I have no idea why you think I'm in favor of our insane tax policy or military spending.
But those hurt government spending, they hurt safety nets once people don't have jobs....they don't really directly impact jobs themselves. (Well, at this point, they've started to, with government cutbacks, but aren't the reason for the last decade of increased unemployment.)
And over the last ten years, approximately 1 in fifteen Americans have fallen into poverty. It is not America's job to get the rest of the world out of poverty while putting itself into it.
I'd look to other things than globalization and outsourcing jobs as the cause of your economic worries.
Really? You'd look somewhere besides 'American corporation are hiring people in other countries instead of America' as the reason that unemployment in America has skyrocketed?
How exactly do you think this whole 'jobs' thing works? Corporations hire people to make things, which they then sell to people. Normally this is a loop, but over the last decade, the first 'people' were foreign, and the second 'people' were Americans, which resulted in Americans not actually making any money and living off credit, and foreigners getting paid microscopic amounts, and corporations keeping the rest of the cash.
I find it hilarious you don't realize that's a large part of the reason that corporations are able to tying up part of our cash. It's because they don't have to pay people in other countries anywhere near what they they can sell the stuff for, proportionally, so they keep the money.
Yes, it would be nice if they were taxed and that money recovered, but what would be more nice is for them to actually give the money to Americans, in the form of wages.
Except 'standard of living' is not something that just magically scales with money.
Americans do not have the option of raising their own food, they do not have enough space. They do not have the option of living off the land, there is not enough unowned open space.
They do not have a communal well to pump water out of when they can't pay their water bill.
They do not have the option to not have a car, because they cannot get to the grocery store to buy food. Nor can they just take food without paying
They have to pay rent or mortgage on their house, or they lose it.
They don't even have a damn free clinic paid for by Americans they can visit for their medical needs, which, incidentally, is really absurd.
Saying 'Americans don't know how good they have it' might be true, but that doesn't mean that Americans, if they magically cut back expenses, can live on a dollar a day at the same level as people living in some African village. It's not some linear scale, where the standard of living just gets shittier and shittier.
Frankly, I don't know what your point is at all. Most of the world would not care to live here without a job vs. living where they were without a job, if they actually knew the facts of the matter. (Many people, of course, are very mistaken about how things work in America.)
You say they are "not getting paid enough to own the shit they're making" as if that's surprising - how many of them, do you imagine, could afford to own that "shit" if they were working as subsistence farmers?
I didn't say they could.
But instead of being poor people working 14 hours in unsafe factories, they could be poor people working 6 hours a day on land they own growing food.
It's not up to me to demonstrate that farmers are better off. Working in a factory is inherently more work, so it's up to you to demonstrate factory workers are better off
Because otherwise they are just doing more work to live at exactly the same fucking standard of living, except, oh yeah, they can laid off at any time, or lose a hand in machinery, or die from toxic fumes, or whatever.
The idea that an equal standard of living to what they already had is acceptable is total nonsense. You have to prove it's a lot better to justify all that harm done to them. (And even then, you're justifying slavery, but apparently you cannot read the word 'slavery', and think I'm just making that up.)
You obviously don't have a very firm grasp of history.
Says the person who snipped every single historic reference I made. A goddamn industrial revolution is deadly to workers, as anyone with the slightest glance of history would know. The machinery is deadly, working people until they drop is deadly, locking people in buildings is deadly, working children is deadly, beating people when they don't work is deadly. WE HAD ALL THAT HAPPEN HERE, I'll come up with a cite for every single one of those happening if you want, so bullshit if you think it isn't happening elsewhere.
And unlike our industrial revolution, the people being harmed aren't even reaping the benefits, and have no possibility of changing the system to be less deadly.
Yes, it is practically slave labor. But they are getting paid. They are no longer subsistence farmers.
Yes, instead of working in a field they own and growing food to eat, they are working 14 hours a day in a factory and not getting paid enough to own the shit they're making. And getting killed by toxins for their trouble. If not beaten to death by the police if they attempt to strike.
That's much better than going out and growing some rice like they used to do.
How many people do you think should starve to death this year so you can maintain your standard of living?
How many slaves do you want to kill in factory fires so you can maintain your standard of living?
Don't you dare try to pull some fucking sanctimonious bullshit on me. You're the one starving people to death. In my universe they're farmers who are perfectly capable of feeding themselves, like, uh, you just said, and they have managed to do for thousands of years. In your universe they have to work in a factory for barely enough wages to feed themselves, until they get injured or old or tired, and get fired and someone else comes along.
