LogisticEarth posted:

Internet and transportation infrastructure aren't "free" though, like land. They need to be produced and maintained. As I understand it, the basic justification for the Georgist/geolibertarian land tax is that the users of land haven't really "earned" the right to property ownership by creating it. Land is different than capital in that it pre-existed humanity, and is therefore commonly owned. Internet infrastructure is totally different. Really the whole idea of "internet as a basic right" is one of the most egregious forms of "universal right" creep. Yes it's a very powerful tool, but so are any number of other forms of capital. It's also fairly cheap and the information is infinitely reproducible.

SyHopeful posted:

I was just reminded that this exists:

StandardVC10 posted:

Still the best cartoon about libertarianism.

SyHopeful posted:

I was just reminded that this exists:

Nintendo Kid posted:

I would note that in Finland where there is a "right" to internet access; it turns out to actually only be a right to be able pay no more than certain amount per month for a 1 megabit each way link, which is allowed to be provided over satellite. Most internet users will be aware that such speeds and satellite latency effectively still locks you out of a lot of the stuff the internet has to offer.

Vahakyla posted:

The speed minimum is about to be raised ten-fold and the country is covered in 3g almost everywhere, so need for satellite is moot.
You can stand in the wilderness and enjoy movies. Actually tested.

And when 3g modems are 9 euros a month with no additional service fees, it is not unfair to talk about universal access, considering that the health care system has a whopping 11 euro fee at the point of service.

And 3g that gives like 7mbps, not some lovely as american 3g of 1mbps.

Nintendo Kid posted:

America's been covered in 3g for a good 5 years now, and no not just 1 mbps. That said 3G is still 15 year old technology so noone should be bragging about 99.9% coverage with it these days. Not to mention 9 euros per month is significantly more expensive than the free cell phone plans for the poor available in America, and the subsidized data plans for same. Anyway, this is why Finland's purported right isn't much in the way of providing a right other than a right to potentially purchase a service.

Nintendo Kid posted:

America's been covered in 3g for a good 5 years now, and no not just 1 mbps. That said 3G is still 15 year old technology so noone should be bragging about 99.9% coverage with it these days. Not to mention 9 euros per month is significantly more expensive than the free cell phone plans for the poor available in America, and the subsidized data plans for same. Anyway, this is why Finland's purported right isn't much in the way of providing a right other than a right to potentially purchase a service.

Vahakyla posted:

There are major service gaps in small rural towns such as Charleston, Pittsburgh, DC, Baltimore, Richmond and Charlotte.

zamin posted:

There are tons of places in the US with absolutely zero cell service, let alone data. This isn't just a black hole for one carrier, but with my Sprint and my girlfriend's AT&T and a friend's Verizon. Places throughout multiple states in multiple regions where you can't even get a roaming signal. Places where people live.

Vahakyla posted:

This just in. Despite me failing to watch a youtube video from 3g inside a metropolitan area or getting an actual cable internet that offers bearable speeds in downtown Charleston, internet connection in America is actually awesome.

Nintendo Kid posted:

The fact that you chose a lovely cell phone carrier for your area does not mean it's impossible to get 3g service in your area. And "bearable speeds" is super vague too.

The point you can't comprehend, apparently, is that according to the Finnish standard of "right to internet" you already possess it, since it's possible for you to buy access to it in your location.

Vahakyla posted:

Except the Finnish government has a long tradition of enforcing laws to their spirit, not to their letter.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Yes. And the current Finnish right to internet law would consider all people in Charleston, SC to have access under the current law.

What don't you get here? The point is that it's a very weak "rights" law. The Finnish government doesn't care who provides the 1/1 service, just that one provider does for every point in the country - and the existence of satellite internet means it's provided all over. They also won't care who provides the purported increase to 10/10 - again, satellites can already do that.

Vahakyla posted:

It wouldn't. Charleston can't manage 1mbps and Finland is about to be covered in cheap 10/10 and 100/100 in cities.

There are cases of enforcing carriers to fix coverage caps and ensuring that the service to every residence is consistent, cheap and reliable.

