Use Quickbooks for accounting and MS Office files loaded with VB scripts for all your custom computing needs. Be sure to browse using IE with Flash Player and JRE installed. Save bandwidth by only running updates monthly. HTH!
A lack of net neutrality massively consolidates Facebook's power. He can afford "fast lanes" or zero-rating while Gab and Stormfront can't.
People who oppose net neutrality over censorship fears are complete and utter morons, the only good news is that they are very good at harming themselves and have done so again...it's just a shame that they've harmed the rest of society almost as much as themselves with this move.
I see the problem, your viewpoint makes sense considering your mistake. You seem to think it's cheap to extract fossil energy, like just flipping the switch on a battery. It really, really isn't. The work involved is actually far greater than expanding and maintaining renewable energy production.
What does it take to make a solar panel or wind turbine? Mine the metals, refine the metals, assemble the products, enjoy sunk-cost energy for a few decades, return to step 2 or 3 when they wear out. What does it take to get oil out of the ground? Search all over for it, build a shit-ton of infrastructure to extract it from increasingly stupid places (far more than the mining required for renewables), build another shit-ton of infrastructure to move massive amounts of the stuff you just mined (pipelines/supertankers/railroads, vs power lines), build a third shit-ton of infrastructure to separate the actual stuff you want from all that stuff you just transported (refineries, which use a shit-ton of energy, or coal power plants for coal power generation), and then if it wasn't for power generation, you haul those final products over the road or rails to where you can finally put gas in your car. It's a ridiculously inefficient system, vastly more difficult than building windmills or solar panels. The effort of building nuclear reactors is more comparable, but the payoff from those is commensurate.
So if you think fossil fuel energy extraction is sustainable purely from an energy budget standpoint, then switching to renewable power sure as hell is too. Storing it isn't rocket science, hydroelectric dams and batteries aren't that complicated. Space is also not much of a limitation - covering one desert with solar panels would give us more energy than we know what to do with.
Excellent post, especially the point about advanced capitalism being deeply unfree. Over time, capitalism plunges deeper into its core traits of being theoretically free and practically unfree. Our theoretical freedom remains high but practically, we have to take part in more and more effectively mandatory activity to participate in society and compete for a decent standard of living, unless we'd like to opt out with what I call "the Unabomber option" (living in a shack in the woods).
The latest mandatory activities coming down the pipeline are social media use and online self-promotion. Those of us abstaining can already feel the disadvantages piling on. At some point in the future, abstaining will be completely impractical if you wish to participate in society and compete in our economy's rat race, and you'll be effectively forced to take part. It will cost us more money and more time away from the things we'd actually like to do, but you'll have to do it, unless you think that shack is a decent option. I'll guess that next will be some gamification bullshit that will have us all competing for coupons needed to keep goods affordable.
If you look at the big picture of the system, capitalism is really a theoretically free system that can be - and naturally tends toward being - configured to act just like feudalism. The 1% are the emperors, other nobility, and their close advisers, and the 99% are the peasants. Business ownership is the gateway to nobility, and as such, theoretically a peasant could become a noble, even an emperor. To severely limit the possibility of new company entering the nobility and upsetting the apple cart, they limit the peasantry's discretionary income to a level that makes it nearly impossible to handle the risk or expenses of starting a business. Boom, gates closed, drawbridge up, suddenly it's a whole lot like feudalism. But wait, it gets worse. National borders trap peasants from moving to wealthier fiefdoms. This is useful for maximizing profit for the nobility of all fiefdoms by placing lower-skilled work (that doesn't require education which can make peasants restive) in poorer fiefdoms where labor will be cheaper. Sure they can theoretically emigrate, but it's so difficult to leave the poorer fiefdoms that the large-scale effect is negligible. A nation is a big cattle pen that keeps very nearly all of the livestock in. It's easy to go from the rich fiefdoms to the poor ones, but there's no profit in that. So the nobles effectively have a captive labor force that has little choice but to work for whatever they're willing to pay - they're kept in either by an inability to emigrate or a complete lack of anything to gain by emigrating. And the wealthier (or less-poor) fiefdoms are inherently incentivized to keep those borders strong, unless they want to compete on wages with the poorer fiefdoms (this is why groups of nations that allow free travel and work like the EU only accept members of similar wealth). You'd think that in an exploitative system like this a barter system or alternate currency might emerge to route around the nobles' stranglehold on capital, but that has never happened.
