Not mostly everyone who wants to be employed. We have a high unemployment rate in the US but the official numbers say otherwise because the government artificially ignores certain classes of people and implicitly implies that they aren't looking for jobs. We also have a huge rate of underemployment. We have too many homeless people living on the streets or in their cars who have no regular or reliable source of income and who are not counted as "looking for work". These are people who used to have jobs, but whose bills have overwhelmed them after they were fired.
This country does have a fraction of people for whom the economy is booming. But it also has quite a lot of people where the economy is failing them. For most people, it's staying about the same, as wages haven't risen much relative to inflation.
And there are so few protesters demanding the destruction of the US. There may be some nutjobs who engage in violence in an attempt to shake up the system.
You can have "social ownership" without appropriation of private property. You can have socialized medicine; sure, it's paid for by taxes but only a moron would call all taxes a form of socialism.
Private property, by the way, being a relatively new concept for those who aren't monarchs. If private property were sacred, we'd have given it all back to the native Americans we stole it from originally. So taking of private property by conquest is ok? Private property only exists in the US because it was granted by the government to someone in the past.
I feel there's been a huge push in recent years to redefine a lot of political terms. Socialism isn't just a system anymore it's become something evil, and furthermore anything evil is rebranded as socialism. Similarly Fascist governments in the past are now being redefined to being left wing because of some innate assumption that the right wing has never done anything evil in the entirety of history. These new definitions are just used to prop up political views and would not hold water in any political science discussion.
Why is this necessarily bad? Changing an email address is a big deal, unless you're maintaining multiple addresses. If some recruiters think that gmail is better than aol or yahoo, then they're basing this on fashion and not logic. If one free email service sounds iffy, then all of them should be considered iffy.
I have one address that I have paid for, not too much a year, which forwards all the email to my ISP account. I can't change it easilly because it's been my address for 25 years. At one point, it got a reputation for spamming and I was blocked from some sites but that got resolved. Too bad it's difficult to just keep the same one forever easily without paying for it and that other email readers would respect Reply-to: instead of using the ISP's address.
(I wanted to get a domain name but it was a bit expensive at the time and was not clear how to attach that to an email provider in the mid 90s when I didn't even have internet at home, whereas my email was "free for life" until they decided it made more business sense to charge for it)
The "masters" here seem to be whoever last whispered in his ear, or whoever last praised him. Which I think he appears so unpredictable because it's always someone else whispering in his ear. Early on, the appointments for cabinet and agency positions definitely appeared to be driven by Steve Bannon and the like to drive their anti-government plan, and it certainly didn't hurt that most of them were billionaires as well. After that, I think some political leaders have learned the trick of how to talk to Trump so that they get him to take action, while others keep making the mistake of assuming there's a two way negotation that should happen.
Then the other unpredictability comes from whatever late night conspiracy program he watched before the morning tweet storm.
But mostly, he was simply a narcissistic blowhard who said whatever it took to get elected and then did whatever his corporate and political masters told him to do.
Sounds like most presidents, including the present one.
Well I think a lot of conspiracy theories begin when you start with a bad set of assumptions (lemmas). Ie, if you assume that Donald Trump is the greatest president to ever exist and is full of infinite wisdom and extremely popular, then you could probably conclude that Google is altering the search results in order to dump on the Trump (sad). The more likely explanation that the negative stories are more comon and more popular conflicts with the original assumptions. Of course, if you've got an ego the size of a galaxy you'd be pretty upset if your name wasn't always used in glowing terms.
This isn't about Trump. Go back to previous presidents and search results alway tended to be more negative than positive. Prior to search engines, headlines in newspapers were generally more negative about presidents than positive; at least in those papers that weren't party mouthpieces. Negative stories sell more copy.
The original Zork was written in an object oriented style, in a Lsip like language. It was ported to Fortran where it became popular because it was available on many more systems. However, that object oriented stuff in Fortran was a particular challenge to figure out...
People are seriously over hydrated. Some myth comes out about 8 glasses of water a day and suddenly people go nuts. To waste technological resources on such fluff is bizarre. Drink when you're thirsty, don't drink when you're not thirsty, we don't need some fad to tell us that.
