>Let them adjust themselves to society and not the inverse.
And right until there I almost had sympathy with you DESPITE rampantly disagreeing with your entire approach. Progress by definition occurs ONLY when we adjust society to suit ourselves, adjusting to suit the existing status quo can ONLY perpetuate said status quo. That is pretty much never a good thing. Remember -call to tradition is a falacy.
Now just in case you care... here's why I don't even agree with your basic post anyway. The whole PROBLEM is that teachers keep trying to teach discipline - same old 18th century German mentality. Let's make good little soldiers and factory workers who do as they are told... and it's the WORST thing schools can do.
We don't NEED disciplined people in society, if anything, we have too FEW people who QUESTION the rules, the systems - who think critically and try to IMPROVE things.
What we need is students who were taught SELF discipline. If you teach kids "Do as you're told or bad things happen" (translation of your words: 'actions with consequences') then all you are teaching them is "don't get caught." If you teach them "do the right thing, because it is right" - then you're creating kids who will (nearly) always choose to DO the right thing, even when it's hard and there's no chance of getting caught.
I was raised that way, so was all my siblings, we're all highly successful and there are a couple of PHD's in the family. Several asian school systems ran like that for thousands of years before the German-inspired system of today even existed.
It works - it has a history of working, and it doesn't create mindless drones when what we NEED above all today are people who can think for themselves.
Actually - it wasn't libel. The Jerry Fallwell case against Hustler failed on EXACTLY these grounds. Fundamental to the law is that "if there is no reasonable chance that anybody would take the claims seriously - the jury is REQUIRED to find the publisher INNOCENT."
It is ONLY possible to be guilty of libel if the people familiar with the target would reasonably BELIEVE the claims. Since the school board themselves have testified that "nobody took the claims seriously" - it is therefore absolutely NOT libel.
I don't LIKE the nature of this parody, but it IS in fact protected parody under U.S. law and the student acted entirely within her first amendment rights.
The license isn't what matters -the moreso because you can download the game for free from their website. You do however pay for server access, that is - you agree to a contract. Why bring the license into it? They don't NEED copyright for this. BESIDES the copyright which only affects copying after all, you have to agree to a contract for their services. Don't like the contract, don't sign it. You agree to a service contract with any service provider from the plumber to the phone company - and any clause in there that you sign you're bound to.
Glider violates the contract. I think making this about the license would be stupid of Blizzard, so I tend to assume the article is written wrongly. I'm massively opposed to EULA style "use copyright to enforce an unfair license" - but this isn't even IN the EULA. The ToS is a seperate contract, related to your right to access the server, not to use the software.
I doubt very much that Blizzard wouldn't play it that way.
>I am not trying to claim that these games will ever be as "successful" (read: profitable) as World of Warcraft, but I would say they far more closely approach video-games-as-art.
I'm not so sure, there's a depth of emotion in WoW that they lack... they are purely intellectual leisure... WoW gets you emotionally involved. Example - when I did the Pamela Redpath questline... that's when I started to genuinely HATE Arthas... quite an extreme emotion to be feeling for a fictional character. I wanted to cry over that little girl. Now THAT is art.
Having an open wifi is more like shagging your girlfriend against the window with the curtains open... you can't complain about privacy if the neighbours watch you do her when you do it in plain sight.
If exhibitionism is NOT your thing... encrypt your damn wifi.
You do realize that significant numbers of browsers share the same layout engines ? So if your site works in the layout engine - it will work with *all* the browsers that support it (give or take a tiny bit). For example Google-chrome and Safari both use a variant of the KHTML engine (known as WebKIT - KTHML itself is used by Konqueror and several related KDE projectS), as does any embedded browser using default QT4 features. There are literally dozens of browsers that use the gecko engine from firefox. In fact... seems just about the only two browsers that do not use engines shared with multiple other projects (and thus benefiting from that wide developer pool) is IE and Opera.
Take it a step further - some browsers have CHANGED engines during the lifetimes - the latest version of galleon for example was using Gecko for it's entire existence but switched to WebKIT with the latest release. This means that if your site is gecko compliant but not WebKIT compliant, then you cannot claim it's supported by Galleon - it used to be, it isn't anymore. Or the other way around, a site that is WebKIT friendly but no Gecko friendly would not have this support where it didn't exist before.
In short - for a web developer, yes it really IS the engine that matters, not the name of the application that uses it.
Congratulations. Now you can start critically doubting what you were taught, and doing so informedly. That's never a bad a thing.
>>That is a nice theory... too bad it never works. The employee promoted to management just never happens, which is why so many employees are overseen by incompetent managers. Nearly all managers START OUT as managers - with an MBA or related degree instead... and even they will still be on the losing side of salary scales.
>Did you catch the part about continuing education? I have an associates and am working on my bachelor's. I've been working for quite a few years at this point. Mom didn't get her bachelor's until she was in her 40's.
Good for you... and do you expect to be C.E.O. of your company one day ? Maybe when you're 60 ? Didn't think so. Well here's the truth... the odds of you even becoming a director are hundreds-to-one against. Why ? Because there's a LOT of people at any low level of an organisation - most of them working hard and studying for the dream of 'advancement' - but there is an order of magnitude LESS positions in middle management and and another order of magnitude less in upper management. The vast majority has no hope of ever advancing. They aren't psychophathically greedy enough to be good directors anyway. The psychpaths who DO become directors never pass through the middle ranks first. Hell most of them spend less than a year at the bottom because directors aren't chosen for skills, they are chosen for utter lack of conscience. There are some very good studies out there about this, and if you'd like the same facts in a more fun presentation... I give you Dilbert.
>>The rich people don't even pretend otherwise. Hell in "rich dad poor dad" he explicitely states that production is a doomed means of wealth generation - you don't get rich by making things, you get rich by NOT making things, by not producing and certainly by not producing quality. The only way to actually gain WEALTH is to "let your money work for you"... to literally (the system is described in detail) live off your assets - not by creating anything.
>Indeed - that's why later on I mentioned making 'paper shuffling' more expensive, IE more marginal means of making money. 'Traditional' asset and investment management is indeed a positive, contributing career path, because you're helping to ensure that the most potentially profitable, the most likely to succeed business ventures get funded.
So now you're regulating the market - and hoping to regulate that section with by far the most current cash, and thus political clout. It's just not going to happen, and no amount of regulation will really change the fact that arbitrage always pays more than production - it's a fundamental flaw in the capitalist structures. To change it, you have to move away from capitalism alltogether. By all means, learn from it the things that WORK - competition is good, rewarding effort and innovation is good. Who the hell says the only way to do it is with a ladder made of the backs of your fellow man ? It's incredibly uninformed to imagine that there is only two ways an economy could work... there are infinite many possibilities we've never even written down let alone tried. Statistically, almost any of them could be better than this... hell BARTER TRADE would be better than modern capitalism in some ways (it has no ability for arbitrage for one). The people with a vested interest in the system will never easily let it be changed to benefit more people. That's human nature, doesn't mean we should let them get their way - and it certainly doesn't mean we should believe a word they say.
>>They make more money out of property rental in a day than all the hamburgers they've sold have made in 30 years.
>Source?
Same as the entire paragraph: Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Which in turn quotes Kroch as saying exactly that when he addressed a gro
>And the England of Charles Dickens progressed to the England of today.
Despite, not because off. More importantly - the (very violent) transition AWAY from that system in the west established as a basic inalienable human right the idea of a fair wage for a fair job, and free labor (meaning the right to quit and find a better job if you want).These basic rights are not recognized, enforced or or available to those Chinese workers anymore than the right to freedom of thought is. Such a system of oppression according to history is inherently unstable and always fails -usually violently. Do you really think everybody in China will drink that mandate-of-heaven kool-aid for EVER ?
>Thing about sweatshops in China and such is that, believe it or not, they're actually better than the alternatives the workers there would otherwise have. To the point that they'll fight you to KEEP that sweatshop job.
I've heard that rationalization before. It's bullshit. Subsistence farmers are BETTER off than sweatshop workers, have a higher life expectancy and a LOT more freedom. I'm sorry, when you have to PISS in a plastic bag because you don't have the right to take a bathroom break - you have EARNED the right to protest for better conditions - and it's only a matter of time before they do. The truth is much closer to what did happen in England. People leave their poor but decent lives in the countryside on false promises of wealth in the big city - only to live in squalor - too ashamed to go home. Many times - they don't even get as FAR as sweatshops - a hell of a lot of them are simply unpaid slaves: http://gvnet.com/humantrafficking/China.htm
>With the extra money they gain they do things like send their kids through more schooling. Even one factory can raise the standard of living for a quite substantial region.
