What the hell does gay marriage have to do with it?
Seriously. I should just keep my yap shut and just mod you flamebait, but I'll bite.
I am sick of dipshits like you asking me to constantly choose between voting for smaller government and the political values I believe in and being a second-class person or else voting for big nanny state government but at least knowing that if my significant other is in the hospital, I'll be able to see him.
I mean, seriously, what the hell is wrong with you dipshits? You're telling me that I can either have small government, which I assume means ending the meaningless war on drugs and terror that are turning us into a police state, or I can get married to the person I love?
No, I'll tell you what the hell you mean by small government. You want a government that tells me what I can and cannot put in my body, from substances that have been used throughout human history safely and are beginning to be recognized as legitimately medically useful to my boyfriend's body parts. You want a government with TSA checkpoints at every airport, railroad station, and probably at every freeway interchange if you had your way. You want "small government" that will dump billions upon billions of dollars into bombing the shit out of third world countries and propping up dictators. You want a border patrol with the right to stop and search anyone, anywhere, anytime solely based on the color of their skin.
Hell, what the hell do I care?
I used to be a Libertarian. I still have a Libertarian keychain I bought four years ago. Let's face it. The Libertarian party isn't going to get into power or be in a position to do jack shit until hell freezes over.
I guess you've convinced me. If voting Democrat will continue legitimizing homosexuality and transgender identities and if voting Democrat might get the gears rolling to respect the people of states who have voted to end marijuana prohibition, I guess I'll vote Democrat.
Because there's sure as hell no way that the Republicans represent anything I even remotely care about. Either way, social security will remain a joke. "Obamacare" (federalized Romneycare) will continue to be a handout to medical "insurance" companies with little hope of real reform. We're going to continue being Team America World Police. The imaginary property crowd will continue gaining clout in Washington, in Redmond, and in Silicon Valley until I'll probably need to register my general-purpose computer without a DRM locked bootloader just the same as a firearm. We're going to continue throwing orders of magnitude more money at pointless wars and "cyber" warfare and "omg the terrirists" than we do at exploring our own solar system and basic scientific research.
But hell. Why the hell not. At least with the Democrats, I might be able to get married, maybe adopt some day, and buy the only substance I've ever used that seems to do jack shit for my anxiety attacks over the counter at any corner Walgreens. (Sorry, I need something more effective than a placebo, so anti-depressants, 5-HTP, St. John's wort, you name it, they're all out. If anything, everything I just listed makes it worse.)
Having Libertarians in power would be great. No more gay marriage and no more straight marriage either! Get the government out of the damned marriage business and separate the legal implications from the religious issues. It's not going to happen, though. The more shit I hear out of Republicans and right-wing nuts like you just makes me wonder whether or not I should vote Democrat for the first time in my life in 2014 and again in '16. (Might be amusing to have another Clinton in the white house, and Billy might just be able to pull off being the first first husband evar.)
I think that GP was arguing that just because it's legalized and in the open doesn't mean it's not corruption, i.e. the laws themselves are corrupt. Perhaps the distorted worship of obscene wealth in the name of some kind of Randian stark individualism that leads to these laws itself is corrupt.
Not to get off topic, but it works the other way around, too. Just because the law says marijuana is a highly addictive and dangerous narcotic with no medical application doesn't make it so. Athough perhaps that's another example of corrupt law. In that particular case though I'd argue the history is more steeped in racism and xenophobia than corruption. ymmv
Fuck. This is one more thing I have to say. In Wrath of Khan, Search for Spock, and Voyage Home, Spock becomes a hero archetype like Gandalf or Jesus. I keep trying to see Kirk as a hero character, but I just can't. Even though he's Kirk and he's supposed to be. But he just isn't.
It's like we need to form some kind of angry mob to kidnap Abrams and make him watch Joseph Campbell documentaries over and over again like in Clockwork Orange.
Note: Read that entire post in the voice of Dr. Girlfriend. Thanks. I won't be here all day, though, because I have to do something to unsee that movie. Even Mega Shark vs. Giant Squid was better than that movie.
My problem with the movie was that it was essentially Wrath of Khan done by Asylum.
I mean, seriously. There are action sequences for no good reason. Basic physics are wrong that I would expect any mediocre "in space" movie to get right like Sunshine or Event Horizon.
I agree with your point about music. Hipsters are incredibly annoying. I'll even go out on a limb. I like Hit Me Baby One More Time because it just has such of a strange post-feminist resignation to female sexuality. I also liked the 2009 movie. Sure, red matter left a lot to be desired, but I didn't complain about all the times main power was rerouted through the deflector dish to emit an anti-dekyon burst at 5 second intevals.
I also agree with other sentiments in this thread that TOS is overrated. While Star Trek II-IV are two masterpieces with a sort of lame film to bridge the middle, my favorite series are TNG, VOY, and ENT. Hell, my favorite captain right now is Janeway followed by Archer. TOS was ok, and it had its moments. However, it was a product of its time, and while progressive at the time, one needs to distance oneself a bit from certain scenes especially concerning women and sexuality.
I guess to get back to my point, Into Darkness really is like watching Asylum remake Wrath of Khan. It opens with what might as well be the last 10 minutes of an episode of a TV show where the Enterprise is sent to survey a planet only to find that it's on the brink of a volcanic ice age (yes, I know, I'm assuming and making shit up because it's never explained how or why that supervolcano will kill all intelligent life on that planet). Afterwards, as I watched the interaction between Pike and Kirk, I thought, ok, this is where the movie takes off. Obviously Kirk has been raised by an abusive stepfather in the alternate timeline, so it makes sense for Pike to fill the vacuum of a male role model to turn Kirk into the man he's destinted to become. But no. Pike's dead in the first half hour. For some fucking reason we have to go to Kronos. Then merely blowing up a few "D4s" is enough to send the entire Empire scurrying away with its tail between its legs. Then we're still in the neutral zone and we're supposed to have some kind of suspense because of how mad and how bad these Klingons are supposed to be. WHERE ARE THEY? THEY NEVER EVEN SHOW UP?!
So, basically, the movie makes no sense on its own terms. It needs you to know that Klingons are a threat and that being inside the neutral zone is serious business. There is no reason for the entire trip to Kronos. The movie could have worked without it.
Then there's the whole remake of Spock's death with the turnabout that it's now Kirk's death. Every time I watch Wrath of Khan, I cry when Spock dies. It's one of the most artistic fantasy death scenes I can think of, next to when Darth Vader dies in Return of the Jedi. Unfortunately, the scene was so forced with such klunky, stupid foreshadowing, that by the time Kirk was dying behind the glass doors, Quinto's Spock was the only one in the WHOLE DAMNED THEATER who was crying.
