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VC Likens Google Bus Backlash To Nazi Rampage
theodp writes "Valleywag reports on legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tom Perkins' WSJ op-ed on class tensions, in which the KPCB founder and former HP and News Corp. board member likens criticism of the techno-affluent and their transformation of San Francisco to one of the most horrific events in Western history. 'I would call attention to the parallels of Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich,"' Perkins writes. 'There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these "techno geeks" can pay...This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent 'progressive' radicalism unthinkable now?"'"
People like that will use any "argument" to justify what they are doing, no matter how remote or unrelated. They will not care whether they cheapen other things that have happened. The only goal is to pull the discussion on an emotional level, because they know the facts are not on their side...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Maybe someone should have told him about Godwin's law.
By invoking a Nazi comparison, he already lost.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What actually led to the third reich's rise to power? Economic imbalance.
What actually fueled the war? Economic benefit to the very richest people. You can't make war without materials. They didn't have all the materials they needed, and they were able to buy them from other countries. The US government knew that an american was making fuel sales to the reich, but permitted them to continue for quite some time, then later seized the profits. Mitsubishi Zeroes were made out of ALCOA aluminum.
What's leading to any possible progrom-like activity against the rich? The actions of the rich.
Can't feel sorry for the wealthy. Share your wealth with us, or we will share our poverty with you. Signed, the world.
P.S. If you have a job, a roof over your head, and lighting and refrigeration, you are a member of the eight percent.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Theres a big difference between the Nazis arguments on the Jews and the OWS argument on the 1%.
The OWS believe the ultra rich are ultra rich because they are ultra rich
The nazis thought the jews where ultra rich because the nazis where racist fanatics.
Kind of a difference.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
The comparison is inappropriate.
At the same time, I do understand the disgust with the neo-luddites of SF and their alarming witch hunt - it is a mob.
Never was so much owed by so many to so few bankers.
Haven't all arguments which degrade to making WW2 Nazi comparisons, automatically lost and pointless?
I guess the "any publicity is good publicity" philosophy is in play here.
Godwin's Law states: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1" It doesn't mean you automatically lose a debate, it just means that Hitler/Nazis will inevitably get dragged into the conversation.
I have lived in Brazil for quite some years now. Here the gap between rich and everyone else (there is no middle class here so to speak) is to such an extent that if you have money you are a target. This means that you must live in a gated community in constant fear that you or your kids might be kidnapped. You need to own a cheapo car so you won't stand out too much when driving around. Of course you will have a nice car too, but this is only for weekends or maybe travel to places where other rich people go. In the end it is easy to become a prisoner of that wealth that is supposed to make you more free. I would prefer to live middle class in a 1st world country than rich in Brazil. The sad thing is that the erosion of the middle class in the 1st world countries means that they soon might resemble Brazil, and this is not good, even if you are rich.
Somehow I think that actual holocaust survivors would be insulted by this comparison. Also I think the yahoo has lost all sense of perspective and proportion.
I think what angers everyone else is that "the rich" are playing by a different set of rules. Fix that and you'll fix most everything else.
C|N>K
You are rendered irrelevant.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
First of all, I'm sure Google/Apple/etc. get to pull some of the cream of the crop, but these guys still don't make the kind of money the Wall St. Assholes make - they are hardly One-percenters.
The dude is truly out of touch with the rest of society.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
1. The Holocaust
I also have a list of things that are like slavery if anyone is interested.
I do agree that the "99% versus the 1%" movement in American politics has some striking historical parallels. However, I don't think that Nazi Germany is the best comparison. A more appropriate historical equivalent would be the Bolshevik/Communist movement that culminated in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolshevik_Revolution).
The contemporary rhetoric from the left wing of America politics: i.e. "the 1%", "make the rich pay their fair share", etc... Is nearly word-for-word the same rhetoric heard on the streets of Russia, adjusted for a century's worth of elapsed history, urging the "proletariat", the working people to rally against the "bourgeoisie", i.e. the rich, and the "kulaks", the ultra-rich. Led by the Bolshevik movement, it culminated in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The word "Bolshevik" is directly translated as "ones belong to the majority". In other words, "the 99%". All the great unwashed I saw on the boob tube at various "Occupy " events, in the last couple of years, are the sons and daughters of the Bolsheviks a century ago. Whether they realize it, or not.
There, fixed that for ya.
People like that will use any "argument" to justify what they are doing, no matter how illogical. They will not care whether theyworked for what they have. The only goal is to pull everyone down to their level, because they know they are too lazy too succeed on their own.
Are you talking about the Op-Ed author or the protestors?
Everyone works hard. This myth that the top of the socio-economic pyramid is there because they worked harder than everyone else and that the poor just sit around and do nothing is just complete and utter non-sense. Well, maybe not. There are the folks who inherited their money and just collect rents and dividends and hang out on their yachts.
I work very hard, but could I ever enter the World of this VC?
No. Because I do not know the right people to get there.
I have no doubt that among the protestors there are very hard working smart people that could do a better job than this guy can - any day. But they don't have the contacts and may even be considered someone who is the "wrong sort" and won't "fit in" to their "corporate culture".
Perkins is very smart - I have no doubt - and lucky for him that he had parents who gave him great genes and the nurturing to bring out his god given talents.
But look how he was at the right place at the right time to ride on the coat tails of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard at the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He was lucky enough to get in at the start of the "gold rush".
No sir. This guy had some wonderful opportunities given to him and like most successful people, delude themselves into thinking it was 100% their hard work.
This anger is not directed at the 1%, it is directed at the productive worker bees who work indirectly for the 1%. Yeah, driving a middle class of people out of their homes and blockading their buses may result in a neighborhood free of these worker bees, but then what do you have left?
It's not war until weapons come out and people start dying.
you know, kristallnacht was bad, but the u.s. had its own pogroms during world war I against Germans in America. German businesses were smashed up, German printing presses were destroyed by mobs, etc.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/...
I am pretty sure Americans have always been outraged when the 1% forced them out of their homes and made them move away.
It is all well and good to allow the ultra rich to offer you anything they want for your home and land. But then they literally force you to take an offer, and one not necessarily of a fair value, or go bankrupt and lose your home; Then people have historically gotten angry.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
at a time when income disparity is at an all-time high in about the last 100 years. tom perkins is worried about some future backlash against the rich, while the political system has already sold out most of the public if anything does happen, when push comes to shove, he'll be able to take his money with him to singapore or hong kong like the russian oligarchs took theirs to london.
lol, he's written books
http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Sing...
how self-absorbed do you have to be to write this?
The man is obviously an idiot. Why do news sites carry these sorts of comments? If it weren't for the, "OMG LOOK WHAT THIS GUY SAID!!!" reactionary attention grab, these sorts of comments would get exactly the response they deserve: being ignored by everyone.
These people are dangerous radicals if not in action then in concept. Their way of thinking... entitlement... and presumptions are dangerous.
We have people in SF that feel they're entitled to stop traffic to promote bicycles with some frequency. We have people that feel they're entitled to pour sugar in the tanks of industrial machinery for pretty much any construction project.
There is a strain of radical leftism in the SF area that really needs to get its public respect pulled. I am not saying pass a law. I am not saying persecute these people with government power. Rather, I am saying that they depend on a basic level on our acceptance of their behavior and we don't have to accept it.
Their actions are not respectable. It really should stop. Stop granting them respect for their behavior. Its unacceptable.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Taking this a bit personally, are we?
For one, the protestors are just going after an easy target - the employees of the companies that were using the public bus stops as their own private stops. If those protestors could, I'm sure they'd rather go after Perkins and his buddies.
These protests are just a symptom of the anger the lower classes at the fact their real incomes and standard of living is declining while being told that they're too stupid to work in the well paying fields while people like the op-ed author are actively lobbying to bring in people overseas that are really no better than they are. (Please, I''ve personally had to train H1-Bs on what a pointer was and what memory locations are. Don't give me this BS that they are smarter or better trained than we are.)