The blind spots absolutely would not fly, as evinced by ordering Sonera to add more towers in Espoo, to fix the gaps that manifested over certain neighborhoods.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Charleston absolutely can manage 1 megabit. There is that service level available all throughout the city and the suburbs and even the exurbs. It does not matter that YOUR provider provides poo poo service, there exists at least one provider that can do it in every inhabited portion of the city and area, and so under the Finnish law the "right" is secure.

Finland is not enforcing any single carriers in particular to fix coverage gaps, providers are free to not cover anyone they wish. Providers are also free to sell slower than 1 or in the future 10 megabit service. There simply has to be one provider available that does provide the service. A single provider, that's all.


Ps you still haven't mentioned what carrier you're on in Charleston.

Vahakyla posted:

The communication ministry can practically order any of the largest carries to extend the coverage if a gap manifests and no one volunteers to fix it.

Vahakyla posted:

Comcast does not offer more than 30mbps to most places

Vahakyla posted:

The internet in the United States does not achieve this.

Vahakyla posted:

All the while a sprint phone and AT&T workphone can't play a youtube video from inside a metropolitan area.

Fansy posted:

Did you guys know that physicists are evil, and should instead be engineers?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-mxDbgtlvg

Cemetry Gator posted:

This is why it's great that we have a government that will fund the sciences and scientific research because a lot of it is just so difficult to get money for from a free-market system, and yet, a lot of it ends up being incredibly useful. Sure, there might not be any direct market gains from figuring out the workings of the big bang, but 20 years from now, that science may be driving the science that makes your car use less gasoline or something.

It's like he can't understand the value of research or knowledge. "Well, the market doesn't want it, so it must be worthless." Seriously, these guys want to go back to the loving stone age.

LogisticEarth posted:

Not defending the Molyneux video, but part of the issue with funding research that might make your car use less gasoline 20 years from now is that...it might lead to a marginal increase in efficiency 20 years from now, maybe. The argument generally is that pushing the bleeding edge of technology further and further from the "normal" marketplace leads to a bunch of discoveries that, while enlightening to a small minority, only reaches usefullness to the larger population decades after it's been discovered. At the same time it fosters a disconnect from practical science, and I think in parts leads to the "egghead" perception of science as a bunch of whiz-bang uselessness.

Like, I had a conversation with a doctor friend about the state of medical care in the US including patents, and the cost of medical research. His initial position was that medical patents were absolutely necessary because without them new methods and medicines would be developed at a much slower rate, due to cost. My counterpoint was that the real problem with healthcare at the moment wasn't necessarily a lack of good medicines or methods, but exorbitant costs and limited access to care. Would we be better off with a system that was less "cutting edge" but far more accessible and egalitarian by cutting out patents?

This is not to say that projects like the LHC are the cause of all social ills and inequality. That's obviously absurd. But it does make me consider if the resources weren't better spent on something more immediately practical. Even manned space flight is at least more "real" to most people, and could potentially lead to much more tangible practical applications like orbital solar, asteroid mining, or the whole "new frontier" of colonization. I remember being fascinated by new physics, but I have been oddly disinterested in the whole LHC, Higgs Boson story, and theoretical physics in general. And yes I know things like quantum theory allows transistors, lasers, and everything to work. However, if we were at a point where theoretical physics is more in line with the "rest of technology", practical applications can be prototyped and tested without having to invest tens of billions of dollars and brain power into giant capital science projects. Or the capital experiments would be less costly to build.

For example, some organizations throw around the number that hunger could be eliminated with $100 billion or something in that range. Would getting 1/10th the way to that goal be worth postponing the discoveries of the LHC for a few decades? How much extra technology, production, and culture would we get by freeing a good chunk of the world's population from poverty?

Absurd Alhazred posted:

That's not how it works, though. Technological advancement isn't like in Civilization or other 4X games. You don't just pour money into the right tech tree and get advancement after a known time. Most important discoveries are made whilst looking for something entirely different. You simply cannot plan for these things directly.