This film is just simply an abomination. It's ADD explosions every 5 minutes for no damned reason. It's a romantic comedy where the autistic reboot Spock is trying to appease the ever so bitchy reboot Uhura and reboot sex machine zero romance Kirk is caught in the middle.
Then there's Dr. Carol Marcus. I know that she's supposed to be the love interest for Kirk, but how the hell would somebody who didn't remember from Wrath of Khan that they had a child ever divine that from the movie? She's just yet another sexy chick in a long line of "ladies" that Kirk's fucked.
Now, there could have been a plot point. This Kirk obviously has some kind of sex addiction presumably to fill the hole in his life left by being fatherless. But no. Fuck no. Fuck any kind of compelling character development or character depth.
Every single character in Into Darkness is a 1 dimensional sterotype, even Am
Ok, I liked the 2009 film. I've admitted this before. Sure, eech, red matter, but it's not like Star Trek and all its dekyons and chronoton emissions and time travel is strict standard model physics. But, no. Sorry, no. You've lost me J. J.
Please go take a basic physics course if you wish to continue making Star Trek movies. You can have your red matter, but get the fucking basics right. Repeat after me: $f = ma$. $f_g = \frac{Gm_1m_2}{r^2}$. $ma = \frac{Gm_1m_2}{r^2}$. You see that? Let me illustrate. *A Klingon Bird of Prey decloaks off the port bow and fires disruptors with lens flares at the ms on both sides of the equation while the screen is shaking in a completely unnecessary 30 minute action sequence* $a =\textrm{---you're never going to believe this---}\frac{Gm_2}{r^2}$. Holy shit! You know what?! That means your whole fucking scene with the Enterprise falling into the Earth's gravity well from the fucking moon DOESN'T MAKE SENSE Or don't. Fuck. What do I care. Chewbacca is a wookie, but he lives on the planet Endor. This DOES NOT MAKE SENSE!
Oh.. wait.. I hear you're going to do something or other with Chewy and Han and Luke. Well, maybe the Star Wars universe is more up your alley anyway.
I mean... if you managed to make a worse movie than Star Trek 5, that means you can't possibly make a worse movie than Phantom Menace. amirite? guys? guys?
But does this mean that having a female mind and a male reproductive system no longer means that I'm a serial killer who's constructing a woman suit? Does this mean when they scan my brain and find that it's psysiologically more female than male (these things aren't exact) that it just means that I'm a woman, not that I have a mental illness? What would we ever do if not for the DSM V? Thank you DSM V for acknowledging that being a woman is a mental illness!
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Am I supposed to believe that these poll results distinguish Palestine or Muslims from the rest of humanity negatively somehow?
Let me tell you, being transgendered, from over here all the Abrahamaic religions look pretty much the same and pretty much all equally morally bankrupt. Those survey results don't look much different from what I'd expect one would obtain by interviewing local Christians around here. Including things you've identified to attempt to make Islam look regressive by way of being misogynist. Christians around here believe the same things, although they have different clothing than hajibs they believe superstitious things about.
Misogyny runs rampant in Abrahamaic religions. Judiasm, Christianity, and Islam just have different ways of expressing it. At least the one thing all three can agree on is that, drawing from the ancient Greek myth, that it must be a woman who's responsible for all the evils of the world.
Guess what. Most of the world, at different times, has been ruled by different people. What do you think the native inhabitants of this continent [The Americas] might think about their Christian conquerors? At least, the ones that are left to speak.
I'm going to get modded flamebait for this, but I honestly believe it, and I've got the karma to burn. Israel couldn't have done better to take plays out of feminism's playbook. They're always history's perpetual victims. They're always morally perfect. It's all completely bullshit. It's a passive-aggressive appeal to white, male, and German guilt.
Israel has no right to exist. Yes, what happened during the holocaust was terrible, but the answer to evil isn't more evil.
Srsly, I once dated a guy who had food stamps. It was quite the nice budget. It made me wonder what a sucker I was when I was younger scraping by on ramen and working a job.
Nicely played, sir. I got a giggle out of that this morning, especially considering that the Ada Initiative would have given you a creeper card for daring to utter a "rape trigger." Too bad nobody modded you up. I'd mod you up, but you'd need to create a time paradox where I never posted so I could use my mod points.
And yes, I posted before I had my tea. I should have replied to the guy who pointed out that this (among lots and lots of other things) pretty much debunks the myth that grrls and womyn-born-womyn somehow have a difficult time of things in IT with a "hear, hear!"
You're both wrong. I was "gifted" as well. All that status did was alienate me from my peers and increase the difficulty of classes. There is no "gifted" diploma; all you get is the same piece of paper everyone else got. All that being "gifted" did was make something that should have been a breeze for me so I could focus on things that are naturally difficult for me, social interaction, into constant stress.
I pushed myself, took all kinds of AP classes, and for what? So I could have a lower GPA? No, being "gifted" is bunch of hogwash. I could have gotten a 4.0 if I'd taken slacker classes that might have given me a chance to develop a much more important life skill: being social.
Nobody asks for your GPA anyway in a job interview. Nobody cares what classes you took. All they care is that you have a college degree. Nobody gives you a "look at how smrt I am!" degree. You get a degree just like everyone else.
Advanced classes and the "gifted" status are wastes of time given how our society works.
You pay for a degree at a college, and it doesn't matter how you get it. Being "gifted" doesn't bump your resume ahead of anybody else's. Then you get a job, and how much you make has absolutely nothing to do with being "gifted" or which percentile you rank in. Being social instead of being a mentat, though, does matter. So screw the "gifted" status. I would have been better off taking the same damned classes as everyone else and having more friends rather than trying to turn myself into a mentat.
What about the hypocrisy of womyn-born-womyn to complain and bitch that men might have things to say about issues of "women's health" and "my body, my choice" when the womyn-born-womyn presumes that it's perfectly ok to speak authoritatively about issues of men's health?
My genitals were mutilated when I was born, and I suffered greatly. There was searing pain when I was young, and male adolescence was a painful, hellish torture. I nearly killed myself because of the physical pain.
In 2012, you womyn-born-womyn were shouting about how men have no right to speak about women's bodies. Why, then, did the womyn-born-womyn at the American Academy of Pediatrics flip-flop their position on routine infant male genital mutilation? Was it some feminist stunt to tell men, "Haha, I have my body, my choice, but we've already succeeded in painfully mutilating you at birth and cursing you to 19 years of intense physical pain that you even thought was normal for a man!"
No, I'll tell you what it was. When the CDC recommended vaccination of young girls against HPV, you womyn-born-womyn went ballistic. How dare the government give young girls a vaccine against a sexually transmitted disease! How dare the innocence and sexual purity of young girls be questioned!