Capitalism is also ugly purely as an economic system. It's a hideous mess of perverse incentives, vicious cycles and coffin corners that requires constant fiddling with the controls to keep from blowing itself up.
Processing power will continue to increase though, by adding cores and coprocessors for exotic forms of computing (such as neural and quantum). We're not going to hit a processing power bottleneck anytime soon.
BUT green energy will never be as plentiful or cheap as fossil energy. As the total energy available to society is reduced [..]
LOL why the hell won't green energy be as plentiful or cheap as fossil energy? It's already cheaper in some places and is set to be the cheapest worldwide within a few years. Solar panels are only getting cheaper and more efficient and they last a long time. Same with wind turbines. And nuclear power is held back mainly by NIMBYism. The idea of suffering a reduction in Earth's overall energy budget as we transition away from fossil fuels is utterly ridiculous.
In the last week or so I've noticed a surge in what could broadly be categorized as pro-inequality propaganda, not only on Slashdot but also on YouTube. Recently on Slashdot there have been a couple of articles suggesting that automation won't cause mass unemployment and will actually be beneficial to most of society. In the context of the current economic climate and known history, this is absurdly wrong.
First let's look at the industrial revolution, the supposed best-case scenario for automation which the people pooh-poohing these fears glowingly reminisce about. They're actually reminiscing about a fictionalized history of it. In reality, at least two generations died in grinding poverty caused by the industrial revolution. The generation that lost their jobs to automation mostly died believing they were right all along. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren got the new jobs automation produced. That's what we're being offered to look forward to.
Automation could be very good or very bad for society, depending on who benefits from the products of automated labor. In our new plutonomy, automation would be very bad for society in both the short and long term. We need to rework our economies so that autmation can benefit all of humanity as soon as possible, rather than letting whole generations starve as in the past, or creating an uberclass of hyper-rich space royalty among a world of slums as we're headed for now.
How would that even work? Would you make it illegal for a person not to own a house? Would you make it illegal for a person not to own a car? Would you make it illegal for a person to accumulate wealth as they age?
You're not far off. I would make it illegal to hire a person for so little that they couldn't reasonably afford housing and at least public transportation. I would have a sharply progressive estate tax to prevent age-accumulated wealth from being used to build dynasties.
It was hilarious how they were all like "OH NOES THEY'RE PURGING CONSERVATIVES!!1!"* but it was because a good fraction of all the centipedes on Twitter were Russian bots XD
*Funny how those on the far-right routinely call everyone from moderate Republicans to actual nazis "conservatives" and don't seem to get any pushback on using that broad brush.
Heh, running on Wine huh? I'm stuck in the same boat with 2.2.1 due to a massive legacy collection. I've had 2 bungled attempts to migrate to Deluge using the uTorrent Import plugin, but I think the bugs have been worked out and the pitfalls have been found now and 3rd time will be the charm.
The counterargument to this is the plutonomy theory, that the 1% can demand/spend enough for make up for the loss in spending by the unemployed populace. Whether it turns out to be right or wrong, testing it will be horrific.
The Pareto principle (exponential wealth distribution) holds whenever you have any sort of freedom, and is the best case when you don't (Feudal systems concentrate wealth even beyond 80/20).
We can beat this with tax policy. Our reality is not ruled with an iron fist by a malevolent rule of thumb.
It's also worth considering that today's inequality is roughly similar to that under feudalism, and people today have less free time than feudal peasants.
Maybe it could appeal to those types with some sort of re-skinning? Make it a game where you're a dastardly lib'rul media organization trying to trick people into voting for Hillary with misinformation? The hard part would be slyly working a concept of objective reality into the game without turning them off.
I might actually buy a Nintendo Switch now. If they get it to run "homebrew" games, that'll just be icing on the cake. I do want to try that new Zelda game.
The rest of the world should care. Putin is willing to use his propaganda capabilities to tear apart any and every Western democracy from the inside if he thinks it could buy him even a tiny morsel of regime survival. Forget Kim Jong-Un, Putin is the #1 threat to free societies across the world right now.
Turns out that Mitt Romney was only wrong about the nature of the threat Russia poses, not the magnitude. It's a threat that needs to be fought with improved education and regulation of advertisements rather than battleships from Romney's pal...but I sure wouldn't complain about some propaganda return-fire aimed at ousting Putin and his cronies.
LOL your god-emperor is guilty as sin and it's just so hilarious to watch you all squirm as law enforcement slowly but surely closes in on him. The hypocrisy is staggering. Can you imagine if anyone on Team Blue had done anything remotely like Donald Jr's bald-faced influence-peddling in India? Just look at how they flipped their lids at the Clintons' charity foundations.