Industrial revolutions kills people, until they can get some laws protecting workers, and considering how corrupt these governments are, and how little political power people have, they're never getting those laws. Look at the fucking history of the US if you don't believe me. We just had the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire.
And, on top of that, they aren't even seeing the fruits of it. At least, when it happened in the US, people got stuff out of it, because eventually the owner factories owners had to sell to someone. But now, they produce there, and sell here.
If you want to help the third world, build them infrastructure. Hell, give them TVs and computers. Don't pretend that them laboring in an unsafe factory for almost no wages 'helps' them. It helps them in the same way that lack of child labor laws would 'help' children.
Well, yes, I agree completely with you, about everything, especially how they stole the entire economy. If we hadn't had easy credit, people would have been out on the streets a decade age.
I was taking issues with you inventing this whole left-wing idea that really isn't. There are no 'one-world government' pushers on the left, and there have never been, barring some crazy hippies in the 1960s.
And because it doesn't exist, it doesn't have anything at all with Free Trade, which is an issue that was invented by the right, and pushed by the right, even though, at this point, the left politicians have so thoroughly accepted it there's no different at all. Protecting American jobs, like taxes, has slowly progressed from 'something we need to be careful with as doing certain things there can harm us' to 'a necessary evil' to 'an unnecessary evil' to 'government oppression!'. All in about three decades.
You've conflated actual policy that the right managed to move everyone to, with hypothetical imaginary one-world-government bullshit the right rants about the left wanting. Free trade is not vaguely related to some stoned Vietnam protester in 1969 who says 'We should just get rid of the different governments, man, and live in peace.'
And, yes, some idiots on the left have decided that's how you 'help' other countries...make them work in factories at slave wages and send all the profits to the superrich while American starve, but that's a post-ex-facto justification for Corporatism that some morons have bought, the left had nothing to do with the invention of the policy, and it's utterly unrelated to the thing doesn't even exist, 'one world government'.
Uh, I think we've pretty clearly demonstrated we can't afford to take the hit, as our economy is in shambles.
But perhaps more importantly, the workers in other countries, despite what they tell you, are not doing any better. They are working for microscopic wages, in unsafe conditions, without any medical care or benefits or anything. Often they are slave labor.
You want to help those people, get a job paying $30,000 a year and donate $5,000 to a fucking charity dedicated to helping there. Don't let their companies put you out of work, and hire them for $100 a year and keep $29,900. Neither of you is better off, the only people who came out better from that deal are the superrich.
Although perhaps someday the money will 'trickle down' when they hire you to give them a foot massage...or, wait, they'll just get an illegal immigrant to do it. They're cheaper and can't complain to the police about abusive conditions or violations of labor laws.
Oh, and you nice wonderful left-wing fucktards who love the "no borders, one world government" movement? Remember, those nice cheapy products come on the backs of slave labor, tiny wages, zero worker safety protection laws, and zero environmental protection laws.
I was about to make a post disagreeing with this nonsense, but, let's do this the other way.
The Left Wing in this country want evil Free Trade as part of their evil plan to reduce the US government to an arm of the UN. (Or whatever weird conspiracy. They'll all true!) Clinton supported it, after all! Take down NAFTA!
Head down to your local tea party today to protest this left wing idea. It's leading to a One World Government! It's anti-American! Demand we make laws requiring businesses to manufacture products in the US! Don't let the communists control America. Conservatives must stand up to Free Trade! American built this county!
(Hey, if the far-incoherent right can be taught that a health care mandate and cap and trade are 'evil left wing things', surely they can be taught that about 'free trade'.)
"Free trade" is a tool of the robber barons, nothing more.
(Look, we're not going to get anywhere if you talk about our noble business leaders like that, you'll screw up the plan.)
Free trade is the tool of communists who have an unworkable economic systems so have to latch themselves to ours like parasites, taking our money and selling us shitty goods in an attempt to undermined our economy and take over.
All they are doing is making a list of the NYT's twitter accounts. That's it. That's not 'retweeting', the article summary is very wrong. (What else is new?)
They are literally asking Twitter to stop someone from saying 'Here are the twitter feeds of the New York Times'.
No, cue their own twitter accounts that are publishing links to all their articles. And this guy's account that list all those accounts.
The NYT is even stupid than this article makes them sound. They're the ones tweeting the links, and no one is 'retweeting' them.
Twitter has a feature where an account can publish a group of other accounts, like 'famous TV stars' or whatever, which people can see all at once, or even follow or unfollow as a group. Some guy went and combed through the NYT's pages and collected all their feeds and put them in a group on that account, so you can follow them all at once, or pick whatever you want.
He's not even tweeting their stuff. They're the ones doing that! All he has is 'Here is a list of all the NYT feeds, which will let you read NYT articles for free if you follow a link.'
