US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1420

On November 11 2014 09:36 GreenHorizons wrote:

Lol "lottery" is just a euphemism now.

Oregon now has slot machines called 'video lottery machines'. They aren't any more benign than Vegas slots. With messages like :"BET MAX to WIN MORE!" Even though the only practical way to win is to walk away/not play. Statistically you can't 'win' only lose more or less slowly if you continue to play.

If you are going to have a lottery or gambling in addition to listing the odds and payouts they should list the number of losers vs winners (people who took more from the lottery than it took from them). When people realized that virtually no one actually 'wins' they might be able to make more rational decisions.

The state shouldn't advertise or try to convince people to gamble period. Which is exactly what is happening now.

On November 11 2014 09:41 GreenHorizons wrote:


You do realize that without Net Neutrality the internet will still change?

Sites like TL may have to pay more just to maintain it's current speeds. Not to mention it would make sites like Twitch more expensive to maintain as they use a lot of bandwidth.

It would effectively destroy any chance of a smaller up and coming stream site from competing with twitch as it would take an investment not currently required. The same goes for Netflix and sites like Tumblr.

your pr0n would have more adds or cost more money, and plenty of other impacts. So please don't think that without the government the internet would work the same as it does now.

In addition Comcast (or another provider) could start charging you surcharges to access specific sites or just block them all together.

On November 11 2014 10:03 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Different states do different things, sure. You're arguing a lot of opinion here. You don't like gambling so the government shouldn't be promoting something you don't like. Others think it's fine or fun so they think it's convenient revenue source.

Not sure why listing 'winners vs losers' is functionally different from odds and payouts. Gambling is a net loss, and you shouldn't really need to know more than that to make a decision. You should either play because you think its fun or you don't play at all.

On November 11 2014 09:45 farvacola wrote:
"states hold too little power"

There are many, many voters in the Midwest, at the very least in Michigan and Ohio, that could not disagree with this statement more. At the very heart of the higher ed spending bubble problem is the hilarious amount of discretionary control state legislatures exercise over public universities; whenever anyone looks at the administrative and financial bloat that is getting put on in the name of education, we all know what a states rights conservative is going to point to. "Federal government loans," they'll say, "look at all the money they waste on ill-conceived federal intervention in the provision of an education!"

But wait a second, who exactly creates these loans bills in the first place? One may think that the universities and their unfettered, Federal-fed appetites are what dictate the terms of the millions of these financial agreements, but you'd be wrong. In the vast majority of states, legislatures are what create tuition policy in addition to playing a number of other administrative roles in supervising state-run higher education. Those areas that instead fall under the management of a university's board of trustees become safe-havens from the remote governance of partisan state legislatures, and that's why you'll see so many public universities (both of the schools I've gone to, Ohio State and Michigan State, are great examples of this) pile on building endowments and athletic investments willy nilly.

Nevertheless, state governing bodies possess a great degree of control over one of the largest industries in the United States, that being higher education, and there are numerous examples of how this authority has been routinely bungled by increasingly partisan legislatures, from Ohio to Washington, that simply don't have the expertise necessary to administrate many of the systems of which they are tasked. Furthermore, when hard-boiled partisanry is the inevitable replacement for the missing expertise, can you really fault those that are actually getting their hands dirty (sorta lol), those being school administrations, for unfairly reaching on spending in order to retain some degree of autonomy over the organization they were supposed to run in the first place? It is precisely the state's degree of control over the administration of services like education that puts some of our system's worst faults on display.

The United States must soon come to terms with its geography or the state vs. federalism debate is only going to get worse.

On November 11 2014 10:18 GreenHorizons wrote:


And it's not benign... What matters is that gambling helps destroy peoples lives. I don't think it should be banned, but I do think the state shouldn't spend millions trying to talk it's citizens into doing it. (Would anyone be ok with the state paying for Alcohol or Cannabis commercials just because they think it is benign and lucrative? Oh and also prohibit anyone else from doing it?)

Moreover, it's f'd to sell them 'winning'. I'd be fine if gambling advertisements focused on the 'fun' and not dreaming about what you would do with your (unfathomably unlikely [almost impossible to obtain]) 'winnings'.

