6 ms·

So that someone's grandma who hardly uses her connection can subsidize your extreme over-consumption of digital media?

by staringback 3y ago

voakbasda 3y ago
Yes, for the same reason that roads used by daily drivers are subsidized by remote workers.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  Ironically roads should also have caps and/or tolls, so this take is strange. This is partly why gas and excise tax is a thing…
  - superb_dev 3y ago
    Do you seriously want every road you drive on to charge you? Roads should be a public good that we all benefit from
    - endisneigh 3y ago
      You already are charged by every road you drive on, just not explicitly or proportionally.
    - NegativeLatency 3y ago
      I would happily pay for congestion pricing because it would allow me to go where I'm going faster. Right now we have this weird sunk cost and lack of obvious incremental charges to driving, that encourages driving when there are other better options for some trips.
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
      Personally, that sounds pretty wonderful. Better yet, charge by vehicle weight. I'd like to be able to ride a bike on the road and have everyone think the guy in the car is imposing inconvenience rather than the other way around.
  - notyourwork 3y ago
    What is ironic about you're opinion disagreeing with the status quo in some countries?
    - endisneigh 3y ago
      It’s ironic because they’re arguing against caps but talk about roads, but roads in the United States are in terrible shape due to certain groups, such as construction vehicles not paying their fair share to begin with. This partly why gas tax is even a thing.
  - eganist 3y ago
    > Ironically roads should also have caps and/or tolls, so this take is strange. We'll set up electronic tolls on your cul-de-sac and every light and stop sign, or toll you by mile driven using an odometer beaconing out to the tax authorities per drive and registered to your tax ID number (US) or equivalent. And then cap you on the number of miles you're allowed to drive per year on all cars unless you pay an additional fee. Older cars must be retrofit at the driver's expense. Also the auditing and anti-fraud infrastructure must be instituted for all of this. --- Or we can just do flat taxes and chill.
    - endisneigh 3y ago
      Flat taxes are regressive and inefficient, but I suppose we can still chill.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      I'm absolutely down for vehicle registration fees to relate to miles driven and weight classifications, and major highways being funded by extra tolling. The streets in my neighborhood cost way less per mile for maintenance than giant highways with massive bridges and interchanges. It makes sense they'd cost more to use. Showing the real cost of these things to consumers might make them change their minds about riding the train. These days a lot of people don't even think about the cost of driving their car across town, but gosh that metro day pass is $5? How expensive!
      - eganist 3y ago
        > gosh that metro day pass is $5? How expensive! Nah, metro day pass should cost as much as howevermany miles the buyer traveled. Otherwise people who buy the passes for just one stop would be subsidizing the costs for people who travel from one end of a line to the other. It'd be pretty shit to meter one and not the other.
  - c54 3y ago
    The economy wide productivity gains from having tax funded roads mean it doesn’t make sense to have roads be profitable or break even as an individual entity. Similar thing probably goes for internet access.
    - endisneigh 3y ago
      Taxes are not flat, just like caps, so there’s no contradiction.
    - NegativeLatency 3y ago
      Gotta be careful what you measure though. If I spend a bunch of money owning and maintaining my car, it's possible that that could've been spent on other things that would be overall better for the economy.
- paxys 3y ago
  Bad analogy, because it actually costs more to maintain roads that are used more. ISPs don't have to pay extra if I consume more data packets than my neighbor. Overage charges are just a money grab on their part, nothing more.
  - kulahan 3y ago
    Also a bad analogy because the roads are paid for with gas taxes, which WFH workers typically purchase less of
    - dghlsakjg 3y ago
      A minority of US road costs are paid for with gas taxes, and it depends tremendously on the location. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/states-road-funding-2019/ https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/states-road-funding... WFH workers likely pay more per mile travelled in taxes than someone who super-commutes.
