• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Yes you signed a contract. That contract has a certain value to it, and that value offsets the cost to them of the phone.

    On your side, the fact that this contract came with a subsidized phone made it worth it to you.

    What the carriers are saying is that this set of interrelated contracts won’t be available, and so these terms won’t be worthwhile to the parties involved, leading to a change in future contracts. Namely, the service contracts will have to be more expensive to them, which will make them less valuable to you, which will make them less likely to happen.



  • The FCC is the one taking away people’s freedom here, by preventing users from entering the kind of contract that T-Mobile and AT&T are offering.

    Consenting adults are happy to sign up on those terms, and the FCC is proposing to prevent that arrangement.

    The carriers make an excellent point that without that lock-in, the sale of the phone is less valuable to them. This means they won’t be able to offer the heavy subsidies on phones any longer.

    This is the government preventing contracts between consenting adults. The government is reducing freedom here.


  • That’s basically how medicine is run these days, and that’s a result of the artificial supply restriction government places on medical facilities and staff.

    All doctors are forced through a narrow gauntlet which is basically designed by government regulations. The result of that process is doctors that have reduced empathy (it’s been documented, look it up), sleep deprivation, enormous debt, and a huge workload.

    As a result, the third leading cause of death is medical malpractice, and people go into financial ruin to get medical care.

    Medicine is one of those things we deemed “too important for a free market”, and so we’ve created a horrible hybrid of profit and government regulation that consistently produces horrible outcomes.

    We need to be careful with this notion that something vitally important will be made safer, or more reliable, or less damaging by getting government involved.

    If we aren’t careful (and let’s face it: government cannot be careful because it operates on a feedback loop of years, not days like private enterprise does), regulating the fuck out of a growing nuclear sector could lead to error and burnout rates similar to our medical sector, with similarly disastrous results.