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[Micro102]

Capitalism shouldn't touch any necessities for life. Imagine a bellcurve of people who can afford X price of something. Now since cutting off the bottom 1% is such a tiny sliver of the population, and getting to charge the other 99% 1% more money, it's a clear choice for any capitalist to make. More capital. However if that thing is food, or housing, or medicine, then that means 1% of the population simply dies so that capitalist can make money.

So think about that when you see someone argue that all we need is the free market.

[MaxTheFox]

Semi-planned-economy market socialism is my preferred economic model. Small businesses are OK and can stay, there's no harm to society if someone wants to start a shop down the street for example. Megacorps should get the axe in all/most cases, however.

[Duuvian]

Cable companies don’t tend to service rural areas (or are otherwise very expensive) because they’re rural areas. All their shit is based in cities because that’s where the most customers are, in terms of density (so you can get more customers for the same lines) and numbers.

It costs money to build shit from there to service far away places, where there are fewer people in less dense concentrations, so it’s harder to recoup costs.

It’s not because they hate rural places or people, they just can’t make money there.

If I remember correctly, cable laying is subsidized by the federal government since cable television was seen as a desirable industry to spread in the '60s or whatever while the start up costs were prohibitive and led to extremely high customer cost. Unfortunately this has evolved over further lobbying to essentially funding regional monopolies, as the federal government doesn't claim ownership over the laid cables, access to which are then controlled by the cable layer despite the federal subsidies. My source for that was an Adam Ruins Everything episode which could be out of date by now. A different source says that expansion of wire and replacement by fibre optic lines has been hindered by corporate shenanigans after taking the funding for expansions. It also said a new scheme of replacing wired connections with 5g service (for pay metered data on top instead of just service fees) may be in the works. That source I found the last time I did some reading on the issue and is here:

http://irregulators.org/bookofbrokenpromises/
I can't vouch for credibility since to be honest I haven't printed out the free pdf of the book that can be found at that link and placed it within grabbing distance of my Porceline Reading Throne yet. After a skim of the pdf back then it seemed legit at first glance so I kept a digital copy for later reading but I haven't read it.

Anyways let's give the USPS a trillion monies to build high speed internet everywhere because in the modern world that's a necessity too.

I think a new red-headed step-agency like Amtrak (assuming the Supreme Court hasn't decided on Federal Agency status; last I read in case law was that Amtrak's status as [not] an agency was disputed between US Circuit jurisdictions the last time I read on the subject about 4 or 5 years ago) would be better for consumers, as long as it opened up access to the laid cable to competition. That kind of (not) agency has it's own set of issues in that some rules regarding federal agency do not apply while still being largely or completely government funded as well as corruption concerns that pop up now and then, but it may be better than very limited competition if not monopoly in regions for internet services, I am not knowledgeable enough to say for sure.. There also may be security concerns as IIRC in some places that have open wires for competition had questionable ISPs arise on the open wires, notably relating to foreign (to the place in question) government affiliation/access to some degree that I can't recall.

[Egan_BW]

Competition through the same laid cable? How does that make sense?

[Starver]

Competition through the same laid cable? How does that make sense?

Not sure how energy companies (mains electricity/gas(-the-actual-gas-not-gasoline)) work in the US, but I can choose my 'energy provider' to whom I pay my bills[1] but it's the same national-grid pipes/cables coming into my home. As it can be with POTS, and the copper cables that go between me and the local exchange. FTTP might have been laid by one of several providers, for high-speed internet, but it also might be ultimately managed/maintained or even laid by the equivalent to the National Grid but for phones and then you're again free to choose which company you pay for your landline/broadband...

I've not done much switching and changing, myself, and I don't know how many areas have High-Speed Internet only through a given supplier and you have to suffer 'inferior' ADSL (or are beyond even its reach, until the local village bands together to lay their own few miles of cable across a willing farmer's land) so leaving you with either truly awful connectivity (compared to most people's current expectations) or forcing you to invest in satellite-internet solutions just to take part in the modern world.

And I'm one of those that doesn't even switch energy-providers as often as I maybe should consider doing (like it's said that people are more likely to get divorced than to change their bank, even...), so I'm not even an expert on what really happens in the UK. But separating the infrastructure from the 'provider' isn't really an unknown thing. (Ditto different train companies, running on the same tracks.)


But something tells me that the US attitude to federalised infrastructure (most, obviously not the given example of USPS acting as a backbone to the 'competitors') or even jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction caretaker bodies doesn't give that sort of flexibility. You get what you already got, or can pay extortionately to get, I must presume, but stand to be corrected.

[1] By whatever criteria. Perhaps just because they're the one currently not asking the most for the kinds of consumption I have. Perhaps because one company guarantees you pay for 'green' electricity.

[da_nang]

Carson v. Makin is out. SCOTUS declares that Maine cannot use sectarian education as a reason to deny Mainers the right to use the private school vouchers^[1] to fund their children's education at private religious schools with sectarian curricula. SCOTUS deems it a violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, but left the door open for non-discriminatory requirements.

