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Deflation and wage stagnation are not the same thing, indeed sometimes they are opposite. And I don't think their is a clear way to measure what potentially low percentage of the cost savings go to executives' pockets.

But certainly true that American workers are being squeezed, having to compete against more and poorer workers because of globalization and free trade policies.

The trend of rich Chinese investing in US property is likely also due to the trade imbalance. Just supply and demand.

<i> He and many others were able to state their critical opinions because they had the Web as an open platform, so they did not depend on anyone’s permission to publish their words. Crucially, the Web’s hyperlinking mechanism lets blogs point to each other, again without requiring any form of permission. This allows for a decentralized value network between equals, where readers remain in active and conscious control of their next move.</i>

For decentralization the root problem always existed, while pointing at another resource requires no permission, receiving and hosting that resource does. Your government has to let you receive it and your ISP has to let you host.

This is a much lower level problem compared to the three challenges Berners-Lee puts forward, which seem to have little to do with decentralization.

1. taking back control of our personal data;

2. preventing the spread of misinformation;

3. realizing transparency for political advertising.

Does anyone blame John Oliver for all of this? A sort of Cold War of comments.

Maybe there should be an internet startup selling e-stamps.

Private organizations are of course able to take and support political opinions, especially since there are competitors in the browser space.

Agreed? An empirical claim that $15 minimum wage is better than $10 could be proven false by some set of metrics and controls. That $1 is better than zero? That is a different type of argument, and one for which expounding upon the scientific method is irrelevant.

The belief in chasing a continuous optimum is as much a belief as choosing the endpoint, so I think there is disagreement about what the debate is.

I read this comment and think instantly of a creation vs evolution debate. Neither side can disprove the other and things just get more heated as we talk past one another.

There is a fundamental logic to thinking that the floor for wages should be 0. Otherwise one can generate a bunch of facts regarding different values and circumstance and controls.

Neither set of arguments proves the other is wrong, they just reference different basic truths. With minimum wage is there are two competing claims, that interfering in the price of exchange is bad and that thumbing the price in favor of the worker vs business has good results. While both can be true, the moral claim can be completely true while the data based claim is at best true to an unknown point.

Studies like this do nothing to convince me there should be a minimum wage, regardless of the claimed optimum point, because a more transparent mechanism to increase lower income worker pay would be a government redistribution that is proportional to all transactions, not acutely affecting specific transactions. I.e. Tax and spend or print and spend, don't price control.

Just like creation and evolution, you can have it both ways but you need to iron it out consistently.

> As we've reported, the FCC falsely claimed that an outage in its public comment system was caused by multiple DDoS attacks, when in fact the outage was caused by the FCC's inability to handle an influx of pro-net neutrality comments. The comment system was also overrun with bots and comments that were fraudulently submitted in people's names without their knowledge.

Many states have laws that force electricity distributors and producers to be legally separate entities. So for example an electric producer that is closer physically or offers the distributor more value by producing at the right time could be favored by the distributor.

In other words the private electric company being compared to that has a vertical monopoly on both facets production and distribution basically doesn't exist.

I agree with you but something different, called "net neutrality" could be implemented trivially; just make sure the net revenue ISP receives from all external entities, for X amount of data is equal.

I'm just trying to say that "net neutrality" already has a political definition that isn't the only way to interpret those words, so its probably fair for the opposition party to try and redefine it. However I also agree that trying to quibble about definitions is usually not a good way make an argument convincing.

Here's a question for you then about the definition of net neutrality. Would it be net neutral to treat all data as the same net value but partition the cost differently? I.e. the cost of data from Wikipedia would fall on the consumer while the cost of Youtube data would fall more on Youtube?

This exactly. The number of parties involved in any information transaction can be reduced to three: the consumer, the immediate producer, and the canonical producer. Prohibiting one of the participants from paying is not good for economic distribution of resources.

Whether or not this is "bogus" is political economics.

