordinate their votes inch a way that ensures that their parties legislation still passes.

Say you have 54 democrats in the senate, and a democratic president 4 democrats that had difficult races can abstain or vote against the bill while 50 democrats can vote for it, with the vice president being the tiebreaker.

He's quoting a woman that accepted more than 650k from ISPs for reelection campaigns.

I understand that a phone connection is different from an internet connection. But I couldn't think of two more similar industries. Wasn't dial-up,the first real consumer internet delivered through via telephone lines and switches?

You can't just say the regulations are old and therefore invalid because they're old.

Remember, the telephone industry was regulated because telephone companies merged and cooperated to create regional monopolies and destroy competition, all at the expense of consumers. Comcast, Time Warner and the like have all been doing the same.

You're correct and I edited my comment. I suspect that that may just be a tactic to save face in vulnerable districts rather than a sincere desire to oppose the bill.

No, he's correct, about 7% of republicans in the house didn't vote for the bill.

The votes in both the house and the senate were almost entirely along party lines. Every republican in the senate that voted, voted for this act and every democrat in the senate that voted, voted against this act.

It's funny because Google has been trying to break free of ISPs with Google Fiber. Unfortunately huge capital costs and regulatory capture by ISPs effectively torpedoed expansion plans. Now the head of the FCC, a former General Consul for Verizon, is adamentaly opposed to net neutrality.

Trump is amusing. He'll say something absolutely obscene, then his surrogates will say that he meant something different and slightly less obscene. Then supporters will go to great lengths to translate his words into an extremely favorable reading that actually isn't obscene at all.

We don't need a Rosetta Stone for it. Trump means exactly what he says.

1. I thought it was funny too. But they also legitimately believed and expressed that anyone who believed in social welfare was a communist.

2. They took the frame back.

3. They did. I was working at the store as an hourly employee. The customers were generally middle to upper middle class.

I spent a summer working for some very conservative business owners. They asked me what I felt about the great society program during Johnson. I said that I thought it was a fine program that lifted a lot of people out of poverty.

The following day they presented me a framed photo of Joseph Stalin.

It's not just liberals that can be closed minded.

Is there anything that she has accomplished or done in her life that indicates that she will improve things? She had a lot of trouble answering absurdly basic questions during her confirmation hearing.

I apologize, I should have said funding mechanisms{[1]. Policy is heavily influenced at the federal level.

[1]https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-chart....

Tragically, the Democrats believed that the Republicans would nominate people who were at least tangentially qualified for the position. Took 'em only one election to screw it up.