We have an upper class that is trying to turn our education system into a jobs training program for their exploitation. Our education system is for having an educated electorate and not about creating worker drones. Our kids should be learning reading, writing, math, science:chem,phys, biology, critical thinking skills - NOT how to be a code monkey; which is all high school level CS classes teach.
In short, these corrupt people are trying to force THEIR training expenses onto the public while PROFITING off of the potential results.
We DO NOT need more programmer we NEED more people who can think and communicate. And with this World getting more and more integrated, our kids need to learn foreign languages MUCH more than a computer language that will go out of style in a few years.
I'm Jewish, and even I, or actually exactly because of that, am appalled!
What happened in the 3rd Reich was a low point in human history. Maybe _the_ lowest point, in that all semblance of humanity and compassion were foregone.
What's going on in California is class warfare with some misguided tactics. I can't blame the residents of the neighborhoods that fear from gentrification, even though I may (or may not, I can't really say for sure, as I don't have a better idea, to be honest) or may not have used their tactics.
Mac's [sic] never made it in the corporate space because they were monolithic and overpriced. With a PC, you could put one together with as few or as many different components as you wanted, of varying capabilities according to your needs, and different hardware manufacturers would compete driving innovation and dropping prices. Also, PC's had a head start. Before there were Windows or Macs, there was MSDOS. There was a lot of software written for DOS and Windows would run them (mostly). Or at least allow them to be run. This was a big deal. The deck was stacked against the Mac from the start. Having said that, I'm still impressed that they're still around and doing quite well.
He does have a point if you think about it (even though he automatically loses his argument through Godwin's Law.) The media has a habit sometimes of picking on the money and the people, and not the system. It demonizes these rich folk as if making them rich automatically makes them bad people who got their money through illegal means. Most of them are guilty of nothing except success. They are just people like us. If you can't accept that thought, you are guilty of the whatever-the-term is..... It's sort of analogous to racism, in a way. Hating someone simply because their skin is a certain color, versus hating someone simply because their bank account has a certain balance. It's just as pointless. Again, the problem is the hate. If the media would focus on the problems with the system, and not the "evil rich people", they might have the moral high ground, but they don't. They could pick on the existence of lobbying, and tax breaks, and unequal opportunity.... and sometimes they do, but often they don't.
Today's capitalists are so all-consumed with greed that it's hard to imagine somebody like Henry Ford actually raising wages to his workers could buy mor stuff. Mister Super-Genius Tom Perkins probably can't even imagine an act like that, or imagine reducing the national workweek to 36 hours to force employers to broaden income distribution, which is really how the Great Depression was fixed (48-hour workweek reduced to 40).
Cry me a river when the government takes your obscene wealth away, Tom.
Oh! Oh! Is it raising taxes a few percent?
Take 25 coins and 25 people. What's the most natural way of distributing the wealth?
Usual answer: given them one each. But swap any two people, and you've got the same distribution. There's only one configuration.
Now give all 25 coins to just one person. There are 25 possible configurations. This is a much more likely outcome.
The (macro)state with the most permutations is where 1 person gets 4 coins, 2 people get 3 coins, 4 people get 2 coins and 7 people get 1 coin. The rest get nothing. (Sound familiar...?)
Uncomfortable for a fair society to accept, but this is simply how the universe works. No amount of laws and regulations will ever make it fair, though that's not an excuse not to try.
A better solution is to forget trying to level the playing field and accept that the bulk of the wealth will always be held by the few. Instead, focus on making it easier to move across the field so that the undeserving rich become a little poorer, and the deserving poor become a little richer.
Create opportunities for people to improve their lot. Don't waste your time complaining about the status quo!
If the NSA were likened to Nazism - powerful entity oppressing the populace - that would be a validly debatable point.
In this occurrence, it's more like he's sitting in Versailles employing the plebes to trim his wigs into topiary. The "we're doing so much so good for these people" argument does not fly when you're on the receiving end of so much wealth, and it's the surrounding citizens that are unhappy.
-- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." --Dijkstra
These people are dangerous radicals if not in action then in concept. Their way of thinking... entitlement... and presumptions are dangerous.
We have people in SF that feel they're entitled to stop traffic to promote bicycles with some frequency. We have people that feel they're entitled to pour sugar in the tanks of industrial machinery for pretty much any construction project.
There is a strain of radical leftism in the SF area that really needs to get its public respect pulled. I am not saying pass a law. I am not saying persecute these people with government power. Rather, I am saying that they depend on a basic level on our acceptance of their behavior and we don't have to accept it.
Their actions are not respectable. It really should stop. Stop granting them respect for their behavior. Its unacceptable.
I don't agree. They are protesting what they think is unfair. How do you protest stuff you think is unfair, bitch about it on forums?
Be seeing you...
You should read your history.
If you think that having "Socialist" in the name makes a party socialistic, you probably also believe that the German Democratic Republic was democratic, right?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Technology is one of those fields when you can still innovate without government/union restrictions.
Patents and long-term exclusive leases to radio frequency spectrum are government restrictions.
That is a gross and inaccurate simplification. Read a bit of history yourself, maybe? The Nazis were definitely not socialists in the traditional sense. That you try to deduce from the name of the party what its nature is shows that you really, really have no clue how these things works or what happened back then.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Look, I've been, in one way or another, poor for most of my life. I have had money at various points and lost it doing stupid things. I intend to have money again now that I have a family. I believe that anyone with enough grit can make it. My wife and myself, we were both homeless travelling hippies when we met. In fact, she recently wrote a short blog about this. We wouldn't have gotten off the street without some help from others, so I doubt we'll ever be as ungrateful as the typical wealthy are. I do not consider the rank and file at Apple, Google, or any other major tech firm to be wealthy, ruling class, or rich. These same progressives who are bitching about their perceived affluence would also shit their pants if these tech companies were to pay them wages comparable to the folks protesting. The more a company makes, the more a society makes, the more its lowest level members should make. That is the way capitalists have always said it should be, and it's really only when they pervert their own notion by giving CEOs 500 to 10,000% of what they pay their janitors that the corruption and bad decision-making begin to take place. Society rewards hard work but it too often rewards asskissing and outright lying, as well. Just my thoughts. I know my family will be fine no matter what; I always seem to figure something out. Still getting on our feet, now, but I'm willing to bet my income will be 300-450% of what it was last year. It takes faith, it takes grit. If I hadn't done it before, though, I don't think I'd feel equipped to do it now, so I recommend anyone who really wants to change their life to take a business class or something along those lines, because you will truly never break the economic chains as long as you have a boss profiting enjoying the fruits of your labor.
Protesting is fine. Obstructing is not.
Its the difference between saying you disagree and getting in my way to stop me. It is the difference between holding a sign up and slashing my tires.
I have no problem with protesting. Protesting is fine.
My problem is with their belief that they can do more then protest.
They have rights... I agree. They have a right to protest.
I have a right to ignore them. That is my right. My right to not agree with them. They want to promote bicycles for example. I don't agree. I want to drive to work in the morning without being slowed down by their stupidity. I have a right to go to work without being intentionally slowed down by their protest.
These people exceed their rights and for that they deserve public scorn.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
http://slashdot.org/~superwiz/...
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
lol
The one sure-fire way to get rid of hipsters in your neighborhood is to allow Walmart to locate there (Yes, there is a compact urban version). But, like that's going to happen in San Francisco.
Photoshop and Indesign are now standard for the soon to be defunct publishing industry (caused by tech advances)
Let me know when "tech advances" make an electronic reading device as cheap as a paper newspaper or as durable as a hardcover book, to the point where dropping it doesn't set one back several days of flipping burgers. And I'd like to know how preparing images or laying out parts a document in pages will become obsolete just because the images and pages are displayed on a screen.