Hey, morons at the NYT: If you don't want people following your twitter feed and going to your web pages for free, either a) stop tweeting, or b) stop letting people who followed links in the tweets in free.
Except that, unlike a lot of bullshit the cops give tickets for, a) there is an actual safety risk driving with broken lights, and b) it is trivially easy to get such a ticket dismissed in court if you've actually fixed your vehicle by the date of court.
Katey Sagal jumped the gun, everyone was still in talks back then. Now the contracts have been actually signed.
And the episode airing on June 23 is the second half of the previous ordered episodes that have all already been made, not another season. Comedy Central just broke the last batch of episodes in half and aired them in two parts.
The season we're talking about here won't be ready until 2012.
Ah, yes, I forgot about 'getting people hooked' as a reason. Yeah, that makes sense for a distributor to do. Get it a space on the shelves, and then increase the price later.
Non functional lights are a non issue as people have incentive to fix them.
Most people don't even know when a light goes out. You did notice I was responding to post talking about taillights being out, right?
So I unplugged one headlight and sure enough the lights stayed on.
So, in other words, you were driving with one headlight. Knowingly, not unknowingly as most people who have a light go out are.
That sounds like a perfectly valid ticket to me.
Incidentally, if you want to argue the case, you have to argue you were justified in court. Like everyone who breaks the law for a 'good reason'. You don't argue your case to cops. The cops see you breaking the law, they give you a ticket for that.
But feel free to show up in court and 'don't recall' what was going on, and then pay your $130 ticket and probably an extra fine for wasting the court's time. Instead of just explaining the actual situation and probably getting no fine at all.
Every single person I've ever heard of who has gotten a ticket for a light being out (none of which who knew it) went to the auto parts store, bought a new light, kept the receipt, and showed it to the judge and said they'd fixed it, who then waived the fine. That's how you deal with a ticket for a deficiency in your vehicle...you fix it before the court date, and document you fixed it, and the judge say 'Well, that's okay then.' and lets you go.
Perhaps you should actually try interacting with the legal system, in the place where you're actually supposed to explain the reason you were in violation of the law, the courtroom, to the judge. Instead explaining it to a cop, who does not care. He cares if you're not in actual violation of the law, but not if you are but have a 'good reason'. Affirmative defenses, or even 'I fixed the problem' defenses, belong in the courtroom.
Yeah, it would be nice to read an examination of her methods and fanbase over the years. Wikipedia is not very helpful, although it appears she wrote 17 books before deciding to self-publish them. So basically, she just kept getting turned down, and finally said 'To hell with this, I'll sell the things myself'.
Also, ugh, supernatural romance. Well, I guess someone has to write them if people want to read them. Don't expect me to read them.:)
Yeah, flashing (or even just not dimming) your brights at oncoming traffic is illegal for any reason, which they can get away with because it's not an attempt to ban speech, it's an attempt to ban dangerous behavior.
In Georgia, interestingly enough, it's legal to flash them if, and only if, the other car is driving with their brights on, which I guess is a sorta 'self-defense' theory of driving safety. But other than that, we can't flash brights. In many states, you can't even do that. (Although, strictly speaking, even where illegal, if you do it for that reason, you can argue that you were preventing greater harm, and possibly get acquitted. It is legal to tackle someone to keep them from accidentally walking off a cliff, and it is legal to blind them to keep them from unknowingly blinding dozens of other cars, one of which may then crash into them.)
But during the day, you can do whatever you want with your headlights. (Well, in some states, you still can't use brights at oncoming traffic, which is more a legal oversight than any purposeful law, but you can use your dims.)
Texas may think it's illegal, but it's not. You are clearly attempting to say 'Police ahead', which is speech, and thus they cannot ban it.
They can ban you flashing your lights at night, because legally you have to have your lights on at all time at night, so you can't cut them off for a second, and it's illegal to shine brights at other people, so you have no actual legal method of communication.
But it is not illegal to have your lights on during the day, and it cannot be illegal to use those lights to communicate with other drivers, even if the message is 'police ahead'.
I suspect it's not actually illegally, and whoever told you that has fallen for a police lie or an exaggeration about the fact you can't flash lights at night.
So in your universe, the police should just ignore broken taillights? Or run around chasing down and pulling over people with broken taillights? Yeah, that seems like a good use of everyone's time.
Giving people tickets for minor deficiencies in their car at a police checkpoint seems like an actual good use of police resources. Unless your position is 'cars should not be required to have operational lights', giving people a ticket for that at a checkpoint seems like the least wasteful way to possible do that, both of police resources and driver's time.