Really ? That only works if there is enough actual extra money to afford that. When it takes your entire meager paycheck to pay the rent and the food - that isn't going to happen. The only reason a significant part of China's kids go to school at all is because their authoritarian government figured out that schooled workers can be sold more expensively - don't imagine for a second that they EARN better.
>I remember a story about a sneaker factory that opened somewhere, most likely India. The workers started by walking to work. Within six months most had bicycles. Within 3 years many had mopeds. Meanwhile, the completion rate of their children for primary school went up by like a factor of 5 - something like 10% to 50%. Stores opened to service their additional wants - bicycle stores, moped stores, repair shops, etc...
>By US standards it was a 'sweatshop'. By local standards? It was a job, even a career, to be proud of.
Like I said, that's a western rationalization -hell it's a rationalization THEY often come up with - because humans are really good at making themselves feel better, it never lasts and it isn't going to last this time. Their lives are shit- and the reason they are shit is so that Calvin Klein can pay a very small amount of money for a pair of jeans, stick a lable on it and sell it for a lot. Considering what those jeans cost, there is absolutely NO justification for not making it in a country with real, enforced, labor laws at a decent wage. The price to US won't go up - his margins would go down but quite frankly he is way beyond rich enough. Excessive greed is an evolutionary unstable trait... it disrupts society and as such, it must inevitably lead to an unstable society.
[quote]What happens when they do figure it out ? I have
>I think the idea here is that you get into a developing field, and by the time that glut of new graduates show up you already have those 5-10 years of experience and are therefore their supervisor/manager. If you've kept up with improving yourself, of course.
That is a nice theory... too bad it never works. The employee promoted to management just never happens, which is why so many employees are overseen by incompetent managers. Nearly all managers START OUT as managers - with an MBA or related degree instead... and even they will still be on the losing side of salary scales. Who makes the real money ? The guy who started a successfull business, or who gets employed as CEO... everybody else ALWAYS works for less than they are worth. Much the same way that a farmer cannot sell raw wheat for the price of produced pasta.
Like it or not - there is only one type of business structure where the employees actually gain - and that's worker's collectives. The rarest type as it turns out, yet ironically the fairest and probably the most well run in general - certainly among the most productive because the people producing the wealth are the same people GETTING the wealth.
>>There was always a small group of wealthy people and a large group of poor people -but never before in all of human history has the wealthy group been this small, or the difference between them this vast.
>Sure it has. Just go back to the medieval period... Not that it's necessarily a good thing.
Nope, look it up - it was NEVER this bad. The percentage of rich people even in medieval times was far larger (ulitmately the gentles were closer to 30% of the population than the current 1%) and more importantly - the wealth-gap was exponentially smaller. They may have been far wealthier than the people working their share-cropped lands, but very few people actually starved, and they weren't THAT much wealthier. Not even relatively speaking was there ever a time when the gap between rich and poor was even CLOSE to what it is now... seriously, there are single individuals in the world today with more money than some entire countries !
Literally - people who can single-handedly invest more cash tomorrow than some nations entire GDP. Who can, at a whim, make a country rich or poor. It took just one man on a pissed off day to bring the bank of England to the verge of bankruptcy, just so he could make a killing on the suddenly cheap pound. Of course he didn't take it all the way back... he wanted the pound to recover after all. Look up George Soros and the bank of England sometime... and Soros decent person as he seems to be... has never produced a single thing in his entire life. He has become one of the wealthiest and most powerful men alive by doing nothing but shifting imaginary money around. Nothing he has ever done has done anything to actually contribute to the economy, every penny he has made has been effectively leeched from it at our expense - and nothing, no goods, no services, no skills, not even proper cashflow circulation has been given back. That's the world we live in - that's where capitalism has gone seriously wrong. When you can make MORE money by leeching the system than you can ever make by being a productive member of it - the system is already doomed. The rich people don't even pretend otherwise. Hell in "rich dad poor dad" he explicitely states that production is a doomed means of wealth generation - you don't get rich by making things, you get rich by NOT making things, by not producing and certainly by not producing quality. The only way to actually gain WEALTH is to "let your money work for you"... to literally (the system is described in detail) live off your assets - not by creating anything. That's why the only people in business who get wealthy are the owners - they aren't producing anything- they are leeching off the asset that is the business's production. Nobody gets rich by making something good. Who here on
>>A black one white civil war makes no sense, the whites aren't in power.
>Yet, a few posts back you claimed: white people STILL have only 5% unemployment, still fill the top 20% of salaried jobs, still make up 60% of business owners (and the next 30% are Indians - not Blacks).
>No comment at the moment on the other possibilities you mention.
Right - holding wealth != holding political power. A protest against employers is known as a "strike" not a "war" civil or otherwise. So the two statements are entirely consistent.
>>Don't believe me ? In 1978 a poll was held at Potch University, probably the most conservative university in the country. 87% of the students declared that they were OPPOSED to appartheid. That was in 1978 already. Ten years later when that generation was the majority of the VOTERS - the system changed.
>One of the main gripes I have with the current political debate is that it's an either/or situation. Either pro-ANC or pro-apartheid (especially the sort of system it became when you and I grew up).
I don't agree. I'm not pro-ANC. I'm not pro-DA either and I'm definitely not pro-appartheid. My philosophies are, in fact, utterly UNrepresented in current politics. It's true that a number of politicians try to paint it that way - but that's racism on THEIR part, or more accurately - it's an attempt to deliberately CREATE racism to secure votes. I'm definitely not in favor of that behavior. But that is a RECENT development, it didn't exist in Mandela's government. A much more ACCURATE assesment is that people are either racist or not - there really CANNOT be any middle ground. Either all people are equal in your eyes, you are utterly colorblind, would marry a women you love without ever asking her ethnicity... or you're a racist. Sorry, "cultural separatism" is STILL racism, it's just racism with a politically correct jacket on.
>Neither is a long term solution. But today it's just Not PC to be anti-ANC, so there's no room for lateral thinking.
Again - you're drinking the kool-aid. That's the propaganda that ANC officials try to use to secure votes - they are wrong, it's not how most people of any race think. I spent most of my career working in the townships. I never felt in any danger - on the contrary, I felt significantly more welcome than among the white world of high walls and razor wire. I discussed politics with many people from across the realms of South African cultures and the ONLY place I EVER heard racism among normal average citizens was among whites - a scathing slap in the face of my own people. Now you could claim that of course the racist blacks won't even BOTHER to discuss politics with a white guy - so I admit my sample space is skewed, but the vast majority of people in this country now only want to survive and build a better country, they just don't CARE what color you are anymore. The small fringes who do are in fact just the loudest. If the average black person WAS still angry at white people (and by god do we deserve it) then the ANC politicians wouldn't NEED to build propaganda about it. The NEED to recreate that animosity as it's the only way to secure their powerbase.
Their constant harping on the race card only proves how little it still matters in the real world.
That said -there is a huge difference between being anti-ANC and being anti-South Africa. Leaving the country because you don't like the party that got the votes is pretty much guaranteed to be a lie. The leavers leave for other reasons - usually ones that they refuse to say out loud because they know their not supposed to think them.
Absolutely - but that's hardly typical. When trying to analyze the motivations of a "profile" - you're already dealing with a massive generalization, the only useful conclusions you could draw are those that apply to the majority of the people in that generalization, edge cases are negligible by the very definition of a profile.
Just noticed a minor oversight in my post. The profile specifies 40+ and single so that married majority don't apply. But then again high-earning 40+ singles tend to be divorcees - in case you missed it, 40+ divorcees pretty much the bottom-feeders of the gene-pool anyway - so if they enjoy blowing up heads in halo rather than another bar-pickup tonight... who are you to judge ?
>They also must have low IQ's as well... Not much to spend it on? are these people brain dead meat puppets? Motorcycles, Cars, Jetpacks, Overpriced stereos... I can list 90,000 things other than videogames to spend my high-earning money on that is not only more fun, but get's you way more chicks...
All of which has this in common: they are LEISURE items - why does choosing one leisure item over another define your IQ ? Also - most high-earning men that age are married, presumably this at least marginally reduces the number of additional chicks they actually NEED to get.
>A sports car is more impressive to a lady than a 6 digit Xbox achievement point number. To some ladies. Perhaps even a significant majority - but most certainly not for ALL ladies.
