• Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Gimli
    Gimli:
    bigoldgeek:
    Have fun paying extra to get to YouTube, Hulu, Facebook.

    As the banking crisis showed, regulation is sometimes a good thing, and lack of regulation disastrous.

    Umm, but the banking crisis was caused by excessive regulation to begin with. The government decided that it was a good thing for people to be able to own their own homes rather than renting. So they passed regulations -- notably CRA, the Community Reinvestment Act -- pressuring banks to give mortgages to people who, by the banks' standards, wouldn't previously have qualified. That is, the bank didn't think these people were likely to be able to repay the loan. The government said, Too bad, you must loan them money anyway.

    Then, shock of shocks, many of these people turned out to not be able to repay the loan! Who would have thought those stupid, greedy bankers were right and the Congressmen and bureaucrats were wrong?

    The solution, of course, was to accuse the bankers of "predatory lending", that is, of loaning money to people who they knew could never repay it.

    Just think about this for a minute. Why would a bank WANT to loan money to people who they knew couldn't repay it? Why would they do that, unless they were forced to by the government? Does the pro-regulation version of this story even make sense?

    A few years ago, conservatives in Congress pressed for hearings on the subject. Bankers warned that the whole system was about to collapse. And the majority in Congress rejected the concerns, declaring that there was no danger, everything was fine, and increasing home ownership was a worthy goal that we needed to continue to pursue.

    You mean it had nothing to do with repealing a pile of regulation on what banks were allowed to do with mortgages, allowing securitization of those mortgages, and giving away free money for 5 years?

  • Optimus Dime (unregistered) in reply to Gimli
    Gimli:
    bigoldgeek:
    Have fun paying extra to get to YouTube, Hulu, Facebook.

    As the banking crisis showed, regulation is sometimes a good thing, and lack of regulation disastrous.

    Umm, but the banking crisis was caused by excessive regulation to begin with. The government decided that it was a good thing for people to be able to own their own homes rather than renting. So they passed regulations -- notably CRA, the Community Reinvestment Act -- pressuring banks to give mortgages to people who, by the banks' standards, wouldn't previously have qualified. That is, the bank didn't think these people were likely to be able to repay the loan. The government said, Too bad, you must loan them money anyway.

    Then, shock of shocks, many of these people turned out to not be able to repay the loan! Who would have thought those stupid, greedy bankers were right and the Congressmen and bureaucrats were wrong?

    The solution, of course, was to accuse the bankers of "predatory lending", that is, of loaning money to people who they knew could never repay it.

    Just think about this for a minute. Why would a bank WANT to loan money to people who they knew couldn't repay it? Why would they do that, unless they were forced to by the government? Does the pro-regulation version of this story even make sense?

    A few years ago, conservatives in Congress pressed for hearings on the subject. Bankers warned that the whole system was about to collapse. And the majority in Congress rejected the concerns, declaring that there was no danger, everything was fine, and increasing home ownership was a worthy goal that we needed to continue to pursue.

    Your grasp of fictional narrative is genius. I look forward to your first novel.

    captcha: appellatio too easy

  • Warpedcow (unregistered) in reply to bigoldgeek
    bigoldgeek:
    As the banking crisis showed, regulation is sometimes a good thing, and lack of regulation disastrous.

    Banking crisis was caused by legislation passed during the Clinton administration that essentially forced them to give out sub-prime loans to "minorities" who could never afford to pay them back.

    So you have it exactly backwards.

  • Garmoran (unregistered) in reply to Gimli
    Gimli:
    Just think about this for a minute. Why would a bank WANT to loan money to people who they knew couldn't repay it? Why would they do that, unless they were forced to by the government?
    Perhaps because, as in IT companies, a sale is a sale and for a bank a loan is a sale? And, in the case of banks, they don't seem to think very far ahead. At one point the limit on the credit card issued by my bank had been gradually increased to the point where I could have raised my debts on one card alone to 80% of my annual income.
  • SOmeGuy (unregistered) in reply to Phil

    Shaw.ca used to let you choose your own hostname for your static IP. They of course had a list of curse words and admin names (like "mail", "email", "mailserver", "popserver", etc.). One word they failed to list: "localhost". Since correct behavior is to look for things with your "searchdomain" (in UNIX in resolv.conf, not sure what it is in Windows) appended anyone talking to "localhost.shaw.ca" ended up at my box. I then phoned tech support and they updated the list. They also used cablemodems that sent ALL traffic they saw to the head end, but that's another story.

