Sometimes the cronys win, sometimes the cronys lose. They’re reportedly winning on STELA, the bill that scared entrenched, well-connected TV broadcasters because it as going to make them compete for cable dollars in a way that they never have had to in 70s-era winners-and-losers regulations. It’s still likely a good bill, but just not the pro-market bill it could have been.
The good news is the cronys are reportedly losing in Colorado, as entrenched taxi services are feeling the threat from new, innovative competitors. Let the customers decide, not government.
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ACU and other normally small-government types have bafflingly come out against the satellite TV bill STELA, and Steve Scalise’s efforts to enact Retransmission Consent reform, a cable idea first proposed jointly with Jim DeMint. This is wrong, and this is a strange supporting of laws that pick winners and losers.
You see, back in the 70s when Cable TV started to take off, broadcasters and socialists alike freaked out. Broadcasters because they were faced with competition for eyeballs where they previously had a monopoly, and socialists because it offended that someone might actually pay for TV. So they teamed up to rig the system, passing laws and regulations that prevented an open market for many broadcasts, instead creating territorial monopolies for broadcasters. These regulations have let the broadcasters get fat and happy (see also Aereo).
Pass retransmission consent reform. Supporters say without reform we “simulate” a free market, and to reform would harm “content producers.” This turns the truth on its head. Broadcasters are overpaid, underworked middlemen with government-manufactured monopolies. They produce nothing but just happen to hold a government license to spectrum. Make ’em compete. And certainly never make satellite providers buy from a propagandist like The Weather Channel.
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Remember during the height of the Edward Snowden media frenzy, how his defenders would dutifully parrot every word RT said about him? Here’s your great Snowden defender now. RT and Snowden are the enemies of liberty, peace, and the United States of America.
Bitcoin is the fantasy tool of ideologues, the 21st century version of Goldbuggery, but there turns out to be a group even more ridiculous than the Bitcoin zealots: TSA agents.
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Started a new job officially this week, which means I personally have a new day to day schedule. This is going to be an adjustment. I’ll hopefully have a minimal disruption of Tech, but we’ll see at first.
Remember how Edward Snowden kept claiming that he was just protecting American privacy and exposing NSA overreach? That’s a lie. The fact is, Snowden is not reliable and it’s a shame NSA mistakenly trusted him.
Yet another Bitcoin site has shut down due to the rampant theft in the Bitcoin community.
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It’s very interesting how effective Edward Snowden’s pro-Russian propaganda has been in some countries. In some countries WhatsApp is being fled in favor of a Russian app. I guess the world is more worried about NSA than “gay rights” or political prisoners, eh? That’s an effective scam, right there.
Netflix uses a lot of bandwidth, and if they start broadcasting 4k movies, then that amount is going to go up. It’s a lot of one-way bandwidth, too. There’s no interchange of data going to and from users. It’s all being piped out. So the traditional concept of ‘peering’ where two Internet companies connect for free to send data both ways, really doesn’t make sense. Thus, Netflix is owning up and making deals to cover that bandwidth. More deals are likely coming. This is good news, as it means realistic investments in Internet infrastructure to make sure we all have enough room for the data we download. The fact that the Net Neuties are shrieking hysterically about this just proves what I was saying all along: Net Neutrality was all about trying to socialize the Internet.
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Anarchy update: The black marketeers at Silk Road 2 got robbed for a Bitcoin amount worth over $2 million at current exchange rates. Iran shut down another black market ring, Germany and the Netherlands have joined the global hunt to shut down Silk Road and spinoffs. Keep in mind these online black markets are used for drugs, hired killings, child pornography, human sex trafficking, and anything else you can think of that’s a problem in society. They try to say “Oh it’s just pot,” but it’s not. It never is.
In another bad sign for digital currencies. another prominent digital currency, Dogecoin, is experiencing a major glitch that threatens to disrupt commerce or even take people’s money away from them. Why do people tolerate all the volatility and instability of digital currencies? Easy: it lets them evade the law. That’s it. That’s why these things are going anywhere at all, because they’re a magnet for the scum of the earth.
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Sometimes you just know somebody needs primaried. Wednesday I learned of a member of Congress who’s clearly only in the House because daddy was in the House before him, and he’s using the influence he has out a personal sense of entitlement. That’s clearly why Bill Shuster wants to ban phones on planes, despite both the OBama FCC and FAA thinking it’s a good idea to let the market decide this. Shuster was first elected in 2001. He needs a refresher on what happened in 2001, that would make us consider why passengers on planes may want that option, and why we should let Mister Market figure it out, instead of a blanket ban.
Look we get it, he’s big important man and he flies on planes often, and so he wants to order the airlines to do what he wants, because that’s what he thinks the perk of being the son of a Congressman is. But that’s why we need to defeat his bill, and defeat him in the primary.
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Even the Glenns Greenwald now admits that NSA work leads to dead terrorists. We come to the true agenda of Edward Snowden and his accomplices: hindering America and aiding our enemies.
It’s a real shame that the NSA was apparently pretty insecure. Fortunately it sounds like he would fail today.
Bitcoiners have even been scamming their allies, Mt. Gox.
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5 hour power outage Friday. Threw my whole day off, as you might imagine. I don’t even know whose fault it was: my apartment building’s or Dominion Power’s.
Apple cut Bitcoin from the App Store.. Bitcoiners are responding like a combination of spoiled children and offended followers of a religion. Wait until they find out that Russia is banning bitcoin and Florida is going after Bitcoin money laundering.
Bitcoin and crime go hand in hand. Mt. Gox is now preparing to rip off its users once and for all, it seems. Mt. Gox is the Magic: the Gathering Online eXchange, a site originally founded to trade collectible game cards, but now trades Bitcoins. Also, organized drug dealers are looking at Bitcoin.
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How about some FCC? Some bad Net Neutrality laws are being proposed, attempting to save the terrible idea. Meanwhile Dean Heller is trying some targeted FCC process reform in the Senate. That’s great.
So, Retransmission Consent. You know what happens when you rig the system to limit competition, as the Congress and the FCC did in the early days of Cable? Broadcasters raking in the bucks. Never would I say that copyright should be attacked, but that price to license these broadcasts should be dictated by the open market. Let broadcasters compete.
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