What you can do is create a good environment for these things to be recognized and then developed. That means pouring money into basic research, and having alert technological transfer departments ready to facilitate product development. But this whole "let's put $10million into cancer research" nonsense doesn't lead to better cancer research. Instead it rewards scientists who can find the most convincing spiel to connect what they wanted to do anyway with cancer, and there's no evidence that this way of doing things has actually made it easier to cure cancer. And that is true for most fields.

quote:

As for your specific example of manned space flights, quite a bit of money has gone into it, and it turns out that space is much more dangerous and hard to deal with than we thought. "Let's develop a sustainable biosphere" is just not a problem you can throw money at. Maybe basic ecological research or somebody studying a remote region of the Andes will find a few silver bullets that will lead to that advance that can allow for sustainable human living in microgravity. Who knows? What will definitely not work is saying "okay, we want biosphere in 5 years, how much money do you need?" If it's easy to predict how long it will take or whether it is possible at all, it just isn't research.

LogisticEarth posted:

I fully understand you just don't dump money into a field and expect it to pump out goodies. But that was part of my point, discoveries are often unplanned and based on a huge number of other factors coming together. I agree that it's important to create a good environment for things to be recognized and developed, but market processes are a big part of this. If you have public choice and political forces dictate where the resources are going, then you're far more likely to end up with the "put $10 million on cancer" because that cause is sexy and high profile, but the extra money might not necessarily able to be speed up the process of being brought to market.

quote:

Again, this is totally my point. The reason I used space flight as an example is because it's much more "real" to people. It may not be the right example, but there are many others. Theoretically there is an "optimal" level basic research, where we are spending the right amount of resources on fields that are likely to produce usable results in the relative near future. On the other hand, if we're spending too much on basic research, or the research was directed to attractive but economically infeasible fields, this would lead to a society where we have a lot of neat advanced technologies and theory that is only affordable to a rich elite, because the rest of the capital structure hasn't caught up and is constantly lagging the "artificially" advanced edge of knowledge.

LogisticEarth posted:

Cemetry Gator posted:

Where does anyone even begin...

This is why it's great that we have a government that will fund the sciences and scientific research because a lot of it is just so difficult to get money for from a free-market system, and yet, a lot of it ends up being incredibly useful. Sure, there might not be any direct market gains from figuring out the workings of the big bang, but 20 years from now, that science may be driving the science that makes your car use less gasoline or something.

It's like he can't understand the value of research or knowledge. "Well, the market doesn't want it, so it must be worthless." Seriously, these guys want to go back to the loving stone age.

Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exUMuE4QRD4
Joe Rogan says "if you listen to him, you're an idiot."

LogisticEarth posted:

The argument generally is that pushing the bleeding edge of technology further and further from the "normal" marketplace leads to a bunch of discoveries that, while enlightening to a small minority, only reaches usefullness to the larger population decades after it's been discovered. At the same time it fosters a disconnect from practical science, and I think in parts leads to the "egghead" perception of science as a bunch of whiz-bang uselessness.

quote:

Like, I had a conversation with a doctor friend about the state of medical care in the US including patents, and the cost of medical research. His initial position was that medical patents were absolutely necessary because without them new methods and medicines would be developed at a much slower rate, due to cost. My counterpoint was that the real problem with healthcare at the moment wasn't necessarily a lack of good medicines or methods, but exorbitant costs and limited access to care. Would we be better off with a system that was less "cutting edge" but far more accessible and egalitarian by cutting out patents?

Halloween Jack posted:

I agree that basic science research contributes to the perception that science involves fundamental principles and is difficult

Absurd Alhazred posted:

I think it's more that basic science researchers have not been given sufficient incentives to be more accessible to the public which is funding them.

LogisticEarth posted:

...

This is not to say that projects like the LHC are the cause of all social ills and inequality. That's obviously absurd. But it does make me consider if the resources weren't better spent on something more immediately practical. Even manned space flight is at least more "real" to most people, and could potentially lead to much more tangible practical applications like orbital solar, asteroid mining, or the whole "new frontier" of colonization. I remember being fascinated by new physics, but I have been oddly disinterested in the whole LHC, Higgs Boson story, and theoretical physics in general. And yes I know things like quantum theory allows transistors, lasers, and everything to work. However, if we were at a point where theoretical physics is more in line with the "rest of technology", practical applications can be prototyped and tested without having to invest tens of billions of dollars and brain power into giant capital science projects. Or the capital experiments would be less costly to build.

