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What part of do you not understand, Caveson? It's not "months" of saving, it's almost always years. If it takes you mere months to save up enough cash to move to a new fucking state, you're obviously not doing that bad in life to begin with. I'm going to be extremely blunt - and in doing so be an asshole - but I don't give a damn about your father's story and I sure as hell didn't ask for it. Because it's exactly the same kind of bullshit that I've been hearing everywhere else about why "The left just wants everything handed to them" "Millennials are so entitled" "Kids these days want the world for nothing". It's always "My parents grew up poor, but they worked and reaped the benefits of their hard work and blah blah blah blah blah" with words like "personal responsibility", "dedication", and "determination". Caveson, you're not this bloody stupid, the entire environment of the United States was vastly different than what it is now, it's why your father was able to actually accomplish that. I don't give a damn what you believe, lack of money is precisely the reason to not move, coming from someone who is currently in a situation where moving is impossible due to financial reasons, you're looking through Red, White, and Blue filtered lenses. Thanks for dropping the pretenses. Fuck the "Free Market". Actually, this more falls into "The internet is a utility - akin to electricity, water, gas, etc. - and should therefore be treated as such instead of letting corporations have unabated control over the internet", nowhere did I ever mention the internet as a "right". Except the states won't be able handle it! The moment a state - and, let's face it, it's going to be California - attempts to actually enact and enforce their own form of Net Neutrality, one of the major ISPs is going to sue that state. And the courts will have no choice but to side with the company because if the FCC repealed Net Neutrality, that means they obviously intended for corporations to be able to do what they're going to do, and therefore the states have no right to try to stop them. It's better than the complete clusterfuck you're asking for. You're assuming a lot about what kind of pricing they're going to offer. Things that use less bandwidth will not necessarily cost an appreciable amount less, and you'll still potentially be making internet access unaffordable for people who regularly use the internet for both "low-bandwidth" and "high-bandwidth" purposes. Gee, gotta love how you immediately jump to some kind of negative assumption of me just because you can't think of a reason so I must be lazy and don't want to do any work. I've already been impacted by differing standards across state lines. Technically I failed the 10th grade according to Georgia's standards, even though by Florida's standards I passed. In the grand scheme of things, it's rather insignificant - that could be said about just about anything - but I remember seriously questioning how and why the standards of education varied enough just across a single state border. The reason I'm making this argument is because the United States has hardly changed over the decades, even centuries. We're still trying to govern on a system that worked perfectly okay in the US' infancy and for some time after its formation. But we've grown tremendously since then, we're now 50 states and ~323 million people strong. Our system of governing has been showing cracks and faults for decades now, and yet, year by year, the wedges keep being driven deeper and we keep adding more wedges. At some point - be it in the near or distant future - those wedges are going to get hammered all the way through the foundations and everything's going to crumble. 2016 was a rather brilliant display of how the low the general landscape the US has reached. You can't always say no to a corporation. For example, I don't really like doing my grocery shopping at Wal-Mart, they're not the greatest company. But there's no place around me that has prices as low as theirs, or a wide enough selection of goods my family either needs or would be willing to buy. There's a Publix closer to my house, but they're typically more expensive on just about everything my family needs and uses. There's an ALDI somewhere around here, but it's far enough out and out of the way enough that we'd be spending every potential penny we saved on gas. So I bite my tongue and get my groceries from Wal-Mart, because they're cheaper and we can save that money in case something happens. Corporations don't need to outright force you to buy their products, they can still get you to buy their stuff in a number of indirect ways. And I'd thank you to not make such generalizing statements about my life when you know nothing about it. Disconnecting from the internet entirely would likely drive me to suicide - I'm an introvert and suffer from anxiety, I don't want to go out and meet with people, I dislike being alone in large crowds, so I don't want to go "experience the real world", whatever the fuck that means, and certainly not for any lengthy period of time - the "simpler things" in my life are chatting and gaming with friends I've made across the globe online. I don't have "my friend"s outside of the internet anymore - I don't have anyone I can call up or text and say "Let's hang out" or "Mind if I come over?" - I have "our friend"s, and even then I see them about once a month now. As edgy as it sounds, I don't have anything out there for me aside from some leisurely stuff I can't do at home. As pathetic as it sounds, my life is online. I already suffer from depression and feelings of loneliness, I don't need my one connection I feel the most comfortable with fucked with by some greedy conglomerate that's only interested in money I don't have.

