Net Neutrality and the Gullible

Ciaran Laval responded to my criticism of his post regarding Net Neutrality in the previous article’s comments. Ciaran opposes the coming proposed Pia-change in the FCC Internet regulation. There is lots to talk about. See which of us you agree with.

The magic of unicorns

The magic of unicorns

I still am not sure Ciaran has read through the FCC document to which the media is reacting. He quotes a point from the FCC’s Myth vs Fact sheet, an accompanying document. I strongly suggest you read it. Ciaran’s one chosen ‘myth’ from 14:

Broadband providers will charge you a premium if you want to reach certain online content.

What are they saying? Is this the idea that the ISP’s will charge you more to access Netflix or Hulu? Has anyone ever seen their ISP make such an offer or place such a limit on your service? No. It has never happened.

Ciaran continues quoting from Myth vs Fact:

This didn’t happen before the Obama Administration’s 2015 heavy-handed Internet regulations, and it won’t happen after they are repealed.

Ciaran calls the last part a statement of hope. But, consider. The fact is it did not happen before Obama started trying to put the Internet under government control. But, is the ‘won’t happen’ with a return to a free market Internet just wishful thinking? Or is there something to base it on?

What we know…

There is a saying, “The only thing we learn from history is we don’t learn from history.” That is a paraphrase of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ‘s comment, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” In a longer comment he said, “What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”

A more telling quote of Hegel’s I like is, “To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.

The quotes don’t mean we can’t learn from history. There are people that do learn from history. We have 6,000+ years of written history. We know what freedom, the free market, and competitive commerce generate. Humans haven’t changed in any significant way in all that time.

So, the forces that keep the Internet growing and prices dropping as speed and quality improved before 2015 will still be in place. So, the ‘hope’ is a well-founded belief and a very probable result.

We also know that government regulation drives up prices, unfairly. The ‘unfairly’ being that because rich and poor have different spending patterns government regulation will affect those groups differently.

A 2016 study of government regulation on prices by Dustin Chambers, Professor of Economics, Salisbury University, titled: How Do Federal Regulations Affect Consumer Prices? shows Poorer Households Spend More on More Heavily Regulated Goods and government regulation drives prices up. Check their methodology before you try and disagree.

More… link below.

What is Net Neutrality in 2017?

Ciaran Laval is on about Net Neutrality and the coming December 14th meeting of the FCC. Ciaran buys into to the mainstream media viewpoint things are getting worse with the pending rules change. I see it the other way. I take a long view and consider the principals that debatably created the greatest economic engine in history, the free market.

Cave Mushrooms

Cave Mushrooms

Ciaran sees current efforts in the FCC as something out of a “dystopian novel”. Well, if we were talking Atlas Shrugged I would agree, but we aren’t.

Quoting Ciaran,

The proposal is not consumer friendly, and consumers are letting the FCC know that. The proposal is not being welcomed by many tech companies and is a glaring example of how officials ignore consumers and fail to serve the public.

Is the proposal ‘consumer friendly’ or not? The answer depends on what you know about the proposal and the principals of the free market. On a purely personal, short-term basis the uninformed will think not. A deeper understanding of the free market gives us the clue that competition is always better for the consumer. Continue reading

San Antonio Church Shooting

This injustice brings up the ongoing gun control debate. Everyone wants to stop these acts of violence. But, to do that we need to know the cause of violence.

In the middle ages (1330 AD) when the Black death swept the world killing 60+% of the population the list of most of the preventives and cures were things we consider silly; Aromatherapy, Religion, Rotten Treacle, Live In a Sewer, Let Leeches Suck You Dry, Eat a Spoon of Crushed Emeralds, Wash Yourself With Urine, Smear Yourself With Human Poop, Rub Your Wounds With a Live Chicken, and Kill Jews.

However, they did come up with the idea of quarantine. Unfortunately, they did not understand fleas and rats also needed to be blocked.

Now we understand about bacterial and viral diseases and how they spread. So, we will most likely be able to control the current Madagascar outbreak of pneumonic plague, which is air born and can kill in 24 hours.

But, we obviously aren’t able to control the violence we are seeing in Las Vegas and San Antonio. Continue reading

Protesting in Second Life

Hamlet has run a couple of articles about fat chicks protesting a store with the sign ‘No Fat Chicks’. (Link) Everyone commenting seems to think this is a serious ‘body shaming’ issue.