LogisticEarth posted:

I fully understand you just don't dump money into a field and expect it to pump out goodies. But that was part of my point, discoveries are often unplanned and based on a huge number of other factors coming together. I agree that it's important to create a good environment for things to be recognized and developed, but market processes are a big part of this. If you have public choice and political forces dictate where the resources are going, then you're far more likely to end up with the "put $10 million on cancer" because that cause is sexy and high profile, but the extra money might not necessarily able to be speed up the process of being brought to market.

...

Halloween Jack posted:

Well, the institution I work for is trying to change this by trying to create connections between interested donors and researchers, so the donors can see where their money is going and why it's important. Unfortunately, that just means you're dealing with a patronage system instead of the market. Party like it's 1610, scientists.

Halloween Jack posted:

I agree that basic science research contributes to the perception that science involves fundamental principles and is difficult

I'm not a policy expert but from what I know, there is not a tradeoff going on between quality of care, advancement of research, and access to good care. What's happening is that hospitals and universities want revenue, revenue, revenue at the cost of all else and research suffers for it. I don't think patents are a particularly big part of the picture.

asdf32 posted:

With healthcare consuming ~20% of the US economy there is pretty much a trade-off between healthcare and literally everything else. Researching, manufacturing and delivering cutting edge care is a major component of that expense.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

I'm going to estimate that 75% of that is overpayment due to poor regulation of the for-profit pharma and insurance markets. Other countries do not provide lesser service, nor invest less in R&D, and yet manage to not gently caress this up.

asdf32 posted:

The US does 50% more research than Europe despite having a smaller GDP. The US absolutely does more research than anyone else, and more by percentage of the economy too (both public and private).

75% of medical spending is around 15% of US GDP. There might be better things we could do with it, but it's not just going to waste.

Buried alive posted:

I felt the need to respond to a couple of things here.


I don't think you even have a solid understanding of the concepts at play. Theoretical physics, almost by definition, is the field that pushes the bleeding edge. As soon as you start looking at practical applications, it's not really theoretical anymore. I know it's wikipedia, but here is an example of what I mean. Electricity/electromagnetism used to be theoretical physics. 300 (or more) years ago, some guy noticed that a force was generated when a metal wire was moved close to a magnet. He presented his findings, and most people went, "Well, interesting, but what can we do with it?" His response was basically, "I dunno, but we'll figure out something." Then I have no doubt that there were a bunch of people who went, "Lol, stupid scientists and their useless research." That phenomenon is now responsible for, at a guess off the top of my head, 99% of the world's electrical power generation.

Also it's fairly hilarious to see you caution against always going for the bleeding edge, then throw up an exception for space travel because it might lead to space-mining, space-power, and space-colonies. All of which are, themselves, pretty damned bleeding edge.

quote:

Market processes are not a big part of theory. You yourself have said a number of times that you don't just pump money into stuff and expect it to pump out goodies, but that is exactly what the market wants. The market's criteria for evaluating anything new is, first and foremost, can it make money? If the answer is anything other than, "Yes", the market won't invest in it. This doesn't mean that government always knows best. Governments can go way wrong. The way to prevent that is to engage with the amount of scientific knowledge out there to see if we might go wrong, not to involve the market.

Jack of Hearts posted:

Out of curiosity, how thoroughly hosed would pure mathematics guys be in your ideal society?

LogisticEarth posted:

You've got this wrong. "The Market" isn't some kind of automaton the perfectly follows the rules of profit. People (like you and I) aren't always 100% interested in profit, so there's no reason to assume freed markets would do so. We all have various values, goals, and means. My point isn't that we should direct all research by profitability. Instead, it's that running forward with state funding allocated via political means runs a large risk of miss-allocating resources for a diminishing rate of return.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

I'm going to have to see sources and breakdowns for this.

Cemetry Gator posted:

There was a survey done where they asked business leaders would they rather take a hit the next quarter if it meant increased profitability for 20 years, and an overwhelming majority said "no." The market is short sighted.