Who gets to sit on their ass while everyone else works? The raw materials needed to manufacture goods don't come from nowhere.
The whole point of the argument is that with the increases in efficiency and productivity, the raw materials and the manufactured goods that come from them can be acquired with far fewer people than before. Now that we can feed, clothe, and equip-with-cool-stuff an entire civilization with a tiny fraction of its population, the assumptions that we've based our economy on break down.
With those assumptions in place, we end up with the opposite problem than the one you stated: who gets to work and who is stuck shut out of the economy?
The gay marriage rights debacle is just one example.
td;dr: What good did that time and money do you even if you won?
Gay marriage was one of the issues I was campaigning on. People didn't really want to talk about it in 2004, but it's passed now in New Hampshire... with absolutely NO backing from the Democratic president or the governor! You ask what good did it do? I didn't get the house seat, but I got the policy change I wanted! Involved citizenry influencing policy rather than professional politicians. Wow. And stop with the "tl;dr" for Christ's sake! tl;dr is how shit like the PATRIOT Act happen.
This was back in 2004. Most of the issues I campaigned on passed either in 2006-7 or this session. So while I didn't get the seat in the state house, five years later my issues won. And isn't that what we really care about anyway?
Bullshit. You're like the elephant who remains constrained by the tiny piece of rope tied to a stake. If you want to use "I can't afford it" as your rationalization for not being involved in the governance of your community, go ahead and do that, but it is only as much of an obstacle as one thinks it is.
I spent about $750 on a campaign for state legislature... and every evening and weekend from June until October. I didn't spend that time raising money, I spent it talking to my neighbors. In the process, I met a couple of people who are in Congress now. They didn't have any money. I also saw candidates going down in flames to candidates who spent a third of what they did. I think it is giving up evenings and weekends to do political things that makes good people (especially most here) not want to do it. I mean, my bread beats rubbery chicken at the VFW and Rotary and the circuses are on TV.
Maybe the solution isn't "stop bitching and start voting." Maybe it's really "stop bitching and start running for office." Now that's sacrifice, and it's no wonder no one steps up. (For sure, don't fucking look at me!) It's easier to just accept a corrupt government.
This is it exactly! The system wasn't designed for people with the skills and capacity to lead to show up for one day every two to four years to choose someone else to do all the work. Direct, personal involvement is the solution to all of our problems. Really. The system itself isn't as broken as people think it is.
I ran in 2004 and I learned a lot. I plan to do so again as soon as I get out of grad school. As small and underfunded as I was, I influenced the discussion. I lost (96 votes, grumble grumble), but most of the issues that I campaigned on have passed now. So I kinda won.
...But Wii Fit and Mario Kart, while bundled with hardware, are clearly being bought because people want that particular game. They are not buying the hardware for other purposes and only getting the game because the hardware isn't sold any other way...
On the other hand, now that my wife has a Wii balance board, I'm more inclined to buy Shawn White Snowboarding to go with it.
Family Guy's use of cut-away humor is the same tired old "Let's insert a random fantasy!" crap that's been going on in every prime-time |/FOX\| comedy, and to a large extent many comedies on other networks, since at least Ally McBeal. (Why was Arrested Development cancelled? the cut-away humor was done in flashback/callback form, rather than fantasy)
Funny things can happen in cut-away humor, but the cut-away itself is lame.
This was painfully obvious to me in the first few weeks of [adult swim] after the switch to Family Guy from Futurama. The cutaways have funny things in them, but the show as a whole is inferior to Futurama is so many ways. It's just so forced.
I don't even know why people ever thought that a convention for game makers and retailers would be suited for game players or vice versa. Some overlap where the gamers can interact with the people who make their hobby possible, sure. But it sounds like E3 had turned into a circus where it was impossible to get any real work done.
Surely some of the comments offer better fodder for your zealotry...
Zealotry was originally a political movement in first century Judaism which sought to incite the people of Iudaea Province to rebel against the Roman Empire and expel it from the holy land by force of arms, most notably during the Great Jewish Revolt (AD 66-70). Zealotry was described by Josephus as one of the "four sects" at this time.
If you're in my district, vote for me. If you're not, tell others to vote for me, and run in your district. I've gotten fed up enough to actually do something. How about you?
