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SACRAMENTO, CA (NBC NEWS) -- California residents may soon have to pay a tax on texting.
According to KNTV, the public utilities commission is floating the idea to help fund programs that give low-income residents access to cell phones.
It's not clear how much the texting tax would be or how it would be collected.
Several business groups have come out against the proposal.
One business group says the program is flush with cash.
But state regulators say the program is breaking the bank after the budget for the program has been raised 300 million dollars in six years.
The wireless industry says the texting tax would put them at a disadvantage over other free messaging services like Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, Apple's i-Message and others.
^ Not sure why this is suddenly news. It's just another in a seemingly endless list of small taxes attached to pretty much every form of utility which we consume.
This is what Braineack opposes. Hot redheads with guns:
I could dissect every one of those clips for hours about what those people did wrong. Granted, no plan survives contact with the enemy, but you gotta at least have a plan to deviate from. Hopefully I never have to find out whether my plans work out or not.
Normally, I'd post a snarky reply to any meme centered around the "people are fleeing California for the south" concept, probably involving an assertion that these people were low-skilled, low-value surplus, and that as a result, this was a net positive for CA and represented a burden for TX.
It's hard to do that after Apple announces that it's building a second corporate HQ in Austin.
Now, don't get me wrong. I've worked in Austin, and it's a very groovy place. I wouldn't mind living there myself, were it not for the fact that it's surrounded by Texas in much the same way that West Berlin was surrounded by East Germany during the cold-war era.
Still, hard to joke about something as significant as that.
Therefore, hot redheaded Russian spy it is:
(Braineack objects to attractive young women with guns.)
The text tax is really nuts, it's my understanding we were all getting screwed for years on texting. The reason for the 140 character limit, initially was the companies using the second band (that communicates location, time, etc) so it essentially cost the companies exactly $0.00 to deliver a text message.
Is that correct, or am I remembering it wrong?
Originally Posted by Joe Perez
Normally, I'd post a snarky reply to any meme centered around the "people are fleeing California for the south" concept, probably involving an assertion that these people were low-skilled, low-value surplus, and that as a result, this was a net positive for CA and represented a burden for TX.
It's hard to do that after Apple announces that it's building a second corporate HQ in Austin.
When I worked for L3 Communications, big defense contractor, there were at least 3 people in the engineering dept (including our VP) that sold their homes at the peak in California and moved to Tulsa. The VP for instance, sold his home, and banked enough profit, that when he moved to Bixby (suburb on the southside) he built a 5,000+ sq ft home on 15 acres, built a horse barn and bought horses for his wife, and still had another $300-400k leftover after that.
Oracle also recently opened their new corporate hub in Austin earlier this year as well, again, 5,000 initial employees with the space to grow past 10,000 employees on campus as well. I actually started looking into moving but:
1. Haven't owned the home in OKC long enough to break even.
2. Housing prices there (while not like the west coast) are still far more than I want to spend. My equivalent house 20 minutes from downtown would be $400k, not $160k.
3. Infrastructure hasn't kept up, so the only affordable housing means a grueling commute from the northside of town. Even though I go in 2-3 days per week, the days I do, I'm not spending 2+ hours in the car everyday.
And I wouldn't be able to stay with Big Red as they have exactly 2 pay scales for the entire country.
1. Bay Area
2. Rest of the country.
Meaning, "Sure, you can move to 'insert cool hip city' but we aren't going to pay you anymore." So that means at least just over 2 more years with the current company so the rest of my signon bonus vests.
Normally, I'd post a snarky reply to any meme centered around the "people are fleeing California for the south" concept, probably involving an assertion that these people were low-skilled, low-value surplus, and that as a result, this was a net positive for CA and represented a burden for TX.
It's hard to do that after Apple announces that it's building a second corporate HQ in Austin.
Now, don't get me wrong. I've worked in Austin, and it's a very groovy place. I wouldn't mind living there myself, were it not for the fact that it's surrounded by Texas in much the same way that West Berlin was surrounded by East Germany during the cold-war era.
Still, hard to joke about something as significant as that.