  • pizzaguy (unregistered)

    Anybody who utters the words "free market" in a discussion about telcos is displaying unbelievable amounts of idiocy.

    Go try and start up an ISP. Get permission to dig up public roads and all that. Then come back and let us know how it goes.

    The flip side of government-granted monopolies should be regulation to ensure that those monopolies stay honest.

    End. Of. Story.

    Libertarians, go home. Unplug your routers and let us commies have the web to ourselves, thanks.

  • Tzafrir Cohen (unregistered)

    And this is supposed to be something written by a Linux guy who actually spent time mocking with a dialup connection (in the mid 90-s)?

    Subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 ? For a PPP connection?

  • BAF (unregistered) in reply to SOmeGuy
    SOmeGuy:
    Shaw.ca used to let you choose your own hostname for your static IP. They of course had a list of curse words and admin names (like "mail", "email", "mailserver", "popserver", etc.). One word they failed to list: "localhost". Since correct behavior is to look for things with your "searchdomain" (in UNIX in resolv.conf, not sure what it is in Windows) appended anyone talking to "localhost.shaw.ca" ended up at my box. I then phoned tech support and they updated the list. They also used cablemodems that sent ALL traffic they saw to the head end, but that's another story.

    That doesn't sound like correct behavior to me. Searchdomain is only used for unknown hosts, hostnames like localhost are already defined in /etc/hosts, and therefore will resolve without contacting a DNS server.

  • Capital Markets Finance programmer (unregistered) in reply to Franz Kafka
    Franz Kafka:
    Gimli:
    bigoldgeek:
    Have fun paying extra to get to YouTube, Hulu, Facebook.

    As the banking crisis showed, regulation is sometimes a good thing, and lack of regulation disastrous.

    Umm, but the banking crisis was caused by excessive regulation to begin with. [...]

    You mean it had nothing to do with repealing a pile of regulation [...]

    What, because one is true, the other must be false? Here in AUS, the two crashes happened separately: A crash which wiped out the state owned State Bank of Victoria and the State Back of Western Australia, because of bad lending practices mandated by the Left-Centre State Governments, and a later crash because of bad lending practices following deregulation after the state governments got out of banking. Here in .vic.au there are "homeowners" still underwater 20 years after the state government helped them into low start loans.

    The true WTF is that after the Australian Government and Banking Industry had already demonstrated what happens (a) when well-meaning people help low income earners into the housing market, and (b) when well-meaning people deregulate the Banking Industry, the Americans went ahead and did the same thing! Only, and this is true genius, BOTH AT ONCE!

    As Bismark said: Only an idiot learns from his own mistakes.

  • Forsaken (unregistered) in reply to Someone You Know
    Someone You Know:
    Gimli:
    So let me see if I can sum up the pro-net neutrality argument we've had here so far:

    ...etc.

    Have any of you considered the possibility that maybe the correct answer is not in either extreme, but some compromise between the two?

    Have any of you checked to see if that's what's actually being proposed?

    Americans don't do that whole "truth in the middle" thing, you're either with them, or you're a commie/fascist.

    They also never stop to consider that maybe, just maybe, governments elsewhere are not quite as inept or corrupt as their own. God forbid taking the next step(wondering why).

  • Wizard Stan (unregistered) in reply to Gimli
    Gimli:
    Just think about this for a minute. Why would a bank WANT to loan money to people who they knew couldn't repay it?
    Just because a bank gives you the loan doesn't mean they're the ones footing the bill. Here's how it generally works: a bank gives you a loan at X%. The bank then "sells" that loan on a special investment market for slightly less than X%. When you pay the bank, the bank passes that payment on to the person or group (or sometimes another (or even the same) bank) who takes on the loan. The bank then gets their money back, plus a small "finders fee" as it were. If you default on the loan, it's not the bank that suffers, but the purchaser of the loan. note: sometimes the bank does keep the loan for themselves. Now, some brilant person realized that there's a huge market of people that want to buy houses that can't. Or rather, a lot of them could, but the risks are so high that no one was willing to invest in these loans. It was a huge challenge figuring out which high-risk people could actually pay off the loan, and which couldn't. So what the brilant person did was take a bunch of loans, slam them together, and chop the result up into slices. The good slices at the top get paid first but very little, the bad slices at the bottom get paid more but are last. The idea being that people could better evaluate the risk if it's divided like this, and could buy the top or the bottom slice depending on their desired risk. If someone defaults, the bottom slices disappear, but the top slices continue to pay out. And it worked well... for a while. But most were buying the low yield, safe top slices; no one was buying the crappy high risk slices on the bottom. So what did this brilant person do? They took the crap no one wanted, slapped it back together, chopped it into different slices, and did the exact same thing. Except now, instead of some stuff being high quality crap that had a good chance of paying off, it was the leftover crap of the leftover crap: a pile of crappy crap, topped with a bit of whipped cream for show, if you will. Investors bought these anyway, because they weren't told the details of where they came from until it was too late. And then, of course, the crap of the crap defaulted. Those that bought the safe slices originally all said "excellent, we were smart and bought the safe ones." Those that bought the later crappy crap said "wait a second. We bought the safe top slices, but now the entire cake has disappeared. What's going on?" Confidence in the investments were lost, even those that bought the initial safe slices sold out, no one was buying new investments, no new money was coming in, loan investments went unpurchased, banks lost money, and the whole thing came crashing down.