Word-up! Democracy doens't work unless the citizens are involved. And I don't mean "vote" involved. I mean "Why isn't your name on the ballot?" involved. Don't make excuses about money, either. You do the best you can with what you have and steer the discussion to your issues as much as possible with that.
I ran for state legislature in 2004. I lost back then, but one of my pet issues just passed and was signed by the gov this week.
My kingdom for a mod point. You are exactly right on every point.
The paperwork is there because the consequence of sloppy record-keeping is very, very bad or even fatal. It's not just "government interference in business"!
If that backlog didn't get fixed by the next records audit, they'd run the risk of fines or even being shut down altogether. I used to loathe the JCAHO audit because it was a huge pain in my ass, but I can't bear to think about what a facility would look like without that threat looming all the time.
Take that up with your HMO, then. Bureaucrats are running healthcare RIGHT NOW, except with hardly anyone to answer to, and a mandate that runs counter to what their customers (businesses) and suppliers (doctors) actually want.
Speaking as someone who has worked as a provider in for-profit healthcare, I'll take a government bureaucrat over a corporate bureaucrat any day. If it's like the DMV (the canonical example) it would be the choice between someone who doesn't give a crap whether I get what I want, versus someone who has a vested interest in my not getting what I want. There were as many people in the billing and finance department as there were in the clinical staff. If you count the billing and finance people up the chain, there were far more bureaucrats than healthcare providers involved in my clients' care.
These were all sweet games when they first came out, but I don't want to play them again. Even if they change parts of gameplay, I have little interest in playing a sequel (or more accurately, another installment in a long series).
Sadly, that does cut down on your options as a video game fan on any platform/console. I guess there's Ghostbusters. That looks fun and it's new.
Ocarina of Time was better than Twilight Princess, too. But I still enjoyed the hell out of both of them. Galaxy 1 was freakin' awesome (and it's about time for me to dig it out again and try a 100% run).
This is exactly what I was thinking. I never had this problem because our buses didn't have numbersâ"they actually said where they were going printed on the sides. I knew who else was on my bus because they lived near me so even if I got on the wrong bus somehow I'd be able to tell because the wrong people would be there. And my bus driver knew everyone's name (and their parents' names).
My mind reels at the thought of a kindergartner in a large, urban school of thousands of kids.
I've put off upgrading because I don't want to spend 0.30 on the free tracks I got from the Pepsi promotion. I didn't spend all that time looking through the bottoms of Sierra Mist bottles just so I could turn around and buy all those songs.
I'm really stunned at how underutilized this solution is. One labrador retriever can scan an entire line at once without slowing people down and without hitting all the false positives such as people's contact lens solution and hair gel.
I saw a Google bicycle months ago on the Penn State campus. IIRC it was an ordinary bike towing a trailer that was tricked out with that same type of camera.
"Hikaru" is plenty Japanese. So he has a Chinese surname. He's not supposed to be Japanese-Japanese anyway. According to the Trek wiki, he was born in California.
My wife and I were sitting in the same row with a seven-year-old and except for some appropriate laughter, I never heard a peep out of him. He seemed to really enjoy it: the next generation after the Next Generation has fans already.
That's what poor people like to tell themselves, but it's not really true -- rich people are, in the aggregate, happier than poor people.
I've read those studies (or at least the abstracts), and this is true only up to a certain point. Being truly poor is likely to make one unhappy, but I think most of the people reading Slashdot already have incomes over the threshold where it doesn't matter.
However, I think the original poster should sell the project to Megacorp and if it turns out to be unsatisfying later, there can always be other projects.
WTF do you need three or more cars for in a 2-person household?
My dad plows snow for extra money in the winter. It's tough on vehicles, so he kept his old pickup when he bought a new one so he could keep from beating the hell out of a new truck for as long as possible. Good for going mudding, too.
In the average suburban driveway, that's a better question.
Slashdot Mirror
Who gets to sit on their ass while everyone else works? The raw materials needed to manufacture goods don't come from nowhere.
The whole point of the argument is that with the increases in efficiency and productivity, the raw materials and the manufactured goods that come from them can be acquired with far fewer people than before. Now that we can feed, clothe, and equip-with-cool-stuff an entire civilization with a tiny fraction of its population, the assumptions that we've based our economy on break down.