Definitely. However in the book the owners of the Manna systems network them and share data. Wouldn't that put them at a competitive disadvantage, it would also most likely be illegal given how little you can ask former employers about workers.
Well companies have been salivating over the idea of a universal shared employment blacklist since approximately forever, so they don't seem to think it would put them at a competitive disadvantage.
As for being illegal? An easy problem to fix in the age of #MAGA!
Check out the price of a 70" 4k LED TV in 2015 vs now. Let me know what you find.
That's right, everyone's economic problems are solved, because we have bigass thin TVs now! We can eat those TVs. Build houses on those TVs. Support families with those TVs. Inches of TV = prosperity.
Wait, you mean they're just good for watching shows!? WTF kind of garbage is this!?!? Can I trade this TV in for a 17" CRT tube with bad colors and faux wood paneling, and get back all that other stuff!? I CAN'T!?!?! >:(
It's like when people think giving companies a tax break will mean all their employees will get a rise in their wages.
Naivety is so cute.
And it's so easy to fool them with crumbs. Like when Trump organized the current redistribution of wealth to the 1%, companies gave about 3.3% of the money they received from corporate tax breaks to workers as one-time bonuses, and most workers lapped it up - "5 stars, would cut taxes for the ownership class again!" they thought. They even got offended when someone pointed out that 3.3% is crumbs.
It's almost difficult to blame the 1% for playing these people like the fools they are for every penny they're worth. Almost.
We certainly won't see a flood of new titles being broken and released hours or days after their release like we have when other DRM schemes have been broken, right?
There will be, because when the wall is breached we take it ALL down to demonstrate to the wall-builders that they have failed. When that first bit of the Berlin wall was breached, they didn't leave all the rest of it in place.
The challenge stops when idiots stop putting up walls.
Slashdot Mirror
Use Quickbooks for accounting and MS Office files loaded with VB scripts for all your custom computing needs. Be sure to browse using IE with Flash Player and JRE installed. Save bandwidth by only running updates monthly. HTH!
>:-)
A lack of net neutrality massively consolidates Facebook's power. He can afford "fast lanes" or zero-rating while Gab and Stormfront can't.
People who oppose net neutrality over censorship fears are complete and utter morons, the only good news is that they are very good at harming themselves and have done so again...it's just a shame that they've harmed the rest of society almost as much as themselves with this move.
I see the problem, your viewpoint makes sense considering your mistake. You seem to think it's cheap to extract fossil energy, like just flipping the switch on a battery. It really, really isn't. The work involved is actually far greater than expanding and maintaining renewable energy production.
What does it take to make a solar panel or wind turbine? Mine the metals, refine the metals, assemble the products, enjoy sunk-cost energy for a few decades, return to step 2 or 3 when they wear out. What does it take to get oil out of the ground? Search all over for it, build a shit-ton of infrastructure to extract it from increasingly stupid places (far more than the mining required for renewables), build another shit-ton of infrastructure to move massive amounts of the stuff you just mined (pipelines/supertankers/railroads, vs power lines), build a third shit-ton of infrastructure to separate the actual stuff you want from all that stuff you just transported (refineries, which use a shit-ton of energy, or coal power plants for coal power generation), and then if it wasn't for power generation, you haul those final products over the road or rails to where you can finally put gas in your car. It's a ridiculously inefficient system, vastly more difficult than building windmills or solar panels. The effort of building nuclear reactors is more comparable, but the payoff from those is commensurate.
So if you think fossil fuel energy extraction is sustainable purely from an energy budget standpoint, then switching to renewable power sure as hell is too. Storing it isn't rocket science, hydroelectric dams and batteries aren't that complicated. Space is also not much of a limitation - covering one desert with solar panels would give us more energy than we know what to do with.
Excellent post, especially the point about advanced capitalism being deeply unfree. Over time, capitalism plunges deeper into its core traits of being theoretically free and practically unfree. Our theoretical freedom remains high but practically, we have to take part in more and more effectively mandatory activity to participate in society and compete for a decent standard of living, unless we'd like to opt out with what I call "the Unabomber option" (living in a shack in the woods).
The latest mandatory activities coming down the pipeline are social media use and online self-promotion. Those of us abstaining can already feel the disadvantages piling on. At some point in the future, abstaining will be completely impractical if you wish to participate in society and compete in our economy's rat race, and you'll be effectively forced to take part. It will cost us more money and more time away from the things we'd actually like to do, but you'll have to do it, unless you think that shack is a decent option. I'll guess that next will be some gamification bullshit that will have us all competing for coupons needed to keep goods affordable.