Hamlet made an effort to avoid promoting the store with The Sign, ‘No Fat Chicks’. But, the brand name is visible in the images he used so it doesn’t take long to figure out which store is being talked about, Back to Graceful.

The Protest

It is hard to tell how the protest is going. Hamlet saw a bunch of people protesting. This morning there are 2 and they show as AFK. I suppose protests are boring…

Reading the articles and the follow-on comments, no one talks about basic principles or philosophical ideals. Seems most espouse narcissistic arrogance, situational ethics, and personal preferences. Protesters never seem overly bright to me. Emotional, yes. Activists seem to hold the brain trust. But, what’s the difference? Continue reading

The Challenge of the Ignorant

Hamlet has an article about those that think Linden Lab® stopped updating Second Life™ and that the recent announcement of ‘millions’ being invested in Second Life this coming year is proof Sansar is failing and the Lab is ‘desperately’ returning to support SL. (Reference)

If you follow Second Life’s development news, this probably sounds ridiculous. It is.

‘Trust me… SL is dying… horribly… heheheha’

But, I see this idea, that development of Second Life has stopped, coming up in several places. August 1, Cindy Kraai posted Will LL have any plans upgrading SL after Sansar beta? Cindy has been around since May 2010, that’s 7+ years. Yet, she has no clue what is happening with Second Life development. Reading through the thread I find the amount of misinformation and ignorance amazing, not surprising.

Then there are those that are so sorry for poor newbies that have no money ($L). (Reference) They feel these newbies should somehow be helped. You see people quickly divide into the victim (or the ‘they’ are victims you [, not me] have to do something) versus self-reliant (DIY) groups on this subject. Continue reading

Second Life – Copybot Viewer Debate

In case there is ANYONE in Second Life™ that doesn’t know what Copybot Viewers are, they are viewers made from the open source viewers, Linden and third-party, that have been altered to ignore Permissions. A person can use them to download ANYTHING… ANYTHING in Second Life.

There are hot issues in SL that carry loads of emotional energy. The issue of content theft, copyboting, is one of them.

At the last Content Creation UG meeting the subject of content theft, what the Lab does about it, and what CAN be done about it came up. It was a surprisingly calm and somewhat intelligent conversation. Still, the resident thief really annoyed me. Listen/watch the video. (60+ minutes) There are time marks for the various topics in the index below (last page) if you want to find just the juicy parts.

This video is from the last few minutes of Content Creation UG meeting of June 27, 2017. It then contuse for another 45+ minutes after the meeting.

The subject of content theft came up when Brooke Barmy asked the question,

“What is being done about the increase in marketplace copybot accounts, the reasoning behind not banning on the first offense, the reasoning behind not IP banning and the reasoning behind not taking [confiscating] the money back to Linden Lab?  Continue reading

How to Save a Digital Copy of Your Soul…

That is a ‘double take’ inspiring line. For a couple of days, people have been writing about M.I.T.’s project to make digital copies of people that can look and speak like the person. Of course, it is hype based people’s curiosity.

M.I.T. has developed an amalgam of technology that allows the creation of an avatar that looks and sounds like a specific person. (Example) But, that is about it.

See Technology Review’s How to Save Your Digital Soul.

From CG Cookie Tutorial – Click

Second Life has been doing the ‘looks’ part for years. The voice part is new tech. Prior voice imitation was about almost only pitch and word speed. The new tech controls pronunciation, word choice, cadence, and the other factors that make voices recognizable as a specific person. The idea is to have more AI interacting with people. Sort of a replacement for customer service people.

In psychology, the idea of the soul is self-aware life. Figuring these things out gets complicated because we can’t know what another person experiences. There is the challenge of whether the color you perceive as red is the same perception I have.

All your life you have looked at a color people call red. So, you too call it red. We can measure the frequency of the color we all agree is red. The color-blind show us that we are not all perceiving the color the same. For me, there is a huge difference between a bright green and bright red. That isn’t true for the color-blind, as the colors are nearly the same.

We can’t know what color others actually perceive. So, how do we know when another person or creature is self-aware? Are animals self-aware? If so, do they have souls?

Some concepts are just hard to define.