Indeed, and I think the 'reaction time' claim is somewhat dangerous. Drunk drivers do not lose very much, and that is not the problem with their driving. People that drunk are 'falling down' drunk. Anyone who's that drunk is probably not driving.
The problem with their driving is that they are very bad drivers. They make very bad decisions. They are careless with their operation of a one ton machine. Often they are 'still at the party', with other people laughing and talking. Sometimes they are 'angry drunk', sometimes they are 'giddy drunk', but almost all sorts of drunk make bad drivers.
It's interesting that this is just a statistical lowering of decisions, and quite a lot of drunk drivers make better decisions that other sober ones. Of course, this doesn't argue that that we should let them be drunk, it argues we should, more importantly, get those shitty sober drivers off the road. (After all, they're bad drivers all the time.)
If reflexes were the problem, we could just require that all drunk drivers stay an extra car length back, although as you pointed out, anyone operating without that sort of safety margin probably shouldn't be operating a car anyway. Of course, one of the risks that drunk drivers take is to follow too closely, which looks, statistically, exactly like 'bad reflexes' when they rear-end people.
The real problem, what has always been the problem, is that it is literally impossible to operate without a car in 80% of America. Thus we can't do what would be the sane thing and remove bad drivers from the road. Include ones that become bad drivers when drinking, if they insist on drinking.
Of course, if we had a way for temporarily bad, aka, drunk, drivers, to get home without drinking, we'd probably have less of them to start with. I wonder how much less traffic fatalities we'd have if we took exactly one police car away from every police department and made it a full-time taxi in areas that don't have one.
The town I live in has exactly one part-time 'taxi', which bars can call on Fri and Sat nights, to take people home. Of course, now their car is stuck at a bar and they can't get it back, nor can they take the 'taxi' if the guy is not operating that night or it's during the day. All that money spent on 'stopping drunk driving', all the money thrown at enforcement and putting breathalyzers in each car and hiring more police and paying them to sit and Terry Stop people so they can find drunk ones, all the money spent having trials for caught drunk drivers, and holding them in jail until then...and we apparently can't partially subsidize a taxi service.
Some products everybody looses money on, from the producer through the retailer. Some products the retailer looses money on, and everybody else makes money off. Some products the distributor looses money on, and everybody else makes money on.
Heh. My company resells software. A one point, we were able to purchase a 3 user license of the software at wholesale for about $10, and a 1 user license for about $15. Very weird. Couldn't figure that one out. We, of course, just kept selling...but bought a lot in advance, because we correctly guessed the price would go back up.
I sorta doubt that distributors lose money on any products, though. Unlike manufacturers, who already have the production equipment, employees, and commitments, and resellers, who use loss leaders, distributors have no real reason to keep distributing something they lose money on. Maybe it happens once in a blue moon, but it's probably very uncommon.
Yes... Producer was definitely the wrong word. Perhaps "inventor" or "creator" would be more accurate?
I don't really know the right word, 'producer' just struck me as odd, because I deal with theatre a lot, and a 'producer' is someone who takes the output of a script writer, hires a director, hires actors, rents a space, does advertising, and bears the risk of failure, giving the writer a cut of success.
Which is pretty much directly analogous to what a publishing company does in writing. They take the output of a writer, hire an editor, do printing runs, get shelf space in stores, does advertising, and bears the risk of failure, giving the writer a cut of success.
Book:publisher::theatre:producer
The only difference is that that producers tend to be individuals who hire actors and directors as needed, whereas publishing companies tend to have permanent staff and handle a lot more projects at once. (And producers find investors in each show, whereas publishing companies don't let people invest in individual books, but that's nothing to do with the actual process. Actually, letting people invest in individual books would be pretty cool.)
'Inventor' is probably a more reasonable analogy. It's like they got a patent and licensed it to a company in exchange for a percentage of profits.
Yeah, the big name can always do what they want, and isn't really that impressive. The impressive stuff is people getting a fanbase before ever dealing with a publisher.
'Famous people who choose to stop dealing with publishers' is sorta an idiotic slashdot topic. Wake me up when it's 'people who became famous enough outside of traditional publishing that they were able to self-publish from the start'.
I think there are some fanfic writers who managed to do that, actually. But I can't think of them off the bat.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no idea why you think I'm in favor of our insane tax policy or military spending.
But those hurt government spending, they hurt safety nets once people don't have jobs....they don't really directly impact jobs themselves. (Well, at this point, they've started to, with government cutbacks, but aren't the reason for the last decade of increased unemployment.)
And over the last ten years, approximately 1 in fifteen Americans have fallen into poverty. It is not America's job to get the rest of the world out of poverty while putting itself into it.
