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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
Cayman Islands24199 Posts
On February 27 2015 14:56 hannahbelle wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2015 14:35 oneofthem wrote: i dont need to read that to know where IU is ranked, and it's not t10. you seem pretty agitated though. try arguing your position instead of talking about other people's education because a lot of people go to better schools than you around here.
also, if your complex real world reasoning skills lead you to be an anti-vaxxer and a variety of other comical positions, then it's not very good reasoning. Not agitated yet. I'm just getting warmed up, bro. And you obviously need to read, because you are woefully ill-informed. About a large variety of topics. So start there, and then come back later and play in the big boy pool. Besides, at the end of the day, it's not where you go to school, it's what you make of it. i'm too used to talking to people who actually acknowledge what they have said to be dealing with you, but you are absolutely right with the last line.
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On February 27 2015 14:19 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2015 13:32 IgnE wrote:I make one-liners in response to idiotic posts. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/17/how-chattanooga-beat-google-fiber-by-half-a-decade/So EPB became an ISP. Now it operates some 8,000 miles of fiber for 56,000 commercial and residential Internet customers. With today's rollout, gigabit service will cost $70 a month, down from $300 a month just last year. The system has gotten consistently strong ratings on DSLReports, the Internet's venerable hub for comparing broadband services.
"What that gives us today is the ability to put 10 gigabits per second in any home or business in our service territory," says Harold DePriest, EPB's CEO. "That could be a manufacturer or office building, or it could be a trailer in a small lot on the back side of Soddy Mountain." The facts are jonny that we could have everyone in the United States getting gigabit service for maybe $100B. Given that the four major cable companies made more than that in one year, in addition to hundreds of millions in government subsidies for what are ostensibly infrastructure upgrades it makes you wonder why we still are paying way more than everyone else for shittier service. Perhaps that's not surprising when you run into 97% profit margins on "high-speed service." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/time-warner-cables-97-pro_b_6591916.htmlYou can say I'm spouting mindless ideology if you want, but the real ideological driver in this discussion is your corporate ideology in tandem with your technological ignorance. I'm calling bullshit on this. Chattanooga spent $330 million on the project. For a population of ~173K that's ~$1904 per person. Extrapolating to the rest of the US, which may be generous, you get a total project cost of $628 billion, which is quite a bit more than your $100 billion figure. I don't have figures for Cox (they're private), but a quick look up of Verizon, TWC, Charter and Comcast yields $14B in combined earnings last year. That's an order of magnitude less what you claimed and includes earnings from the entire companies (not just internet divisions). Also, the 97% profit margin figure is garbage. Cost of revenue is not all the costs. He's trying to trick people like you who know nothing about accounting / finance. For one thing, one of the big costs is the capital cost of building everything. Yet that cost is not included. Not to mention that the guy seems to be doing a lot of funny math (poor assumptions) to get to that figure in the first place. Edit: Show nested quote +If you think my argument last time hinged on uniform purchases you are fucking stupid. That was a joke. But rather than explain what exactly they invested in, you dodged the issue. Let me reiterate it: a line that reads, "investments" that is not itemized and has no further explication does not mean anything, since practically everything counts as an investment if you deem it so. There is such a thing as accounting standards. Cap ex is for long term equipment and property. You're welcome to look through their annual reports and find a better answer.
Chattanooga spent $2k per person and still is charging less than average for a 1gig connection? That seems pretty good. Keep in mind that Chattanooga did it almost a decade before google fiber.
Chattanooga is also pretty rural and didn't take advantage of existing architecture. Hooking up new york city, on the contrary, would be much cheaper per person. Add in cost reductions for scale. $300B at the most. But no less an institution than the esteemed Goldman Sachs estimated that Google Fiber across the entire country would only cost $140B. Source.
Of course I am including profits from the whole company. Arbitrarily dividing profits into an "internet division" when the services flow through the same architecture is just an accounting mechanism. Most people buy package deals anyway to get their internet.
As for the "investments" category, a quick look through Comcast's investment reports reveals almost $5.4B in investments, most of which went to IP, "cloud-enabled platforms" for their content, and "expansion of business services and automation" in 2013. Discussion of investments in actual network hardware, like fiber, is minimal. But you should know this already jonny. If they were really spending billions every year on actual network improvements, instead of trying to grow their IP portfolio and sell scarcity at monopoly prices, we would all have faster internet by now. Comcast, TimeWarner, etc. spends billions every year on content and business services, not upgrading the lines. That's one big reason they were opposed to net neutrality; they want to privilege their content, which they have invested so much money in.
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On February 27 2015 14:27 hannahbelle wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2015 13:53 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 13:41 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 27 2015 13:17 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 13:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 27 2015 13:08 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 12:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 27 2015 11:19 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 10:46 xDaunt wrote: I am watching Walker's CPAC speech. He is a very good orator -- so much better than the crap that we have seen from republican candidates over the past 20+ years.
Edit: I think he gave that speech without a telepromtpter. So Walker is the frontrunner for the xDaunt prize for political theatre. @ jonny I'm sure you've seen this picture before jonny, but I think it sums up the state of the infrastructure in the US pretty well for people like you who like looking at $ graphs. + Show Spoiler +I'm sure you have explanations for this that would make the cable companies proud, like how the US has a unique geography, difficult terrain, and other costly factors that would bring the price up. Also explanations for how if we wanted better, faster internet service we will have to fork over more cash so the internet companies, which have already been investing copiously into a network that is largely static from year to year, can redouble their efforts to provide us with state-of-the-art service. Especially with the failure of public broadband in places like Chattanooga, I, for one, trust my (sole) local cable provider to provide the best cable service at the lowest available price. Why are you addressing this to me? I never took the position that our internet is the best / cheapest or that regulatory changes can absolutely not improve the situation or that municipalities were a pox on free market virtue. But yeah, since you brought it up there is more to pricing than 'evil corporations' and whatever other mindless ideology you feel like shitting out today. Mindless ideology is just rampant in this thread. Jonny's head remains clear: maximize shareholder value. Pricing is complicated. Crawl back under your bridge. You clearly have nothing to add beyond bullshit and baseless accusations. Pot meet kettle. Eh? Really? I didn't steak out any ideologically driven opinions on the subject and, well, that's pretty much all you've done. Last time you tried to claim that ISP's were capitalizing routine expenses like uniform purchases (without proof) simply because the facts ran counter to your preconception. Today you came in with a big sarcastic cut against the extreme free market, pro-Comcast stance... that I never took. Pot meet kettle? More like troll meet sunlight. No I took a big sarcastic cut against your idiotic opinion that it's simply too expensive to provide hundred megabit or gigabit service to everyone in the United States. Is that not your position? That you believe the cable companies when they say there is "congestion" and that it's simply very expensive to provide more piping? If you think my argument last time hinged on uniform purchases you are fucking stupid. That was a joke. But rather than explain what exactly they invested in, you dodged the issue. Let me reiterate it: a line that reads, "investments" that is not itemized and has no further explication does not mean anything, since practically everything counts as an investment if you deem it so. The entire business model is, and has been, built on a scarcity model, where cable companies charged different rates for different kinds of data because they could, irregardless of the fact that a bit is a bit. It does not matter what the bit is or who it is being sent to or whether it's video or internet or voice. The mere fact that cable companies have the gumption to say that they don't feel there is any demand for faster service proves the scam. They don't think there is any demand until google fiber moves in, and suddenly the speeds are doubled for free. @ hannahbelle So fucking what. I know that cable companies aren't actually collecting 97% profit margins on everything. Knock it down to 70% and it's still disgusting. The mere fact that you can make it look like 97% is the problem. Love the high level analysis there. So you are saying that because a liberal hack blogger can't read a financial statement correctly and proceeds to disseminate his incorrect information across the web, that it is the company's responsibility to not report numbers that can be incorrectly interpreted? Wow. Also, not everything can count as an investment. GAAP has very strict rules on what can be classified as an investment on financial statements.