There was a lot of software written for DOS and Windows would run them (mostly).
This is no longer true as of 64-bit Windows. One needs to run an emulator to run DOS apps or to run Windows in an emulator to run 16-bit Windows apps. So why does 64-bit Windows keep its advantage over 64-bit OS X?
Every dollar paid in taxes is the dollar not paid in salary. Just saying.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
2. Joseph Stalin's mass collectivization
3. Other policies of Stalin
When you train and educate for current technology and current needs of business, they will be unqualified when things change.
Companies' needs are for the short term. Technology, business and the markets change very quickly and if we train people to be one trick ponies they will have to be retrained again anyway.
And we're not talking about ancient Babylonian or Greek here - we're talking about reading, writing, math, basic science and critical thinking here - as well as civics; which I think has been completely forgotten by everyone. Those are basic things and more important than the programming language du jour; which after going out of style, those people will be unemployable - even if they do retrain inanother language du jour - because they have no on the job experience and the companies will just go and hire some CHEAP new grads who were trained in the language/tech du jour.. The system is gamed to screw the people and enrich the rich even more.
If a company needs a worker they SHOULD train that person to do the job that THEY need. TO demand that my taxes go to pay for vocational training for some high tech company that off shores their profit so that they don't have to pay taxes is a complete ripp-off.
These companies want it all their way: the public pays for their worker training while they keep all the profits and pay little or no taxes.
Google and the rest of Silicon Valley is actually harming our country. They are importing poor people to work for less, not paying taxes, ripping off the system, and all the while keeping the money for themselves.
The people who bullied us when we were kids are back, in angry new roles appropriate to the Bay Area: street thugs, homeless crazies, political satraps who buddy up with anyone who will project the power they always craved. All it takes now is for some charismatic leader-on-horseback to come galloping out of Berkeley to pass out the brown shirts, and it's game on.
Oh shit, check this out.
So what? You're going to launch an all-out war on hipsters because they've taken over your neighbourhood coffee shop? Do we then need a new set of Nuremberg Laws to define what 'hipster' even means? You know, you can also make coffee at home. Cheaper, quicker, and no need to order a venti soy-latte-chocolate-chip-cookie-caramel-inverted-frappucino.
And this is not similar to Kristallnacht exactly how?
That wasn't said because you originally asked -
I fail to see how this would be a better comparison, would you be so kind to enlighten me?
- when the GGGP mentioned that the French revolution was a better comparison.
See, the Jews were just that - scapegoats - and did nothing to deserve the Holocaust. The French aristocracy, OTOH, were actively harming and exploiting the peasants. In the case of the French aristocrats, they were in fact (mostly) guilty of harming the lower classes. Which is what the upper 1%érs are doing to us by lying about American's lack of skills and lack of intelligence to justify their importing of workers from very poor countries to exploit the wage differential and to put downward pressure on local wages.
> You have your neighborhood back.
and you find yourself living in New Detroit.
That's OK. You can chase away all of the employers. I am sure there are other cities that would be happy to have them.
Come east and leave those eurotrash wannabes behind.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If you think there is something wrong with historically unprecedented income and wealth inequality, if you fear for the future of democracy when 85 individuals control more wealth than 3.5 billion people, if you are alarmed at the influence of this wealth on politics (to the point where a single individual can bankroll an entire presidential campaign, then you are a Nazi.
No further discussion necessary.
A few individuals have vandalized buses, therefore an entire subject is off limits.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
I prefer the NYC approach.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
agreed, they were fascists. But they were socialists in many ways as well, Domestically they were all for redistribution of wealth, As long as they were taking from jews and gypsies and others deemed unworthy and giving to the germans. They were not however right wing in the modern sense, and they were not socalist or left wing in a modern sense. They were fascists first and foremost
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Your ignorance is staggering AC.
There is a war going on for your mind.
That's not how tax incidence works. If payroll taxes are lowered but the elasticity of demand in the labor market is high, employers simply lower wages by the amount taxes are lowered. Labor demand is driven by take-home pay, not the top-line salary figure, and employers will pocket any change as long as jobs are tight and people are willing to work for the same take-home pay.
Also that's not how net transfers work; people who make $25k a year will have a withholding but will probably get the whole balance back, at least on their Federal return. People who make $1 million a year probably aren't making salary at all, and are deriving significant income from economic rents, which can be taxed at 100% without deadweight loss. (Most people would say this is immoral, economic efficiency notwithstanding.)
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
right. Because I would rather not work and bitch and moan about those who have a good job, than have a good job based on my ability. what the fuck happened to this country when working hard and making money became a bad thing?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Because I would rather not work and bitch and moan about those who have a good job, than have a good job based on my ability.
That's not how it works. Hard work is the worst predictor of success. The best is who your parents are. Even luck is more relevant. That's not to say you don't have to work hard, only that it's not a relevant differentiating factor. Many of the most successful people (by typical metrics) have never really worked in their lives.
what the fuck happened to this country when working hard and making money became a bad thing?
Worker productivity has increased by orders of magnitude but worker pay has decreased. That's what happened. It's called lack of incentive. The worker is actually getting a worse deal today than at any other point during the democracy experiment.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
you had better believe that this 'grass roots' protest is funded by people with fat fat wallets. They are making tech workers into the New Jew using propaganda. Propaganda is the hidden force behind all of modern politics. If you go back and look at the rise of hitler and the nazis, it becomes clear that the upper class needed a scapegoat to preserve their wealth from the inevitable oncoming swell of populist-leftist politics coming up from the working class. The upper class knew what was coming, so they found a scapegoat and subverted the working class populist sentiment, diverting working class anger onto the scapegoat, the jews. If you want references for this idea, see the article "I was Hitler's Boss" by Karl Mayr and also the new book _Hitler's_ _First_ _War_. Anyway, the same thing is happening now--the elite are pushing the idea that tech workers are to blame for rising prices. They are demonizing tech workers so that populist anger is directed away from themselves. It is also possible that this anger in SF against tech workers is actually in fact anger against cheap import H1b labor scabs from overseas, but the media is altering and changing the actual tenor and content of the protest to make it looks as if it is a protest against tech workers in general. Also, as a side effect of demonizing tech workers, they can get more cheap labor H1Bs into america because the tech worker will then be an unsympathetic figure.
that it's hard to imagine somebody like Henry Ford actually raising wages to his workers could buy mor stuff.
Ever wonder why society got to the state where shortsightedness is so amply rewarded? It's real simple. Get rid of the risk, which is what has been done on multiple levels, from welfare (both of the personal and corporate sort) through to Keynesian-style economics and publicly funded R&D, and you get rid of the incentive to think long term.
Wages? I thought the luddite townies were complaining about the highly paid tech workers?
You identified the problem though. We've replaced Henry Ford's workers with robots and computers. Billion dollar buyouts of tech companies with 10 employees. Individual lawyers/paralegals doing the job of 10. Taxi, truck, garbage drivers all replaced by Google/Toyota/etc. driverless cars within the next 10 years. Post-employment, pre-utopia.
and if not for the new ACA law there tech likely was to be used as way to get people on to the pre existing condition black list.
The Jews in Germany were killed because they belonged to a specific group of people who had a reference to Jewish religion. All the accusations against them were wrong and just used to form a common enemy. This especially is true for the Reichsprogromnacht (Kristallnacht is Nazi vocabulary).
The attacks on Google employees is wrong, but they are triggered by a real impact these people have. Due to their high income they can pay more for houses, which triggers an increase in house prices. Therefore, other people are pushed out of the same area. The term for this is gentrification. This results in pressure on poorer people. So they get angry. A result of the gentrification in SF is also that the Google-people are destroying the very environment they want to join. Similar things happened in Germany's capital Berlin where the Prenzlauer Berg was former a by artists and other creative but poor people inhabited district, but is now occupied by richer "hip" people. There are also such conflicts in Hamburg.
