Comcast to buy Time Warner Cable

[ChicosBailBonds]

I posted it because I had mentioned that very thing last year and again when this thing came about a few months ago.  Roberts is very cozy with POTUS, very.  This thing is going through because too many people in the admin are bought and paid for IMO.

[Coleman]

I posted it because I had mentioned that very thing last year and again when this thing came about a few months ago.  Roberts is very cozy with POTUS, very.  This thing is going through because too many people in the admin are bought and paid for IMO.

No argument from me. And it will continue with the next administration, regardless of what side of the aisle it is.

I am not a fan of the merger.

[MikeDeanesDarkGlasses]

Bought and Paid for

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/375116/how-comcast-bought-democratic-party-matthew-continetti

This post sponsored by:  The Koch Bros. 

[ChicosBailBonds]

This post sponsored by:  The Koch Bros. 

Do you have a Koch fetish like so many on the left?

[ChicosBailBonds]

No argument from me. And it will continue with the next administration, regardless of what side of the aisle it is.

Exactly....of course that's now what was promised and the amount of gullible people that bought into hopey changy is crazy

[brandx]

Exactly....of course that's now what was promised and the amount of gullible people that bought into hopey changy is crazy

Of course, you are making the leap to say that it is BO's fault that the House refuses to pass anything he promised. But we all know better, really.

[ChicosBailBonds]

Follow the money and the admin


http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/04/14/how-obamas-justice-department-selectively-blocks-mergers-by-republican-ceos/

[brandx]

Follow the money and the admin


http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/04/14/how-obamas-justice-department-selectively-blocks-mergers-by-republican-ceos/

Couldn't you find anything nuttier? The report comes from Frontiers of Freedom.

Let's see: funding from Exxon to discredit Global Warming; Funding from Tobacco Industry to discredit the harmful effects of smoking; pushing for more poisons in the water supply and more poisons in the air.

Go ahead and believe what they say if you must - I think I'll pass on their report!!

If you wanted to be accurate, you could look at which mergers were allowed and which ones have not but I guess it's so much easier posting a link to some fringe group with a clear-cut agenda.

[ChicosBailBonds]

What does that have to do with anything forgetful said?  You don't want to debate the issue so I will choose to use the emotion card.

Plus, that article actually says marijuana is safer than drinking..."The results of the driving experiment gives support to those who say driving while stoned is far less dangerous than driving drunk."

But don't mind me...carry on

Brain damage article last week from Harvard.

Now study about heart damage from marijuana out today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/technology/fcc-new-net-neutrality-rules.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

But don't mind me....carry on

[forgetful]

Brain damage article last week from Harvard.

Now study about heart damage from marijuana out today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/technology/fcc-new-net-neutrality-rules.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

But don't mind me....carry on

You are getting the science completely wrong, but that is not really a surprise.  The Harvard article did not indicate "brain damage" rather reported that there were changes in brain matter (an increase) that correlated with smoking.  I'll note that the statistical significance of the data can be questioned, but regardless, there studies cannot differentiate between whether the change in brain structure results in increased function or decreased function.

So it would be equally true to say that smoking marijuana makes you smarter according to there study (note the point is not that it makes you smarter, just that there data does not speak to one or the other at all).

As for the heart studies, again you are getting the science wrong.  It says that smoking marijuana causes an acute (meaning temporary) increase in the probability of immediately having a heart attack.  The increase is consistent with the increase due to having sex, climbing a flight of stairs or going for a jog. 

[ChicosBailBonds]

You are getting the science completely wrong, but that is not really a surprise.  The Harvard article did not indicate "brain damage" rather reported that there were changes in brain matter (an increase) that correlated with smoking.  I'll note that the statistical significance of the data can be questioned, but regardless, there studies cannot differentiate between whether the change in brain structure results in increased function or decreased function.

So it would be equally true to say that smoking marijuana makes you smarter according to there study (note the point is not that it makes you smarter, just that there data does not speak to one or the other at all).

As for the heart studies, again you are getting the science wrong.  It says that smoking marijuana causes an acute (meaning temporary) increase in the probability of immediately having a heart attack.  The increase is consistent with the increase due to having sex, climbing a flight of stairs or going for a jog. 

The doctors in the study explicitly say damage and go on to list examples.  Sorry, but you're just wanting to ignore what the doctors are saying.

