This is pretty much circular at this point. I’d say the risk/reward (no matter how much money can divert risk) is not great enough or we’d have already seen this happen pre-Open Internet
Ajit is literally an agent of the industry that is changing the rules to profit said industry and when it is done he will quit and move back to the private sector.
And people are 'cutting the cord' because TV content is boring trash, and the media/news channels completely controlled by a few megacorps. You can't get independent or personal views, you can't get personalized shows, you can't get streams from completely random nobodies.
TV is monopolized to hell and back and full of advertising people can't stand. The internet provides everything you could want, without the cancer that has infected television. People wouldn't cut TV out of their lives if TV actually provided what they want at a fair price.
As far as I'm aware, net neutrality was assumed to apply up until a court ruling that went in Verizon's favor.
So it's not a case of "It only came into law 3 years ago!" but rather "We put it back into law after being considered law for 30 years because of a court case that demanded clarification".
What makes you think you're taking sides between two industries?
The way I see it, and probably why Google et al don't seem to be throwing up a recent fuss anymore, is that the big tech companies and industry giants can cut deals with the major ISP's to avoid throttling or provide services/expertise to the ISP's. So the end result is turning Google et al into their OWN monopolies. (e.g. Comcast partners with Youtube to deliver streaming video!)
Now you get telecom monopolies AND service/content monopolies.
>I find it annoying in these threads how people refuse to acknowledge that we have much stronger rule of law in the west.
No we don't. We have a stronger belief in the rule of law, but not an actual practice of rule of law. It's been getting worse and worse over the past two decades and at this point I see little difference between any particular western government and Russia's.
If you haven't noticed it, you've been willfully ignorant.
I can already tell you how and why it will be bad:
By living on a basic income provided to you by the government, you become dependent. That dependency is a weakness that gives the government greater power over you. What recourse do you have if the government removes your basic income? If we eliminate all other forms of income, say via automation, so there are no jobs you could turn to - what choice do you have? Go on to a rural agrarian existence, or die?
What delightful power and leverage a basic income gives the government over its population.
Do you believe automation can have no net benefit for society, then? Is there no future where increasingly all of the basic needs of people can be taken care of by automation, freeing up humans to do creative work?
The point is I think: Problem is somebody invests in the automation (algorithms and hardware) and then own all the results from the automation.
You seem to assume that the proceeds from automation would be evenly distributed. Why would it? The reason most people today can eat is because they (or people close to them) are needed as a workforce.
In the past once things got too bad then people went on strike etc. and taxes were raised and wages improved. But if the basic need of the robot-owners are met without any humans working for them, strikes fail to be efficient. One can only trust in the benevolence of the people owning the capital and the inertia in the current laws and the democractic system to keep things somewhat stable...
They only would need to sell to other robot owners. In a borderline case, a small group could own and operate a whole tree of technology required for a modern living standard, like a self-sufficient farm that buys nothing from the outside.
While possible, this is usually not efficient, though.
We are medieval creatures, we long for a purpose, no matter how small, no matter how trivial. If the machines take the purpose, all the fruit-baskets in the world wont fill that hole.
Is "machines taking all the purpose" a logical conclusion? I don't see a future where machines will create all of the popular culture in the world. I choose to support human-powered culture now, and increasing automation would not change my mind on that.
A UBI would enable humans to do more work that society either can't or won't automate. Care of other humans is an example. Yes, machines may be able to take on some of that role, but never all of it.
Automation certainly can benefit society (the majority of whom are workers), but in the way in which it is used at the moment does not benefit them in the fullest sense; they can take advantage of lower prices, but they can't take advantage of having much more free time to pursue creative hobbies, science, education and entertainment.
There are at least two possible solutions offered; the first is UBI in which everyone gets sufficient money to live off. Where exactly this money comes from and from what profits is up for question, and raises interesting questions about profitability in industries where there is higher organic composition of capital. The second option is one in which automation isn't used for profit at all, it is used simply to reduce working hours via ceasing commodity production and instead only the manufacture of use-values. In my opinion this second option (frequently called Socialism, endorsed by the likes of George Orwell, Einstein, Oscar Wilde, Marx and Engels) leads the way to an even greater emancipation and heightened productive capacity of society, given that there would no longer be any need to ensure high employment (high employment across industries is necessary for workers to buy back the products that they make, which generates profit). The second option also deals quite well with the psychological issues of living in a commodity-producing society brought up by the likes of Marcuse and Adorno.
Although the UBI solution to the problem of rising automation has rightfully earned the interest of many, I do not believe it goes far enough to ensure a more free, equitable and democratic society for all.
Edit: Regarding UBI, what is the incentive to stop companies from "offloading" the duty to pay a fair wage onto the state? I'm not really up to scratch on UBI details, so a response would be appreciated.
The problem with socialism without free market is that it has been tried many times, and it drastically lowers productivity, leading to deficits. People start spending their copious free time in lines waiting for the rare and insufficient goods to arrive. If you think USSR was long ago and this time it will be different, look at Venezuela.
This was not a problem with Socialism, it was a problem with the form of economic planning used. We must also bear in mind that there are forms such as market Socialism. Neither the USSR nor Venezuela paid attention to cybernetic planning; scientists in the USSR were repeatedly shut down by bureaucrats for suggesting it.
