It's a bit much to conclude that way. The disparate income points to a broken morality system perhaps; people who work hard get paid less, people who just tell people what to do get paid more, people who just meet with the board now and then get paid immense sums of money. It points to companies that devalue their workers, treating them as "resources". Distasteful jobs that few people want to do should theoretically pay a lot more money, and yet those are the lowest paying jobs usually. We also have a society that actively discourages collective bargaining, ensuring that workers have less clout. We also have a society that naively believes in the adage that a rising tide raises all boats or that trickle down economics really works.
Overall, America has a ethic that comes from Calvinism, Puritanism, or others. And this is that wealth is not an obstacle to salvation, but a result of salvation. That is, wealth is a natural result of being righteous. This comes from different schools of thought but leads to a similar conclusion that those who are wealthy deserve to be wealthy, which also leads one to conclude that those who are poor must not have deserved to be wealthy.those who are wealthy deserve to be wealthy, those who are poor deserve to be poor. Despite Jesus saying that one cannot serve both God and Mammon, American churches certainly have a trend towards prosperity theology.
In other words, there's this undercurrent of thinking that poor people are not as good as wealthy people. We call poor people who are out of work "bums". We believe that hard work will pay off and therefore someone who's poor must not be a hard worker.
So SteamBox would do well here because it can be optimized for a particular setting. Sort of the CrossOver games for the Mac, which was just Wine with a lot of pre-configured settings of Windows games for the Mac.
You can run Skyrim without Steam running at the same time. Not conveniently, but by killing Steam after the game has started. Steam does not add actual value to most games beyond being DRM and a store. Steam is not an underlying OS for a game, so there's usually little dependency on Steam itself. Some games that require Steam to install actually have very little protection under the hood and you can run straight from the executable after installation. I think it was Fallout New Vegas(?) that needed Steam to run the launcher but you could start the game executable without Steam.
Wine isn't much of a layer to slow things down. It uses Windows DLLs directly when it can and most of those are in user space and don't emulation of the kernel. DirectX tries to be a relatively thin layer on top of the hardware too. The complexity of the game isn't going to slow things down by itself, speed is probably more dependent upon what features it makes heavy use of and whether they involve custom Wine code that isn't optimized or has to be emulated.
Apple likes to claim the building is old and decrepit, but it really is not. It's a very nice building. Apple has tons of buildings though, most of them leased, because it has more employees than it knows what to do with. Internally Apple may decide it's not worth so much to them because they have a nice new shiny building that they overpaid for. But Apple's own idea of "we don't like the old building much" doesn't mean much to the tax assessors. The property is not undesirable or of low quality, they'd probably be able to sell it for close to the assessed price.
It's actually 6 buildings in a cluster, if they're talking about Infinite Loop. They're mostly connected to each other with walkways and utilities. If they're just talking about the one building that the CEO sits in then there are 5 more buildings there with similar issues (not acounting off campus buildings that are owned by Apple). If they're counting the complex as a whole then $200m is undervalued for sure.
If Apple moved out (unlikely) it would likely be snatched up by someone and then leased out. Given the size of the place, the prime location, amount of parking, convenience to freeways, and the prestige, they'd get a lot of takers. You could lease an entire building, or just one or two floors.
So current state of things, where everybody eats meals at a different time and telling the kids to shut off the mobile phones is considered child abuse?
True. But in the past the "old" TV was generally large and bulky and you usually used it until it broke. For new TVs, I also waited until the old one broke, but presumably if it hadn't, a good enough TV is good enough. You don't need 3D TV, you don't need curved screens, you don't need 4K.
Ok, that's unusual in my experience. The only time I remember seeing two TVs was when someone had a "den", or there was a very tiny one in the kitchen so someone could watch the soaps while cooking.
Maybe it's just the time that I grew up. When I was in elementary school TVs were BIG, they were often furniture. Wooden cases. You needed a rooftop antenna to pick up stations. You watched what the family watched or you didn't watch anything. Later more portable TVs were showing up. It's possible that people I knew had TVs in their bedrooms and I just don't remember it. I'm probably naively assuming that parents don't give their kids TVs to watch secretly late at night, but probably TVs have turned into babysitters.