The problem is a class based discrimination through money power. With the widening gap between low and middle/high class income, these problems increase. Cities have to cope with this by limiting the potential to squeeze out poor peoples of districts. The big money bubble presently floating around the world is also steering up house prices causing gentrification resulting in more violence in the end.
Try Democratic People's Republic of Korea, more commonly known as North Korea for a much more "how stupid are you to take things at face value" impact.
I love how you invoke henry ford, Who did not need the government to tell him to do the things that he did, he did it because it was good for the bottom line. Its funny how things work out best when the government does the least
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Any app that works in DOSBox for Windows should work in DOSBox for OS X. (Feel free to correct me with the obscure exception.)
How about what happened in the former Soviet Union during Stalin's reign between 1928 and 1953 and China during Mao's reign between 1949 and 1976?
Between unfettered mass shootings, labor camps, forced exile and deliberate famine (all of which the Nazis practiced in their "racial cleansing" program that included the Holocaust), scholars estimate at minimum 100 million people were killed, with some estimates as high as 150 million! That is genocide on a scale unimaginable in human history--all done in the name of "equality" as defined by the political Left.
Many of the most successful people (by typical metrics) have never really worked in their lives.
While true in some regards (look at our president and previous president) I can tell you that hard work does in fact pay off for a large number of people. Sure they might not be ultra rich, but if someone comes out of a piss poor family and works hard, they will live comfortably
Worker productivity has increased by orders of magnitude but worker pay has decreased
Im not sure this is true either. 100 years ago people were plowing fields by hand and animals, now a machine can be run to do 100 times the work in a day run by 1 person. People are not physically working harder today than they were in the past
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The Nazi's were hardcore socialists that very much believed is socialistic ideals. The Nazi's were very zealous about their socialism and enforcing it. They used everything from price and wage controls to verdant support for trains for the masses. Hitler was an adamant anti-capitalist and used this to support his genocide of the jews. Labor unions were replaced by government controlled unions and shops and other business were routinely seized by the state.
You can read some translated propaganda here where the Nazi's explained why they embraced socialism. In their own words:
The Soviets took them seriously enough to form a treaty with the Nazi's in the time leading up to WW2 - something they weren't in the habit of doing with other nations. Industry was effectively owned by the government (even when in name someone else held the title) and German industrial companies were seized as government assets for repatriation at the end of the war.
By way of example Hitler saw the need for a cheap car for the masses and ordered Ferdinand Porsche to design the original beetle to his specifications (Hitlers original sketch is a Google search away). The result was the founding of the Volkswagen (people's car) for the express purpose of building an affordable car for the masses. At the end of the war the English got that bit and almost put Volkswagen out to pasture, leaving it be only because they thought the company was worthless.
http://jerryfisher.hubpages.co...
Strip away all the genocide and war crimes and your left with very socialist ideals.
I think the opposite is true, the more risk there is, the more short-term thinking there is because the incentive to think long-term is trumped by the risk.
Well, if your risk is day to day survival, then sure. You're not going to be thinking decades or centuries down the road, if you have a good chance of dying tomorrow.
That's not at stake even with most personal welfare (public pensions being a particularly notable example). When not planning for the future has a similar outcome to planning for the future, then there's not much incentive to plan.
Employers can stay in the general area, no one is trying to chase them out. The locals just want to have a few remaining reservations where they can live.
There are no additional fractions needed. There still seems to be confusion around the "1%". You or people you know are in the "1%" when as an individual, you/they have a minimum salary of $350,000.00 a year. The folks who are having to ride those buses are most certainly not making $350k. There is no need to reference ".01%" Unless you are really trying to address folks like Gates or Larry Ellison directly.
The thing is that they were a class of their own. No simple label describes them adequately and "fascist" does not do the trick either. Not even "evil" does the job, although it comes close than many other labels. They had incredible success with just the right mixture of actually doing something about the problems of the little people, appealing to the wannabe big ones with their visions of grandeur, anti-establishment thinking with regards to, for example, the medical establishment, healthy living, Germanic roots, strong leadership, "fixing" some long-term severe problems, etc. And the thing is, for a some time they actually delivered on their promises (something basically no modern politician can do due to universal gross incompetence). The price to pay for this became obvious only far, far later for many of their supporters. That is why such a mix would be as dangerous today as it was back then. There are some strong tendencies in that direction (without the delivering on promises parts) in, for example the "war" on terror rhetoric. Just as most things the NSDAP did, these "wars" serve entirely different purposes than stated but the pretext makes a lot of sense for those not well informed (which is the majority).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You seem to have eaten the propaganda wholesale. Yes, they were opposed to capitalism, but for entirely different reasons: They basically wanted the whole population to be one kind of unified army, and capitalism is chaos. Calling this "socialism" was just good for their propaganda efforts.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I think Perkins is mistaking Versailles in 1789 for Berlin in 1933.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
So you're taking nazi propaganda at face value and using the opportunistic treaty with the nation Hitler was building up his strength to crush as evidence, and you're not doing it ironically?
I'm impressed. Not in the sense you intended, I'm sure, but I am.
Here is the Nazi view of capitalism:
Strike the "Jewish influences" and you get political and economic views that closely match those of Occupy and many progressives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
Taking this a bit personally, are we?
Your post is a great example of Perkins main point being valid.
We already have violence committed against anyone perceived as the 1% - see Occupy, with damage to buildings and windows and so on.
We also see this in things like the Paris taxi unions slashing tires and otherwise trashing Uber cars.
Your mindset is just one short step away from real violence against the people you perceive as having unfair advantages. I am sure before this is all over we'll see some tech workers hurt, possibly killed and a few buses at least disabled or destroyed. All by people like you, if not you yourself.
We have an upper class that is trying to turn our education system into a jobs training program for their exploitation.
We have an upper class that is trying to make the education system work AT ALL.
We DO NOT need more programmer we NEED more people who can think and communicate.
Actually, we need more people who can listen and understand without shutting others out...
But we also need more programmers. And programmers inherently are better at communication just because you have to be clear to the compiler to program well. From what I have seen, that clarity carries forward into human writing as well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Nazis were not socialists, they were anti-capitalist. And their anti-capitalist message was pretty close to the anti-capitalist message of the American left (which, incidentally, also is not socialist).
Consider an economic position that is both anti-communist and anti-capitalist. A position rooted in support of private property but opposed to big international finance, the free flow of money, and the power of large corporations. An economic position that advocates strong regulation of corporations in order to make sure that they operate in the public interest, and implements changes to laws in order to favor "productive labor" over investments and "capitalists".
Does that sound like some economic positions from modern American political discourse? That was, in fact, the Nazi economic position.
The irony here is that it is the hipsters in San Francisco who are protesting. The commuters in these buses are by and large simply Silicon Valley engineers.
Ha! Points!
Am I naive to assume the springs on those things have been disabled?
Or perhaps it's meant to be performance art, with the hapless hipster as the performer....
Imagine the situation, you are working ahrd and do not get a lot of money, tehn suddenly due to company actively providing cheap transport to people better off than you, then area get gentrified. Your renter ask for more. And you get outpriced. Now in addition to having the *cost* of moving to somewhere cheaper (it ain't free), you also most probably have additional transportation cost (from your already small budget) to go from your new place to your work, and have longer transportation (thus even less free time). In other word that little perk of google worker, make the life of people already not having money worst. Of that perk was not there, maybe those worker would have sought another place to live.
This gentrification seems good on superficial view, but the reality is that for the local renter, it will *sucks* hard.
So , those protest don't look so dumb now you know what the problem is ?
Personally I am ambivalent on that, but gentrification can be a real problem when the lower class get bigger and bigger.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
This is actually the most insightful response. Given the utterly ludicrous comparison with Nazi Germany, Tom Perkin's comments have absolutely no merit whatsoever. Best leave this total crap alone.