>A motorcycle is far more fun than ANY driving game on any gaming platform. To you. To me. Not to everyone. Besides, much as I prefer my bike over driving games, I prefer WoW over golf - tastes differ. Why the aggro dude ?
>Racing with your local racing club on a real track is far more fun than any game. $10,000 can get you a nice Miata and all the racing upgrades to really tear it up at the track. a 1.8 with a turbo in a miata makes for real fun on a real track (not a redneck oval)
To you. To some other people. Not to everybody. A helluva lot of people will think THAT is the sign of a low IQ. Choosing to risk your life at high-speed in the real world (where you do NOT respawn).
>Hang gliding is an absolute rush.
Again... to you. I think RAIDING is an actual rush.
I don't fit the profile, I've just turned 30, but I am a high-earning single male without much other financial responsibility. I pay my bond and since I don't have other debt - I got plenty of cash to burn even after making investments. Why the hell should you get to decide that burning it on hanggliding is smarter than burning it on the Cataclysm expansion ?
Talk about having your head so far up your own ass you can't see the crud for the dingleberries...
>giving away your OS/browser on your home page is akin in today's terms to supplying a browser on the install CD.
Which is perfectly legal - every Linux distro out there does it too - and was never the issue with microsoft. The issue was integrating windows 98 with I.E. in such a way that it was not possible to use one without the other - literally you couldn't uninstall IE as windows would STOP WORKING if you did.
Sure you could install another browser AS WELL - but since IE had to be there anyway and couldn't be removed - most people never bothered or even found out that other browsers existed (at the time) - and THAT was what was illegal.
Actually - that's just plain wrong. According to the organisors of the international gaming olympiad - the profile of the typical hardcore gamer is 40+, single, high-earning with significant disposable income and not much to spend it on but gaming gear.
That was without a doubt, the single most disguting, inhumane and utterly evil single post in the history of slashdot. Seriously -you make the goatse guy sound like a fun roommate...
If human life does not have intrinsic value to you - then that very decision ipso facto makes YOURS the least valuable of all, so do us all a favor and just kill yourself. After all -you're not destroying anything of value - and it's one less mouth to feed. Better than that, it's a mouth less that seems to be predominantly focussed on telling us that letting people starve and suffer to death is okay BECAUSE THEY AREN'T WORTH trying to save...
What kind of a psychopath are you ?
And to answer your question... yes I do mourn the children that died while I wrote this. Not a night goes by that I don't spare a sad thought for the children who starved that day and how little I could do to help them. THAT is called having a conscience - a basic attribute of the species called homo sapience, but not apparently of whatever putrescent evolutionary mistake produced you.
Their the only source of arms caches I've heard of in the news.
Either way - there's a huge difference between arms caches and evidence of an intended civil war. Storage rooms for gunsmugglers is actually a MUCH more likely explanation - some of the most notorious arms smugglers of all time operate from South Africa, and that's been the case for a long time. Remember Dirk Stoffberg ?
A civil war requires two distinct sides wanting power. We can't be expecting the black-on-white civil war that Mandela prevented (he had it in his power to unleash one with a word - and he chose a different path, NOT recognizing the nobility of THAT action - when the whole world would have thought him JUSTIFIED if he unleashed it... now THAT is making your own reality). A black one white civil war makes no sense, the whites aren't in power. A white on black one ? Well as I've shown... that's essentially impossible now. The best effort that those who believe in such things could put together came apart at the seams - and not a all-knowing spook, an extremely well orchestrated task-force between the NIA and police. But oh right, the complainers think that because we have some corrupt incompetent policemen, that means there aren't ANY good ones in there, let alone the reality that MOST cops here really are good cops doing their best in what is probably the hardest country on earth to do that in.
A civil war between two black tribes ? Well the only two with the numbers for THAT is the Zulus and the Xhosas respectively, but their sharing power right now. The governing party which is traditionally a particularly Xhosa supported party, is being led by a Zulu president...
Sorry - but... I can't FIND the other force to make war on the government... who on earth did you imagine could possibly have anything to GAIN by it ?
But now explain something to me... I pointed out that were incredibly LUCKY to be as well off as we are after the forced removals of appartheid. You're trying to make a case that were are a lot less lucky than I think... if you're right - you do realize that you are massively STRENGHTENING my argument right ? The whole point is that it's highly unlikely another country would BE that lucky if they tried it now. If we are so much less lucky than I think... doesn't that make the odds off it really backfiring on any other country that tried even HIGHER ?
In short... why the hell are you fighting so hard to prove that I am right and that forced removals for labor purposes is a terrible policy ? What is the point you're making... what purpose does your argument serve except to sound like another typical white complainer - how dare anybody express positive sentiment about this country, everything's gone to shit here right... otherwise how could you NOT concede that 99% of all the expats did NOT leave because of crime. They left because they were the 33% who voted NO in '92. That vast majority left because they are racists no matter how much they deny it. They left because they couldn't STAND the idea of a black government, even if that government had been the most competent and successful one ever - they would STILL have left, and complained that the country has gone to hell to justify it.
As we say in WoW... QQ-moar, nobody's impressed.
You often hear black people say "every white guy I meet is a liberal who always opposed appartheid... so how did it happen, where did all the people who voted for it for 40 years GO ?" By which they are trying to say that they don't believe these white people who aren't racist, and don't want to reconcile because they think it's a facade. Well... I got their answer. All THOSE white people are in Perth and Sydney.
Don't believe me ? In 1978 a poll was held at Potch University, probably the most conservative university in the country. 87% of the students declared that they were OPPOSED to appartheid. That was in 1978 already. Ten years later when that generation was the majority of the VOTERS - the system changed.
>>On a long enough timeframe the probability of any possible event occuring approaches one. In other words, yeah it's possible, and it WILL come - if you are prepared to wait long enough. Right now there is exactly ZERO evidence suggesting one in our lifetime.
>Oh, not ZERO evidence, as there are enough reports in the last 2 or 3 months of weapons stockpiled in Natal & Zimbabwe, "soldiers" reporting for "training", talk on grassroots level, talk in (black-owned) media. But yeah, in the end I haven't seen the goods with my own eyes, so one can close your eyes and make it off as second-hand rumours. I'm no prophet either, so I'm quite happy for us to take a wait an see approach.
That's your evidence ? The boeremag idiots ? The last time they tried something it turned into a massive joke and they really WERE the best the militants could offer. I've read the NIA report on them. These guys were organized, trained and efficient. They had insider knowledge of all military facilities in the country - everything they needed to know to find every weak spot and disable them. They had all the potential you need for it - and they failed quite miserably. Why ? Forget the "they were a joke" news reports - that was deliberately how the authorities chose to spin it in order to demoralize the movement and remove trust in it's leaders - the truth is, they had everything needed for a revolution to succeed - except one thing, mass support. The operation against them started almost two years before the first arrests, and literally waited for the first planned "no deaths" attacks to happen so they could be arrested and charged with more crimes. By the time they made their first "announce ourselves" moves, there was an undercover cop in every single cell of the boeremag. When you base your recruitment on race, you inevitably lose the ability to tell a supporter from somebody who just looks the right color and speaks the right language.
205 undercover policemen blew their cover on the same night- arresting every leader, and most of the middle-men in the entire operation at a perfect culmination. The ISS's report is even more detailed. These reports read like a spy novel - except it details real events of which almost nothing made it into the news (on purpose).
Now as for your second paragraph. I'm FROM a middle-class white Afrikaans family. I remember as a 12 year old putting up posters urging a yes-vote in the '92 referendum, and my dad was concervative party in the early 80's. We learned, we grew - we adapted and the few remaining racist black-people-hate-us-and-want-our-stuff complainers... well please DO leave. Only YOU call it a brain-drain - WE prefer complain-drain. We don't NEED negative people fucking up our efforts at building ONE nation.
The best country I ever saw (and I've lived in more than 25 of them for no less than 3 months at a time now) was Brazil. The only country where EVERY couple is a mixed couple, same-race couples just... don't happen. The ethnicities are mixed, so people mix... logically, in a few generations, brazil will only have on race, a super-mixture of all gene-pools which will probably be immune to more diseases than any other humans on the planet, smarter and stronger too - genetic mixing is GOOD for the gene-pool every farmer who breeds cattle knows this. Every dog breeder who watches their thoroughbreds suffer through excema that mongrels NEVER get knows this. Why are we so stupid as to think it doesn't apply to OUR species ?
