How can you eliminate competition that does not exist? By definition, what the cable companies are doing now is eliminating competition, because there is none. Any change is an improvement.
Google is generally capable of thinking long term. The major broadband providers in America are incapable of thinking beyond the next few quarterly statements--otherwise they would not have gotten themselves into this mess.
As long as all actions are logged and reviewed by an independent ethics committee (with anonymized data if needed), I like it. It couldn't possibly be worse than the way we do things now.
Come on, if Target can predict when a teenager is going to get pregnant, then we can easily keep track of politician's financial lives in however much detail we want. If you want to make a law that says no politician can exceed the median American salary per year, for their entire lives; we can do that. It's just that it won't happen as long as money=power=speech.
Lots of executives around the world make huge profits for their companies and employees, without collecting multimillion dollar salaries for themselves. Since being a millionaire is empirically not required for CEOs, their multimillion dollar salaries could be better used elsewhere.
Then the samurai should behead the king and redistribute all of the fine luxuries that the samurai earned for the king to his samurai buddies. Then simply find a clerk to do the king's old job.
On the other hand, without all of the actual programmers you would have no product and no profits at all. Neither group can function without the other, and pay should reflect that rather than the ridiculously unequal spread we just automatically accept as normal.
How can you possibly believe that? The NSA will just go to the private company and subpeona all the data that it's illegal for them to collect. They can and have done this. Citizens need protection from private corporations just as much as they need protection from the government because there is no meaningful distinction anymore.
Blame yourself? No, I'll blame the people who have more than 1/360,000,000th of a unit of political power in the country, i.e. the actual rich people and politicians who actually do these things that we hate. I will take 1/360,000,000th of the share of the blame, and nothing more.
After reading that article, I actually came away with a very positive view of the field of parapsychology in general. Of course psychics aren't real, but the Flying Spaghetti Monster can be used to make legitimate points about the study of religion, to use an analogy.
This is Step A, where Step Z is one of "save the planet from a world-killing asteroid" or "everyone gets a solid gold toilet" (or "a few people get solid gold toilets larger than the existing moon")
I don't see why that's so hard to believe at all. The federal government, at least in theory, is accountable to its citizens since the citizens vote for their government. The Board of Directors of Comcast, however, is something that no citizen anywhere has any power over whatsoever. Why would you choose the latter scenario, in which you have zero power in principle and in practice, versus the former scenario where you have some power both in theory and in practice?