If you look at the big picture of the system, capitalism is really a theoretically free system that can be - and naturally tends toward being - configured to act just like feudalism. The 1% are the emperors, other nobility, and their close advisers, and the 99% are the peasants. Business ownership is the gateway to nobility, and as such, theoretically a peasant could become a noble, even an emperor. To severely limit the possibility of new company entering the nobility and upsetting the apple cart, they limit the peasantry's discretionary income to a level that makes it nearly impossible to handle the risk or expenses of starting a business. Boom, gates closed, drawbridge up, suddenly it's a whole lot like feudalism. But wait, it gets worse. National borders trap peasants from moving to wealthier fiefdoms. This is useful for maximizing profit for the nobility of all fiefdoms by placing lower-skilled work (that doesn't require education which can make peasants restive) in poorer fiefdoms where labor will be cheaper. Sure they can theoretically emigrate, but it's so difficult to leave the poorer fiefdoms that the large-scale effect is negligible. A nation is a big cattle pen that keeps very nearly all of the livestock in. It's easy to go from the rich fiefdoms to the poor ones, but there's no profit in that. So the nobles effectively have a captive labor force that has little choice but to work for whatever they're willing to pay - they're kept in either by an inability to emigrate or a complete lack of anything to gain by emigrating. And the wealthier (or less-poor) fiefdoms are inherently incentivized to keep those borders strong, unless they want to compete on wages with the poorer fiefdoms (this is why groups of nations that allow free travel and work like the EU only accept members of similar wealth). You'd think that in an exploitative system like this a barter system or alternate currency might emerge to route around the nobles' stranglehold on capital, but that has never happened.
Capitalism is also ugly purely as an economic system. It's a hideous mess of perverse incentives, vicious cycles and coffin corners that requires constant fiddling with the controls to keep from blowing itself up.
Processing power will continue to increase though, by adding cores and coprocessors for exotic forms of computing (such as neural and quantum). We're not going to hit a processing power bottleneck anytime soon.
BUT green energy will never be as plentiful or cheap as fossil energy. As the total energy available to society is reduced [..]
LOL why the hell won't green energy be as plentiful or cheap as fossil energy? It's already cheaper in some places and is set to be the cheapest worldwide within a few years. Solar panels are only getting cheaper and more efficient and they last a long time. Same with wind turbines. And nuclear power is held back mainly by NIMBYism. The idea of suffering a reduction in Earth's overall energy budget as we transition away from fossil fuels is utterly ridiculous.
In the last week or so I've noticed a surge in what could broadly be categorized as pro-inequality propaganda, not only on Slashdot but also on YouTube. Recently on Slashdot there have been a couple of articles suggesting that automation won't cause mass unemployment and will actually be beneficial to most of society. In the context of the current economic climate and known history, this is absurdly wrong.
First let's look at the industrial revolution, the supposed best-case scenario for automation which the people pooh-poohing these fears glowingly reminisce about. They're actually reminiscing about a fictionalized history of it. In reality, at least two generations died in grinding poverty caused by the industrial revolution. The generation that lost their jobs to automation mostly died believing they were right all along. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren got the new jobs automation produced. That's what we're being offered to look forward to.
Now let's look at what's different this time. Today's automation isn't yesterday's automation - it isn't just augmenting human labor with physical force and mechanically repeated actions like the automation of the past. AI is replacing knowledge work. The author of TFA is a horse looking at an early car and saying "this will be good for us, just like before."
Automation could be very good or very bad for society, depending on who benefits from the products of automated labor. In our new plutonomy, automation would be very bad for society in both the short and long term. We need to rework our economies so that autmation can benefit all of humanity as soon as possible, rather than letting whole generations starve as in the past, or creating an uberclass of hyper-rich space royalty among a world of slums as we're headed for now.
How would that even work? Would you make it illegal for a person not to own a house? Would you make it illegal for a person not to own a car? Would you make it illegal for a person to accumulate wealth as they age?
You're not far off. I would make it illegal to hire a person for so little that they couldn't reasonably afford housing and at least public transportation. I would have a sharply progressive estate tax to prevent age-accumulated wealth from being used to build dynasties.