    tl;dr; version: The banking crash had little to do with government regulations, and everything to do with someone thinking he was smarter than the system.

  • (cs) in reply to @Deprecated

    With blu ray converter You can play the output video on iPod, Zune, iPhone, Apple TV, PSP, Archos, iRiver, Creative Zen, PMP, MP4/MP3 Player, Smart Phone, Pocket PC, PDA, Mobile Phone, etc

  • Choose Your Own IP (unregistered) in reply to Warpedcow
    Warpedcow:
    bigoldgeek:
    As the banking crisis showed, regulation is sometimes a good thing, and lack of regulation disastrous.

    Banking crisis was caused by legislation passed during the Clinton administration that essentially forced them to give out sub-prime loans to "minorities" who could never afford to pay them back.

    So you have it exactly backwards.

    Republican spin. The legislation applied to one of 26 failed banks, so what about the other 25?

  • (cs)

    It's always seemed obvious to me that there are lots of organizations that function as "government," not just the nation-states and their official subdivisions that are normally labelled "government." Government is the organization of human activity. In particular, corporations seem to me to be quite obviously a form of government.

    States often do horrible or stupid things. So do all sorts of other forms of government. At least in a democratic republic, there's a pretense that the state must be accountable to the public, and at least sometimes, that restrains the activity of the state. There are other entities that are more or less publicly accountable.

    The question of government regulation is really a question of whether corporations, which effectively govern much of our lives, can be held accountable for their actions.

    The point of the US Bill of Rights is to establish what the state cannot do, in order to preserve individual freedoms against the potential abuse of the state. I don't see why we can't establish what other forms of government can't do, in order to preserve individual freedoms against the potential abuse of other forms of government.

  • SlightlyAjar (unregistered) in reply to justsomedude
    justsomedude:
    Franz Kafka:
    Dan:
    Franz Kafka:
    Nah, once the market is dominated by cable and DSL, they're quite happy to sit on their asses and collect money. Any upstart ISPs can be crushed or legislated out of existence.

    ....snip...

    Who do you think writes that legislation? If you're a telco, it's in your interest to make competition illegal or just plain unworkable.

    No kidding, and the blanket claim that the gov "consistent record of ruining everything they stick their noses into with incompetence" is absurd at face value. I'm not saying they do everything right, mind you, but to say they do everything wrong is equally absurd.

    Not that much more absurd than some of the childish comments about profit motive and the horrendous misreading of the banking collapse in this thread, but, that's what you get for talking politics on the internet.

  • SlightlyAjar (unregistered) in reply to Choose Your Own IP
    Choose Your Own IP:
    Warpedcow:
    bigoldgeek:
    As the banking crisis showed, regulation is sometimes a good thing, and lack of regulation disastrous.

    Banking crisis was caused by legislation passed during the Clinton administration that essentially forced them to give out sub-prime loans to "minorities" who could never afford to pay them back.

    So you have it exactly backwards.

    Republican spin. The legislation applied to one of 26 failed banks, so what about the other 25?

    (Citation required)

  • DishonestBob (unregistered) in reply to pizzaguy
    pizzaguy:
    The flip side of government-granted monopolies should be regulation to ensure that those monopolies stay honest.

    End. Of. Story.

    Libertarians, go home. Unplug your routers and let us commies have the web to ourselves, thanks.

    If there's one place that can ALWAYS be trusted to be honest, it's government.

    You'll feel the same way when the party you like is OUT of power, right?

  • Bim Job (unregistered) in reply to SlightlyAjar
    SlightlyAjar:
    Choose Your Own IP:
    Warpedcow:
    bigoldgeek:
    As the banking crisis showed, regulation is sometimes a good thing, and lack of regulation disastrous.