Because people have been brainwashed for so long that there are only two choices. Even though right now we're somewhat similar to a feudal system, and it is certainly high on the possibilities of what we end up with if capitalism collapses.
Agreed. Too-big-to-fail has no place in a capitalist system. Having the government bail them out essentially made the tax payers the big losers. It upsets the whole system of natural selection in the market when the worst performers are rewarded and new regulation only applies to the little guys. How is a free market supposed to work when we tell the biggest players that risk taking results in big wins or else they get their money back? The fact that no one went to jail over any of this is a disgrace.
In some ways, that was Venezuela's downfall too. Smaller population, lots of natural resources, but with a significant fraction of poor people who will sway elections if those resources get spread around more. It should be a warning to countries that ignore their poor.
And that sounds like the failure coming in the US social security, a system that depends upon newer generations coming along and being prosperous. The problem comes with a baby boom when there are more retirees than workers. The historical demographics of the time would have predicted that it would be a successful system over time, except that demographics changed.
Both the social support school and the free market school both seem to discourage the idea of saving now for when times are hard later. Economists really start to act worried when they see a trend towards spending less. But the future is unpredictable, so saving more and spending less makes sense for individuals.
And the highest standards of living in the capitalist west is not in the USA either. The highest standards of living in the west tend to be those countries that mix in more social aspects to the government. So maybe the answer isn't either pure capitalism or pure socialism (or other isms).
Standard of living seems an odd measurement though. Just before the USSR fell, it had a higher standard of living in most places than existed one hundred years previously. Remember that the Russian revolution occured because of the excess of poverty, even by 1917 standards it was very bad off.
The standards of living have gone up because of other reasons than political ideologies: advances in medicine, science, engineering, technology. Especially in Europe you can see the shift away from a period of regular and ongoing warfare towards relative stability, less rivalry, and more cooperation.
Were those really socialist countries? You describe 4 different sets of political and economics schools of thought there in the second paragraph while implying that they are all the same. Maybe you should describe exactly what you mean by "socialism", and where that "100 million dead" number comes from.
Too bad every place that capitalism has been tried has ended up badly as well and has needed tight government control to keep it from falling apart.
People aren't leaving California and New York over socialist policies but because costs of living are going up and there's a much larger divide between the wealthy and the poor in those places, all driven by excesses of corporatism.
You're trying to turn this all into a binary option, anything that's not a pure free market must be socialism is what you seem to imply. Never mind that Maoism is not the same as Communism, which is not the same as Socialism, and none of these have much resemblance to what's in Venezuela. Economics and politics are much more complicated than this comic book version.
With natural selection you never really get to settle down and have equilibrium. It only looks that way when you look at relatively short periods of time.
You can't even point to periods of time of more than a century where the free market was relatively stable. We are most definitely still in the early experimentation phase of capitalism.
You're talking about free trade, which is not the same as capitalism.
From Wikipedia, take it for what you will, "Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system, and competitive markets."
There may have been very small scale capitalist like economies in the distant past, but nothing like what we have today which emerged maybe 500 years ago.
Too many people are ignoring history and definitions in order to promote their own definitions of capitalism and socialism in order to label one of them as evil. If it's one thing you'd expect from engineers and which is always lacking on slashdot is precision.
People have used entire houses to grow pot. I've gotten some lovely pictures from PG&E from when they went out to investigate unusual power consumption at a house, and every room was filled with plants, lamps, and fans in a fire marshal's worst nightmare. They wired past the meter. Oh, a nice suburban house too (it's possible it was a forcelosed house still owned by the bank).
If they signed up for a year, for $89, and they saw 8 movies or more then they got their money's worth. I don't think they're getting screwed. These customers presumably imagined originally that they were screwing MoviePass.
