Time Warner Cable is going to start charging its customers extra to download games, watch videos or even update your games. This is going to adversely affect any internet based business, regardless of actual cost to the customer.
Percieved pricing will prevent some customers from using services like Impulse and Steam.
Imagine downloading a "free" 8 GB HD movie and having to pay $8.00 just for downloading it? Yep, it's $1.00 per GB.
Time Warner did a test run of the price gouging effort in a few cities and is now poised to widen its grip nationally.
Locally, a city council member has spoken out against Time Warner, but to what avail?
Leffingwell chastises Time Warner for Internet pricing plan
There's a loophole for some of us. Even though Time Warner has the monopoly on cable and dsl internet service where I live, a secondary provider that uses Time Warner's infrastructure doesn't have to apply the same pricing scheme. I got word from Earthlink this morning that they have no plans to copy Time Warner and that their customers are safe from the price increases. A time Warner customer can simply switch over and still use the exact same infrastructure as before and maintain peace of mind while using the internet. You don't even need to change your cable or DSL modem.
Hopefully, more customers will be able to find secondary providers like Earthlink. I'd suggest that any TW customers switch to whatever secondary provider is in their area before this hits the fan.
Oh yes. Insults. That will get your point across. Bravo. I bet you feel big now.
Just because I won't agree to your narrow definition of monopolies you think you know anything about me? Good luck with that.
Getting back on topic for just a second, check out this site for all the info on TW in Rochester and the other cities:
STOPTHECAP
Unlike most people, where political correctness has a semblance of force in their daily activities, I lack any such brainwashing. A statement of fact is not an insult, people are free to disagree with my findings both on your posts and my view on insults. If I find you ignorant, I state it. You're simple minded in your view of commerce and lack the depth of knowledge even to grasp the situation. You're slinging the term monopoly at the only competitor bothering with a specific, localized, non exclusive market on a substitute luxury good. You're wrong.
You're also normal, the educational system in this country hasn't been worth shitting on for decades, and most of the world is a lot worse when it comes to economics. Politics have replaced economics. People say yay when the government goes after a natural monopoly that's not even a technical monopoly with claims that it's a coercive monopoly on the grounds that packaging software together breaks anti-trust laws when they aren't even marginally related.
If I want to insult you, I'll call you a pinko commie shit for brains idiot, since communism is what you'll end up with in the end.
I'll agree that the notion of a 'natural monopoly' is a bit of a red herring, but then so is a 'true free market.' Both concepts are completely dependent on a larger social context, usually including at least one government, and both are essentially Platonic ideals and not real-world things.
I also think that psychoak is right to do some scoffing about anyone who whines too much about pricing if their only use for broadband is entertainment or personal communication. I very much enjoy my luxuries, but I try never to let them come to feel like necessities.
Those of us who depend on broadband to get our work done, though, might have a bit of room for reasonable complaint against 'excessive' bandwidth fees, especially if we are on a tight budget and don't have the 'luxury' of being able to experiment with questionable alternatives to our local cable modem service. If my ISP started charging $1 per gig for large single file transfers, my cost of doing business would rise significantly and it would 'cost' me time and possible lost business to experiment with the satellite service, which is my only alternative due to the details of my local telephony grid (I'm in an older but non-fancy neighborhood, so no DSL for me so far).
Nope. Stupid science-worshippers trying to pretend that their work is anywhere close to being based on testable, empirical hypotheses killed the lovely old discipline of political economy by halving it into political science and economics. The stories are just nowhere near that clean, not least because they are at heart *stories* and not formulae or construction plans. So we have an Origin of Love soap opera where economics and politics try to pretend they are both The One when in fact they're sadly separated Halves.
I think what Psychoak and I are arguing is that regardless of whether or not you think the new pricing scheme is good or bad, what is wrong is expecting the government to step in and price fix or mandate how Time Warner should run it's business. I have absolutely no problem with boycots, propaganda, slander, etc. What I do have a problem with is my tax dollars going to ruining or running a company, as is so common these days in the US.
Let companies run themselves. If you don't like the way they are doing business then don't do business with them. If you want more options, move to a city with more options. No one is forcing you to live in Podunk, Kentuky where you have no options. You should be happy someone came in to give you internet access at all. If you *really* want to do something about it find some startup broadband provider in your area and support them, even if their prices are higher (due to economies of scale).
Claiming it can't be proven is ridiculous, gravity can't be proven either.
In the words of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Everything else has been proven wrong. Until we come up with something else to eliminate, the free market economy is the only method known to man that might actually work. All others have proven self destructive on a massive scale, even the so called limited intervention.