I'd look to other things than globalization and outsourcing jobs as the cause of your economic worries.
Really? You'd look somewhere besides 'American corporation are hiring people in other countries instead of America' as the reason that unemployment in America has skyrocketed?
How exactly do you think this whole 'jobs' thing works? Corporations hire people to make things, which they then sell to people. Normally this is a loop, but over the last decade, the first 'people' were foreign, and the second 'people' were Americans, which resulted in Americans not actually making any money and living off credit, and foreigners getting paid microscopic amounts, and corporations keeping the rest of the cash.
I find it hilarious you don't realize that's a large part of the reason that corporations are able to tying up part of our cash. It's because they don't have to pay people in other countries anywhere near what they they can sell the stuff for, proportionally, so they keep the money.
Yes, it would be nice if they were taxed and that money recovered, but what would be more nice is for them to actually give the money to Americans, in the form of wages.
Except 'standard of living' is not something that just magically scales with money.
Americans do not have the option of raising their own food, they do not have enough space. They do not have the option of living off the land, there is not enough unowned open space.
They do not have a communal well to pump water out of when they can't pay their water bill.
They do not have the option to not have a car, because they cannot get to the grocery store to buy food. Nor can they just take food without paying
They have to pay rent or mortgage on their house, or they lose it.
They don't even have a damn free clinic paid for by Americans they can visit for their medical needs, which, incidentally, is really absurd.
Saying 'Americans don't know how good they have it' might be true, but that doesn't mean that Americans, if they magically cut back expenses, can live on a dollar a day at the same level as people living in some African village. It's not some linear scale, where the standard of living just gets shittier and shittier.
Frankly, I don't know what your point is at all. Most of the world would not care to live here without a job vs. living where they were without a job, if they actually knew the facts of the matter. (Many people, of course, are very mistaken about how things work in America.)
You say they are "not getting paid enough to own the shit they're making" as if that's surprising - how many of them, do you imagine, could afford to own that "shit" if they were working as subsistence farmers?
I didn't say they could.
But instead of being poor people working 14 hours in unsafe factories, they could be poor people working 6 hours a day on land they own growing food.
It's not up to me to demonstrate that farmers are better off. Working in a factory is inherently more work, so it's up to you to demonstrate factory workers are better off
Because otherwise they are just doing more work to live at exactly the same fucking standard of living, except, oh yeah, they can laid off at any time, or lose a hand in machinery, or die from toxic fumes, or whatever.
The idea that an equal standard of living to what they already had is acceptable is total nonsense. You have to prove it's a lot better to justify all that harm done to them. (And even then, you're justifying slavery, but apparently you cannot read the word 'slavery', and think I'm just making that up.)
You obviously don't have a very firm grasp of history.
Says the person who snipped every single historic reference I made. A goddamn industrial revolution is deadly to workers, as anyone with the slightest glance of history would know. The machinery is deadly, working people until they drop is deadly, locking people in buildings is deadly, working children is deadly, beating people when they don't work is deadly. WE HAD ALL THAT HAPPEN HERE, I'll come up with a cite for every single one of those happening if you want, so bullshit if you think it isn't happening elsewhere.
And unlike our industrial revolution, the people being harmed aren't even reaping the benefits, and have no possibility of changing the system to be less deadly.
Mod Parent -1: Idiot
I'm sure glad that 'some of you' are 'actually trying something' and not 'talking uselessly'.
Why don't you practice 'not talking uselessly' somewhat that isn't a fucking discussion forum?
Yes, it is practically slave labor. But they are getting paid. They are no longer subsistence farmers.
Yes, instead of working in a field they own and growing food to eat, they are working 14 hours a day in a factory and not getting paid enough to own the shit they're making. And getting killed by toxins for their trouble. If not beaten to death by the police if they attempt to strike.
That's much better than going out and growing some rice like they used to do.
How many people do you think should starve to death this year so you can maintain your standard of living?
How many slaves do you want to kill in factory fires so you can maintain your standard of living?
Don't you dare try to pull some fucking sanctimonious bullshit on me. You're the one starving people to death. In my universe they're farmers who are perfectly capable of feeding themselves, like, uh, you just said, and they have managed to do for thousands of years. In your universe they have to work in a factory for barely enough wages to feed themselves, until they get injured or old or tired, and get fired and someone else comes along.
Industrial revolutions kills people, until they can get some laws protecting workers, and considering how corrupt these governments are, and how little political power people have, they're never getting those laws. Look at the fucking history of the US if you don't believe me. We just had the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire.