Its funny how things work out best when the government does the least
That only works when people like Henry Ford actually exist. So far as we can tell, no such person exists in the modern 1%. When no one wants to voluntarily raise wages like Henry Ford, when in fact the people in his position do everything they possibly can to depress wages (H1-B visas come to mind), people start thinking about using government power to force it. Their self interest does not trump our self interest in moral terms. Quite the opposite. There are a lot more of us than them.
This is the annoying thing about some other posts in this thread. We don't hate the wealthy because they are wealthy. We hate them because they not only refuse to share the wealth, but actively work to eliminate everyone else's wealth in favor of increasing their own even further. We hate them because they have been successfully socializing their risk and privatizing the profit. We hate them because they have been successfully extending the reach and power of monopolies, from copyrights and patents to telecommunications and food. We hate them because they have massively distorted our political process in their favor. We hate them because of the things they do with their wealth, not because they have it.
Of the alternatives, a 1% that behaves like Henry Ford would be best. Manifestly, that's not an available alternative. An interventionist government that intervenes in favor of the majority is the least-bad option of the available alternatives. There are other ways to redress these wrongs. They include revolution and mass murder. Stop complaining about socialist government. It could be a lot worse.
People are not physically working harder today than they were in the past
...which has absolutely fuck all to do with worker productivity, which is a measure of *economic* output, not *caloric* output.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
0 dollars of income taxes are spent on the roads. 0%. Roads are maintained with the excise tax on gasoline. Excise tax is the tax built into the price (as opposed to the sales tax which is charged after the price). So "raising taxes a few percent" comment, that started this strand of this thread, would do nothing to maintain the roads. If you still don't know what excirse taxes are, they are the reason gas has a very different price across state lines. Delivery costs are the same. The only thing that is different is how much of a cut (excision... hence "excise") the government gets. So my point stands, every dollar spent on taxes is a dollar not spent on salary.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
While true in some regards (look at our president and previous president) I can tell you that hard work does in fact pay off for a large number of people. Sure they might not be ultra rich, but if someone comes out of a piss poor family and works hard, they will live comfortably
By whose standard? If you ran over the border with rain on your back you might be happy to live seven to an apartment. But there's three times as many people out of work in the USA as there are jobs, and many of those jobs are designed to be filled by a H1-B.
People are not physically working harder today than they were in the past
I didn't say that they were. If neither logic not reading comprehension is your strong suit, what is?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Increased healthcare costs? On what planet? Ha? Are you really gonna try to make some case that government makes healthcare affordable? Is this crap something that people are still not ashamed to say out loud? I mean just takes balls.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
let's DO IT
When you can't afford to spare anything from the present, there is no opportunity to plan for the future. Having the luxury to know you have a fallback position, that you won't be destroyed if you take a chance on something else, actually increases planning, rather than decreases it.
Ok, how does that luxury help? I grant you have a point to this. But I think you're way overstating this aspect of the problem. For example, most businesses don't live day to day and those that do IMHO are close to bankruptcy and probably should go that way.
If you were a cat, where would you prefer to try to catch a bird, up in a tree, or safe on the ground?
I see the choice more as being able to catch a bird whether you try or not. If you can get a bird anyway when you want, even though it might not be as good, that greatly reduces the incentive to try. It especially neuters the incentive to try to be a really good bird catcher since you're guaranteed a bunch of birds even if you don't know how to catch a bird.
WSJ op-ed
The opinions posted in the financial version of Fox News (it is a Murdoch holding, after all) is "news for nerds"?
Fucking WHAT?
--
BMO
'Reservations' are called property titles. Other then that, tough shit. There is no right to a SF address, no matter where you were born.
It's not like SF has been a low rent district in living memory. Even low rent districts in SF are expensive.
If someones trust fund no longer covers SF rent, I have no sympathy.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
MacOS, prior to X, was an unmitigated, embarrassing POS without protected memory or real multitasking. The fact that Mac fanboys still make any claim to superior stability verses competitive flavors of NT is a great example of cognitive dissonance and insular cluelessness.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The NAZI's were right wing fascists, which is why they got along with their allies in Italy and the French Vichy, but fought against Russia (the actual socialists). There's been a (completely stupid fucking idiocy induced) trend for the past coupe decades by (completely fucking idiots) people on the right who want to try to distance themselves from the history of conservative fanaticism, the NAZI's, Fascism, the KKK, that they've gone so far as to try to rewrite history to absolve their souls of their legacy. I guess it makes conservatives feel better when they're completely fucking ignorant of reality.... but it doesn't change reality.
Your post shouldn't be "informative," it should be "delusional propaganda." You're either lying, or ignorant and parroting some complete asshat that lied to you.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
WTF1: From the moment labor unions disappear, you cannot call it socialism. Socialism is the ownership of the production means by the workers. Removing the assemblies defeats socialism.
WTF2: The USSR "treaty" was a non attack treaty, like the one signed with Denmark, Estonia, and Latvia. It gave Stalin enough time to prepare for what was next. On the other side, France an the UK were accepting Germany invasions by paper: "Ohh, I want this country. Ok it is yours" (Austria and Czechoslovakia). Also the US was selling the stuff needed. They all wanted Hitler to attack the soviet union (Nazis offered peace with the Allies in 1941 but only if they were allowed to invade Russia. Article from dailymail). Very socialist.
If my grandma had an engine, she would be a car. So Nazi Germany was socialist but you need: To remove racism, genocide, add democracy, add people assemblies, add culture, remove the focus of the government in the private companies (Bayer anyone?) and focus on working with the people. And yes, you're right, it will be a quite socialist state.
Remember that there will be always people to put another flag in the Reichstag.
The only corporations in Fascist Italy were government chartered. Like the Dutch East India Company or Freddy and Fanny.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
to the point where dropping it doesn't set one back several days of flipping burgers
you don't throw your reader away after you've read the articles you're interested in
You don't on purpose. You do after you drop it and ruin it. Or you do after publishers stop offering their works in a format compatible with devices as old as yours.
Propaganda? That was the last thing I looked up. I went by their values and social agendas as well as their actions. They were very adamant about implementing their socialist values and forcing the population to put community before everything else. Set aside the war crimes and genocide and look at the rest of what they did for over a decade - it was pure socialism.
Did they also have extra apostrophe's?
I can see how that could drive a megalomaniac mad enough to invade Europe.
Yeah, "socialism" was part of the name, but Mr Silly Stache's goal was all-or-nothing. "He" lost, but Germany won.
Germany is now an economic superpower (albeit helped along by the US).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053084/
Fascists are pro-corporate leaderships. The Nazis were busy seizing businesses and corporations from the Jews, so they were most emphatically not "fascists."
The modern United States is far more fascist than the Nazis ever were, complete with rah-rah flag-waving sentimentalism and investing in an overly large military machine that they use to attack people around the globe who don't agree with their "ideals".
All forms of government are good at one thing, though: spin and propaganda. The use of such tactics tells you nothing about their intentions; only their actions can speak to that.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I take it you have never actually cracked open a history book to study the subject your talking about. The Germans invaded the Soviets because they thought they could surprise them and defeat them before they got any stronger. They were so confident of a quick victory they didn't even have winter clothing. I am not right wing, I'm a moderate that leans left. The only thing you got right was that Italy was right wing.
Maybe that's the case in your country, but in the United States, road funding tends to come from a variety of sources.
Specifically, road funding tends to come from the general fund for state roads, and out of local funding sources for local roads - this includes stuff like income taxes and property taxes. Roughly speaking, road users are subsidized, for good or bad.
For the United States state spending, you can find a chart here for how much each state actually takes in via user fees, and pays out on roads. The best state is Delaware, where for every $1.00 spent on roads, about $0.60 comes from user fees. The worst state is Alaska or Wyoming - where for every $1.00 spent on roads, about $0.05 comes from user fees. The average is about $0.32 from user fees for every $1.00 spent.
