Lets say that your proposal is implemented in the full glory that you think it should be, Lauren.
What happens when your crowd starts filtering out content based on what they don't like?
Eventually we would be living in a world where the periodic table of elements would be classified.
That is not even remotely sarcasm. A knowledgable person could look at that and come up with some nasty stuff. So we ban that. Also the knowledge that nasty things can be built, but then we have to make certain people don't understand science.
In other words, this quest for banning things, for shutting the US off from the rest of the world ends up planting us firmly in the dark ages. And not any "safer".
To me Trump's vague statements about shutting some of that down are probably the best thing to run with. I would rather see Great Firewall of America where we largely cut off traffic to and from the rest of the world.
Thank you Kim Il Jung!
Your approach and North Korea's are remarkably identical.
Um - no thanks. if you want to be isolated from the world, move there, not try to turn the US into the best Korea.
The news media is the problem. Though you seem to actually have a brain, so keep up the good fight but good luck, you'll need it.
Almost, but not quite.And you do hit right on the issue with the large amount of coverage given to events, and the level of coverage extending to some rather small events.
We're mentally stuck in a small tribe mode. In a world with billions of people in it, bad things will happen somewhere, to someone, every day. But we react as if it's in our neighborhood. I don't have the exact number of people we are mentally adapted to have in our mental "tribes" but recall it was something like 50 could be wrong on that number, but the concept is still there.
So oddly enough, in a country where violence is down, crime is down and murders are down, most people would think just the opposite. When we hear the news, and there was a school shooting somewhere, we automatically assign it to our tribal fringes. So every school shooting happens to our tribe, and we think society is falling apart.
tl;dr version - Our minds haven't caught up with technology yet.
Whilst there are vast differences between Facebook and Slashdot, it would not be remiss to refer to Slashdot as "social media."
Yes, although with a different outlook. I'm on here enough that for better or worse, it is a part of my social life. But for all the warts, its an intellectual mecca by comparison.
I knew enough about Facebook to avoid it, but after my sisters husband passed away, she moved to Florida and suggested that we sign up for Facebook. I passed on it, but signed the wife up. She mostly reads, and her and friends share the pet pix and videos, but the intellectual level is pretty low.
Here at least, we can have spirited discussions, and I get something from most of them.
Hell, I share all sorts of inane shit about the pointless goings on in my life. Others do too.
For instance, your wife uses a laptop with Linux Mint on it and I seem to recall you live in PA.;-)
Thought part of way people left AOL. Was cause there is a whole lot more out there then AOL could provide. But for some reason lots of people want to go back to a single corner of the internet.
The folks who call their Browser "My Facebook" - Oh who am I kidding, they call their computer My Facebook..
Now I use Terminal all the time in OS X, and of course Linux, and so many Windows users think the command line doesn't exist any more. If they ever knew about it in the first place.
Most likely, you are simply an unusual user.
Very possibly. Years ago our head of computer security was a Mac Guru, and took me under his wing. Then a Linux/Mac nerd adopted me, and it was almost like the magic of my Commodore 64 days of computing discovery
However, I do often see the answer to a Mac users' question be "enter this cryptic command into Terminal" and then I laugh and laugh, or usually just sort of smirk because who actually lols all the time over this nerd crap?
I'm guilty.
But seriously, for ages the Mac users were smug upon smug over Windows users having to go to the command line, or having to bang on the registry.
Part of the fun of moving over to Unix, I guess.
Too bad it's super-duper spyware now. I was, no shit, legitimately excited about Windows 10. Not very, but a little bit.
The pity is, the damn OS itself works so well. But the spyware, key logger, and mandatory updates bitching up people's computers really piss me off. There are some serious audio issues in W10 that are making Teamviewer my most used program any more. The user uses the troubleshoot function which says "No problem here sonny!" and the user doesn't believe me when I say ignore the troubleshooter. - some have become pissed even. So it's just easier to use Teamviewer to go in and fix it myself. 100 percent post fix I get a "Huh, you were right".