Slashdot Mirror
Not mostly everyone who wants to be employed. We have a high unemployment rate in the US but the official numbers say otherwise because the government artificially ignores certain classes of people and implicitly implies that they aren't looking for jobs. We also have a huge rate of underemployment. We have too many homeless people living on the streets or in their cars who have no regular or reliable source of income and who are not counted as "looking for work". These are people who used to have jobs, but whose bills have overwhelmed them after they were fired.
This country does have a fraction of people for whom the economy is booming. But it also has quite a lot of people where the economy is failing them. For most people, it's staying about the same, as wages haven't risen much relative to inflation.
And there are so few protesters demanding the destruction of the US. There may be some nutjobs who engage in violence in an attempt to shake up the system.
But communism as defined by Marx has never occured in any country. You can't just change the definitions of words to make your point.
You can have "social ownership" without appropriation of private property. You can have socialized medicine; sure, it's paid for by taxes but only a moron would call all taxes a form of socialism.
Private property, by the way, being a relatively new concept for those who aren't monarchs. If private property were sacred, we'd have given it all back to the native Americans we stole it from originally. So taking of private property by conquest is ok? Private property only exists in the US because it was granted by the government to someone in the past.
I feel there's been a huge push in recent years to redefine a lot of political terms. Socialism isn't just a system anymore it's become something evil, and furthermore anything evil is rebranded as socialism. Similarly Fascist governments in the past are now being redefined to being left wing because of some innate assumption that the right wing has never done anything evil in the entirety of history. These new definitions are just used to prop up political views and would not hold water in any political science discussion.
Why is this necessarily bad? Changing an email address is a big deal, unless you're maintaining multiple addresses. If some recruiters think that gmail is better than aol or yahoo, then they're basing this on fashion and not logic. If one free email service sounds iffy, then all of them should be considered iffy.
I have one address that I have paid for, not too much a year, which forwards all the email to my ISP account. I can't change it easilly because it's been my address for 25 years. At one point, it got a reputation for spamming and I was blocked from some sites but that got resolved. Too bad it's difficult to just keep the same one forever easily without paying for it and that other email readers would respect Reply-to: instead of using the ISP's address.
(I wanted to get a domain name but it was a bit expensive at the time and was not clear how to attach that to an email provider in the mid 90s when I didn't even have internet at home, whereas my email was "free for life" until they decided it made more business sense to charge for it)
The "masters" here seem to be whoever last whispered in his ear, or whoever last praised him. Which I think he appears so unpredictable because it's always someone else whispering in his ear. Early on, the appointments for cabinet and agency positions definitely appeared to be driven by Steve Bannon and the like to drive their anti-government plan, and it certainly didn't hurt that most of them were billionaires as well. After that, I think some political leaders have learned the trick of how to talk to Trump so that they get him to take action, while others keep making the mistake of assuming there's a two way negotation that should happen.
Then the other unpredictability comes from whatever late night conspiracy program he watched before the morning tweet storm.
"I want the people to know that they still have 2 out of 3 branches of the government working for them, and that ain't bad. " -- Mars Attacks
But mostly, he was simply a narcissistic blowhard who said whatever it took to get elected and then did whatever his corporate and political masters told him to do.
Sounds like most presidents, including the present one.
Remember, this was back before the political party quantum wave function collapsed into the binary eigenstates of liberal versus conservative.
Well I think a lot of conspiracy theories begin when you start with a bad set of assumptions (lemmas). Ie, if you assume that Donald Trump is the greatest president to ever exist and is full of infinite wisdom and extremely popular, then you could probably conclude that Google is altering the search results in order to dump on the Trump (sad). The more likely explanation that the negative stories are more comon and more popular conflicts with the original assumptions. Of course, if you've got an ego the size of a galaxy you'd be pretty upset if your name wasn't always used in glowing terms.
This isn't about Trump. Go back to previous presidents and search results alway tended to be more negative than positive. Prior to search engines, headlines in newspapers were generally more negative about presidents than positive; at least in those papers that weren't party mouthpieces. Negative stories sell more copy.
The original Zork was written in an object oriented style, in a Lsip like language. It was ported to Fortran where it became popular because it was available on many more systems. However, that object oriented stuff in Fortran was a particular challenge to figure out...