>For unskilled labor this is true. There are many career fields where people can almost name their price if they have the skills and experience.
That's an illusion that only exist over short term periods. It was like that in I.T. in the 80's and early 90's -now it's not, the market is flooded with poorer but cheap skills. To earn a decent salary now you have to find a highly specialised niche. And every such niche gets flooded eventually.
The trouble is that the period it takes for new graduates to enter a given field - cheap, is around 5-10 years from it's formation, the average CAREER however is more than 30 years. You pick a high-earning career, you can be quite sure by the time you get into it, it won't be anymore. Supply and demand requires that supply will rise to meet demand, and because we're talking about human beings here (a potentially infinite resource that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor [in fact production rate seems to be inversely proportional to the education of the laborers...]) the supply will always come to significantly exceed the demand - and as markets change - demands change.
Until around 1950 the average quality of life of every person had consistently gone up with every generation. The reason was better production methods and thus new business opportunities creating new employment markets - which provided huge demand. Since then it has consistently gone down again now up to where we are now - where middle-class relative income is only marginally higher than it was during the depression -and expected to go down, and the poverty rate is higher than it was in the depression (in the richest country on earth - 50-million people live BELOW the official poverty line), the limited wealth there is has reached the most concentrated level in human history. There was always a small group of wealthy people and a large group of poor people -but never before in all of human history has the wealthy group been this small, or the difference between them this vast.
It can be safely said that as soon as the production spurs of new methodologies were established, supply rose to meet demand, exceeded it and is now being consistently outcompeted by suppliers who are - effectively prepared to run at a loss.
That's the salary-workers economic state of the world today. I'd be buggered if I knew what to do about it- but I'm damn sure that the current system is so inherently unstable it MUST collapse, if we're lucky it collapses into a depression - if we're not, a war.
I reported both, the first guys were caught, the second ones - never found.
The police is a LOT better now than they were even five years ago and improving - but there is still a lot of bad apples, too many cops who basically think of their job as a bribe-collection service. The results are becoming more visible though. More and more hijackers are ending up in prison and less and less are happening.
Murderers are getting away less and less often - and robbers are starting to find life harder too. The days of the gangsters paradise does seem to be ending slowly.
One major change in recent years have been the upcoming of major drug villages. In Johannesburg it's hillbrow - overrun by Nigerian druglords - if you're light skinned you don't go near the place - because if you're not black you're shot on sight, and even a black man's life is forfeit if he's not identifiably part of a gang. They basically own the neighbourhood. Just 5km north of my house in Atlantis is a series of blocks of flats filled with tik dens (tik is a local variant of meth) -the cops refuse to run raids there without army protection !
>irks something terrible? You hate that you found a libertarian with an ounce of compassion?
In the sense that nobody likes having their comfortable prejudices challenged:D
>Actually, I don't think it does, as I stated in the other post. You're proposing a protectionist system, and historically those don't work well. My proposal is to lower the cost of labor such that manufacturers choose to stay here and can remain in business.
You're stating THAT they historically don't work well - but not considering WHY that is. Do the same issues that led to past failures still apply today ? Can we change them ? These are questions one needs to ask - you cannot learn from history without being able to view it in the context of the present.
>Thing is, you're effectively ensuring that there WILL be less work by artificially raising the cost of labor; therefore businesses will attempt to minimize it. It's economic law.
That's what unions do as well. If it wasn't for unions American's would STILL be sweatshop workers. Why would you DENY the people of China, Indonesia and India the right to make the same progress towards their own pursuit of happiness that you have ? Instead their stuck in the England of Charles Dickins ! What happens when they do figure it out ? I have nasty suspicion what will happen is a revolution - that will end up with a group of people in power over these 2 billion people (a third of all humanity) that absolutely despise us - we're the enablers of their oppression. How can it NOT lead to World War 3 ? Every other time in history when laborers felt abused it led to revolution or war if they could not find an amicable middle ground (which seems to have consistently failed without government backed labor laws). Right back to the peasants revolt and probably even earlier. Most of the time - these failed because the barrons (ceo's, kings, pick your era) had better weapons,lances against rice-flails, arrows against scythes, guns against knives... well this next revolution will have peasants with nukes... I don't know about you but I don't want to take my chances on them.
>I view disability(injury counts even if temporary) as a different matter from 'welfare'. Just being 'handicapped' such as confined to a wheelchair doesn't mean you can't work. As for the single parent - well, it's a sticky thing for me, single parents bring all sorts of sub-optimal situations to the board; sometimes it's unavoidable(death), sometimes it's better than a dual parent(where one is abusive, for example). I prefer households to be complete, women to wait until marriage to have kids, etc... On the other hand, kids need to be taken care of. Yet we also have people in the states who have more kids specifically to get more benefits. They view state supported procreation as a right. The kids need to be taken care of(very very important). Sticky Sticky Sticky...
Facing the same questions in my country - I agree, sticky. That's why I believe the only viable way to shift it is to make having a job sufficiently more attractive than wellfare that people go back to seeing it as it should be- a last resort. I am just as in favor of dual-parent households, frankly - it's a job better done by two people than one and we know all the reasons why. But we have to deal with reality - a lot of parents are single. Death, a bad choice in boyfriends, a worse choice in spouse - this stuff happens, and the children that result need to be cared for. The alternative is to go back to the Dickins' England and have 90% of children die before age 10 from working in unsafe factories... frankly I'd rather have 6 year olds living on my tax money than working a job.
>Still, with my idea the kids will have medical care, the woman can work part time, and even with a 40 hour a week job would be able to spend lots of time with her kids. I'm not going to require her to work 60-80 hours a week for benefits.
That was one of the reasons I said I liked it - th
>>RE: Your sig - I started doing your poll, but I stopped a few questions in. I can recognize a loaded poll when I see one.
>Not my poll... Just liked it and stuck it in my sig. Unfortuantly with the sig character limits being for the raw code, I can't add a disclaimer that it's not my site. However, I DO possess concealed carry permits for two states. Oh how I wish they were treated like driver's licenses(get one for the home state, good in all 50). I DO carry, but I'm don't tell random people that I do.
Fair enough
>>(in my country more than 50% of all shootings occur to steal the fire-arms of the victims - most common TARGET for such attacks are policemen. Shoot him in the head from behind while on patrol, steal his gun to use in other crimes) or force you to choose one answer when CLEARLY there are two that BOTH matter.
>Man, what country are you in if shooting police officers for their weapons is common? In the whole USA on average just over a hundred police officers die 'in the line of duty' each year, and that includes things like car accidents.
That would be South Africa - officially the most dangerous not-at-war country in the world. I have personally been a crime victim twice, once stabbed during a mugging in broad daylight- no warning, no threat, guy just walked past me on the side of the road and knifed me in passing and then grabbed my girlfriends handbag. Once I was kidnapped by three people at gunpoint and dropped in a dark street after having my wallet and cellphone removed. In both cases - I am quite sure that if I had been carrying - I would be dead.
>>Well this was the one I stopped on. It forces me to choose between "my safety" or "my attacker's safety" as if they are mutually exclusive. The law in the full developed world for THOUSANDS of years have CLEARLY felt differently.
>Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure the law has normally been on the side of the 'noble' party, and failing that, on allowing the defender to use any means, up to and including killing their attacker. Heck, 'cattle rustling' carrying the possibility of the death penalty wasn't a new thing for the 'old west', it was hallowed tradition from europe.
Im quite sure - both the Dutch Roman and Anglican legal traditions require minimum necessary force. Though in case of DOUBT the court is allowed to accept the word of the noble party over the attacker (assuming both are alive to testify).
>>In very situational cases, a gun could be a good defense, if you're driving through a hijack-notorious area, and give it to a passenger who may get a shot off and let him drive BEFORE the 4 other hijackers can fire a killing shot, maybe.
>Depends on the threat, as you mention. This starts to make me think you're in Mexico, though I'm not familiar with any military that uses a.33 caliber weapon.
The SA Police used them during the riot years in the 80's as did some branches of the Military. That particular rifle is a good 30 years old now.
>In the USA, we don't have to worry about hijackers, and generally speaking, if, on average, most people were armed and willing to use their arms in self defense, hijacking would be a thing of the past. It's a predator-prey thing. The predator has survive, normally without significant injury, every attack.
Four against-one is the typical MO, follow the chosen target home from a mall, hijack it in the driveway. Two stay out of sight and keep a gun trained on you. If you so much as move funny, they kill you. Trust me - being armed REDUCES your survival rate by a massive margin in this country. You can be the fastest drawer in the west all you want, it's useless against a sniper you can't see.