But those are the reasons the Lottery or gambling 'works'. Because too many people don't think it is about fun they think it is a ticket out of poverty (or their station in life), that only takes "A dollar and a dream". Some old guy at slot said it best "I'm going to go bankrupt if I keep winning"

For slot machines simply marking a $10 bet that returns $4 as a $6 loss instead of a $4 win (who else could possibly get away with such false advertisement?) would go a long way in helping people understand what gambling really is.

On November 11 2014 09:45 farvacola wrote:
"states hold too little power"

There are many, many voters in the Midwest, at the very least in Michigan and Ohio, that could not disagree with this statement more. At the very heart of the higher ed spending bubble problem is the hilarious amount of discretionary control state legislatures exercise over public universities; whenever anyone looks at the administrative and financial bloat that is getting put on in the name of education, we all know what a states rights conservative is going to point to. "Federal government loans," they'll say, "look at all the money they waste on ill-conceived federal intervention in the provision of an education!"

But wait a second, who exactly creates these loans bills in the first place? One may think that the universities and their unfettered, Federal-fed appetites are what dictate the terms of the millions of these financial agreements, but you'd be wrong. In the vast majority of states, legislatures are what create tuition policy in addition to playing a number of other administrative roles in supervising state-run higher education. Those areas that instead fall under the management of a university's board of trustees become safe-havens from the remote governance of partisan state legislatures, and that's why you'll see so many public universities (both of the schools I've gone to, Ohio State and Michigan State, are great examples of this) pile on building endowments and athletic investments willy nilly.

Nevertheless, state governing bodies possess a great degree of control over one of the largest industries in the United States, that being higher education, and there are numerous examples of how this authority has been routinely bungled by increasingly partisan legislatures, from Ohio to Washington, that simply don't have the expertise necessary to administrate many of the systems of which they are tasked. Furthermore, when hard-boiled partisanry is the inevitable replacement for the missing expertise, can you really fault those that are actually getting their hands dirty (sorta lol), those being school administrations, for unfairly reaching on spending in order to retain some degree of autonomy over the organization they were supposed to run in the first place? It is precisely the state's degree of control over the administration of services like education that puts some of our system's worst faults on display.

The United States must soon come to terms with its geography or the state vs. federalism debate is only going to get worse.

On November 11 2014 09:48 Nyxisto wrote:
I think "more government" is a really inaccurate term. I think it makes way more sense to distinguish between "wide government" as in many regulations, connections between politics and companies etc.. and strong but narrow government, like redistribution, or law-making regarding a specific problem or something like that. Net neutrality is not "government creeping into the awesome market" it only means that every package on the internet is supposed to be treated exactly the same. It's a single very simple thing that actually stops a lot of crap that could happen if there is no net neutrality.

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On November 11 2014 11:27 Nyxisto wrote:
The government is not getting more regulative power over the internet. How is a law that tells every isp to treat all the information the same and not,for example, charge companies or end users for specific services, empowering the government? The government isn't even getting involved besides making a law.

On November 11 2014 13:50 Danglars wrote:
This isn't a law. I mean for fuck's sakes are you even aware of what's going on? It's Obama pressuring or directing an agency of the US government to reclassify the net in order to regulate it like a public utility. It is not our legislative body crafting a new law that declares all traffic the same. Pretending otherwise is either ignorant or deceptive.

On November 11 2014 13:50 Danglars wrote:
This isn't a law. I mean for fuck's sakes are you even aware of what's going on? It's Obama pressuring or directing an agency of the US government to reclassify the net in order to regulate it like a public utility. It is not our legislative body crafting a new law that declares all traffic the same. Pretending otherwise is either ignorant or deceptive.

On November 11 2014 13:50 Danglars wrote:
This isn't a law. I mean for fuck's sakes are you even aware of what's going on? It's Obama pressuring or directing an agency of the US government to reclassify the net in order to regulate it like a public utility. It is not our legislative body crafting a new law that declares all traffic the same. Pretending otherwise is either ignorant or deceptive.

On November 11 2014 15:31 IgnE wrote:
It's silly to even talk about privatizing internet providers. No one can own the network, and pretending to "privatize" a natural monopoly like an internet network is an insult to society. As it is we have leeches sucking rents from customers for use of a network they mostly didn't lay.