To be honest, I don't know anyone with two televisions that isn't rich. Phones don't count. My parents did get a second TV as they got a portable 5" black and white for attending a time share presentation. They gave it to me though, and it was the TV I used in grad school to watch Star Trek Next Generation.
I didn't get a computer until I left home. I wanted a TRS-80 but my mother said I should save my money to get a used car instead as it would be more useful. (Apple-II would have been nice too but I only knew one person who had one and there was no store that sold one nearby, but I really wanted a Heathkit to be honest) Without disposable income, a home computer at the time was just too expensive.
I got an S-100 based board as a freshman, but it burned out quickly with a puff of smoke a couple weeks after someone put on new voltage regulators! After that I always had computer access at the lab while at school. Again, no extra disposable income. So I didn't get another computer until after graduation whe I got an Amiga 1000.
Because they weren't socialist really. The socialism didn't kill people, the dictators running the country killed the people. Stalin created the famine in the Ukraine because he was a bastard, either because he wanted it to happen or because he was so stupid he didn't realize his actions would cause it. Forced collectivization is not a key concept in socialism. Likewise the cultural revolution in China was not because of socialist principles but because of a set of bastards. Pol Pot didn't create the killing fields because he wsa trying to improve the economy but because he was a bastard.
And of course, such bastards exist in the capitalist realm as well, Mussolini, Pinochet, King Leopold, etc.
I disable javascript all the time. It makes the web faster, you get fewer ads, you get fewer malware infections served up by ads, and if the site absolutely won't work without it then good for you as that's one more site you never visit again. Kids who gleefully serve up their private information are half the problem here, companies aren't going to bother being nice to customers if no one pushes back.
Well, you don't need to pay off student loans if you get free education. You don't have to pay off your medical bills if you never get a bill in the first place. We do have countries that are capitlist in some areas but which also have institutions that are very social-democratic in some key institutions. That is because the government controls the means of production in a few places but not all places.
And yet, if you ask young people about this, they see that Denmark and similar countries have high living standards and rank at the top for happiness. Meanwhile in the US they see poverty, a massive gap between rich and poor, unaffordable education, unaffordable housing, unaffordable health care, and so forth. So is it any surprise that when given the poll that young people think about these issues?
Taxes are a matter of perspective. We tend to hate our relatively low taxes in the US because we see so littlle in return for our money, whereas in many high tax countries thre is a visible return of services back to the tax payers.
And also there are extremes. Denmark isn't engaged in autocratic centralized control of all facets of the economy. Yet some people spit at the word "socialism" as if it were equivalent to Stalinism or Maoism. We also don't have an extremist model of capitalism in the US either. Most modern countries are indeed a mix of some capitalist ideas and some socialist ideas. Denmark is clearly a capitalist state but it also has had social-democrat governments with strong social welfare programs - it's not 100% one way or the other.
Another problem is that "socialism" is being used by the right as an insult to apply to anything they don't like, exactly the same as the left using "fascism" to apply to anything they disagree with.
Many in the past died from capitalism too. Their history is that capitalism has failed badly in too many cases; there is grinding poverty in rich countries, unregulated greed has caused financial turmoil, overuse of natural resources, and so forth. They don't know how government should work because it does not work at the moment - Trump has the most disorganized government in the US for decades, promises from the Obama administration rarely came through, the Dubya years brought needless wars, etc.
When you talk about deaths from socialism you have to leave off stuff like Stalinism, Maoism, etc.
When you take sides about one side being angelic and the other demonic, then you're being short sighted and partisan. Both systems fail when taken to extremes. But moderation is seen as an evil today by both liberals and conservatives.
The comparison in this thread was with voter ID cards, and the suggestion that since you need an ID to get a job therefore it's no big deal to have the same for voting. I'm just pointing out that they're not the same thing.
Yes, you need to fill out that form but you don't need a picture ID. A driver's license certainly makes it simpler but there are other ways to reasonably prove your identity.
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It's a bit much to conclude that way. The disparate income points to a broken morality system perhaps; people who work hard get paid less, people who just tell people what to do get paid more, people who just meet with the board now and then get paid immense sums of money. It points to companies that devalue their workers, treating them as "resources". Distasteful jobs that few people want to do should theoretically pay a lot more money, and yet those are the lowest paying jobs usually. We also have a society that actively discourages collective bargaining, ensuring that workers have less clout. We also have a society that naively believes in the adage that a rising tide raises all boats or that trickle down economics really works.