Now I'm just wondering which Linux distribution I'm going to get excited about next, and happy about the ongoing trend in Linux gaming support. I've got a Windows 7 PC for gaming, and that's working just fine.
7 on my Mac with bootcamp, a W10 machine with nothing on it but the software I have to run, and I really like Mint Cinnamon - evaluating Mate now - for desktops and decent laptops, and Ubuntu for my old Netbook. And Mint is plenty pretty enough as well.
The king of the 3-D look was Apple of course, and interestingly enough, was used by a lot of artist and Illustrators, th elatter of whom know a lot abotu this kind of thing.
I really liked Be's vivid, isomorphic icon style. It was a fad for a moment and then died down, but I miss it. The icons were very clear and easy to see, but also attractive.
I looked it up since I wasn't familiar, and it definitely is vivid with a lot of color. Very cute. And no problem whatsoever with understanding the icons.
I expect similar things are present in a lot of other security products, just that there they are still undiscovered. Criticizing Juniper for this is entirely the wrong reaction.
Hell yeah! Poor Juniper now has to enable another backdoor.
The only people that are to be blamed for privacy violations on Facebook, are the posters themselves. They continually post inaine amount of shit, such as when they're taking a dump and picking their nose etc. Or posting pics of their meals.
If you don't know the difference between FB and Slashdot, Like this post to 100 others, and you'll recieve free money and blessings direct from God.
Oh - this - so much this! The backlash against skeuomorphics has produced some of the most boring and bland and ucking fugly interfaces seen by humans.
It's like someone said "Good design is a square of a primary color, with a letter in it." To me, the problem is across the board - UI's are getting ugly, like we are returning to Commodore 64 days when there just wasn't enough resolution to make nice looking stuff.
There has been an overreaction, certainly, but that's due to people not listening to the complaints about skeuomorphism.
There's no doubt that some got goofy with it, but abandoning it is like throwing the bby out with the washwater..
The problem with skeuomorphic design is that it ignores the basic principles of what an "icon" is, and how the human brain works. The point is that the gradings and shadings and pseudo-3D projections on Windows XP icons were slower to process cognitively than their Windows 95 equivalents. The trick to a good icon is to find the simplest unambiguous "form" that prototypes the concept to the human brain.
While I won't presume to say the XP icons were good, some attractiveness would be nice. The king of the 3-D look was Apple of course, and interestingly enough, was used by a lot of artist and Illustrators, th elatter of whom know a lot abotu this kind of thing.
And while I'm not always in love with the new icons in OS X, they've retained a little of their 3-D look.
Now the thing about processing icons cognitively. I don't really need to process icons. They are just what I use to access the programs I want. What I want from my desktop is something attractive to look at.
Now we are into an entirely different field of ambiguity. Since I find flat squares with a little text inside soul suckingly boring, and artless, I don't want to look at them. Others might find them beautiful. All a matter of taste.
Correction: those who remember having nothing but a command line are dead or retired.
Well...I'm not dead (yet), but I am close to retirement. And yes, I'm one of those cranky old fucks who remembers having nothing but a command line. I welcomed the advent of the GUI (and still do).
There's a time and a place for the command line and a time and a place for a GUI. And I confess, I think GUIs (when done right) are great 99% of the time. But sometimes a command line is truly da' shizzle, dawg!
Amen. As a user of Unix and Linux, there are times when I really appreciate the Terminal. It does things by hand and instantly.
And over the years, an odd thing has happened. Remember when Mac users were supposedly too dumb to use a command line? Man oh man, DOS was the shitz, and dont you forget it! Now I use Terminal all the time in OS X, and of course Linux, and so many Windows users think the command line doesn't exist any more. If they ever knew about it in the first place.
For example, on a lot of web or graphic design forums, if you even try suggesting that flat design is almost always a bad idea that is built on poorly chosen basic design principles, you have a pretty good chance of being downvoted/modded/censored into oblivion.
Oh - this - so much this! The backlash against skeuomorphics has produced some of the most boring and bland and ucking fugly interfaces seen by humans.