Actually, Austin is becoming a second California. This is due to a better business climate. The problem is that it is attracting the wacky left folks, who will soon turn Texas into a Blue state. Then we are permanently screwed.
Last edited by DNMakinson; 12-14-2018 at 10:27 AM.
Reason: Did not need to repeat the picture.
First hand account that West Berlin was awesome in 1989-1990. It seemed a lot dirtier when I went back in 2005. Seems like all the graffiti artists started painting everything else in town once the wall was removed.
For Braineack, I have invented a new term: Common-sensorship. Definition: censoring a speaker which a majority of people who are easily offended find to be offensive, because that's just common-sense.
YouTube removed 7.8 million videos and 1.6 million channels in the third quarter of this year, mostly for spreading spam or posting inappropriate adult content, the company said in a report Thursday.
The Community Guidelines Enforcement Report comes amid growing questions — including in a congressional hearing Tuesday — about how YouTube monitors and deletes problematic content from the platform, including videos depicting violent extremism and hateful, graphic content. Such videos remain a small percentage of the overall number that YouTube deletes, but the prevalence of such content has been the subject of news reports and congressional scrutiny.
The enforcement report, the fourth of its kind for the Google subsidiary, covers July through September and is the first to break out the reasons for removing videos. It is also the first to report the number of channels removed in their entirety for violating YouTube’s “community guidelines.” Channels are removed when they get three strikes within 90 days, or for a single particularly egregious offense, such as predatory behavior.
The report does not say how many videos get flagged by users as inappropriate but are not removed after company moderators review them.
“Finding all violative content on YouTube is an immense challenge, but we see this as one of our core responsibilities and are focused on continuously working towards removing this content before it is widely viewed,” the company said in a blog posted with the release of the report.
The report offers little new insight into how YouTube is managing the large amount of hateful, conspiratorial videos posted to the platform or on its role as a video library for users of Gab.ai and 4chan, social media sites that are popular with racists, anti-Semites and others pushing extremist ideologies. Users of Gab and 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” board link to YouTube thousands of times a day, more than to any other outside site, researchers have found.
The report said that 81 percent of videos that end up being removed are first detected by automated systems, and that of this group, the detection happened before a single view by users in 3 out of 4 cases. However, YouTube and its parent Google still rely heavily on humans to help in the effort. Google had previously set a goal of having 10,000 people working on content moderation by the end of the year.
More than 90 percent of videos uploaded in September and removed for violating guidelines against violent extremism or child safety had fewer than 10 views. (Child safety is a broad category, including videos that portray dangerous behaviors, with child pornography amounting to a small percentage of the overall content.)
YouTube also removed 224 million comments during the three-month period covered by the report, mostly for violating rules against spam.
Conservatives have repeatedly accused YouTube and other leading technology companies of seeking to suppress their views, but others have pushed for the platform to act more aggressively toward content that spreads clearly false and hateful messages.
During Tuesday’s congressional hearing, Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) questioned Google chief executive Sundar Pichai about a report in The Washington Post on the spread of videos falsely claiming that Democrat Hillary Clinton had attacked, killed and drank the blood of a girl. Pichai promised more action was coming from the company in addressing such issues.
YouTube said that 6,195 videos it removed in September were found to have violated guidelines against “hateful or abusive” content, about 0.2 percent of the total deleted that month. And 94,400, or 3.4 percent of the total deleted in September, were found to have violated guidelines against “violent or graphic” content. (YouTube didn’t provide specific numbers on some other metrics for the entire three-month period covered by the report overall.)
“We know there is more work to do and we are continuing to invest in people and technology to remove violative content quickly,” the company said in its blog.
YouTube’s report comes the same week that another tech giant, Twitter, released new data about its efforts to combat hate speech and other abusive content online. More than 6.2 million unique accounts were flagged to the company in the first six months of 2018 for violating its rules, including prohibitions on violent threats and hateful conduct. Twitter said it took action against more than 605,000 unique accounts.
Explaining its work in a blog post, Twitter said that the figure does not reflect when it uses its own tools to “limit the reach and spread of potentially abusive content,” including hate speech, and that in some cases the reports it receives actually are from “bad actors.”
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