Overall, America has a ethic that comes from Calvinism, Puritanism, or others. And this is that wealth is not an obstacle to salvation, but a result of salvation. That is, wealth is a natural result of being righteous. This comes from different schools of thought but leads to a similar conclusion that those who are wealthy deserve to be wealthy, which also leads one to conclude that those who are poor must not have deserved to be wealthy.those who are wealthy deserve to be wealthy, those who are poor deserve to be poor. Despite Jesus saying that one cannot serve both God and Mammon, American churches certainly have a trend towards prosperity theology.
In other words, there's this undercurrent of thinking that poor people are not as good as wealthy people. We call poor people who are out of work "bums". We believe that hard work will pay off and therefore someone who's poor must not be a hard worker.
So SteamBox would do well here because it can be optimized for a particular setting. Sort of the CrossOver games for the Mac, which was just Wine with a lot of pre-configured settings of Windows games for the Mac.
You can run Skyrim without Steam running at the same time. Not conveniently, but by killing Steam after the game has started. Steam does not add actual value to most games beyond being DRM and a store. Steam is not an underlying OS for a game, so there's usually little dependency on Steam itself. Some games that require Steam to install actually have very little protection under the hood and you can run straight from the executable after installation. I think it was Fallout New Vegas(?) that needed Steam to run the launcher but you could start the game executable without Steam.
Wine isn't much of a layer to slow things down. It uses Windows DLLs directly when it can and most of those are in user space and don't emulation of the kernel. DirectX tries to be a relatively thin layer on top of the hardware too. The complexity of the game isn't going to slow things down by itself, speed is probably more dependent upon what features it makes heavy use of and whether they involve custom Wine code that isn't optimized or has to be emulated.
But if they open source it, how will Microsoft convince gamers to upgrade to Windows 10?
Apple likes to claim the building is old and decrepit, but it really is not. It's a very nice building. Apple has tons of buildings though, most of them leased, because it has more employees than it knows what to do with. Internally Apple may decide it's not worth so much to them because they have a nice new shiny building that they overpaid for. But Apple's own idea of "we don't like the old building much" doesn't mean much to the tax assessors. The property is not undesirable or of low quality, they'd probably be able to sell it for close to the assessed price.
It's actually 6 buildings in a cluster, if they're talking about Infinite Loop. They're mostly connected to each other with walkways and utilities. If they're just talking about the one building that the CEO sits in then there are 5 more buildings there with similar issues (not acounting off campus buildings that are owned by Apple). If they're counting the complex as a whole then $200m is undervalued for sure.
If Apple moved out (unlikely) it would likely be snatched up by someone and then leased out. Given the size of the place, the prime location, amount of parking, convenience to freeways, and the prestige, they'd get a lot of takers. You could lease an entire building, or just one or two floors.
So current state of things, where everybody eats meals at a different time and telling the kids to shut off the mobile phones is considered child abuse?
True. But in the past the "old" TV was generally large and bulky and you usually used it until it broke. For new TVs, I also waited until the old one broke, but presumably if it hadn't, a good enough TV is good enough. You don't need 3D TV, you don't need curved screens, you don't need 4K.
Ok, that's unusual in my experience. The only time I remember seeing two TVs was when someone had a "den", or there was a very tiny one in the kitchen so someone could watch the soaps while cooking.
Maybe it's just the time that I grew up. When I was in elementary school TVs were BIG, they were often furniture. Wooden cases. You needed a rooftop antenna to pick up stations. You watched what the family watched or you didn't watch anything. Later more portable TVs were showing up. It's possible that people I knew had TVs in their bedrooms and I just don't remember it. I'm probably naively assuming that parents don't give their kids TVs to watch secretly late at night, but probably TVs have turned into babysitters.
He's not slashing useless fat, just trimming a few toenails here and there.
That's one of the reasons I wanted a TRS-80 when it came out. The was only $500. Still a small fortune but at least it was in sight.