It was hilarious how they were all like "OH NOES THEY'RE PURGING CONSERVATIVES!!1!"* but it was because a good fraction of all the centipedes on Twitter were Russian bots XD
*Funny how those on the far-right routinely call everyone from moderate Republicans to actual nazis "conservatives" and don't seem to get any pushback on using that broad brush.
I don't buy into your survivorship bias but I do agree that these people should be free to experiment on themselves.
Heh, running on Wine huh? I'm stuck in the same boat with 2.2.1 due to a massive legacy collection. I've had 2 bungled attempts to migrate to Deluge using the uTorrent Import plugin, but I think the bugs have been worked out and the pitfalls have been found now and 3rd time will be the charm.
The counterargument to this is the plutonomy theory, that the 1% can demand/spend enough for make up for the loss in spending by the unemployed populace. Whether it turns out to be right or wrong, testing it will be horrific.
Interesting, I'll have to give that a try!
The Pareto principle (exponential wealth distribution) holds whenever you have any sort of freedom, and is the best case when you don't (Feudal systems concentrate wealth even beyond 80/20).
We can beat this with tax policy. Our reality is not ruled with an iron fist by a malevolent rule of thumb.
It's also worth considering that today's inequality is roughly similar to that under feudalism, and people today have less free time than feudal peasants.
Maybe it could appeal to those types with some sort of re-skinning? Make it a game where you're a dastardly lib'rul media organization trying to trick people into voting for Hillary with misinformation? The hard part would be slyly working a concept of objective reality into the game without turning them off.
Make a transaction for less than the cost of Starbucks' fanciest coffee.
A man-bun could be accomodated in a tinfoil hat style such as The Fez, and possibly The Centurion with light modifications.
I might actually buy a Nintendo Switch now. If they get it to run "homebrew" games, that'll just be icing on the cake. I do want to try that new Zelda game.
The rest of the world should care. Putin is willing to use his propaganda capabilities to tear apart any and every Western democracy from the inside if he thinks it could buy him even a tiny morsel of regime survival. Forget Kim Jong-Un, Putin is the #1 threat to free societies across the world right now.
Turns out that Mitt Romney was only wrong about the nature of the threat Russia poses, not the magnitude. It's a threat that needs to be fought with improved education and regulation of advertisements rather than battleships from Romney's pal...but I sure wouldn't complain about some propaganda return-fire aimed at ousting Putin and his cronies.
LOL your god-emperor is guilty as sin and it's just so hilarious to watch you all squirm as law enforcement slowly but surely closes in on him. The hypocrisy is staggering. Can you imagine if anyone on Team Blue had done anything remotely like Donald Jr's bald-faced influence-peddling in India? Just look at how they flipped their lids at the Clintons' charity foundations.
Definitely. However in the book the owners of the Manna systems network them and share data. Wouldn't that put them at a competitive disadvantage, it would also most likely be illegal given how little you can ask former employers about workers.
Well companies have been salivating over the idea of a universal shared employment blacklist since approximately forever, so they don't seem to think it would put them at a competitive disadvantage.
As for being illegal? An easy problem to fix in the age of #MAGA!
Check out the price of a 70" 4k LED TV in 2015 vs now. Let me know what you find.
That's right, everyone's economic problems are solved, because we have bigass thin TVs now! We can eat those TVs. Build houses on those TVs. Support families with those TVs. Inches of TV = prosperity.
Wait, you mean they're just good for watching shows!? WTF kind of garbage is this!?!? Can I trade this TV in for a 17" CRT tube with bad colors and faux wood paneling, and get back all that other stuff!? I CAN'T!?!?! >:(
It's like when people think giving companies a tax break will mean all their employees will get a rise in their wages.
Naivety is so cute.
And it's so easy to fool them with crumbs. Like when Trump organized the current redistribution of wealth to the 1%, companies gave about 3.3% of the money they received from corporate tax breaks to workers as one-time bonuses, and most workers lapped it up - "5 stars, would cut taxes for the ownership class again!" they thought. They even got offended when someone pointed out that 3.3% is crumbs.
It's almost difficult to blame the 1% for playing these people like the fools they are for every penny they're worth. Almost.
Oh, the fools! If only they'd built it with 6 layers of DRM! When will they learn!?
We certainly won't see a flood of new titles being broken and released hours or days after their release like we have when other DRM schemes have been broken, right?
There will be, because when the wall is breached we take it ALL down to demonstrate to the wall-builders that they have failed. When that first bit of the Berlin wall was breached, they didn't leave all the rest of it in place.
The challenge stops when idiots stop putting up walls.