It's like someone said "Good design is a square of a primary color, with a letter in it." To me, the problem is across the board - UI's are getting ugly, like we are returning to Commodore 64 days when there just wasn't enough resolution to make nice looking stuff.
And don't even think about going beyond generic flat design to criticising Apple's recent design efforts or Google's Material Design, because you might as well just hand in your geek card on the spot.
Patience, ABV. Design, like automobiles, goes through periods of massive ugly. And that is exactly where we are at right now. This too shall pass.
You do realize that we would rather McDonald's and Walmart employ their employees at current wages than not at all. Sure, the public benefits given to employees of these companies is often, erroneously termed a subsidy for the employer. But so what if it were. Isn't the whole point of subsidies to encourage behavior we want?
No - I do not. And that's a mighty fine false dichotomy you make there. If thes fine places paid at some determined level that would enable them to live on their own, it wouldn't cause much harm at all to The company. Yes, prices would go up some, but if you believe Government is inefficient, it would be a net gain.
By the way, we do hear how every time minimum wage goes up it creates unemployment. It therefore must follow that reducing minimum wage will increase employment, until teh minimum wage is eliminataed altogether, and we'll have full employment.
Tl;DR. We've heard this all before. From Trickle down to job creators. You need a new line, the old ones are old.
McDonalds and WalMart aren't actually that awful. I shop at WalMart often enough to know that the stockers and cashiers are mostly the same lower-middle-class folks as the clerks in any other retail outlet.
>/quote>
Well that is wonderful. In our area, the last mobile home park closed down last year, and it created a major dillemma for Walmart. In my area no one working at WalMart or any of the local eateries can live within about a 25 mile radius, unless they are being supported by Section 8 housing.
It was bad enough that the WalMart store itself had concerns. Our publictransit system has opened lines going over 30 miles outside of town. Oh. wait. Public transit. Hell, I'm paying part of that too!
The difference is that Big Labor has white-hot hatred for McDonalds and WalMart so there is plenty of off-the-shelf 'information' available to attack McDonalds and WalMart with.
Good lord - and McDonald's has that information on their Website.
But go ahead and believe what the Union Bosses feed you if it seems satisfactory, and gives you a bitmap to shout at in your Five Minute Hates.
Seriously? Union Bosses? 1970 called, and said they want you back, Bing. Unions are about as relevant to 2015 as buggy whips, vbirtua;ly powerless, and certainly broken. Their only use is for your bogeyman target, And my dear Bing, you seem to be spreadinga lot more hatred than me.
All I'm saying is that:
1. Government should not be paying for working people's living.
2. If a person is working full time, they should be able to support themselves.
3. If a person wants to pay people less, so that the Government has to pay to support them, you make a hellava better socialist than I do.
3a. Either that, or they are selfish pricks who doesn't care if they wreck the country as long as they got theirs.
And whereas a lot of folks seem to get Number one, they seem to get a little lost on number two, and completely pissed at their cognitive dissonance when we hit number 3.
And if you still think that Unions are hte problem, you are stuck - way, way, in the past.
Note, I do realize that I piss off peopel who call themselves Cappitalists or conservatives, yet have that creamy center of socialism. And one does not stand up for people paying taxes to support WalMart Workers without being a secret socialist, or even somthing deeper, eh Tovarisch?
"Its easy to live like a rich man if you don't pay your bills."
So you don't actually agree. And what bills really are we speaking of here? Defense contractors? The growing sums of money transferred. reverse Robin Hood-style, from the young poor to elderly rich? Interest payments from people too irresponsible to spend within their means for generations to the banks, foreign countries, and anyone else who holds US bonds and treasuries? Welp, I just specified 80% of the current US government's spending.
And wouldn't it be nice if McDonald's and Walmart payed their employees enough so they didn't have to go with section 8 housing and food stamps?
Those companies have actually - in the name of capitalism, enabled the rest of us, in an exact socialist manner, to pay their employees living expenses. Seriously, what the hell?