To be honest, I don't know anyone with two televisions that isn't rich. Phones don't count. My parents did get a second TV as they got a portable 5" black and white for attending a time share presentation. They gave it to me though, and it was the TV I used in grad school to watch Star Trek Next Generation.
"The picture looks great, now just hold it there and don't move for an hour!"
I didn't get a computer until I left home. I wanted a TRS-80 but my mother said I should save my money to get a used car instead as it would be more useful. (Apple-II would have been nice too but I only knew one person who had one and there was no store that sold one nearby, but I really wanted a Heathkit to be honest) Without disposable income, a home computer at the time was just too expensive.
I got an S-100 based board as a freshman, but it burned out quickly with a puff of smoke a couple weeks after someone put on new voltage regulators! After that I always had computer access at the lab while at school. Again, no extra disposable income. So I didn't get another computer until after graduation whe I got an Amiga 1000.
Because they weren't socialist really. The socialism didn't kill people, the dictators running the country killed the people. Stalin created the famine in the Ukraine because he was a bastard, either because he wanted it to happen or because he was so stupid he didn't realize his actions would cause it. Forced collectivization is not a key concept in socialism. Likewise the cultural revolution in China was not because of socialist principles but because of a set of bastards. Pol Pot didn't create the killing fields because he wsa trying to improve the economy but because he was a bastard.
And of course, such bastards exist in the capitalist realm as well, Mussolini, Pinochet, King Leopold, etc.
Hollow earthers. We don't talk about them.
I disable javascript all the time. It makes the web faster, you get fewer ads, you get fewer malware infections served up by ads, and if the site absolutely won't work without it then good for you as that's one more site you never visit again. Kids who gleefully serve up their private information are half the problem here, companies aren't going to bother being nice to customers if no one pushes back.
Well, you don't need to pay off student loans if you get free education. You don't have to pay off your medical bills if you never get a bill in the first place. We do have countries that are capitlist in some areas but which also have institutions that are very social-democratic in some key institutions. That is because the government controls the means of production in a few places but not all places.
And yet, if you ask young people about this, they see that Denmark and similar countries have high living standards and rank at the top for happiness. Meanwhile in the US they see poverty, a massive gap between rich and poor, unaffordable education, unaffordable housing, unaffordable health care, and so forth. So is it any surprise that when given the poll that young people think about these issues?
Taxes are a matter of perspective. We tend to hate our relatively low taxes in the US because we see so littlle in return for our money, whereas in many high tax countries thre is a visible return of services back to the tax payers.
And also there are extremes. Denmark isn't engaged in autocratic centralized control of all facets of the economy. Yet some people spit at the word "socialism" as if it were equivalent to Stalinism or Maoism. We also don't have an extremist model of capitalism in the US either. Most modern countries are indeed a mix of some capitalist ideas and some socialist ideas. Denmark is clearly a capitalist state but it also has had social-democrat governments with strong social welfare programs - it's not 100% one way or the other.
Another problem is that "socialism" is being used by the right as an insult to apply to anything they don't like, exactly the same as the left using "fascism" to apply to anything they disagree with.
Many in the past died from capitalism too. Their history is that capitalism has failed badly in too many cases; there is grinding poverty in rich countries, unregulated greed has caused financial turmoil, overuse of natural resources, and so forth. They don't know how government should work because it does not work at the moment - Trump has the most disorganized government in the US for decades, promises from the Obama administration rarely came through, the Dubya years brought needless wars, etc.
When you talk about deaths from socialism you have to leave off stuff like Stalinism, Maoism, etc.
When you take sides about one side being angelic and the other demonic, then you're being short sighted and partisan. Both systems fail when taken to extremes. But moderation is seen as an evil today by both liberals and conservatives.
The comparison in this thread was with voter ID cards, and the suggestion that since you need an ID to get a job therefore it's no big deal to have the same for voting. I'm just pointing out that they're not the same thing.
Social Security number is generally required because that is needed for tax purposes. It's not supposed to be used for identification.
The SS card itself may not always be required. Not sure about today though, but in the past I did not have a physical card and still got employed.
Yes, you need to fill out that form but you don't need a picture ID. A driver's license certainly makes it simpler but there are other ways to reasonably prove your identity.
What else would you use?