No that's not what I am saying at all. I am saying that the profits on many cable services are grotesque, and because they are grotesque, the raw numbers are subject to manipulations like the above.
I am well aware that capital costs aren't included in those calculations, but the reality is that state-of-the-art network lines would last for decades with minimal maintenance, and should be run as a public utility. Coincidentally, one big reason to massively upgrade our network (and, let's say, spend $200B over 5 years on it) is that it would boost business. Business lovers everywhere should be demanding better quality service, as it has been proven time and again that access to faster internet services boosts productivity and enhances a country's economy.
And I answered this in responding to Jonny, but IP can be classified as an investment, and has nothing to do with enhancing the quality of the network, but instead is an attempt to collect monopoly prices on corporate-sanctioned content.
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WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders are planning to advance a three-week stopgap funding bill to avert a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security and punt the fight over immigration, Republican sources said Thursday.
In a change of strategy, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) presented the idea of a "continuing resolution" to members at an afternoon meeting Thursday. If Republicans fast-track their bill to the floor, it could potentially pass the House and land in the Senate ahead of the DHS funding deadline Friday at midnight.
"I am very confident we're going to avoid a shutdown," Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), the chairman of the House Rules Committee, told TPM.
From there it would be up to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) whether to bring it up. Senate Republican and Democratic leadership aides wouldn't immediately comment on the idea. But if the alternative is a shutdown, both Republican and Democratic leaders would be hard-pressed to reject it.
Immigration hawk Rep. Steve King (R-IA) vociferously objected to the stopgap bill, claimed that Congress is "obligated by our oath" not to fund his "unconstitutional lawless act" on immigration.
"The president has thrown this all on us and thrown the country in a constitutional crisis," he told reporters.
Source
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Gotta get it wrapped up before the House of Cards marathons that are inevitable in Washington this weekend. It should be as close to a government holiday as it gets.
More seriously, Netanyahu is scheduled to give his speech before Congress on Tuesday. They need to clear the agenda this weekend and avoid distractions.
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On February 27 2015 15:12 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2015 14:19 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 27 2015 13:32 IgnE wrote:I make one-liners in response to idiotic posts. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/17/how-chattanooga-beat-google-fiber-by-half-a-decade/So EPB became an ISP. Now it operates some 8,000 miles of fiber for 56,000 commercial and residential Internet customers. With today's rollout, gigabit service will cost $70 a month, down from $300 a month just last year. The system has gotten consistently strong ratings on DSLReports, the Internet's venerable hub for comparing broadband services.
"What that gives us today is the ability to put 10 gigabits per second in any home or business in our service territory," says Harold DePriest, EPB's CEO. "That could be a manufacturer or office building, or it could be a trailer in a small lot on the back side of Soddy Mountain." The facts are jonny that we could have everyone in the United States getting gigabit service for maybe $100B. Given that the four major cable companies made more than that in one year, in addition to hundreds of millions in government subsidies for what are ostensibly infrastructure upgrades it makes you wonder why we still are paying way more than everyone else for shittier service. Perhaps that's not surprising when you run into 97% profit margins on "high-speed service." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/time-warner-cables-97-pro_b_6591916.htmlYou can say I'm spouting mindless ideology if you want, but the real ideological driver in this discussion is your corporate ideology in tandem with your technological ignorance. I'm calling bullshit on this. Chattanooga spent $330 million on the project. For a population of ~173K that's ~$1904 per person. Extrapolating to the rest of the US, which may be generous, you get a total project cost of $628 billion, which is quite a bit more than your $100 billion figure. I don't have figures for Cox (they're private), but a quick look up of Verizon, TWC, Charter and Comcast yields $14B in combined earnings last year. That's an order of magnitude less what you claimed and includes earnings from the entire companies (not just internet divisions). Also, the 97% profit margin figure is garbage. Cost of revenue is not all the costs. He's trying to trick people like you who know nothing about accounting / finance. For one thing, one of the big costs is the capital cost of building everything. Yet that cost is not included. Not to mention that the guy seems to be doing a lot of funny math (poor assumptions) to get to that figure in the first place. Edit: If you think my argument last time hinged on uniform purchases you are fucking stupid. That was a joke. But rather than explain what exactly they invested in, you dodged the issue. Let me reiterate it: a line that reads, "investments" that is not itemized and has no further explication does not mean anything, since practically everything counts as an investment if you deem it so. There is such a thing as accounting standards. Cap ex is for long term equipment and property. You're welcome to look through their annual reports and find a better answer. Chattanooga spent $2k per person and still is charging less than average for a 1gig connection? That seems pretty good. Keep in mind that Chattanooga did it almost a decade before google fiber. Chattanooga is also pretty rural and didn't take advantage of existing architecture. Hooking up new york city, on the contrary, would be much cheaper per person. Add in cost reductions for scale. $300B at the most. But no less an institution than the esteemed Goldman Sachs estimated that Google Fiber across the entire country would only cost $140B. Source.Of course I am including profits from the whole company. Arbitrarily dividing profits into an "internet division" when the services flow through the same architecture is just an accounting mechanism. Most people buy package deals anyway to get their internet. As for the "investments" category, a quick look through Comcast's investment reports reveals almost $5.4B in investments, most of which went to IP, "cloud-enabled platforms" for their content, and "expansion of business services and automation" in 2013. Discussion of investments in actual network hardware, like fiber, is minimal. But you should know this already jonny. If they were really spending billions every year on actual network improvements, instead of trying to grow their IP portfolio and sell scarcity at monopoly prices, we would all have faster internet by now. Comcast, TimeWarner, etc. spends billions every year on content and business services, not upgrading the lines. That's one big reason they were opposed to net neutrality; they want to privilege their content, which they have invested so much money in. Yeah, Chattanooga has a good deal going. It's also not rural and the project piggybacked off of the local utility's need to revamp its grid and federal stimulus dollars (covered about 1/3). I'm not sure we can say that's perfectly repeatable.