We've gotten so far out of kilter with this sort of thing, where trying to enact a living wage is somehow considered socialism, and demanding that the Government make up for wages the corporation doesn't want to pay is considered Capitalism, that the result is hard to describe as anything other than complete opposite speak. Or maybe insanity.
Wouldn't you agree that it would make more sense for a person to be able to pay their own bills instead of having the convoluted business of dealing with the government for them?
The difference is that Apple isn't squandering MY money on hookers or whatever because I have an Android phone. If Samsung's phone quality/hooker ratio dipped too low I could get a phone from Motorola or LG. Or if ALL the Android and Windows Phone manufacturers had unacceptably low hooker/quality ratios, I could get an Apple phone./quote>
You most very clearly do not get Corporatism. The hookers, and sometimes the fine blow and with no possible doubt, the baksheesh, is an integral part of operations. Corruption, or "Doing business" is the modus operandi. Do not think you can buy any phone without participation in the game.
Anyone who thinks that private industry is less corrupt than teh evilz guvmint, needs to get a grip.
I hate Apple, but this is an incredibly good point. Part of the reason that TAXES should be lower is how much the government squanders the money we already pay.
And the private market is completely honest.
Is bribe money squandered? Baksheesh? Hookers for the visiting suits? Market manipulation?
So what do you think of the earlier poster's claim that it's easy to make a profit, if you don't pay the proper taxes?
Damn straight! Like my father told me in a chat about personal finances:
"Its easy to live like a rich man if you don't pay your bills."
Exactly, and no doubt about it.
But then he added:
"Of course, that's only for a little while."
And that pretty much sums it up. Our unsustainable ecosystem we have built will allow these good folk to make awesome - and defined as perfectly legal - profits. For a little while.
It's easy to make a lot of money if you don't pay the proper taxes.
Sounds like a great reason to lower taxes then. I'd rather make a lot of money for a lot of people, than pay "proper" taxes.
Well yes, you are right. And tax rates would go lower if it wasn't possible to offshore money to evade the taxes. Well,at least for most of us. Obviously the 0% rate some outfits are seeing now would go up.
But whatchya think? Some of these good folk like to make certain they don't pay taxes:
Giving them helpful hints about suckling at the government's teat.
It's a completely unsustainable ecosystem we are setting up, as the combined efforts of salary reduction for most of us are combined with tax avoidance plus directing folks to line up at the government trough so we can pay them as little as possible.
You have to be a slave to the government for half of your life because corporations are permitted to avoid taxation in this manner. If the corporations paid their tax burden and didn't manage to shift profits to other countries, then you wouldn't have to pay nearly so much to maintain the system that they're profiting from far more than you are, and then not paying to maintain.
Perhaps one of the most unsustainable concepts ever invented is corporate offshoring of profits to avoid taxation, while at the same time supply siders demanding pay levels so low as to require the average employee to require government assistance just to live.
Which always leads to the question of how much we can reduce the pay of the "Overpaid American Worker" until we get to the point that is considered proper? And will still allow the same person to buy the shit that is being produced. One of the most bitched up aspects regarding what people who call themselves Capitalists these days have is a complete lack of understanding that they make more money when they have more customers, who are more likely to buy the stuff they are selling if they have money to buy it.
It doesn't take a capitalist, socialist, libertarian, communist, Democrat or Republican, or any other ideology to figure this out. It only takes some really basic math, and not much more.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets say that your proposal is implemented in the full glory that you think it should be, Lauren.
What happens when your crowd starts filtering out content based on what they don't like?
Eventually we would be living in a world where the periodic table of elements would be classified.
That is not even remotely sarcasm. A knowledgable person could look at that and come up with some nasty stuff. So we ban that. Also the knowledge that nasty things can be built, but then we have to make certain people don't understand science.
In other words, this quest for banning things, for shutting the US off from the rest of the world ends up planting us firmly in the dark ages. And not any "safer".