Again, I can't say how your country funds roads, but in the United States, a strong argument can be made that income taxes, as well as other sources, funds roads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... Comparing people to Nazis is not a argument fallacy. You can't change the rules of logic.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
“As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.
There is a purpose behind declaring an argument over once the Nazis are mentioned. The assumption is that if a speaker resorts to comparing his opponents to the Nazis then he has run out of good arguments and is hoping for a visceral response that will therefore cause him to win the point.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
All I'm pointing out that there's a health cost to increased commute times and poorly maintained roads.
Except reality doesn't work that way. Strip away all the genocide and war crimes and you're no longer describing Nazis, you're describing some fictional organization with only a superficial resemblance to Nazis. I'd make an allusion to spherical cows, but the "you have two cows" joke works as well.
People can claim whatever lofty ideals they want, but history judges by the results.
FUCK YOU
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
This just in, Anonymous Coward points to Godwin's Law when examining Tony Perkins's op-ed.
That is a gross and inaccurate simplification. Read a bit of history yourself, maybe? The Nazis were definitely not socialists in the traditional sense.
They were a variation of socialism, as the similarities make clear:
One can quibble that no single one of these is unique to socialism or fascism, but taken together, it's clearly not some sort of misdirection that the Nazis had the word "socialist" in their name, and that their early ranks were filled with ex-socialists and ex-communists.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
My point is that they literally drive intentionally to slow you down. They are obstructing traffic ON PURPOSE. They aren't there because they can't help it or because they're commuting. They're there because they want YOU not to drive. They want YOU to get on a bicycle. And rather then just making a statement about it, they feel they have a right to obstruct traffic ON PURPOSE to make cars less viable.
Which is sort of like car drivers intentionally clipping bicyclists with their cars to make that less practical. Yes, the analogy isn't perfect... They're not causing anyone bodily harm. But they are still presuming the right to influence my behavior in public space.
Its not okay.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Pretty much.
You have a right to your opinion and a right to tell other people about your opinion.
You do not have a right to make me care or otherwise force me to comply.
That is the difference between a republic and mob rule.
You either agree with that or you're some mix of ignorant or barbarian. No offense. Really... no offense. But... if you think you have the right to impose your will on other people arbitrarily like that then you do not believe in a society of laws.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Too much traffic to drive your BMW... take the Google Bus to work.
Why do stupid regular people whine about stuff?
Yeah because prior to the revolution, anyone could vote on laws, debate issues, and get the matter passed by a government of elected officials.
Oh wait... we had a king and you're an ignorant moron.
You seriously said something so stupid that at this point you may only speak when spoken too...
Shoo...
*makes brushing motions*
Children...
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
People who complain about things like, companies taking their employees to work on company busses......wow, wtf? I don't even get how someone can seriously make a complaint like that without laughing at how whiney and ridiculous it sounds. They have way too much time on their hands and need to start spending it productively, rather than focusing on being as much of an ass as possible.
That is, of course, if your measure of usefulness and success is based on $.
One could also argue that usefulness and success is related to expanding human knowledge (including ancient Babylonian history), or human culture (art, etc.)
We're just in a system that for some reasons solely values money. *Shrug* To each their own, I guess.
Socialism doesn't require democracy, in fact it often dictates a lack of democracy to enact as you run the risk of the people choosing themselves over the community. History is rife with examples of socialist states that tried to solve this problem by either eliminating voting or limiting voting to one party. The same thing goes for the right to assemble, if the masses assemble they might demand something different and socialism fails when the people don't want to go along with it. Again history is full of examples of socialist states where the right to assemble was strongly curtailed.
Socialism doesn't have anything to do with racism, culture or genocide as a requirement or a curtailment. Private companies were routinely seized by the Nazi's and even when companies were 'owned' in name by someone else they were effectively government owned. Such was the extant of this that they were seized as war assets and either put out of business or forced into new lines of business. BMW and Volkswagen are direct examples of the result of this (BMW used to make war planes and the blue / white propeller emblem is homage to that history). The nazi's were very anti-corporation and anti-business, traits that run counter to fascism and right wing politics.
I am not putting a flag in the Reichstag, I am simply stating an inconvenient truth, one that the youth of today tend to be unaware of. What are the elements of socialism? You will find all of those elements in Nazi Germany.
And "very plain terms" have an impact on their truthfulness? If so, here is a very plain term for you: You are an idiot.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Wealth essentially arises from either A) production of goods/services or B) renting out one's property to others. (Inheritance is a special case not worth including here.) Technology has produced ENORMOUS quantities of goods and services. (This isn't limited to high-tech, but extends also to the Industrial Revolution and certain tools developed for agriculture.) High-tech, in particular, has been busy producing successive quanta of goods and services for we the people to consume, enjoy and employ in our daily tasks. Moore's Law has yielded tremendous advancements in a wide variety of economic realms. This has enabled consumers (and businesses) to enjoy & produce more than they ever previously imagined possible. It has opened doors to entirely new economic endeavors and liberated billions from past drudgeries. Along with developing technological advances, the market price of those advances has declined on a relentless downward march. What someone was willing to shell out $1,000 for three years ago is now available for $100 or $200 -- and offers greater usability, battery life, storage capacity, whatever. That $800 lower price makes me and all similar consumers better off (wealthier). The producer and the retail chain to get it to me only gets $200 for their work; I walk away with $800 of greater satisfaction. That greater satisfaction and wealth is not measured in the GDP accounts, but it's a reality nonetheless. And it is HUGE. From this perspective, why should radical progressive youth be upset that some people earn vastly more than the median income? Those folks are the vanguard of a new society and economy for all of us, worldwide. Attempts to besmirch, cripple, accuse and jail or restrain that vanguard is akin to wanting to shoot oneself in the foot. It's entirely emotional and totally illogical.
Your assertion was that every dollar paid in taxes is a dollar not paid in salary, that if taxes are lowered then salary goes up in 1:1 correspondence.
That is an argument for marginal utility of dollars, which is not in my post; I'm identifying the difference between income from growth and income from economic rent. If a guy only made $10k a year on economic rent and you taxed 100% of it, it would create no deadweight loss, his gross income is irrelevant.
We distinguish between taxation that causes deadweight loss and taxes that do not. A tax on an economic rent does not. The general goal of neoliberal taxation is to collect as much rent as possible from deadweight, non-Parero optimal activities.
I'm talking about taxes in the most general case. If you put a 10% tax on the sale of apples, apple vendors may lose that money from their profits, or they may pass the costs on to the people buy apples (losing nothing), or a mix of the two. The mix is determined by the elasticity of demand for apples -- if people can replace apples with a supplemental good, or elect to buy them less, then apple vendors can't pass on the tax. If a good has inelastic demand, a good like gasoline, which only very slowly responds to plaice signals, then 100% of the tax will be passed on in the price and none of the company's income available to invest will be affected.
It works the same way with the labor market, if you put a tax on a business activity, this may result in lower salaries, but wether it does or not depends on the labor market they're operating in. It's possible that they can't afford to offer lower salaries because people wouldn't accept the work, they'd be able to find work somewhere else, in which case the costs either come from profits or from another activity. Your analysis above is operating with the assumption of a completely inelastic market for the company's goods, a completely inelastic labor market, the firm is collecting no economic rents of any kind, and is working at a perfect and unimprovable level of efficiency and productivity. The assumptions are wildly unrealistic.
None of this is relevant to your extremely general point, which can be summarized as "taxes is the suxx0r." But your specific, original claim that taxes always deprive workers of wages is simply not true in many cases.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
First, Nazisim was not a Progressive-Liberal Radical idea. The National Socialist party was rabidly anti-communist and full of Capitalist and German elites. It was racist, not socialist, not collectiveist. Its reaction to WW I and the Treaty of Versallles was convervative, nationalist, and elitist, pitting group against group.