[ChicosBailBonds]

http://variety.com/2014/tv/news/att-mulls-40-billion-acquisition-of-directv-report-1201169045/

[jesmu84]

I LOVE everyone in this industry. Oh, and our elected officials.

http://www.newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html

[ChicosBailBonds]

I LOVE everyone in this industry. Oh, and our elected officials.

http://www.newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html

http://www.realcleartechnology.com/lists/myths-debunked/us-internet.html?state=stop

About the author, his real name is Mark Stephens.  He's had a few issues, like claiming to have a PhD from Stanford (he does not) and claiming to be a professor at Stanford (he was a TA).

In terms of his claims, well hard to say how accurate they are.  Yes, some truth to them.  His articles are fun to read, a dash of truth, a dash of speculation passed as truth, some things that are mere opinion, etc.  He's definitely a populist, but some of his facts are way off like the link I gave above.

[MU Fan in Connecticut]

In Connecticut only, AT&T is trying to sell U-verse & landline phone service to Frontier Communications.  Frontier is locally headquarted in Stamford and it's still not certain the sale will go through.

[Coleman]

In Connecticut only, AT&T is trying to sell U-verse & landline phone service to Frontier Communications.  Frontier is locally headquarted in Stamford and it's still not certain the sale will go through.

That's interesting, it seems to be the opposite of the general industry trend of consolidation, which would point to AT&T buying companies like Frontier.

[ChicosBailBonds]

That's interesting, it seems to be the opposite of the general industry trend of consolidation, which would point to AT&T buying companies like Frontier.

They're just abandoning that portion of the market and raising cash.  It costs a ton for them to run the TV side, if they accounted for it solely without the $$ that get for wireless and internet, their TV side would be updside down. 

If you saw the other link I provided, it isn't hard to speculate why they might be doing that.  I know the union for AT&T is hopping mad because they think Frontier is going to axe a bunch of jobs.

[MU Fan in Connecticut]

They're just abandoning that portion of the market and raising cash.  It costs a ton for them to run the TV side, if they accounted for it solely without the $$ that get for wireless and internet, their TV side would be updside down. 

If you saw the other link I provided, it isn't hard to speculate why they might be doing that.  I know the union for AT&T is hopping mad because they think Frontier is going to axe a bunch of jobs.

And more to your point Chicos, then SBC (now AT&T) bought SNET - Southern New England Telephone 15-20 years ago.   It was a stand alone company that only had Connecticut as a market.  It was an AT&T/SBC island as every other telcom company in the northeast was owned by someone else other than them.  Other than mobile phones isn't the current AT&T U-verse & landline phones centered in the Soutwest & Midwest and the local Conn. operations still an island?  I can see why they would want to unload for that reason in addition to declining landlines.

[brandx]

http://crooksandliars.com/2014/05/how-comcast-trying-turn-internet-old


Each day, the open internet/net neutrality battle gets a bit more interesting. We just covered Tim Lee's excellent look at how Comcast and other big telcos were effectively using interconnection disputes to get the same result as violating net neutrality, without technically violating the basic concept of what most people believe is net neutrality. And he's back with an even more important explanation of how Comcast's ultimate goal is to effectively make the internet more like the old phone system, post AT&T breakup, in which everyone had to pay to access the end points of the network. Ironically, they're trying to recreate the internet in the form of the old telephone network, while at the same time doing everything to resist being classified as a telephone network by the FCC.

The short version is that, after AT&T was broken up into the baby bells, and you had some amount of long distance competition, the real bottlenecks were the baby bells who had a terminating monopoly. Anyone who wanted to call someone long distance had to pay the terminating baby bell to reach those people, and since they were monopolies, they drove up the prices quite a bit. This is what happens under a sender-party pays system with monopolies on the last mile/termination points. The internet, on the other hand, was built under a very different system, what's known as "bill and keep", where by the end users pay for their own bandwidth, and ISPs are expected to work out the transit and interconnections on their own -- often with no money changing hands, thanks to what had been mostly informal (and later more formal) peering agreements.

In short: under the old baby bell model, payment mainly went from the "sender/caller" to the terminating provider for access to that end node. Under the internet model, the end nodes paid for access to "the internet" recognizing that part of the deal was that they were getting equal access to everyone else. The shift that Comcast (and now others) have been making, is to try to take their dominant position to recreate the old system, seeking to charge for access to those end nodes as well (effectively, as we've been saying for years, double charging for the internet). That is, they're seeking to have you both pay for your bandwidth and having internet companies pay again to get to you on the bandwidth you already paid for.

And the only reason they can do this is because they have tremendous market power. Comcast pretends that it's doing this because of differing traffic ratios between peering partners, but as Lee notes, that's not right:


But that's not how the internet works. Consumer-facing ISPs have always received more traffic than they send out. Comcast itself sells "unbalanced" internet service to its customers, with download speeds much faster than upload speeds. That makes it inevitable that ISPs like Comcast will receive more data than they send. But in the bill-and-keep model, ISPs generally pay transit providers for connectivity, regardless of traffic ratios.