And, on top of that, they aren't even seeing the fruits of it. At least, when it happened in the US, people got stuff out of it, because eventually the owner factories owners had to sell to someone. But now, they produce there, and sell here.
If you want to help the third world, build them infrastructure. Hell, give them TVs and computers. Don't pretend that them laboring in an unsafe factory for almost no wages 'helps' them. It helps them in the same way that lack of child labor laws would 'help' children.
Well, yes, I agree completely with you, about everything, especially how they stole the entire economy. If we hadn't had easy credit, people would have been out on the streets a decade age.
I was taking issues with you inventing this whole left-wing idea that really isn't. There are no 'one-world government' pushers on the left, and there have never been, barring some crazy hippies in the 1960s.
And because it doesn't exist, it doesn't have anything at all with Free Trade, which is an issue that was invented by the right, and pushed by the right, even though, at this point, the left politicians have so thoroughly accepted it there's no different at all. Protecting American jobs, like taxes, has slowly progressed from 'something we need to be careful with as doing certain things there can harm us' to 'a necessary evil' to 'an unnecessary evil' to 'government oppression!'. All in about three decades.
You've conflated actual policy that the right managed to move everyone to, with hypothetical imaginary one-world-government bullshit the right rants about the left wanting. Free trade is not vaguely related to some stoned Vietnam protester in 1969 who says 'We should just get rid of the different governments, man, and live in peace.'
And, yes, some idiots on the left have decided that's how you 'help' other countries...make them work in factories at slave wages and send all the profits to the superrich while American starve, but that's a post-ex-facto justification for Corporatism that some morons have bought, the left had nothing to do with the invention of the policy, and it's utterly unrelated to the thing doesn't even exist, 'one world government'.
Uh, I think we've pretty clearly demonstrated we can't afford to take the hit, as our economy is in shambles.
But perhaps more importantly, the workers in other countries, despite what they tell you, are not doing any better. They are working for microscopic wages, in unsafe conditions, without any medical care or benefits or anything. Often they are slave labor.
You want to help those people, get a job paying $30,000 a year and donate $5,000 to a fucking charity dedicated to helping there. Don't let their companies put you out of work, and hire them for $100 a year and keep $29,900. Neither of you is better off, the only people who came out better from that deal are the superrich.
Although perhaps someday the money will 'trickle down' when they hire you to give them a foot massage...or, wait, they'll just get an illegal immigrant to do it. They're cheaper and can't complain to the police about abusive conditions or violations of labor laws.
Oh, and you nice wonderful left-wing fucktards who love the "no borders, one world government" movement? Remember, those nice cheapy products come on the backs of slave labor, tiny wages, zero worker safety protection laws, and zero environmental protection laws.
I was about to make a post disagreeing with this nonsense, but, let's do this the other way.
The Left Wing in this country want evil Free Trade as part of their evil plan to reduce the US government to an arm of the UN. (Or whatever weird conspiracy. They'll all true!) Clinton supported it, after all! Take down NAFTA!
Head down to your local tea party today to protest this left wing idea. It's leading to a One World Government! It's anti-American! Demand we make laws requiring businesses to manufacture products in the US! Don't let the communists control America. Conservatives must stand up to Free Trade! American built this county!
(Hey, if the far-incoherent right can be taught that a health care mandate and cap and trade are 'evil left wing things', surely they can be taught that about 'free trade'.)
"Free trade" is a tool of the robber barons, nothing more.
(Look, we're not going to get anywhere if you talk about our noble business leaders like that, you'll screw up the plan.)
Free trade is the tool of communists who have an unworkable economic systems so have to latch themselves to ours like parasites, taking our money and selling us shitty goods in an attempt to undermined our economy and take over.
Conservatives, tell your friends!
They aren't even doing that.
All they are doing is making a list of the NYT's twitter accounts. That's it. That's not 'retweeting', the article summary is very wrong. (What else is new?)
They are literally asking Twitter to stop someone from saying 'Here are the twitter feeds of the New York Times'.
Um, no, that's not the right analogy. It's more like:
Read slashdot without ads:
http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotYourRightsOnline
No, cue their own twitter accounts that are publishing links to all their articles. And this guy's account that list all those accounts.
The NYT is even stupid than this article makes them sound. They're the ones tweeting the links, and no one is 'retweeting' them.
Twitter has a feature where an account can publish a group of other accounts, like 'famous TV stars' or whatever, which people can see all at once, or even follow or unfollow as a group. Some guy went and combed through the NYT's pages and collected all their feeds and put them in a group on that account, so you can follow them all at once, or pick whatever you want.