Yet, why do the womyn-born-womyn of the AAP want male infants mutilated? To protect from sexually transmitted diseases! Even a male infant is a rapist who deserves to be punished by painful mutilation!
What is the name and address of the woman I was punished for raping? Well, what is it. WHO DID I FUCKING RAPE TO DESERVE THAT TORTURE?!
You damned womyn-born-womyn owe every man and trans woman who has suffered from genital mutilation a big fucking explanation for your hypocrisy.
I have been reduced to my body parts and punished for a body part I hate having, that I have against my will at every stage of my life.
How could I ever see you womyn-born-womyn as individuals? You are all guilty, and if the world were just, it would be my right to cut off your clitoris so that you can know genital pain and almost complete loss of sensation except for the sensation of intense pain just as I do and then rape you as payback for all the times I have been presumed and outright called a rapist by you womyn-born-monsters..
So, let me ask you this. How on earth am I supposed to do that when I'm treated as "all men" despite my body parts? How do I do that when I'm required to attend date rape and sexual harassment training on the basis of body parts I might have, things that presume me to be a pig and a rapist merely on the basis of body parts?
There are some things that have happened to recently that made me overhaul my worldview. Firstly, the gall of the womyn-born-womyn at the American Academy of Pediatrics telling men what body parts they should or should not have in the midst of womyn-born-womyn screaming about how inappropriate it was for men to talk about women's health was simply repugnant. Second was the Ada Initiative going around at hacker conventions sexually harassing men with creeper cards threatening violence, culminating in the censorship of a panel on sexuality that would have helped with the kind of harm reduction that the Ada Initiative claimed was the basis for threatening nut shots.
I had to ask myself: I know that womyn-born-womyn consider me to be a man despite all the reasons that's not correct, and instead womyn-born-womyn see me more in the light of Buffalo Bill, merely wearing a woman suit, merely mimicking like John Carpenter's The Thing rather than actually being. I know I am a woman because that's what I am. I can't change it. You can't change it. Feminism can't change it.
I work around women every day who believe that math is for boys only. Not only that, but they believe that math is just a stupid thing boys use to make them feel stupid.
I guess my question for you is how on earth I could ever see womyn-born-womyn as individuals when womyn-born-womyn are hell bent on painting anybody who, in their sole judgement, has some kind of male "stuff" about them as rapists?
How do I treat womyn-born-womyn as individuals when articles like this presume that the problem with women in IT is "all men?" How the hell am I supposed to do anything about the problem when my co-workers are teaching their daughters that math is hard and stupid and when womyn-born-womyn seek to reduce me to a body part I may or may not have and put this insolvable problem in my lap? How do I treat womyn-born-womyn as individuals when they're always screaming for a man to fix their own problems, even when it's a problem that no man and no amount of creeper cards can fix? How can I treat womyn-born-womyn as individuals when they paint me as "all men" and proceed to punish me for their own flaws and when they refuse to take responsibility for their self-made shortcomings?
A womyn-born-womyn is a person who was assigned the female gender at birth. I think at least this includes normal XX people, XY people with severe enough androgen insensitivity, and certain intersexed people. I'm not certain if it would include men assigned the female gender after a circumcision accident, since I'm not certain if the term actually means having the experience of being raised as a girl or if it means having genitals that are apparently female. Clearly, womyn-born-womyn does not include people who seem to be obviously female such as the Korean pop star Harisoo, Julia Serano, or myself (when I'm not having a bad hair day).
More succinctly, it's a term feminists use to exclude trans women.
It seems that womyn-born-womyn just can't handle fields where there are right and wrong answers. They believe that all accomplishment comes from social status alone.
Groups like the Ada Initiative see that womyn-born-womyn can't have the social status of a programmer or engineer (apparently they see something in that social status I'm completely missing) and they want womyn-born-womyn to have that social status as well.
Where are the womyn-born-womyn like Lovelace herself who recognized that one cannot simply expect a computer to do what one means? One must spell it out, step-by-step, mathematical transformation after mathematical transformation.
Post feminist womyn-born-womyn have an entitlement complex. They can't understand that the reason the computer doesn't do what they want it to do is because they've failed in their analysis.
We find that trans women do just fine programming computers, but womyn-born-womyn universally fail. We chalk this up to some kind of sexism. If a womyn-born-womyn fails at something, clearly there must be sexism afoot. Why then can trans women successfully program a computer or set up a computer network? Clearly there's no inherent problem between the ears, since womyn-born-womyn and trans women have the exact same body part between their ears.
The womyn-born-womyn fails because she merely feels entitled to have the computer do what she wants the way trans women and men can.
The feminist response? A trans woman is just Buffalo Bill wearing a woman suit over some kind of inherently "male" stuff and raping the female form. Either that, or trans women like me who are routinely gendered female by others who don't know otherwise, who even find that guys are interested in her, become John Carpenter's The Thing, lurking out in women's bathrooms just waiting for the right moment to shoot out tentacles and rape womyn-born-womyn. And, well, we already knew that all men are rapists. So there's our feminist explanation!
Excuse me while I hook a power generator up to Ada Lovelace. She seems to be spinning in her grave at an impressive rate.
He did it by giving the IT department nut shots and creeper cards every day until they all left. Without any men or trans women to compete with, womyn-born-womyn found they were able to land IT jobs. Obviously.
It even gives me an excuse to not fix co-workers' personal computers for free. "I don't use Windows at home, and I haven't done help desk in ages."
No, seriously. Why?
Linux works for what I want to do. I have a hobby. I don't need everybody in the world to share my hobby to feel good about myself or about my hobby. I don't care what the marketshare of my hobby is. And, there seems to be no shortage of people on the internet with similar hobbies.
I have a phone and a tablet that run Linux, but I don't see either manufacture of either of those devices jumping up and down about how Linux is the kernel, and I don't see anyone pushing for Android/Linux (as opposed to GNU/Linux) to be used instead of just "Android," although I suppose the tablet I'm typing this on would be GNU/Android/Linux.
I guess I just don't get why I should care that Linux has a "stigma?" Is it supposed to reflect on me personally somehow? Stamp collecting has a stigma, too. People still do it.
Most people wouldn't even know or care what to do with a general purpose computer. They're not hobbists, and they just want a way to talk to their friends and families and do things like sharing pictures and arranging get-togethers. All they care about computers is that they're magical boxes that get you to Facebook and Tumblr. They either buy a Windows machine or a Mac if they're feeling hip and trendy, they turn it on, and then they open the internet (you know, that blue E, that's where the internet is) where the places they want to go, like Facebook, are.
Face it. The year of the Linux desktop is here. Just like nobody talks about NT or BSD, nobody's talking about Linux.
Should BSD users feel ashamed that Apple doesn't cry out from the rooftops that OS X is a BSD?