To me Trump's vague statements about shutting some of that down are probably the best thing to run with. I would rather see Great Firewall of America where we largely cut off traffic to and from the rest of the world.
Thank you Kim Il Jung!
Your approach and North Korea's are remarkably identical.
Um - no thanks. if you want to be isolated from the world, move there, not try to turn the US into the best Korea.
They are not way in the east. They have a global presence which is extended further every day. They may even live next door.
Exactly! Right beside the Mexican Rapists that want to take our jerbs, and the chocolate people that want to rape our white wimmin!
I had no Idea that Donald Trump had a Slashdot account!
The news media is the problem. Though you seem to actually have a brain, so keep up the good fight but good luck, you'll need it.
Almost, but not quite.And you do hit right on the issue with the large amount of coverage given to events, and the level of coverage extending to some rather small events.
We're mentally stuck in a small tribe mode. In a world with billions of people in it, bad things will happen somewhere, to someone, every day. But we react as if it's in our neighborhood. I don't have the exact number of people we are mentally adapted to have in our mental "tribes" but recall it was something like 50 could be wrong on that number, but the concept is still there.
So oddly enough, in a country where violence is down, crime is down and murders are down, most people would think just the opposite. When we hear the news, and there was a school shooting somewhere, we automatically assign it to our tribal fringes. So every school shooting happens to our tribe, and we think society is falling apart.
tl;dr version - Our minds haven't caught up with technology yet.
Whilst there are vast differences between Facebook and Slashdot, it would not be remiss to refer to Slashdot as "social media."
Yes, although with a different outlook. I'm on here enough that for better or worse, it is a part of my social life. But for all the warts, its an intellectual mecca by comparison.
I knew enough about Facebook to avoid it, but after my sisters husband passed away, she moved to Florida and suggested that we sign up for Facebook. I passed on it, but signed the wife up. She mostly reads, and her and friends share the pet pix and videos, but the intellectual level is pretty low.
Here at least, we can have spirited discussions, and I get something from most of them.
Hell, I share all sorts of inane shit about the pointless goings on in my life. Others do too.
For instance, your wife uses a laptop with Linux Mint on it and I seem to recall you live in PA. ;-)
Good memory!
Thought part of way people left AOL. Was cause there is a whole lot more out there then AOL could provide. But for some reason lots of people want to go back to a single corner of the internet.
The folks who call their Browser "My Facebook" - Oh who am I kidding, they call their computer My Facebook..
Facebook is the new AOL?
Very much so. I don't use it, but my wife does, ,and the chain letterish crap is just annoying .
Now I use Terminal all the time in OS X, and of course Linux, and so many Windows users think the command line doesn't exist any more. If they ever knew about it in the first place.
Most likely, you are simply an unusual user.
Very possibly. Years ago our head of computer security was a Mac Guru, and took me under his wing. Then a Linux/Mac nerd adopted me, and it was almost like the magic of my Commodore 64 days of computing discovery
However, I do often see the answer to a Mac users' question be "enter this cryptic command into Terminal" and then I laugh and laugh, or usually just sort of smirk because who actually lols all the time over this nerd crap?
I'm guilty.
But seriously, for ages the Mac users were smug upon smug over Windows users having to go to the command line, or having to bang on the registry.
Part of the fun of moving over to Unix, I guess.
Too bad it's super-duper spyware now. I was, no shit, legitimately excited about Windows 10. Not very, but a little bit.
The pity is, the damn OS itself works so well. But the spyware, key logger, and mandatory updates bitching up people's computers really piss me off. There are some serious audio issues in W10 that are making Teamviewer my most used program any more. The user uses the troubleshoot function which says "No problem here sonny!" and the user doesn't believe me when I say ignore the troubleshooter. - some have become pissed even. So it's just easier to use Teamviewer to go in and fix it myself. 100 percent post fix I get a "Huh, you were right".
Now I'm just wondering which Linux distribution I'm going to get excited about next, and happy about the ongoing trend in Linux gaming support. I've got a Windows 7 PC for gaming, and that's working just fine.