This stupid man has fired another salvo in a class war, and does it for the reason every conservative movement does so, to divide and conquer, to disunite a diverse group of people so that his elite, his Capitalist elite, can come out oh top. He is the Nazi, replete with the Social Aarweinsim invented by American Capitalists in the 1890's and adapted by the Nazis in the 1920's.
So, given the income distribution, lopsided, that he helped to create, for the Great Unwashed to get upset that Google and Facebook are giving their employees perks at the expense of everybody else, of renters in the Bay Area and of MUNI riders in San Francisco, interferring at bus stops for public transportation, is an imposition on the 1%, too bad. People are beginning to keep score if the advantages given to Silicon Valley are reallly worth the sacrifice. If SV has really given back in a meaningful and not created more problems. I am not talking about the token charity that Silicon Valley firms and others have patted themselves on the back ad nauseium with the help of the local media, and drive me to turn off the TV and the local news, propaganda. I am talking about real help with the problems that face California and the nation. The 50 year love affair with Silicon Valley and Stanford University and its economic thinking may be done.
I'm sure the Holocaust survivors can offer this guy sympathy.
Idiot! Last I heard the major firms that backed the Nazis were all Capitalist firms. Quit this BS!
Guillotines would be too good for Google.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Socialism doesn't require democracy, in fact it often dictates a lack of democracy to enact as you run the risk of the people choosing themselves over the community.
And where exactly do people choose themselves over the community and how can that be a problem in an assembly where majority wins.
History is rife with examples of socialist states that tried to solve this problem by either eliminating voting or limiting voting to one party.
Solve this problem, can you explain how people deciding is a problem? I know that after Lenin died in Russia the soviet assembly died. But how people having the control of the production means is a problem, It is an interesting idea.
The same thing goes for the right to assemble, if the masses assemble they might demand something different and socialism fails when the people don't want to go along with it.
Socialism is when the masses assembly and take control. It will be really fun that they assembly to vote not to be able to assemble again an decide their future.
Again history is full of examples of socialist states where the right to assemble was strongly curtailed.
It would be nice if you put some, just to know what do you consider a socialist state, and if you take into consideration anything else.
Because now in the US the right of assemble is strongly curtailed, not only with the "funny" law of demonstrations near the white house, but with demonstrations near the secret service or someone protected by the secret service. Let alone the "funny" (again) reasons used to stop people assembling in the wall street demonstrations. I must say that using nets to treat people like cattle was another "funny" idea. Better than shooting students like in the 70s.
Socialism doesn't have anything to do with racism, culture or genocide as a requirement or a curtailment.
I won't call this a non-sequitur, because there is nothing backing this up. You could first compare how the US or Europe evolved around the racism problem and how socialist countries did it. Just to see how constitutions where not only removing races but also equality between women and men.
But you can go to the theory. "Racism serves the interests of the capitalist or employer class by dividing black and white workers, reducing their potential unity and thus their bargaining power." (I guess you can google this and learn more about it).
Private companies were routinely seized by the Nazi's and even when companies were 'owned' in name by someone else they were effectively government owned. Such was the extant of this that they were seized as war assets and either put out of business or forced into new lines of business. BMW and Volkswagen are direct examples of the result of this (BMW used to make war planes and the blue / white propeller emblem is homage to that history). The nazi's were very anti-corporation and anti-business, traits that run counter to fascism and right wing politics.
Yep, Bayer and Josef Mengele, and of course inside IG Farben wasn't a capitalist conglomerate. But the worst of all of this is this fact "The Bayer executive Fritz ter Meer, sentenced to seven years in prison during the IG Farben Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, was made head of the supervisory board of Bayer in 1956, after his release".
So can you tell me when BMW was seized by the government?
I am not putting a flag in the Reichstag, I am simply stating an inconvenient truth, one that the youth of today tend to be unaware of. What are the elements of socialism? You will find all of those elements in Nazi Germany.
You're defending so much the Nazi that it feels that you would like them to come back. In that case, don't worry there will be people willing to put a different flag in the Reichstag.
A bunch of non-sequitur is called now truth?. Why? You know more about yourself. But I guess I'll remember for some months your comment about "Socialism is not democracy".
Have fun with your democracy :P
I don't know where you got your idea of what Socialism is, or where you got the idea that Hitler's speeches bear any fundamental relation to reality, but you'll be better off forgetting everything you got there.
The Nazis supported large capitalists. They allowed them to run their businesses as they liked until Speer rationalized the economy, and he did nothing more Socialistic there than Britain or the US. They formed a national labor union not to allow workers to organize, but to destroy all unions that might be effective. They persecuted left-wingers. The Night of the Long Knives was about getting the Socialists out of the National Socialist German Worker's Party (not that they changed the name afterwards).
The Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty was a result of Western Allies not wanting to negotiate seriously with the Soviets (allying with Germany was plan B). Earlier cooperation had been on the basis that both the German military and the Soviet Union were disliked by the WWI victors, and Hitler stopped that fast when he came to power (odd behavior for a Socialist).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
My view on that is that dealing with more mundane or routine risks effectively helps build up knowledge and fortitude for more ambitious efforts.
The point of discussion between us is not a choice as to whether the cat catches a bird or eats prepared food, but whether the cat risks breaking a leg jumping from a tree or not. If trying to catch a bird risked immediate death, you're not going to try to catch any, until you reach a point of extreme desperation, because the danger is too much.
Let's suppose that bird catching actually were costly for society much as a number of notably risky activities, like, business creation, education, large asset purchases (like homes), etc, can be. Why would we want to negate the consequences of a risky activity that has costs for us?
Finally, why should I expect more rewards from risk takers just because I got rid of a bunch of risks. My take is that for most people, there's little value to society to minimize their risks. They just aren't going to do something amazing just because they don't have to work to feed themselves any more. Similarly, since most people can work to feed themselves and deal with most other short term risks, there's little value to reducing those risks.
Let me see: penicillin, internet protocol, encryption, GPS, sonar/radar. These were all funded in a big way by government research. How did these not have a long-term effect?
The thing is, because government funded the research, there was no consequence to anyone else blowing it off.
By me in response ro "Virgle", including a bit on the two worlds at Google: http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-ra... ... I don't miss working there. The people arn't really all that friendly, people have arrogance and MBA, PHD attitudes." :-(
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"But given what Gatto and Ellul say, that action may be a long time coming because the wealthy get so much emotional reward out of believing the propaganda of elites deserving abundance amidst scarcity for the many and spreading that propaganda further (even via Virgle).
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.democraticundergrou...
"The cheap-labor conservative "minimalist government" social Darwinian world view is just plain bullshit. It builds a new class structure, which just like the ancient class structures, is based on a set of mythological concepts. In fact, those mythological concepts like "property rights", "contract rights", "corporations", "stocks", "bonds", and even "money" itself are socially created to regulate distribution and access to resources. The "market place" is a human creation. The details of how it operates are determined by the particulars of the institutions on which it is built. It is "instituted among men", and if its workings become destructive of the lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness of people subject to it, it may be "altered or abolished"."
For example, Google contractors get no Segways and massages?
http://www.google-watch.org/go...
Or second class badges?
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/...
"I used to work at Google as a Contractor. Let me tell you, it wasn't the greatest place for a contractor. First, you have red badges, so anyone with a Google badge looks down on you. Already you feel left out, and you don't feel like enjoying all the benefits Googler's have.
And ultimately, aren't even the people in sweatshops in, say, China who build component used in Google servers in some sense Google contractors? Definitely no Segways or massages for them.
http://www.monthlyreview.org/m...
"Well over 150 million migrant workers from rural areas have crowded into the cities over the past decade in search of economic survival. They may regularly not get paid for months at a time. Public healthcare across the economy is declining to the point where many millions of working families cannot afford to seek medical care or risk huge debt if they do. Migrant workers are at especial risk. Large numbers of workers in the toy industry have now lost their jobs directly as a result of the Mattel recall, and its fallout continues. They are the direct victims of their local bosses' abuses and the lack of safety control. But of course they and their stories and suffering, literally inscribed in the toys they make, remain invisible."