No, the only "stigma" I see here is a news site owned by Dice trying to stir up some social inferiority complex it assumes its nerdy readerbase has (or what's left of it, god only knows why I'm still here).
Really. This stuff did happen to me, my father, two friends and a repairman.
I'm sure it did. As others have pointed out, the point of the exercise is proving it. Can you still go to the house and observe these things? How frequently do these things happen? Did the frequency of these events begin to decrease over time? Would it help stir things up to drag my "misogynist" ass into the house and let me get into full fledged 5 creeper card rant about everything that's wrong with feminism?
If we can pull it off and get conclusive proof of the haunting, there may be a million bucks we could split 50/50, although hauntings may be beyond the scope of Randi's challenge.
However, without proof, you've done little more than given me some creepypasta to my old 4chan creepypasta collection that I revisit every October. So if your post turns up on 4chan with a few exaggerations, I admit it and apologize in advance, you can blame me.
And I know. I've known friends of friends on occasion who claim that such and such place is haunted or that their house is haunted. I want to see a haunting in action, except there's excuse after excuse.
The trouble is that it comes down to "how could it possibly work?" Well, that's no problem for science. Relativity and quantum dynamics come to mind as things that raise the question of "how could it possibly work?" And the answer is "I don't know." And that's an acceptable answer because we know that they do work. No, I've never created a relativistic experiment, and I've never operated a particle collider. GPS works, though, and so do solar powered calculators.
With hauntings, though, what are the rules? How can I know that they do work? How rare are they? What conditions cause a tragedy to turn into a haunting? What can we know about them at all? Can anything be done that will have an effect on them?
Can we predict which acts of violence will become hauntings or at least be able to make good guesses? Obviously not all acts of violence do become hauntings, otherwise there'd be a ghost around every corner.
It seems that in general people who experience hauntings are generally unable to answer those questions in meaningful ways. At least that's been my experience. Perhaps you can provide a better quality answer since you're a scientific person.
When you see 3 inch nails flying across a room, more than once, that sends a message.
Weren't you curious about what could have caused such potentially dangerous things? Did you notice any patterns or telltale events that preceded occurrences?
Where did the nails come from? How fast were they going? Were they aimed at someone or were they flying at a random trajectory? Did they appear to be in a guided flight or had they been thrown?
I guess I'm replying because magical thinking irks me as does superstition. Those things are generally the reason why we can't have nice things. At any rate, I generally don't worry about hauntings since they seem to be allergic to me anyway.
Hi there. I originally wasn't going to respond since I was at work, but I was washing off my woman suit just now and I suddenly had a thought that put me in dispair!
You're absolutely right! We can't just go changing the terms and definitions. I had never thought of it that way before!
I had watched The Silence of the Lambs for the first time earler this week to try to get some tips on how to improve my woman suit. It's already pretty good. Most people who know me outside of work call me "she." I learned the other day that one of the greeters at a Meijer I frequent thinks that I'm a woman, and I didn't even tell her that I was wearing a woman suit!
But that's not all. Then I realized I was in for some big, big trouble. Since I browse/. as AC at work, I get to see all the ads. This site is plastered with attractive young women with large breasts who all want to sell me T-shirts. How do I know they're women? Why, it's obvious! There's only one ad that's a problem. There's a woman from IBM trying to sell something or other (I never pay attention too much to the ads), and she's butt-ugly. Then I remembered your comment. What if I made a mistake? What if he's really a man, too!
How could we ever find out? How do you do it? When you see an ugly woman with a man jaw in public, do you feel her up to make sure before you use a pronoun to refer to him/her? I just realized! That's what the TSA is doing. The TSA is doing a public service! They're sorting out the ugly women from the men with woman suits!
OMG! This is so awful! You know Harisoo who is a Korean pop singer? I JUST REALIZED THAT HE'S A MAN! Oh god! I was jacking off my woman suit to a man ALL THIS TIME!
I think you've got it. I'm in group #2 myself, but know a lot of people in group #1 who make a lot more than me on paper but seem to be only treading water.
Seems like we're headed for "there be dragons here" territory with respect to the debt-slavery I'm watching take hold. What's the point of making 60k or 70k per year if you're working 60 hours per week and struggling to pay rent (which is money flushed down the toilet) and your student loans? The really frightening thing to me is that (and this is either going to blow this comment into +5 insightful or -1 troll territory so here goes).. that some of these people who are struggling making $60k or $70k I know are starting to buy into Fox News tin-foil-hattery. So here's a nod to John Steinbeck's notion of the American voter who sees himself as a temporarily embarassed millionaire.
He asks himself, "Why is it that I'm working more and living worse than my parents when I make more than they did?" Well, obviously it must be welfare queens! ocupiers! liberals! environmentalists! socialists! Anyone who dares to work less than me and live better than me! And it's all Obama's fault!
I think this is an interesting way to get some people from group #1 and group #2 to group #3, but inherently it still creates that problem that group #3 is a class of individuals who have orders of magnitude more wealth than the other groups. It also panders to the notion of meritocracy, the idea that the just world hypothesis holds under "free market" conditions. It fails to address the fundamental problems of putting a price tag on the evaluation that one can read and write (a bachelor's degree these days) and a derelect public education system. The question it raises is one of why the existing methods of venture capital and investment are inadequate and how this intends to scale better than traditional methods.
Ideas such as a basic guaranteed income are appealing, but we find that these ideas are inherently unfair until we've truly entered a post-scarcity society. I may get more liberal the older I get, but I will never cease to be offended by the freeloader. I've known too many folks who have never worked a day in their lives or maybe took a job once but found it to be below them, thus returned to their welfare aristocracy. The only solution to the freeloader is if everybody has the option to become a freeloader so that the labor market would be truly voluntary. Of course, that would require post-scarcity and genetically engineered unicorns.
I guess at any rate, I'm with you. There's a company that's a vendor for my employer. If I could take a year or two hiatus, I could probably put them under. How would I ever prove it to a venture capitalist since I'd need the year or two hiatus to even get a working demo product. Well, so, I've got savings. Why not vacation to a 3rd world island like in that other story? Well, what if it fails? Not even unemployment will help me since presumably I voluntarily left employment to pursue this hiatus. So, the opportunity cost continues to send me back to my day job day after day. That vendor continues to make money off of some spectacularily bad software simply because it's a niche market, and a very un-sexy market at that.
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What the hell does gay marriage have to do with it?
Seriously. I should just keep my yap shut and just mod you flamebait, but I'll bite.
I am sick of dipshits like you asking me to constantly choose between voting for smaller government and the political values I believe in and being a second-class person or else voting for big nanny state government but at least knowing that if my significant other is in the hospital, I'll be able to see him.