7 on my Mac with bootcamp, a W10 machine with nothing on it but the software I have to run, and I really like Mint Cinnamon - evaluating Mate now - for desktops and decent laptops, and Ubuntu for my old Netbook. And Mint is plenty pretty enough as well.
The king of the 3-D look was Apple of course, and interestingly enough, was used by a lot of artist and Illustrators, th elatter of whom know a lot abotu this kind of thing.
I really liked Be's vivid, isomorphic icon style. It was a fad for a moment and then died down, but I miss it. The icons were very clear and easy to see, but also attractive.
I looked it up since I wasn't familiar, and it definitely is vivid with a lot of color. Very cute. And no problem whatsoever with understanding the icons.
"Microsoft Fails Windows Phone Fans (...)"
Is there such a thing as "windows phone fans"?
Ballmers new basketball team. By orders.
I expect similar things are present in a lot of other security products, just that there they are still undiscovered. Criticizing Juniper for this is entirely the wrong reaction.
Hell yeah! Poor Juniper now has to enable another backdoor.
And slashdot is different how?
The only people that are to be blamed for privacy violations on Facebook, are the posters themselves. They continually post inaine amount of shit, such as when they're taking a dump and picking their nose etc. Or posting pics of their meals.
If you don't know the difference between FB and Slashdot, Like this post to 100 others, and you'll recieve free money and blessings direct from God.
Oh - this - so much this! The backlash against skeuomorphics has produced some of the most boring and bland and ucking fugly interfaces seen by humans.
It's like someone said "Good design is a square of a primary color, with a letter in it." To me, the problem is across the board - UI's are getting ugly, like we are returning to Commodore 64 days when there just wasn't enough resolution to make nice looking stuff.
There has been an overreaction, certainly, but that's due to people not listening to the complaints about skeuomorphism.
There's no doubt that some got goofy with it, but abandoning it is like throwing the bby out with the washwater..
The problem with skeuomorphic design is that it ignores the basic principles of what an "icon" is, and how the human brain works. The point is that the gradings and shadings and pseudo-3D projections on Windows XP icons were slower to process cognitively than their Windows 95 equivalents. The trick to a good icon is to find the simplest unambiguous "form" that prototypes the concept to the human brain.
While I won't presume to say the XP icons were good, some attractiveness would be nice. The king of the 3-D look was Apple of course, and interestingly enough, was used by a lot of artist and Illustrators, th elatter of whom know a lot abotu this kind of thing.
And while I'm not always in love with the new icons in OS X, they've retained a little of their 3-D look.
Now the thing about processing icons cognitively. I don't really need to process icons. They are just what I use to access the programs I want. What I want from my desktop is something attractive to look at.
Now we are into an entirely different field of ambiguity. Since I find flat squares with a little text inside soul suckingly boring, and artless, I don't want to look at them. Others might find them beautiful. All a matter of taste.
Correction: those who remember having nothing but a command line are dead or retired.
Well...I'm not dead (yet), but I am close to retirement. And yes, I'm one of those cranky old fucks who remembers having nothing but a command line. I welcomed the advent of the GUI (and still do).
There's a time and a place for the command line and a time and a place for a GUI. And I confess, I think GUIs (when done right) are great 99% of the time. But sometimes a command line is truly da' shizzle, dawg!
Amen. As a user of Unix and Linux, there are times when I really appreciate the Terminal. It does things by hand and instantly.
And over the years, an odd thing has happened. Remember when Mac users were supposedly too dumb to use a command line? Man oh man, DOS was the shitz, and dont you forget it! Now I use Terminal all the time in OS X, and of course Linux, and so many Windows users think the command line doesn't exist any more. If they ever knew about it in the first place.
For example, on a lot of web or graphic design forums, if you even try suggesting that flat design is almost always a bad idea that is built on poorly chosen basic design principles, you have a pretty good chance of being downvoted/modded/censored into oblivion.
Oh - this - so much this! The backlash against skeuomorphics has produced some of the most boring and bland and ucking fugly interfaces seen by humans.