>hijackers normally don't kill, but the predator relation remains - they'll go after people with bodyguards less frequently than people without. They'll target those with the best payoff-risk ratios.
In South Africa they do. Hell even if you fully cooperate they will S
>Then what simply happens is that you get a seperate company to do it. A different company builds a factory in the cheap country, then starts importing the product. The in-country company ends up shuttering the factory because they can't compete.
>Otherwise you're looking at tariffs and blockades, and those generally harm the country doing more than it does the foreign country; indeed it's worse all around.
These are valid critiques, but I think more practical than philosophically wrong - and practical problems can be solved.
>Let's say welfare pays $10k if you have no job. Get a job earning $10k and your welfare drops to $7500, so you're now earning $17.5k, you're MUCH better off, whereas the current situation would have you now with a job earning $10k and NOT getting any welfare, thus you're actually better off on welfare.
>Get a job earning $40k a year and your benefits completely cease, but at that point do you really care?
I like your idea to an extent... except how on earth do you finance it ? I cannot imagine ANYTHING more stupid than a person paying tax AND getting a wellfare bonus (of any sort at all) - why not just let him keep the tax and lose the wellfare then ? Which means your cut off point needs to below the lowest income-tax bracket to make sense (sorry - I have NO idea what the tax-brackets in the US are).
Then the question becomes - can 30% or 40% of people pay enough tax to fund the running of the country AND pay those sliding scale wellfare checks ? Well possibly - in my country only 20% of people earn enough to pay any taxes at all- and we manage a fairly successful welfare state with 40% unemployment (but that 20% pay between 35 and 40 percent tax on average).
It's quite harsh to lose half your income to taxes.
The only practical way to reduce it however would be to significantly reduce that 40% number - and THAT will take at least one more generation, because almost ALL of that 40% are illiterate and this economy simply doesn't HAVE that much manual labor.
Mind you -when a minimum wage law for all workers here were first proposed, the rich 20% vocally complained... until they heard what the minimum wage WAS - then they all supported it. For the vast majority of them - it was LESS than they were paying their maids and gardeners before.
I always thought that little bit of history said sooo much about human nature.
I must say I do like your proposal in principle, it seems like a suitable one - but like mine I see practical problems with - and I am not sure what the sollutions for either would be (yet).
Slashdot Mirror
>Let them adjust themselves to society and not the inverse.
And right until there I almost had sympathy with you DESPITE rampantly disagreeing with your entire approach.
Progress by definition occurs ONLY when we adjust society to suit ourselves, adjusting to suit the existing status quo can ONLY perpetuate said status quo. That is pretty much never a good thing. Remember -call to tradition is a falacy.
Now just in case you care... here's why I don't even agree with your basic post anyway. The whole PROBLEM is that teachers keep trying to teach discipline - same old 18th century German mentality. Let's make good little soldiers and factory workers who do as they are told... and it's the WORST thing schools can do.
We don't NEED disciplined people in society, if anything, we have too FEW people who QUESTION the rules, the systems - who think critically and try to IMPROVE things.
What we need is students who were taught SELF discipline. If you teach kids "Do as you're told or bad things happen" (translation of your words: 'actions with consequences') then all you are teaching them is "don't get caught."
If you teach them "do the right thing, because it is right" - then you're creating kids who will (nearly) always choose to DO the right thing, even when it's hard and there's no chance of getting caught.
I was raised that way, so was all my siblings, we're all highly successful and there are a couple of PHD's in the family. Several asian school systems ran like that for thousands of years before the German-inspired system of today even existed.
It works - it has a history of working, and it doesn't create mindless drones when what we NEED above all today are people who can think for themselves.
Actually - it wasn't libel.
The Jerry Fallwell case against Hustler failed on EXACTLY these grounds. Fundamental to the law is that "if there is no reasonable chance that anybody would take the claims seriously - the jury is REQUIRED to find the publisher INNOCENT."
It is ONLY possible to be guilty of libel if the people familiar with the target would reasonably BELIEVE the claims. Since the school board themselves have testified that "nobody took the claims seriously" - it is therefore absolutely NOT libel.
I don't LIKE the nature of this parody, but it IS in fact protected parody under U.S. law and the student acted entirely within her first amendment rights.
Thing is - their making a stupid agreement.
The license isn't what matters -the moreso because you can download the game for free from their website. You do however pay for server access, that is - you agree to a contract.
Why bring the license into it? They don't NEED copyright for this. BESIDES the copyright which only affects copying after all, you have to agree to a contract for their services.
Don't like the contract, don't sign it. You agree to a service contract with any service provider from the plumber to the phone company - and any clause in there that you sign you're bound to.
Glider violates the contract. I think making this about the license would be stupid of Blizzard, so I tend to assume the article is written wrongly. I'm massively opposed to EULA style "use copyright to enforce an unfair license" - but this isn't even IN the EULA. The ToS is a seperate contract, related to your right to access the server, not to use the software.
I doubt very much that Blizzard wouldn't play it that way.
>I am not trying to claim that these games will ever be as "successful" (read: profitable) as World of Warcraft, but I would say they far more closely approach video-games-as-art.
I'm not so sure, there's a depth of emotion in WoW that they lack... they are purely intellectual leisure... WoW gets you emotionally involved.
Example - when I did the Pamela Redpath questline... that's when I started to genuinely HATE Arthas... quite an extreme emotion to be feeling for a fictional character. I wanted to cry over that little girl. Now THAT is art.
Obviously, in this analogy, google is the fat slashdotter across the road who doesn't just ENJOY the show, but videotapes it.
His Analogy works, yours don't.
Having an open wifi is more like shagging your girlfriend against the window with the curtains open... you can't complain about privacy if the neighbours watch you do her when you do it in plain sight.
If exhibitionism is NOT your thing... encrypt your damn wifi.
You do realize that significant numbers of browsers share the same layout engines ? So if your site works in the layout engine - it will work with *all* the browsers that support it (give or take a tiny bit).
For example Google-chrome and Safari both use a variant of the KHTML engine (known as WebKIT - KTHML itself is used by Konqueror and several related KDE projectS), as does any embedded browser using default QT4 features. There are literally dozens of browsers that use the gecko engine from firefox. In fact... seems just about the only two browsers that do not use engines shared with multiple other projects (and thus benefiting from that wide developer pool) is IE and Opera.
Take it a step further - some browsers have CHANGED engines during the lifetimes - the latest version of galleon for example was using Gecko for it's entire existence but switched to WebKIT with the latest release.
This means that if your site is gecko compliant but not WebKIT compliant, then you cannot claim it's supported by Galleon - it used to be, it isn't anymore. Or the other way around, a site that is WebKIT friendly but no Gecko friendly would not have this support where it didn't exist before.
In short - for a web developer, yes it really IS the engine that matters, not the name of the application that uses it.
Aside - just passed macroeconomics CLEP - woot. Also, fairly relevant here.
Congratulations. Now you can start critically doubting what you were taught, and doing so informedly. That's never a bad a thing.
>>That is a nice theory... too bad it never works. The employee promoted to management just never happens, which is why so many employees are overseen by incompetent managers. Nearly all managers START OUT as managers - with an MBA or related degree instead... and even they will still be on the losing side of salary scales.
>Did you catch the part about continuing education? I have an associates and am working on my bachelor's. I've been working for quite a few years at this point. Mom didn't get her bachelor's until she was in her 40's.
Good for you... and do you expect to be C.E.O. of your company one day ? Maybe when you're 60 ? Didn't think so.
Well here's the truth... the odds of you even becoming a director are hundreds-to-one against.
Why ? Because there's a LOT of people at any low level of an organisation - most of them working hard and studying for the dream of 'advancement' - but there is an order of magnitude LESS positions in middle management and and another order of magnitude less in upper management. The vast majority has no hope of ever advancing. They aren't psychophathically greedy enough to be good directors anyway.
The psychpaths who DO become directors never pass through the middle ranks first. Hell most of them spend less than a year at the bottom because directors aren't chosen for skills, they are chosen for utter lack of conscience. There are some very good studies out there about this, and if you'd like the same facts in a more fun presentation... I give you Dilbert.
>>The rich people don't even pretend otherwise. Hell in "rich dad poor dad" he explicitely states that production is a doomed means of wealth generation - you don't get rich by making things, you get rich by NOT making things, by not producing and certainly by not producing quality. The only way to actually gain WEALTH is to "let your money work for you" ... to literally (the system is described in detail) live off your assets - not by creating anything.