I mean, seriously, what the hell is wrong with you dipshits? You're telling me that I can either have small government, which I assume means ending the meaningless war on drugs and terror that are turning us into a police state, or I can get married to the person I love?
No, I'll tell you what the hell you mean by small government. You want a government that tells me what I can and cannot put in my body, from substances that have been used throughout human history safely and are beginning to be recognized as legitimately medically useful to my boyfriend's body parts. You want a government with TSA checkpoints at every airport, railroad station, and probably at every freeway interchange if you had your way. You want "small government" that will dump billions upon billions of dollars into bombing the shit out of third world countries and propping up dictators. You want a border patrol with the right to stop and search anyone, anywhere, anytime solely based on the color of their skin.
Hell, what the hell do I care?
I used to be a Libertarian. I still have a Libertarian keychain I bought four years ago. Let's face it. The Libertarian party isn't going to get into power or be in a position to do jack shit until hell freezes over.
I guess you've convinced me. If voting Democrat will continue legitimizing homosexuality and transgender identities and if voting Democrat might get the gears rolling to respect the people of states who have voted to end marijuana prohibition, I guess I'll vote Democrat.
Because there's sure as hell no way that the Republicans represent anything I even remotely care about. Either way, social security will remain a joke. "Obamacare" (federalized Romneycare) will continue to be a handout to medical "insurance" companies with little hope of real reform. We're going to continue being Team America World Police. The imaginary property crowd will continue gaining clout in Washington, in Redmond, and in Silicon Valley until I'll probably need to register my general-purpose computer without a DRM locked bootloader just the same as a firearm. We're going to continue throwing orders of magnitude more money at pointless wars and "cyber" warfare and "omg the terrirists" than we do at exploring our own solar system and basic scientific research.
But hell. Why the hell not. At least with the Democrats, I might be able to get married, maybe adopt some day, and buy the only substance I've ever used that seems to do jack shit for my anxiety attacks over the counter at any corner Walgreens. (Sorry, I need something more effective than a placebo, so anti-depressants, 5-HTP, St. John's wort, you name it, they're all out. If anything, everything I just listed makes it worse.)
Having Libertarians in power would be great. No more gay marriage and no more straight marriage either! Get the government out of the damned marriage business and separate the legal implications from the religious issues. It's not going to happen, though. The more shit I hear out of Republicans and right-wing nuts like you just makes me wonder whether or not I should vote Democrat for the first time in my life in 2014 and again in '16. (Might be amusing to have another Clinton in the white house, and Billy might just be able to pull off being the first first husband evar.)
I think that GP was arguing that just because it's legalized and in the open doesn't mean it's not corruption, i.e. the laws themselves are corrupt. Perhaps the distorted worship of obscene wealth in the name of some kind of Randian stark individualism that leads to these laws itself is corrupt.
Not to get off topic, but it works the other way around, too. Just because the law says marijuana is a highly addictive and dangerous narcotic with no medical application doesn't make it so. Athough perhaps that's another example of corrupt law. In that particular case though I'd argue the history is more steeped in racism and xenophobia than corruption. ymmv
Fuck. This is one more thing I have to say. In Wrath of Khan, Search for Spock, and Voyage Home, Spock becomes a hero archetype like Gandalf or Jesus. I keep trying to see Kirk as a hero character, but I just can't. Even though he's Kirk and he's supposed to be. But he just isn't. It's like we need to form some kind of angry mob to kidnap Abrams and make him watch Joseph Campbell documentaries over and over again like in Clockwork Orange.
Note: Read that entire post in the voice of Dr. Girlfriend. Thanks. I won't be here all day, though, because I have to do something to unsee that movie. Even Mega Shark vs. Giant Squid was better than that movie.
Ok, I'll bite.
My problem with the movie was that it was essentially Wrath of Khan done by Asylum.
I mean, seriously. There are action sequences for no good reason. Basic physics are wrong that I would expect any mediocre "in space" movie to get right like Sunshine or Event Horizon.
I agree with your point about music. Hipsters are incredibly annoying. I'll even go out on a limb. I like Hit Me Baby One More Time because it just has such of a strange post-feminist resignation to female sexuality. I also liked the 2009 movie. Sure, red matter left a lot to be desired, but I didn't complain about all the times main power was rerouted through the deflector dish to emit an anti-dekyon burst at 5 second intevals.
I also agree with other sentiments in this thread that TOS is overrated. While Star Trek II-IV are two masterpieces with a sort of lame film to bridge the middle, my favorite series are TNG, VOY, and ENT. Hell, my favorite captain right now is Janeway followed by Archer. TOS was ok, and it had its moments. However, it was a product of its time, and while progressive at the time, one needs to distance oneself a bit from certain scenes especially concerning women and sexuality.
I guess to get back to my point, Into Darkness really is like watching Asylum remake Wrath of Khan. It opens with what might as well be the last 10 minutes of an episode of a TV show where the Enterprise is sent to survey a planet only to find that it's on the brink of a volcanic ice age (yes, I know, I'm assuming and making shit up because it's never explained how or why that supervolcano will kill all intelligent life on that planet). Afterwards, as I watched the interaction between Pike and Kirk, I thought, ok, this is where the movie takes off. Obviously Kirk has been raised by an abusive stepfather in the alternate timeline, so it makes sense for Pike to fill the vacuum of a male role model to turn Kirk into the man he's destinted to become. But no. Pike's dead in the first half hour. For some fucking reason we have to go to Kronos. Then merely blowing up a few "D4s" is enough to send the entire Empire scurrying away with its tail between its legs. Then we're still in the neutral zone and we're supposed to have some kind of suspense because of how mad and how bad these Klingons are supposed to be. WHERE ARE THEY? THEY NEVER EVEN SHOW UP?!
So, basically, the movie makes no sense on its own terms. It needs you to know that Klingons are a threat and that being inside the neutral zone is serious business. There is no reason for the entire trip to Kronos. The movie could have worked without it.
Then there's the whole remake of Spock's death with the turnabout that it's now Kirk's death. Every time I watch Wrath of Khan, I cry when Spock dies. It's one of the most artistic fantasy death scenes I can think of, next to when Darth Vader dies in Return of the Jedi. Unfortunately, the scene was so forced with such klunky, stupid foreshadowing, that by the time Kirk was dying behind the glass doors, Quinto's Spock was the only one in the WHOLE DAMNED THEATER who was crying.
This film is just simply an abomination. It's ADD explosions every 5 minutes for no damned reason. It's a romantic comedy where the autistic reboot Spock is trying to appease the ever so bitchy reboot Uhura and reboot sex machine zero romance Kirk is caught in the middle.
Then there's Dr. Carol Marcus. I know that she's supposed to be the love interest for Kirk, but how the hell would somebody who didn't remember from Wrath of Khan that they had a child ever divine that from the movie? She's just yet another sexy chick in a long line of "ladies" that Kirk's fucked.