The BI article doesn't quote enough to say how serious the GS estimate is supposed to be. Regardless the quote is for half of households not the entire country, and a linear extrapolation is inappropriate.
OK, great, yet profits for the whole companies are... far less that what you claimed. I also love how you're now claiming that looking at just the internet division would be inappropriate, right after you complained about "97% margins" for a segment.
You should be looking at capital expenditures, not investments. For FY 2013 Cable Distribution $1.8B, Customer Premise Equipment $2.9B, etc.
Edit: On February 27 2015 15:16 IgnE wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On February 27 2015 14:27 hannahbelle wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2015 13:53 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 13:41 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 27 2015 13:17 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 13:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 27 2015 13:08 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 12:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 27 2015 11:19 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 10:46 xDaunt wrote: I am watching Walker's CPAC speech. He is a very good orator -- so much better than the crap that we have seen from republican candidates over the past 20+ years.
Edit: I think he gave that speech without a telepromtpter. So Walker is the frontrunner for the xDaunt prize for political theatre. @ jonny I'm sure you've seen this picture before jonny, but I think it sums up the state of the infrastructure in the US pretty well for people like you who like looking at $ graphs. + Show Spoiler +I'm sure you have explanations for this that would make the cable companies proud, like how the US has a unique geography, difficult terrain, and other costly factors that would bring the price up. Also explanations for how if we wanted better, faster internet service we will have to fork over more cash so the internet companies, which have already been investing copiously into a network that is largely static from year to year, can redouble their efforts to provide us with state-of-the-art service. Especially with the failure of public broadband in places like Chattanooga, I, for one, trust my (sole) local cable provider to provide the best cable service at the lowest available price. Why are you addressing this to me? I never took the position that our internet is the best / cheapest or that regulatory changes can absolutely not improve the situation or that municipalities were a pox on free market virtue. But yeah, since you brought it up there is more to pricing than 'evil corporations' and whatever other mindless ideology you feel like shitting out today. Mindless ideology is just rampant in this thread. Jonny's head remains clear: maximize shareholder value. Pricing is complicated. Crawl back under your bridge. You clearly have nothing to add beyond bullshit and baseless accusations. Pot meet kettle. Eh? Really? I didn't steak out any ideologically driven opinions on the subject and, well, that's pretty much all you've done. Last time you tried to claim that ISP's were capitalizing routine expenses like uniform purchases (without proof) simply because the facts ran counter to your preconception. Today you came in with a big sarcastic cut against the extreme free market, pro-Comcast stance... that I never took. Pot meet kettle? More like troll meet sunlight. No I took a big sarcastic cut against your idiotic opinion that it's simply too expensive to provide hundred megabit or gigabit service to everyone in the United States. Is that not your position? That you believe the cable companies when they say there is "congestion" and that it's simply very expensive to provide more piping? If you think my argument last time hinged on uniform purchases you are fucking stupid. That was a joke. But rather than explain what exactly they invested in, you dodged the issue. Let me reiterate it: a line that reads, "investments" that is not itemized and has no further explication does not mean anything, since practically everything counts as an investment if you deem it so. The entire business model is, and has been, built on a scarcity model, where cable companies charged different rates for different kinds of data because they could, irregardless of the fact that a bit is a bit. It does not matter what the bit is or who it is being sent to or whether it's video or internet or voice. The mere fact that cable companies have the gumption to say that they don't feel there is any demand for faster service proves the scam. They don't think there is any demand until google fiber moves in, and suddenly the speeds are doubled for free. @ hannahbelle So fucking what. I know that cable companies aren't actually collecting 97% profit margins on everything. Knock it down to 70% and it's still disgusting. The mere fact that you can make it look like 97% is the problem. Love the high level analysis there. So you are saying that because a liberal hack blogger can't read a financial statement correctly and proceeds to disseminate his incorrect information across the web, that it is the company's responsibility to not report numbers that can be incorrectly interpreted? Wow. Also, not everything can count as an investment. GAAP has very strict rules on what can be classified as an investment on financial statements. No that's not what I am saying at all. I am saying that the profits on many cable services are grotesque, and because they are grotesque, the raw numbers are subject to manipulations like the above. I am well aware that capital costs aren't included in those calculations, but the reality is that state-of-the-art network lines would last for decades with minimal maintenance, and should be run as a public utility. Coincidentally, one big reason to massively upgrade our network (and, let's say, spend $200B over 5 years on it) is that it would boost business. Business lovers everywhere should be demanding better quality service, as it has been proven time and again that access to faster internet services boosts productivity and enhances a country's economy. And I answered this in responding to Jonny, but IP can be classified as an investment, and has nothing to do with enhancing the quality of the network, but instead is an attempt to collect monopoly prices on corporate-sanctioned content. Yeah, you answered with lies. Those don't count
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Great jonny, customer premise equipment for $2B in one quarter. $2B on those little boxes you have in your home. Thanks for putting that to rest. It should be very clear where they are spending the money and it's not on fiber upgrades.
$70B to wire half the country with google fiber is still a lot cheaper than you are pretending it would be. Chattanooga wired everyone for $2k per person and are offering 1 gig service for less than the national average. That's 50 to 100 times faster for cheaper, and they were spending more per person than goldman estimates it would cost to wire half the country. And yet you still think that the cable companies are spending $10B a year on capital expenditures related to the network but are struggling to hit 50 mb/s? I can guarantee you that if you talked to network nerds about how much it would really cost to wire the entire country it would be significantly less than whatever the cable companies are quoting.
Profits for the whole companies are not far less than what I claimed. AT&T turned a profit of $49B in 2013. Verizon was $42B, and Comcast was $30B. And a 97% margin is a 97% margin. Not sure what your point is.
The entire point that I'm trying to make is that the cable companies like owning the entire network, and don't see a reason to invest ~$100B in dramatically upgrading it when there is no real threat of competition by private or public organizations. They want people to believe that bandwidth is a scarce commodity, which is utter nonsense, and that the costs to bring 1G/s internet to the majority of Americans would be prohibitive which is also utter nonsense.
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I see everyone is getting along just swell. How you all can sit here and debate about how twat #1 is less worse/marginally better than twat #2, or that your party is saintly, and the other party is the evil and keep straight faces seems so...what's the word quixotic. All the partisanry is drowning me in filth. Well, that ol' power grab called the Presidential election 'season' is heating up and the orthodox mumblings of the children, fear, fear, ISIS, security, WAR, tax, tax, regulate, control, power, is heating up, amid the media driven talking points and narrative assumptions. Frame those questions as biased as you can. Yes, you can do it.