    Banking crisis was caused by legislation passed during the Clinton administration that essentially forced them to give out sub-prime loans to "minorities" who could never afford to pay them back.

    So you have it exactly backwards.

    Republican spin. The legislation applied to one of 26 failed banks, so what about the other 25?

    (Citation required)

    Citation required? On this thread? I've lost count of the number of times that I've wondered, "hmmm. Where did that come from?" and then decided that, on balance, I'd rather be in Philadelphia.

    Choose Your Own IP is obviously mistaken. Warpedcow is not a Republican; he's just a good old-fashioned ignorant bigot. The use of quotation marks around the word minorities should make this obvious.

    Not a citation, but the best I can manage is that Clinton managed to screw up Fannie Mae with said legislation. The Feds find it a bit difficult to screw up independent corporate entities; they tend to go for the quasi-governmental ones instead. Everyone else screwed themselves up -- and I think the fundamental cause is that there's an impedance mismatch between the understanding of mathematical models and the drooling imperative to make a sale, yesterday.

    This ain't right-wing, and it ain't left wing. It's just an observation of entrenched mental deficiency. It happens in government, and it happens in "the free market" (quotation marks used appropriately). Whether or not a particular piece of regulation would ameliorate the problem is an entirely different matter.

    As to "net neutrality;" well, it's Mom and Apple Pie and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, isn't it? Pick your own definition, and pick your own ideological objection, but don't for God's sake bore us with anything germane like numbers.

    Anybody who's actually worked with DSLAMs will tell you that the manufacturers put a huge amount of effort into traffic shaping (particularly with regard to broadcast, which is supposed to be the Next Big Thing. I'm sceptical). Considering the rubbishy 1970s technology base, this is quite impressive. I would assume that the purchasers of said DSLAMs have a reason to pay for the effort.

    Or, to put it another way: "net neutrality" is a convenient political football with no immediate reality for the consumer. There's no need to enforce it, because there's no imminent problem, and sufficient competition to ensure that rationing just won't work. The hardware will see to that.

    Yay! Technology wins, for once!

  • Economist (unregistered)

    The tone of the anti-net neutrality posts sounds like a case of "keep your government hands off my internet." Which is about as on-target as "keep your government hands off my Medicare."

    Where did the internet come from? Who designed, created, and funded ARPANET?

    (Hint: it wasn't some libertarian collective)

  • mostlibertariansaremoronslikeyou (unregistered) in reply to Carl
    Carl:
    I agree with Leo that Net Neutrality is a very bad idea.

    Of course I support "Network Neutrality" as defined in Justsomedude's post. But that definition doesn't say anything about the government. I can't in good conscience support the idea that the government has the right to tell businesses what kinds of services they can and can't offer, or to tell consumers what kinds of services they're allowed to purchase, or to regulate the Internet or access to it in any way.

    I am constantly shocked by the overwhelming number of Internet users who appar believe that what the Internet really needs is increased government regulation.

    I am constantly shocked by the number of people who have no knowledge of their own society's history. You have easy access to cellphones, telephones, cable, television, etc. because the "eeevil guvmint" made rules that carriers have to carry all signals, regardless of origin. Dude, highway lanes have to be a certain width, trains can run on anyone's tracks, roads have to carry anyone's trucks, and telephones have to connect all calls regardless of carrier origin, because there are regulations that say they have to. What if you couldn't call an AT&T phone from your T-Mobile phone? You CAN, because the FCC says you can. that's neutrality, idiot.

    If you lived your life dictated by big business instead of a government that makes rules to protect consumers, you'd be paying extra if you wanted to talk to friends with different phone carriers, your DVD burner and blank CD's would never have been manufactured, your ISP would only resolve and load websites from folks who paid them off, and you'd be SOL if you wanted to watch shows on NBC, because your TV manufacturer only cut deals with CBS, CNN, and HBO, and will only display channels from those who paid them off.

    Government is the ONLY entity that can tell businesses how to conduct business. You ever tried to get satisfaction from AT&T over a spurious phone bill? Good luck, peon. The 20th Century was culturally engaged and defined by nightly news -- a "loss leader" that TV networks were FORCED to produce as a public service in exchange for the right to a slice of broadcast frequency. Can you imagine a 20th Century made entirely of American Bandstand with no Walter Cronkite? That's what you're advocating there, you green-as-grass kneebiter.

  • nicole_sexy (unregistered) in reply to Phil

    i have choosen my ip

  • nicole_sexy (unregistered)

    this my ip

Leave a comment on “Choose Your Own IP”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article