>Indeed - that's why later on I mentioned making 'paper shuffling' more expensive, IE more marginal means of making money. 'Traditional' asset and investment management is indeed a positive, contributing career path, because you're helping to ensure that the most potentially profitable, the most likely to succeed business ventures get funded.
So now you're regulating the market - and hoping to regulate that section with by far the most current cash, and thus political clout. It's just not going to happen, and no amount of regulation will really change the fact that arbitrage always pays more than production - it's a fundamental flaw in the capitalist structures. To change it, you have to move away from capitalism alltogether.
By all means, learn from it the things that WORK - competition is good, rewarding effort and innovation is good. Who the hell says the only way to do it is with a ladder made of the backs of your fellow man ? It's incredibly uninformed to imagine that there is only two ways an economy could work... there are infinite many possibilities we've never even written down let alone tried.
Statistically, almost any of them could be better than this... hell BARTER TRADE would be better than modern capitalism in some ways (it has no ability for arbitrage for one). The people with a vested interest in the system will never easily let it be changed to benefit more people. That's human nature, doesn't mean we should let them get their way - and it certainly doesn't mean we should believe a word they say.
>>They make more money out of property rental in a day than all the hamburgers they've sold have made in 30 years.
>Source?
Same as the entire paragraph: Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
Which in turn quotes Kroch as saying exactly that when he addressed a gro
>And the England of Charles Dickens progressed to the England of today.
Despite, not because off.
More importantly - the (very violent) transition AWAY from that system in the west established as a basic inalienable human right the idea of a fair wage for a fair job, and free labor (meaning the right to quit and find a better job if you want).These basic rights are not recognized, enforced or or available to those Chinese workers anymore than the right to freedom of thought is.
Such a system of oppression according to history is inherently unstable and always fails -usually violently. Do you really think everybody in China will drink that mandate-of-heaven kool-aid for EVER ?
>Thing about sweatshops in China and such is that, believe it or not, they're actually better than the alternatives the workers there would otherwise have. To the point that they'll fight you to KEEP that sweatshop job.
I've heard that rationalization before. It's bullshit. Subsistence farmers are BETTER off than sweatshop workers, have a higher life expectancy and a LOT more freedom. I'm sorry, when you have to PISS in a plastic bag because you don't have the right to take a bathroom break - you have EARNED the right to protest for better conditions - and it's only a matter of time before they do.
The truth is much closer to what did happen in England. People leave their poor but decent lives in the countryside on false promises of wealth in the big city - only to live in squalor - too ashamed to go home. Many times - they don't even get as FAR as sweatshops - a hell of a lot of them are simply unpaid slaves: http://gvnet.com/humantrafficking/China.htm
>With the extra money they gain they do things like send their kids through more schooling. Even one factory can raise the standard of living for a quite substantial region.
Really ? That only works if there is enough actual extra money to afford that. When it takes your entire meager paycheck to pay the rent and the food - that isn't going to happen. The only reason a significant part of China's kids go to school at all is because their authoritarian government figured out that schooled workers can be sold more expensively - don't imagine for a second that they EARN better.
>I remember a story about a sneaker factory that opened somewhere, most likely India. The workers started by walking to work. Within six months most had bicycles. Within 3 years many had mopeds. Meanwhile, the completion rate of their children for primary school went up by like a factor of 5 - something like 10% to 50%. Stores opened to service their additional wants - bicycle stores, moped stores, repair shops, etc...
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&source=imghp&q=Dharavi&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2&aq=f&aqi=g9g-m1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
You were saying ?
>By US standards it was a 'sweatshop'. By local standards? It was a job, even a career, to be proud of.
Like I said, that's a western rationalization -hell it's a rationalization THEY often come up with - because humans are really good at making themselves feel better, it never lasts and it isn't going to last this time. Their lives are shit- and the reason they are shit is so that Calvin Klein can pay a very small amount of money for a pair of jeans, stick a lable on it and sell it for a lot. Considering what those jeans cost, there is absolutely NO justification for not making it in a country with real, enforced, labor laws at a decent wage. The price to US won't go up - his margins would go down but quite frankly he is way beyond rich enough.
Excessive greed is an evolutionary unstable trait... it disrupts society and as such, it must inevitably lead to an unstable society.
[quote]What happens when they do figure it out ? I have
>I think the idea here is that you get into a developing field, and by the time that glut of new graduates show up you already have those 5-10 years of experience and are therefore their supervisor/manager. If you've kept up with improving yourself, of course.
That is a nice theory... too bad it never works. The employee promoted to management just never happens, which is why so many employees are overseen by incompetent managers. Nearly all managers START OUT as managers - with an MBA or related degree instead... and even they will still be on the losing side of salary scales.
Who makes the real money ? The guy who started a successfull business, or who gets employed as CEO... everybody else ALWAYS works for less than they are worth. Much the same way that a farmer cannot sell raw wheat for the price of produced pasta.
Like it or not - there is only one type of business structure where the employees actually gain - and that's worker's collectives.
The rarest type as it turns out, yet ironically the fairest and probably the most well run in general - certainly among the most productive because the people producing the wealth are the same people GETTING the wealth.
>>There was always a small group of wealthy people and a large group of poor people -but never before in all of human history has the wealthy group been this small, or the difference between them this vast.
>Sure it has. Just go back to the medieval period... Not that it's necessarily a good thing.
Nope, look it up - it was NEVER this bad. The percentage of rich people even in medieval times was far larger (ulitmately the gentles were closer to 30% of the population than the current 1%) and more importantly - the wealth-gap was exponentially smaller.
They may have been far wealthier than the people working their share-cropped lands, but very few people actually starved, and they weren't THAT much wealthier.
Not even relatively speaking was there ever a time when the gap between rich and poor was even CLOSE to what it is now... seriously, there are single individuals in the world today with more money than some entire countries !
Literally - people who can single-handedly invest more cash tomorrow than some nations entire GDP. Who can, at a whim, make a country rich or poor. It took just one man on a pissed off day to bring the bank of England to the verge of bankruptcy, just so he could make a killing on the suddenly cheap pound. Of course he didn't take it all the way back... he wanted the pound to recover after all. ... has never produced a single thing in his entire life. He has become one of the wealthiest and most powerful men alive by doing nothing but shifting imaginary money around. Nothing he has ever done has done anything to actually contribute to the economy, every penny he has made has been effectively leeched from it at our expense - and nothing, no goods, no services, no skills, not even proper cashflow circulation has been given back. ... to literally (the system is described in detail) live off your assets - not by creating anything.
Look up George Soros and the bank of England sometime... and Soros decent person as he seems to be
That's the world we live in - that's where capitalism has gone seriously wrong. When you can make MORE money by leeching the system than you can ever make by being a productive member of it - the system is already doomed.
The rich people don't even pretend otherwise. Hell in "rich dad poor dad" he explicitely states that production is a doomed means of wealth generation - you don't get rich by making things, you get rich by NOT making things, by not producing and certainly by not producing quality. The only way to actually gain WEALTH is to "let your money work for you"
That's why the only people in business who get wealthy are the owners - they aren't producing anything- they are leeching off the asset that is the business's production. Nobody gets rich by making something good.
Who here on
>>A black one white civil war makes no sense, the whites aren't in power.
>Yet, a few posts back you claimed: white people STILL have only 5% unemployment, still fill the top 20% of salaried jobs, still make up 60% of business owners (and the next 30% are Indians - not Blacks).
>No comment at the moment on the other possibilities you mention.
Right - holding wealth != holding political power.
A protest against employers is known as a "strike" not a "war" civil or otherwise. So the two statements are entirely consistent.
>>Don't believe me ? In 1978 a poll was held at Potch University, probably the most conservative university in the country. 87% of the students declared that they were OPPOSED to appartheid. That was in 1978 already. Ten years later when that generation was the majority of the VOTERS - the system changed.
>One of the main gripes I have with the current political debate is that it's an either/or situation. Either pro-ANC or pro-apartheid (especially the sort of system it became when you and I grew up).
I don't agree. I'm not pro-ANC. I'm not pro-DA either and I'm definitely not pro-appartheid. My philosophies are, in fact, utterly UNrepresented in current politics. It's true that a number of politicians try to paint it that way - but that's racism on THEIR part, or more accurately - it's an attempt to deliberately CREATE racism to secure votes.