It's like someone said "Good design is a square of a primary color, with a letter in it." To me, the problem is across the board - UI's are getting ugly, like we are returning to Commodore 64 days when there just wasn't enough resolution to make nice looking stuff.
And don't even think about going beyond generic flat design to criticising Apple's recent design efforts or Google's Material Design, because you might as well just hand in your geek card on the spot.
Patience, ABV. Design, like automobiles, goes through periods of massive ugly. And that is exactly where we are at right now. This too shall pass.
Yeah, and anyone who looks up my tax bill will think, "That guy doesn't have anything worth stealing."
Unless you get yourself a little drone.
Please keep her occupied until football season is over. kthx.
Dayum! Freakkin half chewed saltine crackers are all over my keyboard now!
You do realize that we would rather McDonald's and Walmart employ their employees at current wages than not at all. Sure, the public benefits given to employees of these companies is often, erroneously termed a subsidy for the employer. But so what if it were. Isn't the whole point of subsidies to encourage behavior we want?
No - I do not. And that's a mighty fine false dichotomy you make there. If thes fine places paid at some determined level that would enable them to live on their own, it wouldn't cause much harm at all to The company. Yes, prices would go up some, but if you believe Government is inefficient, it would be a net gain.
By the way, we do hear how every time minimum wage goes up it creates unemployment. It therefore must follow that reducing minimum wage will increase employment, until teh minimum wage is eliminataed altogether, and we'll have full employment.
Tl;DR. We've heard this all before. From Trickle down to job creators. You need a new line, the old ones are old.
McDonalds and WalMart aren't actually that awful. I shop at WalMart often enough to know that the stockers and cashiers are mostly the same lower-middle-class folks as the clerks in any other retail outlet.
>/quote> Well that is wonderful. In our area, the last mobile home park closed down last year, and it created a major dillemma for Walmart. In my area no one working at WalMart or any of the local eateries can live within about a 25 mile radius, unless they are being supported by Section 8 housing.
It was bad enough that the WalMart store itself had concerns. Our publictransit system has opened lines going over 30 miles outside of town. Oh. wait. Public transit. Hell, I'm paying part of that too!
The difference is that Big Labor has white-hot hatred for McDonalds and WalMart so there is plenty of off-the-shelf 'information' available to attack McDonalds and WalMart with.
Good lord - and McDonald's has that information on their Website.
But go ahead and believe what the Union Bosses feed you if it seems satisfactory, and gives you a bitmap to shout at in your Five Minute Hates.
Seriously? Union Bosses? 1970 called, and said they want you back, Bing. Unions are about as relevant to 2015 as buggy whips, vbirtua;ly powerless, and certainly broken. Their only use is for your bogeyman target, And my dear Bing, you seem to be spreadinga lot more hatred than me.
All I'm saying is that: 1. Government should not be paying for working people's living.
2. If a person is working full time, they should be able to support themselves. 3. If a person wants to pay people less, so that the Government has to pay to support them, you make a hellava better socialist than I do.
3a. Either that, or they are selfish pricks who doesn't care if they wreck the country as long as they got theirs.
And whereas a lot of folks seem to get Number one, they seem to get a little lost on number two, and completely pissed at their cognitive dissonance when we hit number 3.
And if you still think that Unions are hte problem, you are stuck - way, way, in the past.
Note, I do realize that I piss off peopel who call themselves Cappitalists or conservatives, yet have that creamy center of socialism. And one does not stand up for people paying taxes to support WalMart Workers without being a secret socialist, or even somthing deeper, eh Tovarisch?
"Its easy to live like a rich man if you don't pay your bills."
So you don't actually agree. And what bills really are we speaking of here? Defense contractors? The growing sums of money transferred. reverse Robin Hood-style, from the young poor to elderly rich? Interest payments from people too irresponsible to spend within their means for generations to the banks, foreign countries, and anyone else who holds US bonds and treasuries? Welp, I just specified 80% of the current US government's spending.