The traffic ratio rule Comcast advocated in 2010 was a variation on the sender-pays rule. It will create the same kind of terminating monopoly problem that plagued the long distance telephone market. But that might not seem like a bad thing if you own the monopoly.

Again, what's really happening is that Comcast is trying to quietly recreate the baby bell system of old, in which it has enough power as a terminating monopoly to charge monopoly rents for "access" in a system that was built off of the idea that no one needs to pay to access another end point, you're just paying for your own connection to the network.

And the simple fact is that the other large ISPs (including AT&T and Verizon -- who understand this deeply, given their own histories) have caught onto what's happening and are doing the same thing. That's why the transit players are pointing out that the five biggest US ISPs have all been effectively clogging up the internet in order to effectively hold end internet sites hostage, to get them to pay for access, and to remake the internet's more open system into something that much more resembles the old telco system with monopoly rents.

And this is also why Comcast is being dreadfully misleading in arguing that its merger with Time Warner Cable won't impact anything, because the two are not in competitive markets. As Lee notes, Comcast is (purposefully) mis-identifying the market that's actually important here:

 Defenders of the merger have argued that it won't reduce competition because Comcast and Time Warner don't serve the same customers. That's true, but it ignores how the merger would affect the interconnection market. A merged cable giant would have even more leverage to demand monopoly rents from companies across the internet.
A century ago, the Wilson administration decided not to press its antitrust case against AT&T, allowing the firm to continue the acquisition spree that made it a monopoly. In retrospect, that decision looks like a mistake. Wilson's decision not to intervene in the market led to a telephone monopoly, which in turn led to 70 years of regulation and a messy, 10-year antitrust case.

Obviously, the combination of Comcast and Time Warner would not dominate the internet the way AT&T dominated the telephone industry. But recent events suggest that Comcast is already large enough to threaten competition on the internet. Preventing the company from getting even larger might avoid the need for a lot more regulation in the years ahead.

The interconnection market is where Comcast has tremendous leverage, and Time Warner Cable will only give them much more leverage. And they're using it to reshape the internet in a very dangerous way, which will make internet connections more expensive, with no direct benefit. On top of that, it will slow down the ability for startups to create new innovations by increasing the cost (potentially massively) to innovate on the network by creating access tolls.

Oh, and the major problem is that the FCC still doesn't even seem to realize this is the issue, with Tom Wheeler arguing that the interconnection issue isn't really an issue at all, despite it likely being the issue here. As Lee explains concerning telco regulations around a terminating monopoly system:  Unfortunately, while all-knowing perfectly benevolent regulators could make this work, in practice regulators tend to be neither all-knowing nor benevolent.  So imagine what kind of internet we'll have when you recreate the terminating monopoly tollbooths, combined with regulators who still don't seem to even realize what's going on.

[hepennypacker5000]

The doctors in the study explicitly say damage and go on to list examples.  Sorry, but you're just wanting to ignore what the doctors are saying.

Where did they say that, exactly? I read the actual research paper, and they do not link the abnormalities (which is not the same as "damages") to a decrease in functioning. The paper looked at changes in brain structure and how those changes are "abnormal" compared to the general population; but they never state damages. There are other studies which have indicated decreased functioning in individuals that have smoked marijuana, but those studies are in individuals under the age of 25. The doctors of the Harvard study did say, in this article*, that no one under the age of 16 should smoke marijuana, but I didn't think that's what's being debated here.

(you'll note that the only use of "damage" in that article is the headline, which is written by a copy editor. They want you to click on it, not be informed about the actual contents of the piece)

* http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2014/04/16/casual-marijuana-use-may-damage-your-brain/

[ChicosBailBonds]

http://www.livescience.com/45087-marijuana-heart-problems-deaths.html

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/health/smoking-cannabis-can-cause-lethal-damage-to-heart-30212927.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2611377/Cannabis-increases-heart-problems-prove-fatal.html

[jesmu84]

http://www.livescience.com/45087-marijuana-heart-problems-deaths.html

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/health/smoking-cannabis-can-cause-lethal-damage-to-heart-30212927.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2611377/Cannabis-increases-heart-problems-prove-fatal.html

That's the same article/study 3 different times. Not sure why you repeated the same thing.

1.8%? Really? I'm betting people who eat unhealthy foods are higher than 1.8%. And, should it really be surprising that SMOKING something would increase heart problems? Smoking ANYTHING would increase heart problems.