With those assumptions in place, we end up with the opposite problem than the one you stated: who gets to work and who is stuck shut out of the economy?
The gay marriage rights debacle is just one example.
td;dr: What good did that time and money do you even if you won?
Gay marriage was one of the issues I was campaigning on. People didn't really want to talk about it in 2004, but it's passed now in New Hampshire... with absolutely NO backing from the Democratic president or the governor!
You ask what good did it do? I didn't get the house seat, but I got the policy change I wanted! Involved citizenry influencing policy rather than professional politicians. Wow.
And stop with the "tl;dr" for Christ's sake! tl;dr is how shit like the PATRIOT Act happen.
Lost by 96 votes! I don't regret a thing.
This was back in 2004. Most of the issues I campaigned on passed either in 2006-7 or this session. So while I didn't get the seat in the state house, five years later my issues won. And isn't that what we really care about anyway?
Bullshit. You're like the elephant who remains constrained by the tiny piece of rope tied to a stake. If you want to use "I can't afford it" as your rationalization for not being involved in the governance of your community, go ahead and do that, but it is only as much of an obstacle as one thinks it is.
I spent about $750 on a campaign for state legislature... and every evening and weekend from June until October. I didn't spend that time raising money, I spent it talking to my neighbors. In the process, I met a couple of people who are in Congress now. They didn't have any money. I also saw candidates going down in flames to candidates who spent a third of what they did.
I think it is giving up evenings and weekends to do political things that makes good people (especially most here) not want to do it. I mean, my bread beats rubbery chicken at the VFW and Rotary and the circuses are on TV.
Maybe the solution isn't "stop bitching and start voting." Maybe it's really "stop bitching and start running for office." Now that's sacrifice, and it's no wonder no one steps up. (For sure, don't fucking look at me!) It's easier to just accept a corrupt government.
This is it exactly! The system wasn't designed for people with the skills and capacity to lead to show up for one day every two to four years to choose someone else to do all the work. Direct, personal involvement is the solution to all of our problems. Really. The system itself isn't as broken as people think it is.
I ran in 2004 and I learned a lot. I plan to do so again as soon as I get out of grad school. As small and underfunded as I was, I influenced the discussion. I lost (96 votes, grumble grumble), but most of the issues that I campaigned on have passed now. So I kinda won.
...But Wii Fit and Mario Kart, while bundled with hardware, are clearly being bought because people want that particular game. They are not buying the hardware for other purposes and only getting the game because the hardware isn't sold any other way...
On the other hand, now that my wife has a Wii balance board, I'm more inclined to buy Shawn White Snowboarding to go with it.
Family Guy's use of cut-away humor is the same tired old "Let's insert a random fantasy!" crap that's been going on in every prime-time |/FOX\| comedy, and to a large extent many comedies on other networks, since at least Ally McBeal. (Why was Arrested Development cancelled? the cut-away humor was done in flashback/callback form, rather than fantasy)
Funny things can happen in cut-away humor, but the cut-away itself is lame.
This was painfully obvious to me in the first few weeks of [adult swim] after the switch to Family Guy from Futurama. The cutaways have funny things in them, but the show as a whole is inferior to Futurama is so many ways. It's just so forced.
Oh so you haven't heard? I was under the impression that everybody had heard that latest news of a certain avian variety.
Meist3r, What are you talking about?
duguk, wait! Don't...
I don't even know why people ever thought that a convention for game makers and retailers would be suited for game players or vice versa. Some overlap where the gamers can interact with the people who make their hobby possible, sure. But it sounds like E3 had turned into a circus where it was impossible to get any real work done.
Surely some of the comments offer better fodder for your zealotry...
Zealotry was originally a political movement in first century Judaism which sought to incite the people of Iudaea Province to rebel against the Roman Empire and expel it from the holy land by force of arms, most notably during the Great Jewish Revolt (AD 66-70). Zealotry was described by Josephus as one of the "four sects" at this time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealotry
I don't see how that applies to the GP.
If you're in my district, vote for me. If you're not, tell others to vote for me, and run in your district. I've gotten fed up enough to actually do something. How about you?