He's not even tweeting their stuff. They're the ones doing that! All he has is 'Here is a list of all the NYT feeds, which will let you read NYT articles for free if you follow a link.'
Hey, morons at the NYT: If you don't want people following your twitter feed and going to your web pages for free, either a) stop tweeting, or b) stop letting people who followed links in the tweets in free.
Buffy was not a supernatural romance. Buffy was a horror comedy action show, with actually dangerous supernatural creatures.
Except that, unlike a lot of bullshit the cops give tickets for, a) there is an actual safety risk driving with broken lights, and b) it is trivially easy to get such a ticket dismissed in court if you've actually fixed your vehicle by the date of court.
Look, sarcasm detectors fuses are expensive, and I can't keep replacing them, so stop it.
Katey Sagal jumped the gun, everyone was still in talks back then. Now the contracts have been actually signed.
And the episode airing on June 23 is the second half of the previous ordered episodes that have all already been made, not another season. Comedy Central just broke the last batch of episodes in half and aired them in two parts.
The season we're talking about here won't be ready until 2012.
No. There is No. International. Talk Like William Shatner Day. Do not be limited. By the rules.
Every day. Is. International Talk Like William Shatner Day.
Ah, yes, I forgot about 'getting people hooked' as a reason. Yeah, that makes sense for a distributor to do. Get it a space on the shelves, and then increase the price later.
Non functional lights are a non issue as people have incentive to fix them.
Most people don't even know when a light goes out. You did notice I was responding to post talking about taillights being out, right?
So I unplugged one headlight and sure enough the lights stayed on.
So, in other words, you were driving with one headlight. Knowingly, not unknowingly as most people who have a light go out are.
That sounds like a perfectly valid ticket to me.
Incidentally, if you want to argue the case, you have to argue you were justified in court. Like everyone who breaks the law for a 'good reason'. You don't argue your case to cops. The cops see you breaking the law, they give you a ticket for that.
But feel free to show up in court and 'don't recall' what was going on, and then pay your $130 ticket and probably an extra fine for wasting the court's time. Instead of just explaining the actual situation and probably getting no fine at all.
Every single person I've ever heard of who has gotten a ticket for a light being out (none of which who knew it) went to the auto parts store, bought a new light, kept the receipt, and showed it to the judge and said they'd fixed it, who then waived the fine. That's how you deal with a ticket for a deficiency in your vehicle...you fix it before the court date, and document you fixed it, and the judge say 'Well, that's okay then.' and lets you go.
Perhaps you should actually try interacting with the legal system, in the place where you're actually supposed to explain the reason you were in violation of the law, the courtroom, to the judge. Instead explaining it to a cop, who does not care. He cares if you're not in actual violation of the law, but not if you are but have a 'good reason'. Affirmative defenses, or even 'I fixed the problem' defenses, belong in the courtroom.
Yeah, it would be nice to read an examination of her methods and fanbase over the years. Wikipedia is not very helpful, although it appears she wrote 17 books before deciding to self-publish them. So basically, she just kept getting turned down, and finally said 'To hell with this, I'll sell the things myself'.
Also, ugh, supernatural romance. Well, I guess someone has to write them if people want to read them. Don't expect me to read them. :)
Yeah, flashing (or even just not dimming) your brights at oncoming traffic is illegal for any reason, which they can get away with because it's not an attempt to ban speech, it's an attempt to ban dangerous behavior.
In Georgia, interestingly enough, it's legal to flash them if, and only if, the other car is driving with their brights on, which I guess is a sorta 'self-defense' theory of driving safety. But other than that, we can't flash brights. In many states, you can't even do that. (Although, strictly speaking, even where illegal, if you do it for that reason, you can argue that you were preventing greater harm, and possibly get acquitted. It is legal to tackle someone to keep them from accidentally walking off a cliff, and it is legal to blind them to keep them from unknowingly blinding dozens of other cars, one of which may then crash into them.)
But during the day, you can do whatever you want with your headlights. (Well, in some states, you still can't use brights at oncoming traffic, which is more a legal oversight than any purposeful law, but you can use your dims.)
Texas may think it's illegal, but it's not. You are clearly attempting to say 'Police ahead', which is speech, and thus they cannot ban it.
They can ban you flashing your lights at night, because legally you have to have your lights on at all time at night, so you can't cut them off for a second, and it's illegal to shine brights at other people, so you have no actual legal method of communication.
But it is not illegal to have your lights on during the day, and it cannot be illegal to use those lights to communicate with other drivers, even if the message is 'police ahead'.
I suspect it's not actually illegally, and whoever told you that has fallen for a police lie or an exaggeration about the fact you can't flash lights at night.
