Denninger's post outlines the major financial problem with net neutrality, which basically ends up being that the days of paying a relatively low flat fee for unlimited internet access at a certain speed are effectively over now that the government has gotten involved.
Unless this crap is reversed relatively soon (which it won't be) you can expect the free WiFi at restaurants and coffee shops to go away. It's going to cost you extra to buy software like Microsoft Office, because right now you buy a license key for $140 and then download the software.
My biggest worry is what this will do to the price of playing WoW. WoW does not actually consume a lot of bandwidth on an instantaneous basis, but it does have a constant back-and-forth between the client and server.
Still, it's possible that the home user won't see much difference unless he is a heavy data user, such as someone who uses Netflix. Even Pandora users don't use as much bandwidth as Netflix users do, and the MP3 codec is a hell of a lot more forgiving of jitter than the HD video codecs are. I've had Pandora continue to play a song, all the way to completion, after losing my network access, because the file size is negligible compared to the bandwidth. (Comcast offers 50 Mbps, and a typical audio codec runs at perhaps 350 kbps.)
"Losing your network access?" When they can, Comcast generally saves maintenance shutdowns for 1 or 2 AM. The interruption seldom lasts longer than five or ten minutes, the time it takes to switch cables to a backup unit or to make other changes, but it's still inconvenient if you're in a raid and get disconnected. But what else can they do? It's not anyone's fault and they're not doing it maliciously; they take the connection down because they have to. (And, knock on wood, it hasn't happened for quite a while.)
Still: Netflix is finding out that the last thing you ever want is for the government to help, because it invariably doesn't.
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The subprime auto bubble is, apparently, over.
Look: if you know that you can't afford to buy a new car, don't. Even if the salesman and the finance guy tell you they can work it out so your payment is extra-extra low, don't do it. You are ultimately the one who has to pay for the friggin' thing, and if you can't afford it, you can't, and you know it regardless of what anyone else says to you on the subject.
"But I waaaaaant one!!!" I know, I know: shiny. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was 7, but I was already nearsighted and that didn't get better as I got older. Face reality.
So for a little while, the auto industry was able to gin up better sales numbers by selling a car to anyone with a pulse. As that market fades, though, auto sales figures return to what their natural level is during a depression, and it looks like they've "collapsed".
Sooner or later we must run out of ways to hide the fact that we've been in a depression since 2007.
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Incidentally? The idea that you should borrow $40,000 on an 84-month note and invest it in the stock market is amazingly, incredibly STUPID.
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Germany is tired of US warmongering. I'm going to say it again: I don't understand what our vital national interest in Ukraine is. As far as I can see it's BIG FAT ZERO which, oddly enough, is the approximate amount of expertise that Obama has in foreign policy.
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Good satire is always believable. It's the element of the truth that makes it funny.
The thing is, it's easy to believe that Joe Biden could only have written two e-mails during his tenure as VP.
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One week from today is 3/14/15, which is the first five digits of pi. Cool.