I'm definitely not in favor of that behavior. But that is a RECENT development, it didn't exist in Mandela's government.
A much more ACCURATE assesment is that people are either racist or not - there really CANNOT be any middle ground. Either all people are equal in your eyes, you are utterly colorblind, would marry a women you love without ever asking her ethnicity... or you're a racist.
Sorry, "cultural separatism" is STILL racism, it's just racism with a politically correct jacket on.
>Neither is a long term solution. But today it's just Not PC to be anti-ANC, so there's no room for lateral thinking.
Again - you're drinking the kool-aid. That's the propaganda that ANC officials try to use to secure votes - they are wrong, it's not how most people of any race think. I spent most of my career working in the townships. I never felt in any danger - on the contrary, I felt significantly more welcome than among the white world of high walls and razor wire. I discussed politics with many people from across the realms of South African cultures and the ONLY place I EVER heard racism among normal average citizens was among whites - a scathing slap in the face of my own people. Now you could claim that of course the racist blacks won't even BOTHER to discuss politics with a white guy - so I admit my sample space is skewed, but the vast majority of people in this country now only want to survive and build a better country, they just don't CARE what color you are anymore.
The small fringes who do are in fact just the loudest. If the average black person WAS still angry at white people (and by god do we deserve it) then the ANC politicians wouldn't NEED to build propaganda about it. The NEED to recreate that animosity as it's the only way to secure their powerbase.
Their constant harping on the race card only proves how little it still matters in the real world.
That said -there is a huge difference between being anti-ANC and being anti-South Africa. Leaving the country because you don't like the party that got the votes is pretty much guaranteed to be a lie. The leavers leave for other reasons - usually ones that they refuse to say out loud because they know their not supposed to think them.
Absolutely - but that's hardly typical. When trying to analyze the motivations of a "profile" - you're already dealing with a massive generalization, the only useful conclusions you could draw are those that apply to the majority of the people in that generalization, edge cases are negligible by the very definition of a profile.
Just noticed a minor oversight in my post. The profile specifies 40+ and single so that married majority don't apply. But then again high-earning 40+ singles tend to be divorcees - in case you missed it, 40+ divorcees pretty much the bottom-feeders of the gene-pool anyway - so if they enjoy blowing up heads in halo rather than another bar-pickup tonight... who are you to judge ?
>They also must have low IQ's as well... Not much to spend it on? are these people brain dead meat puppets? Motorcycles, Cars, Jetpacks, Overpriced stereos... I can list 90,000 things other than videogames to spend my high-earning money on that is not only
more fun, but get's you way more chicks...
All of which has this in common: they are LEISURE items - why does choosing one leisure item over another define your IQ ?
Also - most high-earning men that age are married, presumably this at least marginally reduces the number of additional chicks they actually NEED to get.
>A sports car is more impressive to a lady than a 6 digit Xbox achievement point number.
To some ladies. Perhaps even a significant majority - but most certainly not for ALL ladies.
>A motorcycle is far more fun than ANY driving game on any gaming platform.
To you. To me. Not to everyone.
Besides, much as I prefer my bike over driving games, I prefer WoW over golf - tastes differ. Why the aggro dude ?
>Racing with your local racing club on a real track is far more fun than any game. $10,000 can get you a nice Miata and all the racing upgrades to really tear it up at the track. a 1.8 with a turbo in a miata makes for real fun on a real track (not a redneck oval)
To you. To some other people. Not to everybody. A helluva lot of people will think THAT is the sign of a low IQ. Choosing to risk your life at high-speed in the real world (where you do NOT respawn).
>Hang gliding is an absolute rush.
Again... to you. I think RAIDING is an actual rush.
I don't fit the profile, I've just turned 30, but I am a high-earning single male without much other financial responsibility. I pay my bond and since I don't have other debt - I got plenty of cash to burn even after making investments. Why the hell should you get to decide that burning it on hanggliding is smarter than burning it on the Cataclysm expansion ?
Talk about having your head so far up your own ass you can't see the crud for the dingleberries...
>giving away your OS/browser on your home page is akin in today's terms to supplying a browser on the install CD.
Which is perfectly legal - every Linux distro out there does it too - and was never the issue with microsoft. The issue was integrating windows 98 with I.E. in such a way that it was not possible to use one without the other - literally you couldn't uninstall IE as windows would STOP WORKING if you did.
Sure you could install another browser AS WELL - but since IE had to be there anyway and couldn't be removed - most people never bothered or even found out that other browsers existed (at the time) - and THAT was what was illegal.
Actually - that's just plain wrong. According to the organisors of the international gaming olympiad - the profile of the typical hardcore gamer is 40+, single, high-earning with significant disposable income and not much to spend it on but gaming gear.
Oh Look mommy, I'm Hitler.
That was without a doubt, the single most disguting, inhumane and utterly evil single post in the history of slashdot. Seriously -you make the goatse guy sound like a fun roommate...
If human life does not have intrinsic value to you - then that very decision ipso facto makes YOURS the least valuable of all, so do us all a favor and just kill yourself. After all -you're not destroying anything of value - and it's one less mouth to feed. Better than that, it's a mouth less that seems to be predominantly focussed on telling us that letting people starve and suffer to death is okay BECAUSE THEY AREN'T WORTH trying to save...
What kind of a psychopath are you ?
And to answer your question... yes I do mourn the children that died while I wrote this. Not a night goes by that I don't spare a sad thought for the children who starved that day and how little I could do to help them. THAT is called having a conscience - a basic attribute of the species called homo sapience, but not apparently of whatever putrescent evolutionary mistake produced you.
Their the only source of arms caches I've heard of in the news.
Either way - there's a huge difference between arms caches and evidence of an intended civil war. Storage rooms for gunsmugglers is actually a MUCH more likely explanation - some of the most notorious arms smugglers of all time operate from South Africa, and that's been the case for a long time. Remember Dirk Stoffberg ?
A civil war requires two distinct sides wanting power. We can't be expecting the black-on-white civil war that Mandela prevented (he had it in his power to unleash one with a word - and he chose a different path, NOT recognizing the nobility of THAT action - when the whole world would have thought him JUSTIFIED if he unleashed it... now THAT is making your own reality). A black one white civil war makes no sense, the whites aren't in power. ... that's essentially impossible now. The best effort that those who believe in such things could put together came apart at the seams - and not a all-knowing spook, an extremely well orchestrated task-force between the NIA and police.
A white on black one ? Well as I've shown
But oh right, the complainers think that because we have some corrupt incompetent policemen, that means there aren't ANY good ones in there, let alone the reality that MOST cops here really are good cops doing their best in what is probably the hardest country on earth to do that in.
A civil war between two black tribes ? Well the only two with the numbers for THAT is the Zulus and the Xhosas respectively, but their sharing power right now. The governing party which is traditionally a particularly Xhosa supported party, is being led by a Zulu president...
Sorry - but... I can't FIND the other force to make war on the government... who on earth did you imagine could possibly have anything to GAIN by it ?
But now explain something to me... I pointed out that were incredibly LUCKY to be as well off as we are after the forced removals of appartheid. You're trying to make a case that were are a lot less lucky than I think... if you're right - you do realize that you are massively STRENGHTENING my argument right ? The whole point is that it's highly unlikely another country would BE that lucky if they tried it now. If we are so much less lucky than I think... doesn't that make the odds off it really backfiring on any other country that tried even HIGHER ?
In short... why the hell are you fighting so hard to prove that I am right and that forced removals for labor purposes is a terrible policy ? What is the point you're making... what purpose does your argument serve except to sound like another typical white complainer - how dare anybody express positive sentiment about this country, everything's gone to shit here right... otherwise how could you NOT concede that 99% of all the expats did NOT leave because of crime.
They left because they were the 33% who voted NO in '92. That vast majority left because they are racists no matter how much they deny it. They left because they couldn't STAND the idea of a black government, even if that government had been the most competent and successful one ever - they would STILL have left, and complained that the country has gone to hell to justify it.
As we say in WoW... QQ-moar, nobody's impressed.
You often hear black people say "every white guy I meet is a liberal who always opposed appartheid... so how did it happen, where did all the people who voted for it for 40 years GO ?"
By which they are trying to say that they don't believe these white people who aren't racist, and don't want to reconcile because they think it's a facade. Well... I got their answer. All THOSE white people are in Perth and Sydney.
Don't believe me ? In 1978 a poll was held at Potch University, probably the most conservative university in the country. 87% of the students declared that they were OPPOSED to appartheid. That was in 1978 already.