- Willamin 3y ago
  In the US, we tax roads by usage via fuel (gasoline and diesel) tax [^1]. It's a simple solution: the more miles you drive, the more fuel you use; the more fuel you use, the more tax you pay. Vehicles that use more fuel per mile driven tend to be larger and thus cause more wear on the roads. It's not without its faults though. Fuel usage isn't directly related to cost of road maintenance, it's just a very rough approximation. Fuel usage has mattered less and less over the past couple of decades with hybrids and EVs – though this is addressed in some places by imposing an extra EV tax (since EV drivers would pay no fuel tax but would still cause wear on the roads). [^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    A lot more wear on the roads in a lot of cases, as it's exponential (~fourth power) with respect to weight and EVs weigh a lot (~30% more than a comparable ICE car).
  - dghlsakjg 3y ago
    A minority of roadbuilding funds come from fuel taxes in the US. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/states-road-funding-2019/ https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/states-road-funding... The additional problem with this is that road wear scales a lot faster than fuel usage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
paxys 3y ago
Data packets aren't a limited resource. The costs for your ISP are fixed whether they serve you 1MB or 1TB. Data caps and overage charges are purely a money grab, not some fundamental economic requirement. So no, infrequent users aren't "subsidizing" anyone else.
- 542458 3y ago
  > The costs for your ISP are fixed whether they serve you 1MB or 1TB. That's only true in a very abstract sense. If everybody went from using 1MB/day to 1TB/day there would be massive congestion issues and costs would increase as ISPs rush to install higher-bandwidth equipment. Put a different way: It is cheaper to construct a network where all subscribers consume only 1MB/day than a network where all subscribers consume 1TB/day, because the former can be done with much lower end equipment.
  - paxys 3y ago
    Well it should be true in the concrete sense. If they can't consistently serve you at 100mpbs or whatever else then they shouldn't advertise it. "But everyone else is using it at the same time so too bad" wouldn't work as an excuse in any other industry.
    - 542458 3y ago
      > If they can't consistently serve you at 100mpbs or whatever else then they shouldn't advertise it. But that's true of almost every industry. Your bank advertises that you can withdraw your money at any time, but if everybody withdrew their money simultaneously there would be issues. A store advertises next-day shipping, but if everybody ordered simultaneously there would be issues. A house might have 100A power service, but if every house started burning 100A simultaneously there would be issues. Put another way, what you're proposing is dramatically slower speeds for most users. ISPs are profitable, but they're not that profitable. Actual average usage on most lines is probably low single digit percentages, if not sub-1%. I just checked my line - my average use is about 200kB/s (for a total of about 500GB per month), or about 1% of my speed cap.
    - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
phkahler 3y ago
>> So that someone's grandma who hardly uses her connection can subsidize your extreme over-consumption of digital media? While I agree that grandma doesn't need 1Gbps, neither do I and neither do most people. So why mandate such a high speed for the label anyway? It seems like a way to disqualify things like Starlink that will have difficulty providing extreme speeds to large numbers of users at once. The only time I'll use such a speed is when downloading some data - an ISO file or something similar. Streaming video does not require such (gbps) speeds even for multiple streams in the same house.
rasz 3y ago
No, so that ISPs are incentivized to actually invest in bigger pipes.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  So it was a series of tubes after all...
antisthenes 3y ago
This is how consumption of any resource works, in any group where the number of people using it is more than 1. If I drink less water than you, am I subsidizing your water usage. I'd say so! Not the hill you want to die on, trust me.
- arp242 3y ago
  Except in many places you pay water by amount used (Islamic and some other countries excepted). This is the case for loads of resources.