I don't know why you guys do stuff like this. Just say the discussion is dumb if you want to. Posting a bunch of meme images after serious posts just makes you look like asshats. If you don't care about the discussion then don't say anything. You guys are good posters on topics you care about but you then have to become ironically detached from discussions that other people care about that you don't. Maybe I'm the only one annoyed by this. If that's true then I guess I'll shut up.

The reason that I've largely stopped caring about these net neutrality discussions is how apocalyptic the discussions are. I mean that both in the sense of how overblown the predictions are for what will happen if it net neutrality vanishes, but also in how frequently it is presented as a final battle between good and evil which will determine the ultimate fate of the internet. It's like if Wagner was still around he'd be writing about this instead of the Goetterdaemmerung. Rather than dealing with specific pieces of legislation or specific historical precedents, the conversation all too often turns to hypothetical dystopian scenarios gleaned from cyberpunk novels. It also all too often becomes a melodrama with one side full of mustache twirling villains who want to destroy the internet for laughs, and the other side a bunch of shining cavaliers making a brave last stand to save the internet. The reality of the situation is that we are largely dealing with a power struggle between various factions of large corporations and the government, each of which have shown that they are more than willing to fuck over the common internet user if they can get away with it and each of which stands to personally benefit quite a bit should their preferred set of regulations go through. It's also clear that the reality of the situation is that there is nothing final about any of these conflicts. No matter which way the matter is decided during the current conflict, it will inevitably be challenged a few years down the road. In the end I don't think that we're really discussing any course of government action (or inaction) so much as we are discussing the extent that we like the status quo of the internet. Thus the discussion actually becomes something along the lines of "do you want the status quo, or do you want horrible dystopian internet or no internet at all?" Of course everyone's going to say the former, and anyone who disagrees is going to be mocked. But at that point I don't see why it's worth having the conversation.

I agree with this. I'm not saying that occasional shitpost should be grounds for immediate excommunication because god knows that practically every user on this forum is guilty of at least an occasional shitpost, but there are certain people who return to post only to incite and degrade and others who let themselves get whipped up into a frenzy by a fleeting mood. You want to know why this torrent of shitposts came along in this thread? It's because we (Myself, Facade, Huff, Insectan and Raze) were discussing it on Discord, as we do certain controversial things that are posted on these boards. I won't lie to you, there are some opinions that have been posted in this thread that I think are incredibly naive and that I disagree with, but I also don't have the energy or data to really dispute them outside of an "Well I don't feel this way" perspective. So I just don't post. But we still talk about it on the Discord and then people get into this weird fucking mood and it becomes a competition about who can be the most edgy when it comes to the responses. I personally would prefer it if people could just keep it to the Discord if they're going to be like this, but I also don't want to become the moral arbiter of what's OK to fuck with and what's not OK to fuck with, because as mentioned above, it's not like I'm sinless when it comes to this stuff. So I just stay quiet. Honestly I think you hit the nail on the head, as much as Insectan wanted to prove some point by quoting you or whatever that was. I don't even think that dropping in to say that a discussion is "dumb" is even something you should do, it just comes across as really fucking arrogant. Just ignore it and participate in discussions you do find interesting. Like the really good one about CIA in the War Room right now.

I mean, the same goes for government. I'm a "member" of the EFF and even though support is currently for the Title II classification to remain, just a few years ago they were bringing the FCC to court over their previous attempt at the "Open Internet Order," claiming it was too overreaching. I support net neutrality, and also the Title II classification, but people have a legitimate argument when they express fear of potential regulatory misuse. Maybe it's an argument that's mostly relevant in the US.