Ok, sarcasm and cynicism aside, the current crop of candidates are worse than the choice between Nero and Caligula. I'm partial to Nero myself - might as well go all in on the bread and circus before the implosion. Who's with me?
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
On February 27 2015 17:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2015 15:12 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 14:19 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 27 2015 13:32 IgnE wrote:I make one-liners in response to idiotic posts. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/17/how-chattanooga-beat-google-fiber-by-half-a-decade/So EPB became an ISP. Now it operates some 8,000 miles of fiber for 56,000 commercial and residential Internet customers. With today's rollout, gigabit service will cost $70 a month, down from $300 a month just last year. The system has gotten consistently strong ratings on DSLReports, the Internet's venerable hub for comparing broadband services.
"What that gives us today is the ability to put 10 gigabits per second in any home or business in our service territory," says Harold DePriest, EPB's CEO. "That could be a manufacturer or office building, or it could be a trailer in a small lot on the back side of Soddy Mountain." The facts are jonny that we could have everyone in the United States getting gigabit service for maybe $100B. Given that the four major cable companies made more than that in one year, in addition to hundreds of millions in government subsidies for what are ostensibly infrastructure upgrades it makes you wonder why we still are paying way more than everyone else for shittier service. Perhaps that's not surprising when you run into 97% profit margins on "high-speed service." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/time-warner-cables-97-pro_b_6591916.htmlYou can say I'm spouting mindless ideology if you want, but the real ideological driver in this discussion is your corporate ideology in tandem with your technological ignorance. I'm calling bullshit on this. Chattanooga spent $330 million on the project. For a population of ~173K that's ~$1904 per person. Extrapolating to the rest of the US, which may be generous, you get a total project cost of $628 billion, which is quite a bit more than your $100 billion figure. I don't have figures for Cox (they're private), but a quick look up of Verizon, TWC, Charter and Comcast yields $14B in combined earnings last year. That's an order of magnitude less what you claimed and includes earnings from the entire companies (not just internet divisions). Also, the 97% profit margin figure is garbage. Cost of revenue is not all the costs. He's trying to trick people like you who know nothing about accounting / finance. For one thing, one of the big costs is the capital cost of building everything. Yet that cost is not included. Not to mention that the guy seems to be doing a lot of funny math (poor assumptions) to get to that figure in the first place. Edit: If you think my argument last time hinged on uniform purchases you are fucking stupid. That was a joke. But rather than explain what exactly they invested in, you dodged the issue. Let me reiterate it: a line that reads, "investments" that is not itemized and has no further explication does not mean anything, since practically everything counts as an investment if you deem it so. There is such a thing as accounting standards. Cap ex is for long term equipment and property. You're welcome to look through their annual reports and find a better answer. Chattanooga spent $2k per person and still is charging less than average for a 1gig connection? That seems pretty good. Keep in mind that Chattanooga did it almost a decade before google fiber. Chattanooga is also pretty rural and didn't take advantage of existing architecture. Hooking up new york city, on the contrary, would be much cheaper per person. Add in cost reductions for scale. $300B at the most. But no less an institution than the esteemed Goldman Sachs estimated that Google Fiber across the entire country would only cost $140B. Source.Of course I am including profits from the whole company. Arbitrarily dividing profits into an "internet division" when the services flow through the same architecture is just an accounting mechanism. Most people buy package deals anyway to get their internet. As for the "investments" category, a quick look through Comcast's investment reports reveals almost $5.4B in investments, most of which went to IP, "cloud-enabled platforms" for their content, and "expansion of business services and automation" in 2013. Discussion of investments in actual network hardware, like fiber, is minimal. But you should know this already jonny. If they were really spending billions every year on actual network improvements, instead of trying to grow their IP portfolio and sell scarcity at monopoly prices, we would all have faster internet by now. Comcast, TimeWarner, etc. spends billions every year on content and business services, not upgrading the lines. That's one big reason they were opposed to net neutrality; they want to privilege their content, which they have invested so much money in. Yeah, Chattanooga has a good deal going. It's also not rural and the project piggybacked off of the local utility's need to revamp its grid and federal stimulus dollars (covered about 1/3). I'm not sure we can say that's perfectly repeatable. The BI article doesn't quote enough to say how serious the GS estimate is supposed to be. Regardless the quote is for half of households not the entire country, and a linear extrapolation is inappropriate. OK, great, yet profits for the whole companies are... far less that what you claimed. I also love how you're now claiming that looking at just the internet division would be inappropriate, right after you complained about "97% margins" for a segment. You should be looking at capital expenditures, not investments. For FY 2013 Cable Distribution $1.8B, Customer Premise Equipment $2.9B, etc. Edit: Show nested quote +On February 27 2015 15:16 IgnE wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On February 27 2015 14:27 hannahbelle wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2015 13:53 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 13:41 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 27 2015 13:17 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 13:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 27 2015 13:08 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 12:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 27 2015 11:19 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 10:46 xDaunt wrote: I am watching Walker's CPAC speech. He is a very good orator -- so much better than the crap that we have seen from republican candidates over the past 20+ years.