So that someone's grandma who hardly uses her connection can subsidize your extreme over-consumption of digital media?

voakbasda 3y ago

Yes, for the same reason that roads used by daily drivers are subsidized by remote workers.

endisneigh 3y ago
Ironically roads should also have caps and/or tolls, so this take is strange. This is partly why gas and excise tax is a thing…
- superb_dev 3y ago
  Do you seriously want every road you drive on to charge you? Roads should be a public good that we all benefit from
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    You already are charged by every road you drive on, just not explicitly or proportionally.
  - NegativeLatency 3y ago
    I would happily pay for congestion pricing because it would allow me to go where I'm going faster. Right now we have this weird sunk cost and lack of obvious incremental charges to driving, that encourages driving when there are other better options for some trips.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
    Personally, that sounds pretty wonderful. Better yet, charge by vehicle weight. I'd like to be able to ride a bike on the road and have everyone think the guy in the car is imposing inconvenience rather than the other way around.
- notyourwork 3y ago
  What is ironic about you're opinion disagreeing with the status quo in some countries?
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    It’s ironic because they’re arguing against caps but talk about roads, but roads in the United States are in terrible shape due to certain groups, such as construction vehicles not paying their fair share to begin with. This partly why gas tax is even a thing.
- eganist 3y ago
  > Ironically roads should also have caps and/or tolls, so this take is strange. We'll set up electronic tolls on your cul-de-sac and every light and stop sign, or toll you by mile driven using an odometer beaconing out to the tax authorities per drive and registered to your tax ID number (US) or equivalent. And then cap you on the number of miles you're allowed to drive per year on all cars unless you pay an additional fee. Older cars must be retrofit at the driver's expense. Also the auditing and anti-fraud infrastructure must be instituted for all of this. --- Or we can just do flat taxes and chill.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    Flat taxes are regressive and inefficient, but I suppose we can still chill.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    I'm absolutely down for vehicle registration fees to relate to miles driven and weight classifications, and major highways being funded by extra tolling. The streets in my neighborhood cost way less per mile for maintenance than giant highways with massive bridges and interchanges. It makes sense they'd cost more to use. Showing the real cost of these things to consumers might make them change their minds about riding the train. These days a lot of people don't even think about the cost of driving their car across town, but gosh that metro day pass is $5? How expensive!
    - eganist 3y ago
      > gosh that metro day pass is $5? How expensive! Nah, metro day pass should cost as much as howevermany miles the buyer traveled. Otherwise people who buy the passes for just one stop would be subsidizing the costs for people who travel from one end of a line to the other. It'd be pretty shit to meter one and not the other.
- c54 3y ago
  The economy wide productivity gains from having tax funded roads mean it doesn’t make sense to have roads be profitable or break even as an individual entity. Similar thing probably goes for internet access.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    Taxes are not flat, just like caps, so there’s no contradiction.
  - NegativeLatency 3y ago
    Gotta be careful what you measure though. If I spend a bunch of money owning and maintaining my car, it's possible that that could've been spent on other things that would be overall better for the economy.
paxys 3y ago
Bad analogy, because it actually costs more to maintain roads that are used more. ISPs don't have to pay extra if I consume more data packets than my neighbor. Overage charges are just a money grab on their part, nothing more.
- kulahan 3y ago
  Also a bad analogy because the roads are paid for with gas taxes, which WFH workers typically purchase less of
  - dghlsakjg 3y ago
    A minority of US road costs are paid for with gas taxes, and it depends tremendously on the location. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/states-road-funding-2019/ https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/states-road-funding... WFH workers likely pay more per mile travelled in taxes than someone who super-commutes.
Willamin 3y ago
In the US, we tax roads by usage via fuel (gasoline and diesel) tax [^1]. It's a simple solution: the more miles you drive, the more fuel you use; the more fuel you use, the more tax you pay. Vehicles that use more fuel per mile driven tend to be larger and thus cause more wear on the roads. It's not without its faults though. Fuel usage isn't directly related to cost of road maintenance, it's just a very rough approximation. Fuel usage has mattered less and less over the past couple of decades with hybrids and EVs – though this is addressed in some places by imposing an extra EV tax (since EV drivers would pay no fuel tax but would still cause wear on the roads). [^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
- arcticbull 3y ago
  A lot more wear on the roads in a lot of cases, as it's exponential (~fourth power) with respect to weight and EVs weigh a lot (~30% more than a comparable ICE car).
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  A minority of roadbuilding funds come from fuel taxes in the US. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/states-road-funding-2019/ https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/states-road-funding... The additional problem with this is that road wear scales a lot faster than fuel usage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

paxys 3y ago

Data packets aren't a limited resource. The costs for your ISP are fixed whether they serve you 1MB or 1TB. Data caps and overage charges are purely a money grab, not some fundamental economic requirement. So no, infrequent users aren't "subsidizing" anyone else.

542458 3y ago
> The costs for your ISP are fixed whether they serve you 1MB or 1TB. That's only true in a very abstract sense. If everybody went from using 1MB/day to 1TB/day there would be massive congestion issues and costs would increase as ISPs rush to install higher-bandwidth equipment. Put a different way: It is cheaper to construct a network where all subscribers consume only 1MB/day than a network where all subscribers consume 1TB/day, because the former can be done with much lower end equipment.
- paxys 3y ago
  Well it should be true in the concrete sense. If they can't consistently serve you at 100mpbs or whatever else then they shouldn't advertise it. "But everyone else is using it at the same time so too bad" wouldn't work as an excuse in any other industry.
  - 542458 3y ago
    > If they can't consistently serve you at 100mpbs or whatever else then they shouldn't advertise it. But that's true of almost every industry. Your bank advertises that you can withdraw your money at any time, but if everybody withdrew their money simultaneously there would be issues. A store advertises next-day shipping, but if everybody ordered simultaneously there would be issues. A house might have 100A power service, but if every house started burning 100A simultaneously there would be issues. Put another way, what you're proposing is dramatically slower speeds for most users. ISPs are profitable, but they're not that profitable. Actual average usage on most lines is probably low single digit percentages, if not sub-1%. I just checked my line - my average use is about 200kB/s (for a total of about 500GB per month), or about 1% of my speed cap.
  - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

phkahler 3y ago

>> So that someone's grandma who hardly uses her connection can subsidize your extreme over-consumption of digital media? While I agree that grandma doesn't need 1Gbps, neither do I and neither do most people. So why mandate such a high speed for the label anyway? It seems like a way to disqualify things like Starlink that will have difficulty providing extreme speeds to large numbers of users at once. The only time I'll use such a speed is when downloading some data - an ISO file or something similar. Streaming video does not require such (gbps) speeds even for multiple streams in the same house.

rasz 3y ago

No, so that ISPs are incentivized to actually invest in bigger pipes.

antisthenes 3y ago
So it was a series of tubes after all...

antisthenes 3y ago

This is how consumption of any resource works, in any group where the number of people using it is more than 1. If I drink less water than you, am I subsidizing your water usage. I'd say so! Not the hill you want to die on, trust me.

arp242 3y ago
Except in many places you pay water by amount used (Islamic and some other countries excepted). This is the case for loads of resources.