Word-up!
Democracy doens't work unless the citizens are involved. And I don't mean "vote" involved. I mean "Why isn't your name on the ballot?" involved. Don't make excuses about money, either. You do the best you can with what you have and steer the discussion to your issues as much as possible with that.
I ran for state legislature in 2004. I lost back then, but one of my pet issues just passed and was signed by the gov this week.
ie... More americans would do better under the Canadian system than worse. That's a net IMPROVEMENT over what we have now.
Libertarians don't care about net improvement across an alleged "society"; they've got theirs so fuck all of y'all.
My kingdom for a mod point. You are exactly right on every point.
The paperwork is there because the consequence of sloppy record-keeping is very, very bad or even fatal. It's not just "government interference in business"!
If that backlog didn't get fixed by the next records audit, they'd run the risk of fines or even being shut down altogether. I used to loathe the JCAHO audit because it was a huge pain in my ass, but I can't bear to think about what a facility would look like without that threat looming all the time.
Take that up with your HMO, then. Bureaucrats are running healthcare RIGHT NOW, except with hardly anyone to answer to, and a mandate that runs counter to what their customers (businesses) and suppliers (doctors) actually want.
Speaking as someone who has worked as a provider in for-profit healthcare, I'll take a government bureaucrat over a corporate bureaucrat any day. If it's like the DMV (the canonical example) it would be the choice between someone who doesn't give a crap whether I get what I want, versus someone who has a vested interest in my not getting what I want.
There were as many people in the billing and finance department as there were in the clinical staff. If you count the billing and finance people up the chain, there were far more bureaucrats than healthcare providers involved in my clients' care.
These were all sweet games when they first came out, but I don't want to play them again. Even if they change parts of gameplay, I have little interest in playing a sequel (or more accurately, another installment in a long series).
Sadly, that does cut down on your options as a video game fan on any platform/console.
I guess there's Ghostbusters. That looks fun and it's new.
Ocarina of Time was better than Twilight Princess, too. But I still enjoyed the hell out of both of them. Galaxy 1 was freakin' awesome (and it's about time for me to dig it out again and try a 100% run).
This is exactly what I was thinking. I never had this problem because our buses didn't have numbersâ"they actually said where they were going printed on the sides. I knew who else was on my bus because they lived near me so even if I got on the wrong bus somehow I'd be able to tell because the wrong people would be there. And my bus driver knew everyone's name (and their parents' names).
My mind reels at the thought of a kindergartner in a large, urban school of thousands of kids.
Too soon, man! That is SO not funny.
(I hate myself for chuckling at it.)
I've put off upgrading because I don't want to spend 0.30 on the free tracks I got from the Pepsi promotion. I didn't spend all that time looking through the bottoms of Sierra Mist bottles just so I could turn around and buy all those songs.
I'm really stunned at how underutilized this solution is. One labrador retriever can scan an entire line at once without slowing people down and without hitting all the false positives such as people's contact lens solution and hair gel.
I saw a Google bicycle months ago on the Penn State campus. IIRC it was an ordinary bike towing a trailer that was tricked out with that same type of camera.
"Hikaru" is plenty Japanese. So he has a Chinese surname. He's not supposed to be Japanese-Japanese anyway. According to the Trek wiki, he was born in California.
My wife and I were sitting in the same row with a seven-year-old and except for some appropriate laughter, I never heard a peep out of him. He seemed to really enjoy it: the next generation after the Next Generation has fans already.
That's what poor people like to tell themselves, but it's not really true -- rich people are, in the aggregate, happier than poor people.
I've read those studies (or at least the abstracts), and this is true only up to a certain point. Being truly poor is likely to make one unhappy, but I think most of the people reading Slashdot already have incomes over the threshold where it doesn't matter.
However, I think the original poster should sell the project to Megacorp and if it turns out to be unsatisfying later, there can always be other projects.
WTF do you need three or more cars for in a 2-person household?
My dad plows snow for extra money in the winter. It's tough on vehicles, so he kept his old pickup when he bought a new one so he could keep from beating the hell out of a new truck for as long as possible. Good for going mudding, too.
In the average suburban driveway, that's a better question.