The power grid in this country is so inefficient that over half the power generation never even makes it to an outlet. It's pissed out of leaky transformers all over the country. That's the buzzing sound in the radio when you're driving past the poles. If the power companies had competing lines from other companies, they'd actually have to maintain them instead of charging twice what the power consumption is worth to make up for the half that's lost. You don't have any idea how utterly fucked you are just because it's been like that. You only notice when something changes for the worse, if it's already a horrific ream job you're oblivious to it and assume the system is functioning. Still worried about your internet?
In honor of 'my friend' psychoak, I have to say: Well, why don't you move to a world where everyone is always able to do whatever is ncessary to achieve their goals--otherwise known as Dreamland.
The problem with you market-worshippers is that you continually discuss markets as if they were the environmental equivalent of gravity or the bipolar water molecule. Markets are fundamentally social, and trying to talk about them as if they could be as consistent as physics or chemistry is just silly.
I'm a lapsed anarchist, which makes me strongly sympathetic to general claims like "let companies run themselves," but I'm a practicing small-d democrat because I accept that I live in a real, specificaly detailed world that demands compromises from everyone who wants to have anything to do with the agora/forum/market/polity/nation/whatever. Whether or not a customer is being 'forced' into anyting in a commodity market like bandwith services, even if it is generally considered a non-essential commodity, is definitely a judgement call; it is not a matter of 'science' or crudely binary rhetoric.
Monopoly or not, we can tip the scales as consumers. I voted with my money and switched to Earthlink. I'm getting the exact same speed and using the exact same cable modem, but I no longer have to face the limits that Time Warner is trying to impose on us. My internet cable bill actually went down from $39.99 for Time Warner to $29.99 for Earthlink and my measured speed went up from 1.5mbps to 2.0 mbps. (I attribute the speed increase to the time of day I tested and not the switch, though. The same infrastructure is most likely going to give the same speed).
It's because of government's intervention that this is even possible for me. Time Warner has to allow Earthlink access to their infrastructure. On the other hand again, it was the local government that gave Time Warner the advantage of a defacto monopoly anyway, with their city contract. Once the metropolis of Austin sold the right of way to Time Warner, the other two cable companies in Austin and the surrounding towns went under. It's a two edged sword.
Whether you agree with government intervention or not, you still likely have a choice similar to mine. If Time Warner is the only cable provider and there is no DSL in your area, there's more than likely a secondary provider that you can switch to. Doing so will send the message to Time Warner that we as customers are not pleased.
Bring the company to its knees and boycott the service. Either that or don't download much. Contact customer service and drive them up the wall. If African Americans can live without bus service in the wake of the heroic action taken by Rosa Parks, you can live without internet except what is absoutely needed for a job, etc.
Fight or complain, your choice.
Just because you live in a world that doesn't have any free markets doesn't mean you can't strive and fight to get closer to that (instead of further away). While I would definately like a Free Market in the world I also understand that there aren't any but I still vote on things that push us a little closer to a free market instead of a little away. I also pointlessly argue on random internet forums and IRC channels for changes that put us closer to a free market, instead of pushing us away in hopes that even a single other person will join me in voting against socialism in the future, or perhaps take up arms in some far off revolution.
Just because you live in a broken world doesn't mean you should actually argue to make it worse. All I'm trying to do is persuade people (0 or more) to let companies run themselves. I'm not expecting things to change because of my arguments but the theory is that if enough people are educated about a better alternative eventually things will change. Unfortunately, most people are not properly educated on the subject and thus the reason we are going down the path towards socialism (which, according to Marx, leads to communism).
Ironically, if people get their way and cable companies don't do something about their broken pricing model everyone will end up in a worse off situation in the long run: no broadband or government subsidized broadband (meaning little/no growhth).
I am a Republican conservative, but I see the limitations of the free market. Complete unfettered free market capitalism leads to Time Warner's current atrocity, similar to how the various tycoons of past lore worked children to death for pennies a day in payment. Some Government intrusion to lay the smack down on greedy companies is necessary, the key is a happy balance. Lately, government has been a little too intrusive for my liking, but Time Warner ought to be put in their place.
AMEN!!!!!!!!!!!
Am I the only one who finds this hilarious?
If you're the only shmuck on this forum that doesn't know gravity is a theory, yes you are. Since there are plenty of utter morons on this planet that share such an education, you're probably not. There are problems in the theory of gravity that we've as yet been unable to surmount. It may be wrong entirely. When they figure out why their numbers keep coming up wrong on slingshot mechanics and why the pioneer space craft aren't moving fast enough, we'll have a better idea.
