The Left consists of two groups of people running on two parallel yet very different paths to Oblivion.
The Left’s leadership knows their Huge Government ideas are absurd and don’t work – but they’ll be in charge after the collapse they induce so they’re fine with it.
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · Featured · Internet/Telecom · Liberty · Regulation · Taxes
Since the Internet itself has no one “location,” it would be difficult to create a simple set of tax rules for items bought and sold. Rather than make it complex and add to the mix of confusing tax policies that already dominate American life, we should continue to shop and sell unabridged from government interference.
Digital learning – the combination of online adaptive testing and instruction made possible by new technologies, software, and the internet – is beginning to transform K-12 education.
The Internet peering marketplace works exceptionally well and it has for its entire twenty year history. The unparalleled success, growth, and resiliency of the unregulated model for the Internet backbone peering marketplace has been nothing short of phenomenal in enabling and ensuring everyone reasonable access to the Internet.
Economics · Featured · Government · Liberty
It is a rare occurrence when Hollywood produces a film that neither glorifies the welfare-warfare state, nor vilifies capitalists and businessmen. Yet that is exactly what Marvel Studios has managed with the Iron Man series. In the character of Tony Stark we see the pinnacle of the capitalist fantasy: an ingenious businessman who values property rights and self-defense, and who does not compromise those fundamental rights in the face of government intimidation and force.
Economics · Featured · Science
Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor, while not a household name, has been recognized by the scientific community many times over the years. The metric system unit for magnetic field strength, for example, is known as the tesla. Tesla made many contributions to various sciences over the years, including pioneering work in magnetic fields, induction motors, and electricity. In recent years, various communities on the Internet have sought to lionize Tesla’s life and to expand knowledge of his scientific achievements. This goal is a noble one, as Tesla’s life is frequently reduced to the position of footnote in science histories. But these communities have also engaged in a very wrong-headed pursuit: trashing the reputation of Thomas Edison.
Featured · Government · Liberty · Politics
It began as the idea of one eccentric entrepreneur, but now has 1.3 million signatories backing it: the case for breaking California up into six separate states is gathering steam. When the Six Californias campaign began, most serious commentators thought it was crackpot scheme, a pipe-dream of a few people that had no hope of gaining traction. They have been proved wrong. To an extent anyway.
Featured · Internet/Telecom · Legal Affairs
According to data released this week, Samsung and Apple make up the majority of the top 20 global smartphone models sold in the first quarter of 2014. While that success demonstrates the robust market prowess of these smartphone manufacturers, the real winners are the customers, getting more services, better products and lower prices. Almost the exact opposite happens when companies resort to lawsuits to gain market advantage, a sort of rent seeking via the courts.
The FCC has asserted a foundational regulatory premise that warrants rebuttal and disproving, given that the FCC is considering if Internet access, and Internet backbone peering, should be regulated like a utility under Title II telephone common carrier regulation.
This morning the House Judiciary Committee will undertake the markup of the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act. The Act would protect consumers from the increased costs in accessing and using the Internet by permanently extending the moratorium on Internet access taxes, and would prevent multiple and discriminatory taxation of Internet sales.
Featured · Government · Regulation
The state of Virginia has stepped up its attack on ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft. It’s just the latest example of crony capitalism and government favoritism toward the wealthy and powerful.
Featured · Government · Science · Taxes
The benefits of government-funded university research are not shared widely enough in society, with universities retaining full ownership, for the most part, of their academic work. This means they get to profit from the government-funded research, and rarely have to share it with the taxpayers. By mandating that the research it spends so much taxpayer money on enter the public sphere, the government can more effectively spread the benefits of its own largesse and do its duty to all its citizens to provide them with the full benefit of what it produces with their tax money.
With more than $155 billion in debt and a projected annual deficit $3 billion in 2015, Illinois has certainly proven it can spend like Nero. Now Chicago is inviting the state to allow it to turn to increasingly more discriminatory and greater confiscatory heights of tax on mobile broadband.
The Media Marxist Left pushing the terrible Internet policy known as Network Neutrality oft are absurdly called “consumer groups.”
Net neutrality activists succeeded last week in getting the FCC to officially consider ruling that private broadband companies should be price and profit regulated like public utilities in order to[…]
The all-encompassing government-Internet-power-grab that is Network Neutrality rarely gets outside-the-Tech-World media attention. But Thursday the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted in Democrat Party-line fashion to begin its process of imposing it. This was a big enough deal that it garnered over-the-weekend Big Media coverage from ABC (with a Bloomberg assist) and PBS (with a Washington Post assist).
In the 1980s I devoted a lot of effort to debunking a torrent of Green lies about pesticides and herbicides. This was before the Greens latched onto “global warming” which has since become “climate change” and the subject of a recent White House report filled with dire predictions of planetary doom and disaster.
My husband and I couldn’t compete with the new computers in the children’s area. Each time our little people refocused their attention on reading, some beep or boop would emanate from the screens, and they were distracted.
I confess that I am more than a bit mystified at the way FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and his Democrat colleagues, seemingly, are moving ever closer in the direction of embracing a Title II reclassification of Internet access services. No matter how loud the banging of pots and pans outside the FCC’s headquarters, it would be terribly unsound as a matter of policy to subject Internet services to the same Title II public utility regulatory regime that applied to last century’s POTS (“plain old telephone”) service.
Given the avalanche of misinformation and manufactured hysteria by net neutrality proponents over the FCC’s proposed rulemaking to make the FCC’s Open Internet Order comply with the Appeals Court Verizon v. FCC decision, AT&T’s FCC filing here (and below) is a welcome and much-needed total debunking of the call for Title II reclassification of broadband.
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