Edit: I think he gave that speech without a telepromtpter. So Walker is the frontrunner for the xDaunt prize for political theatre. @ jonny I'm sure you've seen this picture before jonny, but I think it sums up the state of the infrastructure in the US pretty well for people like you who like looking at $ graphs. + Show Spoiler +I'm sure you have explanations for this that would make the cable companies proud, like how the US has a unique geography, difficult terrain, and other costly factors that would bring the price up. Also explanations for how if we wanted better, faster internet service we will have to fork over more cash so the internet companies, which have already been investing copiously into a network that is largely static from year to year, can redouble their efforts to provide us with state-of-the-art service. Especially with the failure of public broadband in places like Chattanooga, I, for one, trust my (sole) local cable provider to provide the best cable service at the lowest available price. Why are you addressing this to me? I never took the position that our internet is the best / cheapest or that regulatory changes can absolutely not improve the situation or that municipalities were a pox on free market virtue. But yeah, since you brought it up there is more to pricing than 'evil corporations' and whatever other mindless ideology you feel like shitting out today. Mindless ideology is just rampant in this thread. Jonny's head remains clear: maximize shareholder value. Pricing is complicated. Crawl back under your bridge. You clearly have nothing to add beyond bullshit and baseless accusations. Pot meet kettle. Eh? Really? I didn't steak out any ideologically driven opinions on the subject and, well, that's pretty much all you've done. Last time you tried to claim that ISP's were capitalizing routine expenses like uniform purchases (without proof) simply because the facts ran counter to your preconception. Today you came in with a big sarcastic cut against the extreme free market, pro-Comcast stance... that I never took. Pot meet kettle? More like troll meet sunlight. No I took a big sarcastic cut against your idiotic opinion that it's simply too expensive to provide hundred megabit or gigabit service to everyone in the United States. Is that not your position? That you believe the cable companies when they say there is "congestion" and that it's simply very expensive to provide more piping? If you think my argument last time hinged on uniform purchases you are fucking stupid. That was a joke. But rather than explain what exactly they invested in, you dodged the issue. Let me reiterate it: a line that reads, "investments" that is not itemized and has no further explication does not mean anything, since practically everything counts as an investment if you deem it so. The entire business model is, and has been, built on a scarcity model, where cable companies charged different rates for different kinds of data because they could, irregardless of the fact that a bit is a bit. It does not matter what the bit is or who it is being sent to or whether it's video or internet or voice. The mere fact that cable companies have the gumption to say that they don't feel there is any demand for faster service proves the scam. They don't think there is any demand until google fiber moves in, and suddenly the speeds are doubled for free. @ hannahbelle So fucking what. I know that cable companies aren't actually collecting 97% profit margins on everything. Knock it down to 70% and it's still disgusting. The mere fact that you can make it look like 97% is the problem. Love the high level analysis there. So you are saying that because a liberal hack blogger can't read a financial statement correctly and proceeds to disseminate his incorrect information across the web, that it is the company's responsibility to not report numbers that can be incorrectly interpreted? Wow. Also, not everything can count as an investment. GAAP has very strict rules on what can be classified as an investment on financial statements. No that's not what I am saying at all. I am saying that the profits on many cable services are grotesque, and because they are grotesque, the raw numbers are subject to manipulations like the above. I am well aware that capital costs aren't included in those calculations, but the reality is that state-of-the-art network lines would last for decades with minimal maintenance, and should be run as a public utility. Coincidentally, one big reason to massively upgrade our network (and, let's say, spend $200B over 5 years on it) is that it would boost business. Business lovers everywhere should be demanding better quality service, as it has been proven time and again that access to faster internet services boosts productivity and enhances a country's economy. And I answered this in responding to Jonny, but IP can be classified as an investment, and has nothing to do with enhancing the quality of the network, but instead is an attempt to collect monopoly prices on corporate-sanctioned content. Yeah, you answered with lies. Those don't count what sort of equipment and piping is this? sounds like it can be stuff like your cable box
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On February 27 2015 13:26 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2015 12:58 hannahbelle wrote:On February 27 2015 02:11 oneofthem wrote:On February 27 2015 01:46 hannahbelle wrote:On February 27 2015 01:42 oneofthem wrote: hannahbelle where did you go to school MBA from the Kelley School of Business in Indiana. Not that I am sure it is relevant to the discussion... read up one post from mine, see where you talked about the guy's public education reasoning skills. looks like your nonpublic education didn't get you enough skills to score a decent gmat kek. Really, you are stooping this low? I would have thought better of you, but then I realized, you're just ignorant. Probably socio-economically disadvantaged, so you really can't be held responsible for your own stupidity. When I was checking on grad schools, my GMAT was the median of those at the Harvard School of Business. I just didn't have the money or desire to uproot my family and move them 1000 miles to go to school. As well as trying to find another job to support my family in a new area while going to school. It was just as easy to go to the top-10 rated MBA program that was a half hour from my house. But I'm sure you in your infinite knowledge of business grad schools already knew how these programs stack up. kek Half of his posts are trolls. You don't have to bother defending yourself, just ignore it. It's what everyone else does. Edit: I mean everyone else just ignores the trolly posts. Like IgnE's cute one liners. oh, it's getting angry in here!
You are really recommending the chief troll in this thread to ignore the trolls? :D
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IRS inspector general opens a criminal probe after recovering Lois Lerner's e-mails:
The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed.
Investigators have already scoured 744 backup tapes and gleaned 32,774 unique emails, but just two weeks ago they found an additional 424 tapes that could contain even more Lerner emails, Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told the House Oversight Committee in a rare late-night hearing meant to look into the status of the investigation.
“There is potential criminal activity,” Mr. Camus said.
He said they have also discovered the hard drives from the IRS’s email servers, but said because the drives are out of synch it’s not clear whether they will be able to recover anything from them.
“To date we have found 32,744 unique emails that were backed up from Lois Lerner’s email box. We are in the process of comparing these emails to what the IRS has already produced to Congress to determine if we did in fact recover any new emails,” Mr. Camus said.
Mr. Camus said it took him only two weeks to track down the backup tapes, and when he asked the IRS depository for them, the workers there said they’d never been contacted by the agency itself.
Republicans said that was stunning because IRS Commissioner John Koskinen repeatedly assured Congress the emails were irretrievably lost...
Mr. Camus said they were clued in to the 424 new tapes they just found a couple of weeks ago after realizing the IRS hadn’t given over a key document. They demanded that document, and realized it showed hundreds of other tapes existed.
Democrats said the GOP seemed to be insinuating Ms. Lerner had purposely crashed her hard drive to hide emails — though she herself pushed to try to get messages recovered.
Democrats also questioned why the hearing was happening now, given that Mr. Camus and Mr. George both stressed that their findings are preliminary and could change as they learn more. Sounds like they're both right. The IRS and Lerner in particular did this dirty and they appear to have tried to hide something. But the cost of the investigation is very high and it's pretty clear this is a political witch-hunt.
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On February 27 2015 22:10 coverpunch wrote:IRS inspector general opens a criminal probe after recovering Lois Lerner's e-mails:Show nested quote +The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed.
Investigators have already scoured 744 backup tapes and gleaned 32,774 unique emails, but just two weeks ago they found an additional 424 tapes that could contain even more Lerner emails, Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told the House Oversight Committee in a rare late-night hearing meant to look into the status of the investigation.
“There is potential criminal activity,” Mr. Camus said.
He said they have also discovered the hard drives from the IRS’s email servers, but said because the drives are out of synch it’s not clear whether they will be able to recover anything from them.
“To date we have found 32,744 unique emails that were backed up from Lois Lerner’s email box. We are in the process of comparing these emails to what the IRS has already produced to Congress to determine if we did in fact recover any new emails,” Mr. Camus said. Show nested quote + Mr. Camus said it took him only two weeks to track down the backup tapes, and when he asked the IRS depository for them, the workers there said they’d never been contacted by the agency itself.
Republicans said that was stunning because IRS Commissioner John Koskinen repeatedly assured Congress the emails were irretrievably lost...
Mr. Camus said they were clued in to the 424 new tapes they just found a couple of weeks ago after realizing the IRS hadn’t given over a key document. They demanded that document, and realized it showed hundreds of other tapes existed. Show nested quote +Democrats said the GOP seemed to be insinuating Ms. Lerner had purposely crashed her hard drive to hide emails — though she herself pushed to try to get messages recovered.
Democrats also questioned why the hearing was happening now, given that Mr. Camus and Mr. George both stressed that their findings are preliminary and could change as they learn more. Sounds like they're both right. The IRS and Lerner in particular did this dirty and they appear to have tried to hide something. But the cost of the investigation is very high and it's pretty clear this is a political witch-hunt. Someone tried to hide something from oversight, I would say cost of investigation should not be a consideration.