It's nice that you use the word lore. That's about all it is. Child labor atrocities are a work of fiction. Children have worked since the dawn of time. When a kid was working with his family on the family farm or in the family store, no one gave a shit. They still don't. The only thing that changed was the rise of industry. When they were doing things like beating children, or practicing forced labor, they were doing criminal acts. Crime is crime.
I have yet to see an actual instance of Government laying the smackdown on a greedy company for anything that wasn't criminal in the first place. I have seen them put people out of work and into homeless shelters so they weren't paid an "unfair" wage, destroy the best companies around because they were too good and took out all their competition, and, most commonly, reverse their own actions and turn on the monopolies they themselves created when it was no longer politically expedient to support them. Naturally it's always an evil corporation that's the target.
Time-Warner is a dying company. They're losing money on the cable networks, lots and lots of money. Jacking the price up is a last ditch effort to survive. Satellite is wiping out their customer base for television, and Fios and wireless are butchering an already crumbling infrastructure that's ten years too old. If they really are reaming their customers, competition will come in to make money off the circumstances and wipe them out for good. If they aren't, you're paying a reasonable price for the service and you get to either accept it or drop it.
Cool. That makes exactly 3 of us in the ToE AFAIK. I knew there was a reason I liked you.
+1 karma.
So the fact that the numbers are wrong, regardless of by how much, proves that the effect doesn't exist?
There are instances where the military modifier of 2.1022411 doesn't give me the exact military might that it should in GC2. Sometimes it's lower, and sometimes it's actually higher. Does this mean there is no modifier?
No, it means there's something unexplained in the current theory of gravity. The current theory is merely a working approximation based on observed effects with no solid theory behind why those numbers are what they are. Add in the fact that no one can completely explain how gravity works at the quantum level, and there's plenty of room for newer theories to supercede the current one. Gravity is easy to observe, damn hard to prove.
If u really must know its just greed and a way for them to limit people from the internet. they are trying to get rid of "net nuetrallity" (AND YES THAT IS REALL) wich means one that is free of restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed, as well as one where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams.and this is what Time Warner is doing - telecom companies seek to impose a tiered service model more for the purpose of profiting from their control of the pipeline rather than for any demand for their content or services.
If I could ascertain what psychoak's earlier comment was in response to, I might at this point be able to try to refute it. As I can't, I simply found it humorous that he compared gravity, which by all accounts we have a fair approximation of, quantum effects notwithstanding, to economics (at least, I think that's what he compared it to), which by all accounts it appears we do not have a fair approximation of. Except for those who think a truly free market can solve all of their problems-oh, it appears I've found what we were arguing about after all.
and on the gravity thing, It is just a theory, just the most excepted one. just like the big bang theory is just a theory. if space is infinit with finite matter in it then isnt space finite, if there is no matter to measure space then there is no space. or is there? lol.like the theory of space, its forever but no one knows, some assume it is because if it ends then there has to be something behind it that goes on forever doesnt it? and to me space is the absence of matter, as black is the absence of color. and i can have my own theorys, as we all can. so u cant actually prove me wrong or u wright on the space thing. they are just theorys.
The internet is a very busy place these days, which is why I would like to thank the inventors of the word "Socialism."
Any time you see it used, you know that there's a 95% chance that the person using it can safely be ignored, as they have no real idea what they are talking about, and are simply using it as a funny little noise to indicate something that they dislike.
The ratio of "things which are actually Socialism" to "things which get called Socialism" is roughly 1:32000 on the internet.
Or perhaps you're just a flaming retard like most of humanity and can't objectively view your own opinions. Minimum wages laws are socialism, the redistributive tax structure and welfare programs are socialism. Any method of redistributing wealth to provide a more even distribution, is socialism.
If you're waiting for a top down command economy before you'll accept the label, you need to read more. When you get that far, they call it communism. Of course, liberal idiots are scared of being labeled socialist after Hitler and Stalin gave it such a bad name, so you'll probably remain in denial.
And you're such a model of dispassionate self-critique.
Like nearly any label that achieves widespread use in political arguments, socialism is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. IMO, the rhetorical essence of Ray Radlein's reply 122 is accurate, but so is psychoak's point about a progressive tax scheme. My own notion of socialism requires public ownership of some production or distribution system, e.g. the US Interstate system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, or the Hoover Dam. We've had partial socialization since Ben Franklin got the postal roads going, and it seems like we have a solid majority who are comfortable with everything about partial socialism except calling it by that name.
Well, the complaints won't matter. TWC is expecting short-term losses from this, to get long-term gains at consumer expense.
There is the alternative of other services, so you wouldn't have to boycott the internet.
I'd suggest boycotting TW's other products as well- if you're a comic reader- throw DC away, Time magazine, etc.
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