There exist modern planning methods, though still academic, such as those elaborated by Cockshott and Cottrell in Towards a New Socialism, it's worth a look if you haven't seen it already.
Nobody is suggesting rigid five year plans any more.
Currently I have to pay the government if I work (taxes). If I don't pay, I go to jail. So my only other choice is not work and go on "rural agrarian existence, or die".
So, let's see, work and pay the man, or don't work and the man pays you, hmmm...
One is total dependency in which you can't exist without the government giving you an income. The other is the government being dependent on you and taking part of your income as their revenue source. In the first case, you're the dependent; in the second case, the government is the dependent.
Further, keeping with your example, it's not: don't work and the man pays you. It's: don't work and become entirely owned by and dependent on the man (who is the source of everything you have).
You're forgetting something, you can still choose to work and collect the basic income; that's rather the point. BI does not make you dependent on government, it simply allows you the option, which by the way gives you more control in your life as it allows you a safety net thus allowing you to take more chances in your pursuit of work because you can now turn down bad work.
A lot more people would be taking a crack at running their own small businesses with such a safety net in place.
I'd rather be dependent on someone I can talk to, and whose personal wealth is a function of my ability to produce than the State who I have basically no influence over. Both ultimately have their own interests at heart, but the first situation is more likely to turn out better for me if I do good work.
I hear this "dependency" argument over and over again, and it rings so very wrong in my ears. Survival depends on so many other people. Just ignore the flow of money for a moment and consider who depends on whose work most.
UBI is discussed mainly as an alternative means-tested welfare (at least in Europe). Which of the two makes you feel more dependent on government if companies don't offer you enough for your labour: A) you have to explain to some official that you are in need, prove that you are actively looking for work, open your financial situation and report what you are doing; if you don't comply with their suggestions your benefits will be cut; or B) you have an unconditional right to the money, they don't get to judge your situation, and you won't lose the money if you find paid work.
In addition, the assumption that government will somehow impose its own will against the majority of citizen and cannot be controlled implies that democracy is corrupt, in which case there is no point to debate its policies.
A proper income tax credit system, which adjusts based on income, is also the solution to eliminating the regressive, backward minimum wage approach that simultaneously punishes low skill labor and small businesses the higher you raise it.
It's also vastly superior to the basic income, which is extremely regressive as it gives money to everyone, including the very well-off top 1/3.
This is a bit of a silly conversation. UBI would obviously have to come with a restructuring of the tax levels, so UBI and Negative Income Tax are mostly the same in terms of outcomes. The difference is in presentation.
By the way, negative income tax is not the same as a tax credit. That's quite different, since a tax credit can only be offset against taxes you owe, and is therefore very regressive, since the poor already pay little income taxes.
That is a striking perspective. While I was already hesitant about UBI, I had never considered that it effectively expands the power of the government.
There's no reason that government can't be vastly reduced in a world that is capable of sustaining UBI. The only way UBI works is with massive increases in automation and productivity. At that point, why is a large, powerful government needed?
And further to the point, why can't collection of taxes and distribution of UBI be fully automated, taken away from governments altogether?
No need to completely censor, when you can instead control the direction of the conversation.
Without comments, people go elsewhere to discuss the issue - elsewhere that you don't control. With comments, they discus it on your site, where you can completely control who can say what and how visible those comments are.
Done correctly it's a form of soft censorship by controlling of the discussion and manufacturing consensus among the "commentators".
Hard censorship has more immediate backlash than this does.
A conversation that a moderator can't clean up, does save you from biased and unfriendly moderators.
Something I find a lot of people carelessly shrug off - moderation isn't always a good thing. The act of moderation is, at its essence, censorship. That's a lot of power to be misused by the wrong sort of people.
Than you haven't looked far enough, long enough, whatever. Reddit is an incredible source of information and discussion. It took me a long while to "get it", but I'm an addict now. Just for fun, but there are many serious subreddits with good discussions. It can be problematic to find them, as it's huge.
A good way to organise the good stuff into topics for yourself is via "multireddits", and add high quality subreddits as you discover them.
I have multireddits for tech, cryptocurrencies, DIY, entrepreneurship and so on. You can skim each multireddit for the top content every few days and filter out most of the low quality stuff that way. I learn a lot about interesting web businesses this way that I would have never discovered otherwise for example.
you have no idea how wrong you are, to put it mildly. there are some absolutely fantastic subreddits with quality discussions and stronger moderation than the internet forum you're currently complaining on. check out r/askscience for one example.
The thing I can't stand (rage) is when you see something interesting, then have to trawl through dick jokes, and dank memes.... to find an actual real topic answer to a redditor's interesting question. It winds me up no end!
It's not like it'd be difficult for NYT to have whitelisted commentator accounts run by NYT editors to game their own comment/vote system and drive a false consensus for readers.
Modern media do this every day already with their yellow-journalist hit pieces, biased comments to drive a narrative aren't even a skip away from that.
The thing is that commenting on NYT is limited to paying subscribers so it's not like they need to defend from outside 'raids'.
Then again, I would be shocked if PACs of all flavors didn't have pay groups of subscribers to crash the comments sections of the most prominent publications (NYT, WSJ, etc). Especially during the primaries last year. When you consider the amount of traffic they get, the top comment is valuable thought capital real estate during election season.
Why care how egregious your actions are when the government listens to you and your bags of money, and not the people you're fucking over?