So what is Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California but a little temporary space habitat bubble of happiness for regular employees, but floating on a sea of relative misery for everyone else planetwide who supports it? Can't we as a society or Google/Virgle as an aspiration do better that that? And even within that bubble are emerging issues. How long can a company expect to run on twenty-somethings without kids?"
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We've been watching "Manor House" and "Downton Abbey" and it is perhaps interesting to think about the upstairs/downstairs distinction in relation to Google employees vs. contractors and other supporters (including suppliers and users).
Personally, I feel Google (including its top management) i
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Also related:
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/...
My satirical take on it all: ... ... now!" :-) Then cue long tirade on how could engineers seriously wanted to help the German workers to not have to work so hard when the whole Nazi party platform was based on providing full employment using fiat dollars. Then cue long tirade on how could engineers have taken the socialism part seriously and shared the wealth of nature and technology with everyone globally.]
https://groups.google.com/foru...
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Dialog of alternatively a military officer and Hitler:
"It looks like there are now local digital fabrication facilities here, here, and here."
"But we still have the rockets we need to take them out?"
"The rockets have all been used to launch seed automated machine shops for self-replicating space habitats for more living space in space."
"What about the nuclear bombs?"
"All turned into battery-style nuclear power plants for island cities in the oceans."
"What about the tanks?"
"The diesel engines have been remade to run biodiesel and are powering the internet hubs supplying technical education to the rest of the world."
"I can't believe this. What about the weaponized plagues?"
"The gene engineers turned them into antidotes for most major diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, cancer, and river blindness."
"Well, send in the Daleks."
"The Daleks have been re-outfitted to terraform Mars. There all gone with the rockets."
"Well, use the 3D printers to print out some more grenades."
"We tried that, but they only are printing toys, food, clothes, shelters, solar panels, and more 3D printers, for some reason."
"But what about the Samsung automated machine guns?"
"They were all reprogrammed into automated bird watching platforms. The guns were taken out and melted down into parts for agricultural robots."
"I just can't believe this. We've developed the most amazing technology the world has ever known in order to create artificial scarcity so we could rule the world through managing scarcity. Where is the scarcity?"
"Gone, Mein Fuhrer, all gone. All the technologies we developed for weapons to enforce scarcity have all been used to make abundance."
"How can we rule without scarcity? Where did it all go so wrong?
Everyone with an engineering degree leave the room
[Cue long tirade on the general incompetence of engineers.
"So how are the common people paying for all this?"
"Much is free, and there is a basic income given to everyone for the rest. There is so much to go around with the robots and 3D printers and solar panels and so on, that most of the old work no longer needs to be done."
"You mean people get money without working at jobs? But nobody would work?"
"Everyone does what they love. And they are producing so much just as gifts."
"Oh, so you mean people are producing so much for free that the economic system has failed?"
"Yes, the old pyramid scheme one, anyway. There is a new post-scarcity economy, where between automation and a a gift economy the income-through-jobs link is almost completely broken. Everyone also gets income as a right of citizenship as a share of all our resources for the few things that still need to be rationed. Even you."
"Really? How much is this basic income?"
"Two thousand a month."
"Two thousand a month? Just for bein
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
But your specific, original claim that taxes always deprive workers of wages is simply not true in many cases.
Taxes on business activity always, without exception, reduce ability to pay salaries and result in reduced workfoce.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
if you put a 10% tax on the sale of apples, apple vendors may lose that money from their profits, or they may pass the costs on to the people buy apples (losing nothing), or a mix of the two. The mix is determined by the elasticity of demand for apples -- if people can replace apples with a supplemental good, or elect to buy them less, then apple vendors can't pass on the tax.
It's an idiotic argument. You should know better. The sum total of the utility will be decreased by the amount uptaken in taxes. Those who would, otherwise, provide the now-destroyed utility would become unemployed.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
What do you mean "my country"? It's obvious that I live in the US. You got figures for all years? The fact that there was a deficit in 1 year (especially the year when deficit was the most critical) does not mean that these are not the taxes maintaining the roads. In order to claim that roads are maintained through other means, you'd have to show that the excise tax (plus tolls) wasn't sufficient to maintain the roads in a long term. 2010 was a perfect storm of reduced economic activity (due to recession) and reduced fuel consumption due to increased vehicle efficiency. Which makes using of that year's data particularly suspect.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
but...how do the bicycle parts get to SF, if not by car? Are there large bicycle trains running the roads bringing supplies?
I thought of another government-provided service which demonstrates this point. The Post Office. Try making the argument that the government needs to collect income taxes in order to operate the Post Office. People would treat you as insane. Because everyone knows that you already pay feeds for using postal service (stamps and other postal fees). But when the Postal Office comes up short, the US Treasury makes up the difference. So it is supported by the income tax (in times of deficit). The only reason people accept the income tax argument in case of the roads is that most people have no idea that excise tax exists. They simply don't know that, just like in the case of the Post Office, they already pay for use when they buy gas. Which brings up another question, where does the government gets its authority to impose an excise tax? It's indistinguishable from the sales tax, but hidden. Where does the Constitution give governments (Federal and local) the authority to impose hidden taxes? Not sure that the Supreme Court ever took up a case of excise taxes. But I haven't looked into it.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
You're wrong, excise taxes and tolls only cover about a third of road spending. General taxes pay for the other 2/3. It varies quite a bit by state, you can see the numbers here.
The big reason for this is the fact gas taxes haven't been raised in many years and are a flat rate, not a percentage of the cost. Every year the gas taxes aren't raised to keep up with rising prices roads fall further behind.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Given the general demographics of the SF Bay Area, I presume there are many Google employees who identify as "Liberal" or "Progressive".
I'm wondering how Googlers feel now that many of them are the targets of this sort of protest?
From a Googlers perspective, they're simply taking a bus ride to work. This allows them to relax, and be productive and get some work done instead of sitting in horrific Bay Area traffic for an hour or more. It's a win for both employee and employer. Is it not also the ultimate form of carpooling, an environmentalist win? Is not carpooling and HOV lanes something championed and endorsed and often claimed as an exclusive province of the left?
It's quite the tangle of conflicting leftist ideas, no?
BTW, I'm not a Googler. I have my own issues with Googler having to do with anti-2A policies, which pretty much prevents me from considering employment there, despite semi-frequent contact by their recruiters.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if these protests against the bus programs ultimately erupt into violence, damaging property, terrifying the passengers, and perhaps even resulting in injury or death.
To a Google or other bussed employee, broken glass of a bus window would probably invoke similar fears to those felt by the persecuted of Nazi Germany when their shop windows were broken. Would it not?
Violence is a very under-reported fact of the Occupy movement. There were more than a few injuries, fights, and lots of property damage, including, incidentally, broken shop windows.
These are likely the sorts of thoughts that provoked Perkin's Op-Ed.
Globalization, a changing economy, and class warfare promulgated by the politically "Progressive/Liberal" are what is spurring these sorts of protests and actions. Obstructing buses, picketing employees homes, etc.
And the folks doing the bus thing aren't by any means "1%ers". Which is probably why Perkins put that term in quotes. They are basically middle and upper middle class folks.
Regardless of the validity of the protestors' position and beliefs, the sorts of actions they've been taking are troubling.
Sure. Gentrification would suck if you are being forced out of your place of residence by rising rents. But is it really right to blame folks for the effects of supply and demand?
Anyway, I'm sure the primary goal for these protests is to try to cajole the government into some sort of action, such as rent control, or some other artificial means of keeping rents down. Whether that is fair or not is the subject of a separate debate. I just hope the so called "99%ers" don't take things any farther than they have already.