It's 6-3, along party lines, so naturally there's a shitshow outside of the lawyer space. A lot of lay people seem to think the Establishment Clause means laïcité, but law folk (in spaces I visit) appear to maintain that it's more accurate to say it means religious neutrality.

Going forward, it seems Maine can keep the law as is and let parents use the vouchers to pay for a sectarian education, change the law to use non-discriminatory requirements, or simply scrap the law and fund their damn public schools.


[1] Apparently public schools in rural Maine are too expensive, so the Maine government decided to give parents vouchers to pay for private school education, but required that the education must be non-sectarian.

[Dunamisdeos]

I'm not sure I see the potential risk in this from a state/church separation standpoint.

I don't actually know of any private schools that exist, have electives/curriculum relating to religion, but don't favor a specific sect of some kind. Not until you reach the post-high-school level, at least. Wouldn't the previous setup just restrict the use of the voucher to a tiny number of schools, thereby defeating its purpose? I had the idea that most private schools are either some sort of religion-based thing or some high end prep school type of deal.

This way you're giving the funds to the parent so they can choose their private whatever, but also making it so there's somewhere to send them that isn't the Daddy Billion-bucks Supercreche or what have you. Since it isn't the state funneling money directly to private religious schools, I don't see the risk. What do you guys feel? You guys are probably better at finding that sort of thing.

Side note, why would they not just fund the public schools instead of this whole complicated nonsense? Probably so they can try and get state sanctioned religious teachings of some kind, which is probably the risk. Maybe I answered my own question, but I don't really see this as a direct potential pathway to that.

[nenjin]

Side note, why would they not just fund the public schools instead of this whole complicated nonsense?

Ostensibly (just reading from context), setting up rural schools is too expensive to fund. Not the first time I've heard that (I live in Nebraska, where "rural" encompasses 95% of the state, and the rural part of the state larger than the footprint of entire other states. We got a whole lot of fucking nothing except fields in Nebraska.) Finding qualified teachers to move out to BFE to teach at an under-funded rural school with few resources has always been a struggle here. (Getting ANYONE to take a job in rural areas that isn't in agriculture is a struggle. Shit in college they were pitching us on taking news reporting jobs in small towns because no one wanted to do local small town journalism.)

So because they can't fund adequate rural schools, and parents are pissed, they instead let them go to religious schools, which are funded (thanks to church money), so not only do their kids get the education quality they feel they deserve, they get to send them to schools which fit their ideology.

It's just another step toward privatization and the state relinquishing responsibility for providing education. That's the real danger. In this case it sounds like an economic rather than political reality. It leads to the same place though. And Maine isn't exactly fucking huge. It probably speaks to wider budgetary problems in the state.

[McTraveller]

I think the dissenters are off here; the Maine law specifically singled out sectarian schools and so put them at a government-mandated disadvantage.  It did not outright prohibit sectarian private schools true, but in granting the vouchers to be used on any school that met the accreditation standards, they treat all schools equally.

HOWEVER - voucher programs are an easily abused system, and it's unclear to what extent the use of vouchers for such sectarian schools will result in abuse.  It's a bit different from other voucher systems that I know were abused (such as in the south), because in those situations there were public schools, and people used the vouchers to avoid the public schools.  In this case, since there are no public schools, that doesn't seem to hold...

In order for me to think this is the wrong decision, you'd have to show how society as a whole is harmed or how society as a whole runs afoul of the 1A clauses - and not "possibly" but "effectively".  In other words, if there is a dissent it needs to be a much stronger one.

[Dunamisdeos]

HOWEVER - voucher programs are an easily abused system, and it's unclear to what extent the use of vouchers for such sectarian schools will result in abuse.

See I know nothing about how it can be abused, either. How does this happen?

[Iduno]

HOWEVER - voucher programs are an easily abused system, and it's unclear to what extent the use of vouchers for such sectarian schools will result in abuse.

See I know nothing about how it can be abused, either. How does this happen?

I know around here they use a similar program to help defund public schools so charter/private schools are the only option. Because they aren't government-run, they don't have to worry about all of those anti-segregation laws and can provide lower quality educations to non-white students.

[EuchreJack]

Actually, I think private schools can offer lower-quality education to all students.

The teachers can be less educated than in the public sector.

Religious schools in particular are notorious for just being lousy.

[delphonso]

Yeah the goal of voucher programs is to take public school funding and distribute some of it to private schools.

I'm torn on it, because I think such a program does offer more choice, but also at the clear cost of defunding public education, which should never happen.

[McTraveller]

The abuses of vouchers I'm familiar with are the ones that Iduno mentioned. Particularly in "the south", voucher programs were used to pull white kids out of public schools and even though the public schools were integrated on paper, they weren't in practice because all the white kids were going to private schools.

[Dunamisdeos]

See, I went to a religious school until high school. I ended up ahead of the public school programs.

I wonder how religious schools ACTUALLY stack up. You're always going to hear about the shitty ones that refuse to have sex ed and whatnot, but how many are, like, just schools?

Either way though, they should just fund public schools. Even as someone who went to private Jesus school and had a good experience, I feel like public school should be the priority. Splitting the funding just waters down everyone's education, I think.