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I'm just tickled by the fact that the deputy inspector general's last name is Camus
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On February 27 2015 22:15 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2015 22:10 coverpunch wrote:IRS inspector general opens a criminal probe after recovering Lois Lerner's e-mails:The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed.
Investigators have already scoured 744 backup tapes and gleaned 32,774 unique emails, but just two weeks ago they found an additional 424 tapes that could contain even more Lerner emails, Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told the House Oversight Committee in a rare late-night hearing meant to look into the status of the investigation.
“There is potential criminal activity,” Mr. Camus said.
He said they have also discovered the hard drives from the IRS’s email servers, but said because the drives are out of synch it’s not clear whether they will be able to recover anything from them.
“To date we have found 32,744 unique emails that were backed up from Lois Lerner’s email box. We are in the process of comparing these emails to what the IRS has already produced to Congress to determine if we did in fact recover any new emails,” Mr. Camus said. Mr. Camus said it took him only two weeks to track down the backup tapes, and when he asked the IRS depository for them, the workers there said they’d never been contacted by the agency itself.
Republicans said that was stunning because IRS Commissioner John Koskinen repeatedly assured Congress the emails were irretrievably lost...
Mr. Camus said they were clued in to the 424 new tapes they just found a couple of weeks ago after realizing the IRS hadn’t given over a key document. They demanded that document, and realized it showed hundreds of other tapes existed. Democrats said the GOP seemed to be insinuating Ms. Lerner had purposely crashed her hard drive to hide emails — though she herself pushed to try to get messages recovered.
Democrats also questioned why the hearing was happening now, given that Mr. Camus and Mr. George both stressed that their findings are preliminary and could change as they learn more. Sounds like they're both right. The IRS and Lerner in particular did this dirty and they appear to have tried to hide something. But the cost of the investigation is very high and it's pretty clear this is a political witch-hunt. Someone tried to hide something from oversight, I would say cost of investigation should not be a consideration. It shouldn't in principle, but the story quotes a cost of $20 million just to reach this preliminary stage, which is exorbitant. In the fucked up logic of investigations, it's almost worth just letting Lerner get away with the crime rather than spending more to try and get a conviction, which won't anywhere near the satisfying closure that we think it will. This thing will be measured out in years and she'll just reach a settlement for probation before getting a cushy liberal think tank or lobbyist job.
It's only worth pursuing the drama for the remote chance that they flip her and she says something crazy like Obama put her up to it.
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What she says should be regarded as worthless at this point. Too many bad convictions throughout the justice system are a result of relying on flipped criminals and jailhouse snitches.
Can't Lerner be charged with obstruction of justice or something? If inspectors could find stuff, then that means people lied. Perjury charges perhaps?
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On February 27 2015 21:34 oneofthem wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2015 17:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 27 2015 15:12 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 14:19 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 27 2015 13:32 IgnE wrote:I make one-liners in response to idiotic posts. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/17/how-chattanooga-beat-google-fiber-by-half-a-decade/So EPB became an ISP. Now it operates some 8,000 miles of fiber for 56,000 commercial and residential Internet customers. With today's rollout, gigabit service will cost $70 a month, down from $300 a month just last year. The system has gotten consistently strong ratings on DSLReports, the Internet's venerable hub for comparing broadband services.
"What that gives us today is the ability to put 10 gigabits per second in any home or business in our service territory," says Harold DePriest, EPB's CEO. "That could be a manufacturer or office building, or it could be a trailer in a small lot on the back side of Soddy Mountain." The facts are jonny that we could have everyone in the United States getting gigabit service for maybe $100B. Given that the four major cable companies made more than that in one year, in addition to hundreds of millions in government subsidies for what are ostensibly infrastructure upgrades it makes you wonder why we still are paying way more than everyone else for shittier service. Perhaps that's not surprising when you run into 97% profit margins on "high-speed service." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/time-warner-cables-97-pro_b_6591916.htmlYou can say I'm spouting mindless ideology if you want, but the real ideological driver in this discussion is your corporate ideology in tandem with your technological ignorance. I'm calling bullshit on this. Chattanooga spent $330 million on the project. For a population of ~173K that's ~$1904 per person. Extrapolating to the rest of the US, which may be generous, you get a total project cost of $628 billion, which is quite a bit more than your $100 billion figure. I don't have figures for Cox (they're private), but a quick look up of Verizon, TWC, Charter and Comcast yields $14B in combined earnings last year. That's an order of magnitude less what you claimed and includes earnings from the entire companies (not just internet divisions). Also, the 97% profit margin figure is garbage. Cost of revenue is not all the costs. He's trying to trick people like you who know nothing about accounting / finance. For one thing, one of the big costs is the capital cost of building everything. Yet that cost is not included. Not to mention that the guy seems to be doing a lot of funny math (poor assumptions) to get to that figure in the first place. Edit: If you think my argument last time hinged on uniform purchases you are fucking stupid. That was a joke. But rather than explain what exactly they invested in, you dodged the issue. Let me reiterate it: a line that reads, "investments" that is not itemized and has no further explication does not mean anything, since practically everything counts as an investment if you deem it so. There is such a thing as accounting standards. Cap ex is for long term equipment and property. You're welcome to look through their annual reports and find a better answer. Chattanooga spent $2k per person and still is charging less than average for a 1gig connection? That seems pretty good. Keep in mind that Chattanooga did it almost a decade before google fiber. Chattanooga is also pretty rural and didn't take advantage of existing architecture. Hooking up new york city, on the contrary, would be much cheaper per person. Add in cost reductions for scale. $300B at the most. But no less an institution than the esteemed Goldman Sachs estimated that Google Fiber across the entire country would only cost $140B. Source.Of course I am including profits from the whole company. Arbitrarily dividing profits into an "internet division" when the services flow through the same architecture is just an accounting mechanism. Most people buy package deals anyway to get their internet. As for the "investments" category, a quick look through Comcast's investment reports reveals almost $5.4B in investments, most of which went to IP, "cloud-enabled platforms" for their content, and "expansion of business services and automation" in 2013. Discussion of investments in actual network hardware, like fiber, is minimal. But you should know this already jonny. If they were really spending billions every year on actual network improvements, instead of trying to grow their IP portfolio and sell scarcity at monopoly prices, we would all have faster internet by now. Comcast, TimeWarner, etc. spends billions every year on content and business services, not upgrading the lines. That's one big reason they were opposed to net neutrality; they want to privilege their content, which they have invested so much money in. Yeah, Chattanooga has a good deal going. It's also not rural and the project piggybacked off of the local utility's need to revamp its grid and federal stimulus dollars (covered about 1/3). I'm not sure we can say that's perfectly repeatable. The BI article doesn't quote enough to say how serious the GS estimate is supposed to be. Regardless the quote is for half of households not the entire country, and a linear extrapolation is inappropriate. OK, great, yet profits for the whole companies are... far less that what you claimed. I also love how you're now claiming that looking at just the internet division would be inappropriate, right after you complained about "97% margins" for a segment. You should be looking at capital expenditures, not investments. For FY 2013 Cable Distribution $1.8B, Customer Premise Equipment $2.9B, etc. Edit: On February 27 2015 15:16 IgnE wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On February 27 2015 14:27 hannahbelle wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2015 13:53 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 13:41 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 27 2015 13:17 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 13:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 27 2015 13:08 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 12:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 27 2015 11:19 IgnE wrote:On February 27 2015 10:46 xDaunt wrote: I am watching Walker's CPAC speech. He is a very good orator -- so much better than the crap that we have seen from republican candidates over the past 20+ years.