That better be some damn good code.
People are seriously over hydrated. Some myth comes out about 8 glasses of water a day and suddenly people go nuts. To waste technological resources on such fluff is bizarre. Drink when you're thirsty, don't drink when you're not thirsty, we don't need some fad to tell us that.
Because people have been brainwashed for so long that there are only two choices. Even though right now we're somewhat similar to a feudal system, and it is certainly high on the possibilities of what we end up with if capitalism collapses.
Agreed. Too-big-to-fail has no place in a capitalist system. Having the government bail them out essentially made the tax payers the big losers. It upsets the whole system of natural selection in the market when the worst performers are rewarded and new regulation only applies to the little guys. How is a free market supposed to work when we tell the biggest players that risk taking results in big wins or else they get their money back? The fact that no one went to jail over any of this is a disgrace.
In some ways, that was Venezuela's downfall too. Smaller population, lots of natural resources, but with a significant fraction of poor people who will sway elections if those resources get spread around more. It should be a warning to countries that ignore their poor.
And that sounds like the failure coming in the US social security, a system that depends upon newer generations coming along and being prosperous. The problem comes with a baby boom when there are more retirees than workers. The historical demographics of the time would have predicted that it would be a successful system over time, except that demographics changed.
Both the social support school and the free market school both seem to discourage the idea of saving now for when times are hard later. Economists really start to act worried when they see a trend towards spending less. But the future is unpredictable, so saving more and spending less makes sense for individuals.
And the highest standards of living in the capitalist west is not in the USA either. The highest standards of living in the west tend to be those countries that mix in more social aspects to the government. So maybe the answer isn't either pure capitalism or pure socialism (or other isms).
Standard of living seems an odd measurement though. Just before the USSR fell, it had a higher standard of living in most places than existed one hundred years previously. Remember that the Russian revolution occured because of the excess of poverty, even by 1917 standards it was very bad off.
The standards of living have gone up because of other reasons than political ideologies: advances in medicine, science, engineering, technology. Especially in Europe you can see the shift away from a period of regular and ongoing warfare towards relative stability, less rivalry, and more cooperation.
Were those really socialist countries? You describe 4 different sets of political and economics schools of thought there in the second paragraph while implying that they are all the same. Maybe you should describe exactly what you mean by "socialism", and where that "100 million dead" number comes from.
Too bad every place that capitalism has been tried has ended up badly as well and has needed tight government control to keep it from falling apart.
People aren't leaving California and New York over socialist policies but because costs of living are going up and there's a much larger divide between the wealthy and the poor in those places, all driven by excesses of corporatism.
You're trying to turn this all into a binary option, anything that's not a pure free market must be socialism is what you seem to imply. Never mind that Maoism is not the same as Communism, which is not the same as Socialism, and none of these have much resemblance to what's in Venezuela. Economics and politics are much more complicated than this comic book version.
With natural selection you never really get to settle down and have equilibrium. It only looks that way when you look at relatively short periods of time.
You can't even point to periods of time of more than a century where the free market was relatively stable. We are most definitely still in the early experimentation phase of capitalism.
You're talking about free trade, which is not the same as capitalism.
From Wikipedia, take it for what you will, "Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system, and competitive markets."
There may have been very small scale capitalist like economies in the distant past, but nothing like what we have today which emerged maybe 500 years ago.
Too many people are ignoring history and definitions in order to promote their own definitions of capitalism and socialism in order to label one of them as evil. If it's one thing you'd expect from engineers and which is always lacking on slashdot is precision.
People have used entire houses to grow pot. I've gotten some lovely pictures from PG&E from when they went out to investigate unusual power consumption at a house, and every room was filled with plants, lamps, and fans in a fire marshal's worst nightmare. They wired past the meter. Oh, a nice suburban house too (it's possible it was a forcelosed house still owned by the bank).
The answer may surprise you!
Yes, mistress.
If they signed up for a year, for $89, and they saw 8 movies or more then they got their money's worth. I don't think they're getting screwed. These customers presumably imagined originally that they were screwing MoviePass.