If Americans are so keen to pay people better they should vote to elect leaders who will decrease inflation. But they don't. So it does seem that the majority of voters don't care enough to decrease inflation.

If Americans would like people to have proper access to healthcare, they would not make it dependent on having a job and make it a universal benefit funded by the government, but they don't.

I actually am an advocate for lower prices for all goods, and some government programs for healthcare, education, and access to daycare / pre-school;...etc.

> I might be for that, as long as any welfare given to a company's employees is billed to the company.

Sounds like a convoluted way of having a job and getting paid for it.

Thanks! To all the others too.

To HN: Is there a body of economic theory or a good text that separates inflation of the base currency from some other term that captures its relative value to other currencies?

None of these articles ever talk about any concept of economic "distance". This one at least discusses the need for throttling if you read past the headline.

End consumers pay an set price for generic data at their ISPs corporate node, but data that comes from further nodes fundamentally costs more, as do large sources at peak times. Personally, I would rather the ISPs sort this out between themselves and other corporations rather than graduate my bill based on which sites/times I browse. The best would be a patchwork of municipal, regional, and private owned wired ISPs, private wireless carriers, and an open standard for peering agreements with concepts of "distance" and "congestion".

In response to the title of the article and ones like it: why is it surprising or "evil" that a company charging destinations a fixed price throttles at peak times or tries to be selective about data sources, even asking some over a certain threshold to reduce or foot part of the bill? It's OK to be suspicious of quasi public/private companies, but I need to see more evidence and more logic in news reporting to conclude people are acting immorally here. For example, outright blocking of content at the behest of politicians or differential throttling of data with equal "distance" outside of a common price structure.

This is a problem of economics more than design failure. The current legal/technical system that has developed between ISPs doesn't charge parties fractionally very well.

Perhaps, but an even easier comparison to Maginot line is China's concrete islands

Why do people lie? Maybe people are prone to exaggeration when its an idea they like or it's somehow attached to a position or stake they have taken (of)themselves.

But really the point I was trying to make by saying it's just another sentiment: perhaps the number of people put off by incomplete statistics is more than the people swayed by the dramatic results

I think this is a major arguement for folks who criticize currencies. For example an energy based currency could be intrinsically ecologically conservative.

Another example is continuous inflation of fiat currency (exponential growth), whereas all things that experience exponential growth in nature eventually run into a limit or another correcting factor.

Has any politician ever campaigned on this though? I don't think I've ever had the opportunity to vote for a cap and trade

I think the problem is not really a blip on GDP, because it could be done in a revenue neutral way. The problem is that it will change the winners and losers

But this is just different sentiment. Personally, I think that people are very skilled at identifying when they are being spoken to unhonestly or dismissively.

I hope that the FCC leaves well out of this, unless the state law later morphs into something that restricts home servers or favors California based servers

There's a lot of plotting and plodding over artificial intelligence in our culture, from movies to politics. But we should look forward to the automation of simple tasks and not worry about creative and complicated ones.

Appealing to both science and religion: look at group IV of the periodic table where the structure of brains is higher than computers (C and Si) and then think about the creativity of Fairchild, Backus, Hopper, Richie, Jobs, Mcarthy, Page, etc. and have even more faith in our creator.

Competitor to the Federal Reserve :)

I can't use every gear ratio on my 18-speed bike but I'm not upset by this relevation.

An ironic name.

Not traffic imbalances at peering points. Rather a situation where data has to travel further, through more nodes from source to destination. Shouldn't a logical system allllow that data to cost more? Or for example through the same number of nodes but more expensive source nodes.

Beyond that, there is some "discrimination" I would be just fine with. For example why should the end consumer pay the cost of YouTube ad data?

The fear is of course discrimination on political or ideological grounds, not just economic. but it would be fairly obvious and nearly impossible technically for an isp to pull that off. And a net neutrality regulation or even ownership at the state or local level would be perfect. You only need net neutrality at the end points where there is no competition, not in the network at large