So in your universe, the police should just ignore broken taillights? Or run around chasing down and pulling over people with broken taillights? Yeah, that seems like a good use of everyone's time.
Giving people tickets for minor deficiencies in their car at a police checkpoint seems like an actual good use of police resources. Unless your position is 'cars should not be required to have operational lights', giving people a ticket for that at a checkpoint seems like the least wasteful way to possible do that, both of police resources and driver's time.
Indeed, and I think the 'reaction time' claim is somewhat dangerous. Drunk drivers do not lose very much, and that is not the problem with their driving. People that drunk are 'falling down' drunk. Anyone who's that drunk is probably not driving.
The problem with their driving is that they are very bad drivers. They make very bad decisions. They are careless with their operation of a one ton machine. Often they are 'still at the party', with other people laughing and talking. Sometimes they are 'angry drunk', sometimes they are 'giddy drunk', but almost all sorts of drunk make bad drivers.
It's interesting that this is just a statistical lowering of decisions, and quite a lot of drunk drivers make better decisions that other sober ones. Of course, this doesn't argue that that we should let them be drunk, it argues we should, more importantly, get those shitty sober drivers off the road. (After all, they're bad drivers all the time.)
If reflexes were the problem, we could just require that all drunk drivers stay an extra car length back, although as you pointed out, anyone operating without that sort of safety margin probably shouldn't be operating a car anyway. Of course, one of the risks that drunk drivers take is to follow too closely, which looks, statistically, exactly like 'bad reflexes' when they rear-end people.
The real problem, what has always been the problem, is that it is literally impossible to operate without a car in 80% of America. Thus we can't do what would be the sane thing and remove bad drivers from the road. Include ones that become bad drivers when drinking, if they insist on drinking.
Of course, if we had a way for temporarily bad, aka, drunk, drivers, to get home without drinking, we'd probably have less of them to start with. I wonder how much less traffic fatalities we'd have if we took exactly one police car away from every police department and made it a full-time taxi in areas that don't have one.
The town I live in has exactly one part-time 'taxi', which bars can call on Fri and Sat nights, to take people home. Of course, now their car is stuck at a bar and they can't get it back, nor can they take the 'taxi' if the guy is not operating that night or it's during the day. All that money spent on 'stopping drunk driving', all the money thrown at enforcement and putting breathalyzers in each car and hiring more police and paying them to sit and Terry Stop people so they can find drunk ones, all the money spent having trials for caught drunk drivers, and holding them in jail until then...and we apparently can't partially subsidize a taxi service.
Some products everybody looses money on, from the producer through the retailer. Some products the retailer looses money on, and everybody else makes money off. Some products the distributor looses money on, and everybody else makes money on.
Heh. My company resells software. A one point, we were able to purchase a 3 user license of the software at wholesale for about $10, and a 1 user license for about $15. Very weird. Couldn't figure that one out. We, of course, just kept selling...but bought a lot in advance, because we correctly guessed the price would go back up.
I sorta doubt that distributors lose money on any products, though. Unlike manufacturers, who already have the production equipment, employees, and commitments, and resellers, who use loss leaders, distributors have no real reason to keep distributing something they lose money on. Maybe it happens once in a blue moon, but it's probably very uncommon.
Yes... Producer was definitely the wrong word. Perhaps "inventor" or "creator" would be more accurate?
I don't really know the right word, 'producer' just struck me as odd, because I deal with theatre a lot, and a 'producer' is someone who takes the output of a script writer, hires a director, hires actors, rents a space, does advertising, and bears the risk of failure, giving the writer a cut of success.
Which is pretty much directly analogous to what a publishing company does in writing. They take the output of a writer, hire an editor, do printing runs, get shelf space in stores, does advertising, and bears the risk of failure, giving the writer a cut of success.
Book:publisher::theatre:producer
The only difference is that that producers tend to be individuals who hire actors and directors as needed, whereas publishing companies tend to have permanent staff and handle a lot more projects at once. (And producers find investors in each show, whereas publishing companies don't let people invest in individual books, but that's nothing to do with the actual process. Actually, letting people invest in individual books would be pretty cool.)
'Inventor' is probably a more reasonable analogy. It's like they got a patent and licensed it to a company in exchange for a percentage of profits.
Yeah, the big name can always do what they want, and isn't really that impressive. The impressive stuff is people getting a fanbase before ever dealing with a publisher.
'Famous people who choose to stop dealing with publishers' is sorta an idiotic slashdot topic. Wake me up when it's 'people who became famous enough outside of traditional publishing that they were able to self-publish from the start'.
I think there are some fanfic writers who managed to do that, actually. But I can't think of them off the bat.