Edit: I think he gave that speech without a telepromtpter. So Walker is the frontrunner for the xDaunt prize for political theatre. @ jonny I'm sure you've seen this picture before jonny, but I think it sums up the state of the infrastructure in the US pretty well for people like you who like looking at $ graphs. + Show Spoiler +I'm sure you have explanations for this that would make the cable companies proud, like how the US has a unique geography, difficult terrain, and other costly factors that would bring the price up. Also explanations for how if we wanted better, faster internet service we will have to fork over more cash so the internet companies, which have already been investing copiously into a network that is largely static from year to year, can redouble their efforts to provide us with state-of-the-art service. Especially with the failure of public broadband in places like Chattanooga, I, for one, trust my (sole) local cable provider to provide the best cable service at the lowest available price. Why are you addressing this to me? I never took the position that our internet is the best / cheapest or that regulatory changes can absolutely not improve the situation or that municipalities were a pox on free market virtue. But yeah, since you brought it up there is more to pricing than 'evil corporations' and whatever other mindless ideology you feel like shitting out today. Mindless ideology is just rampant in this thread. Jonny's head remains clear: maximize shareholder value. Pricing is complicated. Crawl back under your bridge. You clearly have nothing to add beyond bullshit and baseless accusations. Pot meet kettle. Eh? Really? I didn't steak out any ideologically driven opinions on the subject and, well, that's pretty much all you've done. Last time you tried to claim that ISP's were capitalizing routine expenses like uniform purchases (without proof) simply because the facts ran counter to your preconception. Today you came in with a big sarcastic cut against the extreme free market, pro-Comcast stance... that I never took. Pot meet kettle? More like troll meet sunlight. No I took a big sarcastic cut against your idiotic opinion that it's simply too expensive to provide hundred megabit or gigabit service to everyone in the United States. Is that not your position? That you believe the cable companies when they say there is "congestion" and that it's simply very expensive to provide more piping? If you think my argument last time hinged on uniform purchases you are fucking stupid. That was a joke. But rather than explain what exactly they invested in, you dodged the issue. Let me reiterate it: a line that reads, "investments" that is not itemized and has no further explication does not mean anything, since practically everything counts as an investment if you deem it so. The entire business model is, and has been, built on a scarcity model, where cable companies charged different rates for different kinds of data because they could, irregardless of the fact that a bit is a bit. It does not matter what the bit is or who it is being sent to or whether it's video or internet or voice. The mere fact that cable companies have the gumption to say that they don't feel there is any demand for faster service proves the scam. They don't think there is any demand until google fiber moves in, and suddenly the speeds are doubled for free. @ hannahbelle So fucking what. I know that cable companies aren't actually collecting 97% profit margins on everything. Knock it down to 70% and it's still disgusting. The mere fact that you can make it look like 97% is the problem. Love the high level analysis there. So you are saying that because a liberal hack blogger can't read a financial statement correctly and proceeds to disseminate his incorrect information across the web, that it is the company's responsibility to not report numbers that can be incorrectly interpreted? Wow. Also, not everything can count as an investment. GAAP has very strict rules on what can be classified as an investment on financial statements. No that's not what I am saying at all. I am saying that the profits on many cable services are grotesque, and because they are grotesque, the raw numbers are subject to manipulations like the above. I am well aware that capital costs aren't included in those calculations, but the reality is that state-of-the-art network lines would last for decades with minimal maintenance, and should be run as a public utility. Coincidentally, one big reason to massively upgrade our network (and, let's say, spend $200B over 5 years on it) is that it would boost business. Business lovers everywhere should be demanding better quality service, as it has been proven time and again that access to faster internet services boosts productivity and enhances a country's economy. And I answered this in responding to Jonny, but IP can be classified as an investment, and has nothing to do with enhancing the quality of the network, but instead is an attempt to collect monopoly prices on corporate-sanctioned content. Yeah, you answered with lies. Those don't count what sort of equipment and piping is this? sounds like it can be stuff like your cable box
Premise equipment is also the cost of setting new drops, burying them in locations that allow it, splitters, amplifiers, coax cable, ethernet cable, routers, modems, phone modems, as well as the repairs for any service that's broken, which people typically get at a discounted rate or free.
What's funny, is that 2013 was a year when a lot of cable companies were buying new cable boxes en masse to create better whole home DVR products (since the first line of cable boxes that a lot of companies bought into had severe technical issues), so that's a slightly inflated number. They do not purchase new cable boxes every year. They will purchase a certain amount of new ones when a new product requires it, and otherwise, will refurbish old cable boxes as many times as possible, up to the point where customers are sending them back on the first day because they're so beaten up.
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On February 27 2015 19:51 Wegandi wrote: I see everyone is getting along just swell. How you all can sit here and debate about how twat #1 is less worse/marginally better than twat #2, or that your party is saintly, and the other party is the evil and keep straight faces seems so...what's the word quixotic. All the partisanry is drowning me in filth. Well, that ol' power grab called the Presidential election 'season' is heating up and the orthodox mumblings of the children, fear, fear, ISIS, security, WAR, tax, tax, regulate, control, power, is heating up, amid the media driven talking points and narrative assumptions. Frame those questions as biased as you can. Yes, you can do it.
Ok, sarcasm and cynicism aside, the current crop of candidates are worse than the choice between Nero and Caligula. I'm partial to Nero myself - might as well go all in on the bread and circus before the implosion. Who's with me? I don't know if now's the time to go into cynicism paralysis. i grant you that regardless of the party in power, things will get a whole lot worse before getting better. I'd rather vote for the best shot at having a strong recovery phase, rather than, say, excuses about how the bad could've been much much worse.
I'll take the gentler slope to the erosion of personal liberty and the growth in the scope of collective societal "responsibility." I might even turn cautiously optimistic about the future reduction of corruption in Washington if Walker wins primary against media and perhaps GOP donor onslaught.
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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) late Thursday tried to downplay a comment he made about being prepared to confront Islamic State terrorists thanks to his experience fighting union protesters.