Now, there could have been a plot point. This Kirk obviously has some kind of sex addiction presumably to fill the hole in his life left by being fatherless. But no. Fuck no. Fuck any kind of compelling character development or character depth.
Every single character in Into Darkness is a 1 dimensional sterotype, even Am
Ok, I liked the 2009 film. I've admitted this before. Sure, eech, red matter, but it's not like Star Trek and all its dekyons and chronoton emissions and time travel is strict standard model physics. But, no. Sorry, no. You've lost me J. J.
Please go take a basic physics course if you wish to continue making Star Trek movies. You can have your red matter, but get the fucking basics right. Repeat after me: $f = ma$. $f_g = \frac{Gm_1m_2}{r^2}$. $ma = \frac{Gm_1m_2}{r^2}$. You see that? Let me illustrate. *A Klingon Bird of Prey decloaks off the port bow and fires disruptors with lens flares at the ms on both sides of the equation while the screen is shaking in a completely unnecessary 30 minute action sequence* $a =\textrm{---you're never going to believe this---}\frac{Gm_2}{r^2}$. Holy shit! You know what?! That means your whole fucking scene with the Enterprise falling into the Earth's gravity well from the fucking moon DOESN'T MAKE SENSE Or don't. Fuck. What do I care. Chewbacca is a wookie, but he lives on the planet Endor. This DOES NOT MAKE SENSE!
Oh.. wait.. I hear you're going to do something or other with Chewy and Han and Luke. Well, maybe the Star Wars universe is more up your alley anyway.
I mean... if you managed to make a worse movie than Star Trek 5, that means you can't possibly make a worse movie than Phantom Menace. amirite? guys? guys?
But does this mean that having a female mind and a male reproductive system no longer means that I'm a serial killer who's constructing a woman suit? Does this mean when they scan my brain and find that it's psysiologically more female than male (these things aren't exact) that it just means that I'm a woman, not that I have a mental illness? What would we ever do if not for the DSM V? Thank you DSM V for acknowledging that being a woman is a mental illness! This post brought to you by b33r.
Am I supposed to believe that these poll results distinguish Palestine or Muslims from the rest of humanity negatively somehow?
Let me tell you, being transgendered, from over here all the Abrahamaic religions look pretty much the same and pretty much all equally morally bankrupt. Those survey results don't look much different from what I'd expect one would obtain by interviewing local Christians around here. Including things you've identified to attempt to make Islam look regressive by way of being misogynist. Christians around here believe the same things, although they have different clothing than hajibs they believe superstitious things about.
Misogyny runs rampant in Abrahamaic religions. Judiasm, Christianity, and Islam just have different ways of expressing it. At least the one thing all three can agree on is that, drawing from the ancient Greek myth, that it must be a woman who's responsible for all the evils of the world.
Guess what. Most of the world, at different times, has been ruled by different people. What do you think the native inhabitants of this continent [The Americas] might think about their Christian conquerors? At least, the ones that are left to speak.
I'm going to get modded flamebait for this, but I honestly believe it, and I've got the karma to burn. Israel couldn't have done better to take plays out of feminism's playbook. They're always history's perpetual victims. They're always morally perfect. It's all completely bullshit. It's a passive-aggressive appeal to white, male, and German guilt.
Israel has no right to exist. Yes, what happened during the holocaust was terrible, but the answer to evil isn't more evil.
Mod parent up. That is all.
Who are they?
Srsly, I once dated a guy who had food stamps. It was quite the nice budget. It made me wonder what a sucker I was when I was younger scraping by on ramen and working a job.
Oh wow. Excellent troll, sir. Appeal to authority and the whole nine yards.
*rummages around*
I know I've got some mod points around here somewhere.
but srsly
Unless you think they were all paid off by Bayer...
That's EXACTLY what we're suspecting.
Nicely played, sir. I got a giggle out of that this morning, especially considering that the Ada Initiative would have given you a creeper card for daring to utter a "rape trigger." Too bad nobody modded you up. I'd mod you up, but you'd need to create a time paradox where I never posted so I could use my mod points.
And yes, I posted before I had my tea. I should have replied to the guy who pointed out that this (among lots and lots of other things) pretty much debunks the myth that grrls and womyn-born-womyn somehow have a difficult time of things in IT with a "hear, hear!"
Zomg! Why didn't I think of that. I was taking estrogen when I was 19...
er...
shoot. Apparently you have to be a womyn-born-womyn.
You're both wrong. I was "gifted" as well. All that status did was alienate me from my peers and increase the difficulty of classes. There is no "gifted" diploma; all you get is the same piece of paper everyone else got. All that being "gifted" did was make something that should have been a breeze for me so I could focus on things that are naturally difficult for me, social interaction, into constant stress.
I pushed myself, took all kinds of AP classes, and for what? So I could have a lower GPA? No, being "gifted" is bunch of hogwash. I could have gotten a 4.0 if I'd taken slacker classes that might have given me a chance to develop a much more important life skill: being social.
Nobody asks for your GPA anyway in a job interview. Nobody cares what classes you took. All they care is that you have a college degree. Nobody gives you a "look at how smrt I am!" degree. You get a degree just like everyone else.
Advanced classes and the "gifted" status are wastes of time given how our society works.
You pay for a degree at a college, and it doesn't matter how you get it. Being "gifted" doesn't bump your resume ahead of anybody else's. Then you get a job, and how much you make has absolutely nothing to do with being "gifted" or which percentile you rank in. Being social instead of being a mentat, though, does matter. So screw the "gifted" status. I would have been better off taking the same damned classes as everyone else and having more friends rather than trying to turn myself into a mentat.
What about the hypocrisy of womyn-born-womyn to complain and bitch that men might have things to say about issues of "women's health" and "my body, my choice" when the womyn-born-womyn presumes that it's perfectly ok to speak authoritatively about issues of men's health?
My genitals were mutilated when I was born, and I suffered greatly. There was searing pain when I was young, and male adolescence was a painful, hellish torture. I nearly killed myself because of the physical pain.
In 2012, you womyn-born-womyn were shouting about how men have no right to speak about women's bodies. Why, then, did the womyn-born-womyn at the American Academy of Pediatrics flip-flop their position on routine infant male genital mutilation? Was it some feminist stunt to tell men, "Haha, I have my body, my choice, but we've already succeeded in painfully mutilating you at birth and cursing you to 19 years of intense physical pain that you even thought was normal for a man!"
No, I'll tell you what it was. When the CDC recommended vaccination of young girls against HPV, you womyn-born-womyn went ballistic. How dare the government give young girls a vaccine against a sexually transmitted disease! How dare the innocence and sexual purity of young girls be questioned!