And wouldn't it be nice if McDonald's and Walmart payed their employees enough so they didn't have to go with section 8 housing and food stamps?
Those companies have actually - in the name of capitalism, enabled the rest of us, in an exact socialist manner, to pay their employees living expenses. Seriously, what the hell?
We've gotten so far out of kilter with this sort of thing, where trying to enact a living wage is somehow considered socialism, and demanding that the Government make up for wages the corporation doesn't want to pay is considered Capitalism, that the result is hard to describe as anything other than complete opposite speak. Or maybe insanity.
Wouldn't you agree that it would make more sense for a person to be able to pay their own bills instead of having the convoluted business of dealing with the government for them?
The difference is that Apple isn't squandering MY money on hookers or whatever because I have an Android phone. If Samsung's phone quality/hooker ratio dipped too low I could get a phone from Motorola or LG. Or if ALL the Android and Windows Phone manufacturers had unacceptably low hooker/quality ratios, I could get an Apple phone./quote> You most very clearly do not get Corporatism. The hookers, and sometimes the fine blow and with no possible doubt, the baksheesh, is an integral part of operations. Corruption, or "Doing business" is the modus operandi. Do not think you can buy any phone without participation in the game.
Anyone who thinks that private industry is less corrupt than teh evilz guvmint, needs to get a grip.
And if so, here is your poster child - I'll sell you some of thease at a deep discount. http://farm9.staticflickr.com/...
With governments, there's just the government. It doesn't matter how much quality they deliver, you still have to pay for their hookers.
I hate Apple, but this is an incredibly good point. Part of the reason that TAXES should be lower is how much the government squanders the money we already pay.
And the private market is completely honest.
Is bribe money squandered? Baksheesh? Hookers for the visiting suits? Market manipulation?
So what do you think of the earlier poster's claim that it's easy to make a profit, if you don't pay the proper taxes?
Damn straight! Like my father told me in a chat about personal finances :
"Its easy to live like a rich man if you don't pay your bills."
Exactly, and no doubt about it.
But then he added:
"Of course, that's only for a little while."
And that pretty much sums it up. Our unsustainable ecosystem we have built will allow these good folk to make awesome - and defined as perfectly legal - profits. For a little while.
It's easy to make a lot of money if you don't pay the proper taxes.
Sounds like a great reason to lower taxes then. I'd rather make a lot of money for a lot of people, than pay "proper" taxes.
Well yes, you are right. And tax rates would go lower if it wasn't possible to offshore money to evade the taxes. Well ,at least for most of us. Obviously the 0% rate some outfits are seeing now would go up.
But whatchya think? Some of these good folk like to make certain they don't pay taxes:
http://www.world-psi.org/en/go...
While at the same time:
http://consumerist.com/2013/10...
http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/2...
Giving them helpful hints about suckling at the government's teat.
It's a completely unsustainable ecosystem we are setting up, as the combined efforts of salary reduction for most of us are combined with tax avoidance plus directing folks to line up at the government trough so we can pay them as little as possible.
Basic math, no ologys or isms required.
You have to be a slave to the government for half of your life because corporations are permitted to avoid taxation in this manner. If the corporations paid their tax burden and didn't manage to shift profits to other countries, then you wouldn't have to pay nearly so much to maintain the system that they're profiting from far more than you are, and then not paying to maintain.
Perhaps one of the most unsustainable concepts ever invented is corporate offshoring of profits to avoid taxation, while at the same time supply siders demanding pay levels so low as to require the average employee to require government assistance just to live.
Which always leads to the question of how much we can reduce the pay of the "Overpaid American Worker" until we get to the point that is considered proper? And will still allow the same person to buy the shit that is being produced. One of the most bitched up aspects regarding what people who call themselves Capitalists these days have is a complete lack of understanding that they make more money when they have more customers, who are more likely to buy the stuff they are selling if they have money to buy it.
It doesn't take a capitalist, socialist, libertarian, communist, Democrat or Republican, or any other ideology to figure this out. It only takes some really basic math, and not much more.