In response to a question from an audience member at at the Conservative Political Action conference earlier in the evening, Walker brought up the massive protests in Wisconsin in 2011 over a law he signed stripping public-sector unions of their power to collectively bargain.
"I want a commander-in-chief who will do everything in their power to ensure that the threat from radical Islamic terrorists do not wash up on American soil. We will have someone who leads and ultimately will send a message not only that we will protect American soil but do not take this upon freedom-loving people anywhere else in the world," Walker said. "We need a leader with that kind of confidence. If I can take on a 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world."
Following the remarks, the National Review's Jim Geraghty wrote that he took no pleasure in defending the union protesters, but that Walker gave a "terrible response" to the Islamic State question. A spokeswoman for Walker's political committee later sent Geraghty a statement downplaying the governor's mention of the protesters.
"Governor Walker believes our fight against ISIS is one of the most important issues our country face," the statement to Geraghty from Walker spokeswoman Kristen Kukowski said. "He was in no way comparing any American citizen to ISIS. What the governor was saying was when faced with adversity he chooses strength and leadership. Those are the qualities we need to fix the leadership void this White House has created."
In an interview with Bloomberg Politics' Mark Halperin and John Heilemann after the CPAC speech, Heilemann gave Walker a golden opportunity to deny that he was equating violent extremists with union protesters.
Source
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On February 27 2015 17:53 IgnE wrote: Great jonny, customer premise equipment for $2B in one quarter. $2B on those little boxes you have in your home. Thanks for putting that to rest. It should be very clear where they are spending the money and it's not on fiber upgrades.
$70B to wire half the country with google fiber is still a lot cheaper than you are pretending it would be. Chattanooga wired everyone for $2k per person and are offering 1 gig service for less than the national average. That's 50 to 100 times faster for cheaper, and they were spending more per person than goldman estimates it would cost to wire half the country. And yet you still think that the cable companies are spending $10B a year on capital expenditures related to the network but are struggling to hit 50 mb/s? I can guarantee you that if you talked to network nerds about how much it would really cost to wire the entire country it would be significantly less than whatever the cable companies are quoting.
Profits for the whole companies are not far less than what I claimed. AT&T turned a profit of $49B in 2013. Verizon was $42B, and Comcast was $30B. And a 97% margin is a 97% margin. Not sure what your point is.
The entire point that I'm trying to make is that the cable companies like owning the entire network, and don't see a reason to invest ~$100B in dramatically upgrading it when there is no real threat of competition by private or public organizations. They want people to believe that bandwidth is a scarce commodity, which is utter nonsense, and that the costs to bring 1G/s internet to the majority of Americans would be prohibitive which is also utter nonsense. Allow me to highlight some of your crap:
The numbers were not $2B customer equipment, full stop. There were other figures as well that you chose to ignore. This is lying by omission.
AT&T's profit for 2014 was $6B, Verizon $5B, Comcast $7B. I have no idea where you are getting your numbers from, but they are incorrect. Same goes for the 97% margin; that is a lie.
Wow, that's a lot of crap in just one post!
As for Chattanooga, like I said, they have a good thing going there. They spent the relative equivalent of a $600B+ national project so it better damn well be good. It was also financed on the cheap with tax free bonds and stimulus grants, and was built alongside the electric utility's fiber project, so it better damn well be cheap. Pricing was also a lot higher in the first few years with 1 gig service costing $300+. A lot of local residents don't even use it - last I could find EPB only had a 30%+ market share with the other residents using the cheaper alternatives. That'll likely change with time, but that's largely how infrastructure works. You build to meet future capacity needs.
Side note: after looking into Chattanooga a bit more, EPB leases out their fiber wholesale, so when the local cable co increases speeds after a municipal fiber launch, it's probably due to that rather than withholding service.
Cable co cap ex is real. Yes, it's not all on fiber (never claimed it was) but you can't just lay fiber either. You need to hook it up and service it too otherwise it's pretty useless. These companies also have other areas to invest in like wireless and cable TV operations. And speeds are increasing because of that - speeds have been doubling every few years. I'm sure everyone here would like to see things progress quicker, but realistically that involves other people, and other people's money, who may not be interested in footing the bill.
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On February 27 2015 09:45 Nyxisto wrote:how do people like him get these jobs Show nested quote + Inhofe has made multiple foreign trips, especially to Africa, on missions that he described as "a Jesus thing" and that were paid for by the U.S. government. He has used these trips for activities on behalf of The Fellowship, a Christian organization.[95] Inhofe has said that his trips included some governmental work but also involved "the political philosophy of Jesus, something that had been put together by Doug Coe, the leader of The Fellowship...It's all scripturally based." Inhofe used his access as a Senator to pursue religious goals
I'm pretty sure Jesus would not be amused by his behaviour
It's really kinda bizarre. Jesus invented the core to our idea of separation of church and state ("Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto God what is God's.") I get your average guy doesn't read the Bible a lot, but embezzling other people's money is kinda the opposite of what Christianity is about.
On February 27 2015 14:04 oneofthem wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2015 12:58 hannahbelle wrote:On February 27 2015 02:11 oneofthem wrote:On February 27 2015 01:46 hannahbelle wrote:On February 27 2015 01:42 oneofthem wrote: hannahbelle where did you go to school MBA from the Kelley School of Business in Indiana. Not that I am sure it is relevant to the discussion... read up one post from mine, see where you talked about the guy's public education reasoning skills. looks like your nonpublic education didn't get you enough skills to score a decent gmat kek. Really, you are stooping this low? I would have thought better of you, but then I realized, you're just ignorant. Probably socio-economically disadvantaged, so you really can't be held responsible for your own stupidity. When I was checking on grad schools, my GMAT was the median of those at the Harvard School of Business. I just didn't have the money or desire to uproot my family and move them 1000 miles to go to school. As well as trying to find another job to support my family in a new area while going to school. It was just as easy to go to the top-10 rated MBA program that was a half hour from my house. But I'm sure you in your infinite knowledge of business grad schools already knew how these programs stack up. kek never seen IU ranked in t10 bro. there's a couple of t10's near you but IU isn't it, but iti s strong regionally so w/e. point is not about you really, but looking at the type of reasoning you are throwing out here you shouldnt be dissing other people's education. just saying
Holy shit... hannah looking like the good guy. I'm... speechless... It's like when John Edwards did the gay dig at Dick Cheney and I found myself sympathizing with Darth Vader.
But seriously though, can we cut out the personal vendettas please? Given that moderation appears to have given up on this thread (understandably) [edit: yay for warnings!], it would be awesome if we could try to act like decent human beings without questioning GMATs or calling one another ideologues (hint: everyone here is one or another kind of an ideologue; that's why they're in the fucking politics thread. I almost wrote an exception or two, but it's not a lot and even them not consistently.)
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