Yet, why do the womyn-born-womyn of the AAP want male infants mutilated? To protect from sexually transmitted diseases! Even a male infant is a rapist who deserves to be punished by painful mutilation!
What is the name and address of the woman I was punished for raping? Well, what is it. WHO DID I FUCKING RAPE TO DESERVE THAT TORTURE?!
You damned womyn-born-womyn owe every man and trans woman who has suffered from genital mutilation a big fucking explanation for your hypocrisy.
I have been reduced to my body parts and punished for a body part I hate having, that I have against my will at every stage of my life.
How could I ever see you womyn-born-womyn as individuals? You are all guilty, and if the world were just, it would be my right to cut off your clitoris so that you can know genital pain and almost complete loss of sensation except for the sensation of intense pain just as I do and then rape you as payback for all the times I have been presumed and outright called a rapist by you womyn-born-monsters..
Some of us would rather live in a just world, not some macho fantasy.
So, let me ask you this. How on earth am I supposed to do that when I'm treated as "all men" despite my body parts? How do I do that when I'm required to attend date rape and sexual harassment training on the basis of body parts I might have, things that presume me to be a pig and a rapist merely on the basis of body parts?
There are some things that have happened to recently that made me overhaul my worldview. Firstly, the gall of the womyn-born-womyn at the American Academy of Pediatrics telling men what body parts they should or should not have in the midst of womyn-born-womyn screaming about how inappropriate it was for men to talk about women's health was simply repugnant. Second was the Ada Initiative going around at hacker conventions sexually harassing men with creeper cards threatening violence, culminating in the censorship of a panel on sexuality that would have helped with the kind of harm reduction that the Ada Initiative claimed was the basis for threatening nut shots.
I had to ask myself: I know that womyn-born-womyn consider me to be a man despite all the reasons that's not correct, and instead womyn-born-womyn see me more in the light of Buffalo Bill, merely wearing a woman suit, merely mimicking like John Carpenter's The Thing rather than actually being. I know I am a woman because that's what I am. I can't change it. You can't change it. Feminism can't change it.
I work around women every day who believe that math is for boys only. Not only that, but they believe that math is just a stupid thing boys use to make them feel stupid.
I guess my question for you is how on earth I could ever see womyn-born-womyn as individuals when womyn-born-womyn are hell bent on painting anybody who, in their sole judgement, has some kind of male "stuff" about them as rapists?
How do I treat womyn-born-womyn as individuals when articles like this presume that the problem with women in IT is "all men?" How the hell am I supposed to do anything about the problem when my co-workers are teaching their daughters that math is hard and stupid and when womyn-born-womyn seek to reduce me to a body part I may or may not have and put this insolvable problem in my lap? How do I treat womyn-born-womyn as individuals when they're always screaming for a man to fix their own problems, even when it's a problem that no man and no amount of creeper cards can fix? How can I treat womyn-born-womyn as individuals when they paint me as "all men" and proceed to punish me for their own flaws and when they refuse to take responsibility for their self-made shortcomings?
A womyn-born-womyn is a person who was assigned the female gender at birth. I think at least this includes normal XX people, XY people with severe enough androgen insensitivity, and certain intersexed people. I'm not certain if it would include men assigned the female gender after a circumcision accident, since I'm not certain if the term actually means having the experience of being raised as a girl or if it means having genitals that are apparently female. Clearly, womyn-born-womyn does not include people who seem to be obviously female such as the Korean pop star Harisoo, Julia Serano, or myself (when I'm not having a bad hair day).
More succinctly, it's a term feminists use to exclude trans women.
if there was one available.
This. A million times this.
It seems that womyn-born-womyn just can't handle fields where there are right and wrong answers. They believe that all accomplishment comes from social status alone.
Groups like the Ada Initiative see that womyn-born-womyn can't have the social status of a programmer or engineer (apparently they see something in that social status I'm completely missing) and they want womyn-born-womyn to have that social status as well.
Where are the womyn-born-womyn like Lovelace herself who recognized that one cannot simply expect a computer to do what one means? One must spell it out, step-by-step, mathematical transformation after mathematical transformation.
Post feminist womyn-born-womyn have an entitlement complex. They can't understand that the reason the computer doesn't do what they want it to do is because they've failed in their analysis.
We find that trans women do just fine programming computers, but womyn-born-womyn universally fail. We chalk this up to some kind of sexism. If a womyn-born-womyn fails at something, clearly there must be sexism afoot. Why then can trans women successfully program a computer or set up a computer network? Clearly there's no inherent problem between the ears, since womyn-born-womyn and trans women have the exact same body part between their ears.
The womyn-born-womyn fails because she merely feels entitled to have the computer do what she wants the way trans women and men can.
The feminist response? A trans woman is just Buffalo Bill wearing a woman suit over some kind of inherently "male" stuff and raping the female form. Either that, or trans women like me who are routinely gendered female by others who don't know otherwise, who even find that guys are interested in her, become John Carpenter's The Thing, lurking out in women's bathrooms just waiting for the right moment to shoot out tentacles and rape womyn-born-womyn. And, well, we already knew that all men are rapists. So there's our feminist explanation!
Excuse me while I hook a power generator up to Ada Lovelace. She seems to be spinning in her grave at an impressive rate.
He did it by giving the IT department nut shots and creeper cards every day until they all left. Without any men or trans women to compete with, womyn-born-womyn found they were able to land IT jobs. Obviously.
But... but... why do we care?
It even gives me an excuse to not fix co-workers' personal computers for free. "I don't use Windows at home, and I haven't done help desk in ages."
No, seriously. Why?
Linux works for what I want to do. I have a hobby. I don't need everybody in the world to share my hobby to feel good about myself or about my hobby. I don't care what the marketshare of my hobby is. And, there seems to be no shortage of people on the internet with similar hobbies.
I have a phone and a tablet that run Linux, but I don't see either manufacture of either of those devices jumping up and down about how Linux is the kernel, and I don't see anyone pushing for Android/Linux (as opposed to GNU/Linux) to be used instead of just "Android," although I suppose the tablet I'm typing this on would be GNU/Android/Linux.
I guess I just don't get why I should care that Linux has a "stigma?" Is it supposed to reflect on me personally somehow? Stamp collecting has a stigma, too. People still do it.
Most people wouldn't even know or care what to do with a general purpose computer. They're not hobbists, and they just want a way to talk to their friends and families and do things like sharing pictures and arranging get-togethers. All they care about computers is that they're magical boxes that get you to Facebook and Tumblr. They either buy a Windows machine or a Mac if they're feeling hip and trendy, they turn it on, and then they open the internet (you know, that blue E, that's where the internet is) where the places they want to go, like Facebook, are.