Not to mention the study stated that the results are not conclusive.

I will say there hasn't been enough research/studies done yet. But using these articles/studies is garbage at best, scare tactics at worst.

Disclaimer: I am not a marijuana user

From someone smarter than I:

"Stats nerd here. Let's talk about some of the specific problems with this study.

First, their N value is 35 (lol, my sophomore psych midterm had an N value of higher than that and my sample was collected from a school that has less than 2000 people). The N value is the number of participants in the study. The idea that a study about an issue of this magnitude with an N value of less than 1000 would even get published is beyond me.

Next, This line is key: "Cases could be included even if data such as management of patients or toxicologic analysis information were lacking." Toxicologic analysis. That seems important in a study that claims to be specific to a substance. What does this mean? Say I go into the ER because I am having an acute coronary episode. I'm a meth/heroin addict who happened to smoke weed a few hours before my episode. If a doctor asks me what I've taken, chances are I'll respond with Marijuana. Though it's obvious (hopefully) that meth and heroin would be more detrimental, without the Tox report, this patient can come into this study and be categorized as a pot smoker. They later try to address this by saying "Concomitant use of other psychoactive substances was also taken into account if available and reported in the medical records or when investigated in toxicologic analyses." If available...or when investigated in tox analyses...but you just said that patients without tox reports could be included in the astronomically small sample size.

Third, they correctly report that "The percentage of cannabis‐related cardiovascular complications increased from 1.1% in 2006 to 3.6% in 2010 of all cannabis‐related reports." However, I would argue that this has less to do with toxicity of substances and more to do with legalization. People are more likely to disclose marijuana use to doctors if they aren't afraid of the legal ramifications of doing so. Does this mean that these events are even remotely attributable to marijuana? Not at all. The burden of proof still rests on the shoulders of those who oppose marijuana use. Later in the paper they disclose that "Toxicologic analyses were performed in 13 cases". Only 13. And in only 10 of these was marijuana the only substance found.

Fourth, this stat is pretty key, "9 subjects had personal and 7 had familial cardiovascular history." Predisposition to heart problems weakens their case for marijuana being the cause of these attacks. I'm inclined to disregard these 16 cases which brings their usable N value to 19. Actually, on that note, I'll just leave this here, "Personal cardiovascular history consisted of high blood pressure (n=2), acute coronary syndrome (n=2), and atherogenic hypercholesterolemia (n=1) in patients with cardiac complications and of Raynaud disease (n=3), intermittent claudication (n=2), high blood pressure (n=1), deep vein thrombosis (n=1), and acute coronary syndrome (n=1) in patients with extracardiac complications. Familial history of coronary (n=4) or vascular (n=2) diseases or cerebral stroke (n=1) was documented. Twenty‐one patients (60%) were identified as concomitant tobacco smokers, of whom 6 had personal cardiovascular history. Details about these preexisting cardiovascular risk factors are presented in Table S1. Body mass index could be assessed in only 31% (11/35) of the patients. Among these patients, all of whom belonged to the “acute coronary syndrome” group, 6 (54%, 6/11) were in the normal healthy weight category, 4 (36%) were overweight, and 1 was in the first obese class (body mass index=32.1 kg/m2)."

Last point, "Financial support was provided by the French InterMinisterial Mission for the Fight Against Drugs and Addiction (MILDT, Mission interministérielle de lutte contre les drogues et toxicomanies), and by the French drug agency (ANSM, Agence Nationale de Sécurité des Médicaments)." This study is funded by anti-drug agencies."

[🏀]

I'm having DirecTV installed Sunday at my new house, this better be worth it Chico.

[MU Fan in Connecticut]

"Stats nerd here. Let's talk about some of the specific problems with this study.

First, their N value is 35 (lol, my sophomore psych midterm had an N value of higher than that and my sample was collected from a school that has less than 2000 people). The N value is the number of participants in the study. The idea that a study about an issue of this magnitude with an N value of less than 1000 would even get published is beyond me.

As someone who uses statistics in manufacturing, 30 is the absolute minimum for the data to tell you anything.  The preference is to use 300 or more as a good indicator of a trend. 

[hepennypacker5000]

http://www.livescience.com/45087-marijuana-heart-problems-deaths.html

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/health/smoking-cannabis-can-cause-lethal-damage-to-heart-30212927.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2611377/Cannabis-increases-heart-problems-prove-fatal.html

Forgetful was talking about the Harvard study on the brain when he said you were wrong about "damages". The Harvard study is what I was also referring to. Now I see where the mix up occurred.