Face it. The year of the Linux desktop is here. Just like nobody talks about NT or BSD, nobody's talking about Linux.
Should BSD users feel ashamed that Apple doesn't cry out from the rooftops that OS X is a BSD?
No, the only "stigma" I see here is a news site owned by Dice trying to stir up some social inferiority complex it assumes its nerdy readerbase has (or what's left of it, god only knows why I'm still here).
Damn it. My mod points expired yesterday. Will somebody else do the +1 honors, please?
Really. This stuff did happen to me, my father, two friends and a repairman.
I'm sure it did. As others have pointed out, the point of the exercise is proving it. Can you still go to the house and observe these things? How frequently do these things happen? Did the frequency of these events begin to decrease over time? Would it help stir things up to drag my "misogynist" ass into the house and let me get into full fledged 5 creeper card rant about everything that's wrong with feminism?
If we can pull it off and get conclusive proof of the haunting, there may be a million bucks we could split 50/50, although hauntings may be beyond the scope of Randi's challenge. However, without proof, you've done little more than given me some creepypasta to my old 4chan creepypasta collection that I revisit every October. So if your post turns up on 4chan with a few exaggerations, I admit it and apologize in advance, you can blame me.
And I know. I've known friends of friends on occasion who claim that such and such place is haunted or that their house is haunted. I want to see a haunting in action, except there's excuse after excuse.
The trouble is that it comes down to "how could it possibly work?" Well, that's no problem for science. Relativity and quantum dynamics come to mind as things that raise the question of "how could it possibly work?" And the answer is "I don't know." And that's an acceptable answer because we know that they do work. No, I've never created a relativistic experiment, and I've never operated a particle collider. GPS works, though, and so do solar powered calculators.
With hauntings, though, what are the rules? How can I know that they do work? How rare are they? What conditions cause a tragedy to turn into a haunting? What can we know about them at all? Can anything be done that will have an effect on them?
Can we predict which acts of violence will become hauntings or at least be able to make good guesses? Obviously not all acts of violence do become hauntings, otherwise there'd be a ghost around every corner.
It seems that in general people who experience hauntings are generally unable to answer those questions in meaningful ways. At least that's been my experience. Perhaps you can provide a better quality answer since you're a scientific person.
When you see 3 inch nails flying across a room, more than once, that sends a message.
Weren't you curious about what could have caused such potentially dangerous things? Did you notice any patterns or telltale events that preceded occurrences? Where did the nails come from? How fast were they going? Were they aimed at someone or were they flying at a random trajectory? Did they appear to be in a guided flight or had they been thrown?
I guess I'm replying because magical thinking irks me as does superstition. Those things are generally the reason why we can't have nice things. At any rate, I generally don't worry about hauntings since they seem to be allergic to me anyway.
Hi there. I originally wasn't going to respond since I was at work, but I was washing off my woman suit just now and I suddenly had a thought that put me in dispair!
You're absolutely right! We can't just go changing the terms and definitions. I had never thought of it that way before!
I had watched The Silence of the Lambs for the first time earler this week to try to get some tips on how to improve my woman suit. It's already pretty good. Most people who know me outside of work call me "she." I learned the other day that one of the greeters at a Meijer I frequent thinks that I'm a woman, and I didn't even tell her that I was wearing a woman suit!
But that's not all. Then I realized I was in for some big, big trouble. Since I browse /. as AC at work, I get to see all the ads. This site is plastered with attractive young women with large breasts who all want to sell me T-shirts. How do I know they're women? Why, it's obvious! There's only one ad that's a problem. There's a woman from IBM trying to sell something or other (I never pay attention too much to the ads), and she's butt-ugly. Then I remembered your comment. What if I made a mistake? What if he's really a man, too!
How could we ever find out? How do you do it? When you see an ugly woman with a man jaw in public, do you feel her up to make sure before you use a pronoun to refer to him/her? I just realized! That's what the TSA is doing. The TSA is doing a public service! They're sorting out the ugly women from the men with woman suits!
OMG! This is so awful! You know Harisoo who is a Korean pop singer? I JUST REALIZED THAT HE'S A MAN! Oh god! I was jacking off my woman suit to a man ALL THIS TIME!
whatdoidowhatsdoidowhatdoido?!?!?!?!
I think you've got it. I'm in group #2 myself, but know a lot of people in group #1 who make a lot more than me on paper but seem to be only treading water.
Seems like we're headed for "there be dragons here" territory with respect to the debt-slavery I'm watching take hold. What's the point of making 60k or 70k per year if you're working 60 hours per week and struggling to pay rent (which is money flushed down the toilet) and your student loans? The really frightening thing to me is that (and this is either going to blow this comment into +5 insightful or -1 troll territory so here goes).. that some of these people who are struggling making $60k or $70k I know are starting to buy into Fox News tin-foil-hattery. So here's a nod to John Steinbeck's notion of the American voter who sees himself as a temporarily embarassed millionaire.
He asks himself, "Why is it that I'm working more and living worse than my parents when I make more than they did?" Well, obviously it must be welfare queens! ocupiers! liberals! environmentalists! socialists! Anyone who dares to work less than me and live better than me! And it's all Obama's fault!
I think this is an interesting way to get some people from group #1 and group #2 to group #3, but inherently it still creates that problem that group #3 is a class of individuals who have orders of magnitude more wealth than the other groups. It also panders to the notion of meritocracy, the idea that the just world hypothesis holds under "free market" conditions. It fails to address the fundamental problems of putting a price tag on the evaluation that one can read and write (a bachelor's degree these days) and a derelect public education system. The question it raises is one of why the existing methods of venture capital and investment are inadequate and how this intends to scale better than traditional methods.
Ideas such as a basic guaranteed income are appealing, but we find that these ideas are inherently unfair until we've truly entered a post-scarcity society. I may get more liberal the older I get, but I will never cease to be offended by the freeloader. I've known too many folks who have never worked a day in their lives or maybe took a job once but found it to be below them, thus returned to their welfare aristocracy. The only solution to the freeloader is if everybody has the option to become a freeloader so that the labor market would be truly voluntary. Of course, that would require post-scarcity and genetically engineered unicorns.
I guess at any rate, I'm with you. There's a company that's a vendor for my employer. If I could take a year or two hiatus, I could probably put them under. How would I ever prove it to a venture capitalist since I'd need the year or two hiatus to even get a working demo product. Well, so, I've got savings. Why not vacation to a 3rd world island like in that other story? Well, what if it fails? Not even unemployment will help me since presumably I voluntarily left employment to pursue this hiatus. So, the opportunity cost continues to send me back to my day job day after day. That vendor continues to make money off of some spectacularily bad software simply because it's a niche market, and a very un-sexy market at that.
What's the solution? Who knows.