Ten years later when that generation was the majority of the VOTERS - the system changed.
>>On a long enough timeframe the probability of any possible event occuring approaches one. In other words, yeah it's possible, and it WILL come - if you are prepared to wait long enough. Right now there is exactly ZERO evidence suggesting one in our lifetime.
>Oh, not ZERO evidence, as there are enough reports in the last 2 or 3 months of weapons stockpiled in Natal & Zimbabwe, "soldiers" reporting for "training", talk on grassroots level, talk in (black-owned) media. But yeah, in the end I haven't seen the goods with my own eyes, so one can close your eyes and make it off as second-hand rumours. I'm no prophet either, so I'm quite happy for us to take a wait an see approach.
That's your evidence ? The boeremag idiots ? The last time they tried something it turned into a massive joke and they really WERE the best the militants could offer. I've read the NIA report on them. These guys were organized, trained and efficient. They had insider knowledge of all military facilities in the country - everything they needed to know to find every weak spot and disable them.
They had all the potential you need for it - and they failed quite miserably. Why ? Forget the "they were a joke" news reports - that was deliberately how the authorities chose to spin it in order to demoralize the movement and remove trust in it's leaders - the truth is, they had everything needed for a revolution to succeed - except one thing, mass support.
The operation against them started almost two years before the first arrests, and literally waited for the first planned "no deaths" attacks to happen so they could be arrested and charged with more crimes. By the time they made their first "announce ourselves" moves, there was an undercover cop in every single cell of the boeremag.
When you base your recruitment on race, you inevitably lose the ability to tell a supporter from somebody who just looks the right color and speaks the right language.
205 undercover policemen blew their cover on the same night- arresting every leader, and most of the middle-men in the entire operation at a perfect culmination. The ISS's report is even more detailed. These reports read like a spy novel - except it details real events of which almost nothing made it into the news (on purpose).
Now as for your second paragraph. I'm FROM a middle-class white Afrikaans family. I remember as a 12 year old putting up posters urging a yes-vote in the '92 referendum, and my dad was concervative party in the early 80's. We learned, we grew - we adapted and the few remaining racist black-people-hate-us-and-want-our-stuff complainers... well please DO leave.
Only YOU call it a brain-drain - WE prefer complain-drain. We don't NEED negative people fucking up our efforts at building ONE nation.
The best country I ever saw (and I've lived in more than 25 of them for no less than 3 months at a time now) was Brazil. The only country where EVERY couple is a mixed couple, same-race couples just... don't happen. The ethnicities are mixed, so people mix... logically, in a few generations, brazil will only have on race, a super-mixture of all gene-pools which will probably be immune to more diseases than any other humans on the planet, smarter and stronger too - genetic mixing is GOOD for the gene-pool every farmer who breeds cattle knows this. Every dog breeder who watches their thoroughbreds suffer through excema that mongrels NEVER get knows this.
Why are we so stupid as to think it doesn't apply to OUR species ?
>For unskilled labor this is true. There are many career fields where people can almost name their price if they have the skills and experience.
That's an illusion that only exist over short term periods. It was like that in I.T. in the 80's and early 90's -now it's not, the market is flooded with poorer but cheap skills. To earn a decent salary now you have to find a highly specialised niche.
And every such niche gets flooded eventually.
The trouble is that the period it takes for new graduates to enter a given field - cheap, is around 5-10 years from it's formation, the average CAREER however is more than 30 years. You pick a high-earning career, you can be quite sure by the time you get into it, it won't be anymore.
Supply and demand requires that supply will rise to meet demand, and because we're talking about human beings here (a potentially infinite resource that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor [in fact production rate seems to be inversely proportional to the education of the laborers...]) the supply will always come to significantly exceed the demand - and as markets change - demands change.
Until around 1950 the average quality of life of every person had consistently gone up with every generation. The reason was better production methods and thus new business opportunities creating new employment markets - which provided huge demand.
Since then it has consistently gone down again now up to where we are now - where middle-class relative income is only marginally higher than it was during the depression -and expected to go down, and the poverty rate is higher than it was in the depression (in the richest country on earth - 50-million people live BELOW the official poverty line), the limited wealth there is has reached the most concentrated level in human history.
There was always a small group of wealthy people and a large group of poor people -but never before in all of human history has the wealthy group been this small, or the difference between them this vast.
It can be safely said that as soon as the production spurs of new methodologies were established, supply rose to meet demand, exceeded it and is now being consistently outcompeted by suppliers who are - effectively prepared to run at a loss.
That's the salary-workers economic state of the world today. I'd be buggered if I knew what to do about it- but I'm damn sure that the current system is so inherently unstable it MUST collapse, if we're lucky it collapses into a depression - if we're not, a war.
I reported both, the first guys were caught, the second ones - never found.
The police is a LOT better now than they were even five years ago and improving - but there is still a lot of bad apples, too many cops who basically think of their job as a bribe-collection service. The results are becoming more visible though. More and more hijackers are ending up in prison and less and less are happening.
Murderers are getting away less and less often - and robbers are starting to find life harder too. The days of the gangsters paradise does seem to be ending slowly.
One major change in recent years have been the upcoming of major drug villages. In Johannesburg it's hillbrow - overrun by Nigerian druglords - if you're light skinned you don't go near the place - because if you're not black you're shot on sight, and even a black man's life is forfeit if he's not identifiably part of a gang. They basically own the neighbourhood.
Just 5km north of my house in Atlantis is a series of blocks of flats filled with tik dens (tik is a local variant of meth) -the cops refuse to run raids there without army protection !
That does rather depend on NOT being away from home working for 20 hours a day !
>irks something terrible? You hate that you found a libertarian with an ounce of compassion?
In the sense that nobody likes having their comfortable prejudices challenged :D
>Actually, I don't think it does, as I stated in the other post. You're proposing a protectionist system, and historically those don't work well. My proposal is to lower the cost of labor such that manufacturers choose to stay here and can remain in business.
You're stating THAT they historically don't work well - but not considering WHY that is. Do the same issues that led to past failures still apply today ? Can we change them ? These are questions one needs to ask - you cannot learn from history without being able to view it in the context of the present.
>Thing is, you're effectively ensuring that there WILL be less work by artificially raising the cost of labor; therefore businesses will attempt to minimize it. It's economic law.
That's what unions do as well. If it wasn't for unions American's would STILL be sweatshop workers. Why would you DENY the people of China, Indonesia and India the right to make the same progress towards their own pursuit of happiness that you have ? Instead their stuck in the England of Charles Dickins ! ,lances against rice-flails, arrows against scythes, guns against knives... well this next revolution will have peasants with nukes... I don't know about you but I don't want to take my chances on them.
What happens when they do figure it out ? I have nasty suspicion what will happen is a revolution - that will end up with a group of people in power over these 2 billion people (a third of all humanity) that absolutely despise us - we're the enablers of their oppression. How can it NOT lead to World War 3 ?
Every other time in history when laborers felt abused it led to revolution or war if they could not find an amicable middle ground (which seems to have consistently failed without government backed labor laws). Right back to the peasants revolt and probably even earlier.
Most of the time - these failed because the barrons (ceo's, kings, pick your era) had better weapons
>I view disability(injury counts even if temporary) as a different matter from 'welfare'. Just being 'handicapped' such as confined to a wheelchair doesn't mean you can't work. As for the single parent - well, it's a sticky thing for me, single parents bring all sorts of sub-optimal situations to the board; sometimes it's unavoidable(death), sometimes it's better than a dual parent(where one is abusive, for example). I prefer households to be complete, women to wait until marriage to have kids, etc... On the other hand, kids need to be taken care of. Yet we also have people in the states who have more kids specifically to get more benefits. They view state supported procreation as a right. The kids need to be taken care of(very very important). Sticky Sticky Sticky...
Facing the same questions in my country - I agree, sticky. That's why I believe the only viable way to shift it is to make having a job sufficiently more attractive than wellfare that people go back to seeing it as it should be- a last resort.
I am just as in favor of dual-parent households, frankly - it's a job better done by two people than one and we know all the reasons why. But we have to deal with reality - a lot of parents are single. Death, a bad choice in boyfriends, a worse choice in spouse - this stuff happens, and the children that result need to be cared for.
The alternative is to go back to the Dickins' England and have 90% of children die before age 10 from working in unsafe factories... frankly I'd rather have 6 year olds living on my tax money than working a job.
>Still, with my idea the kids will have medical care, the woman can work part time, and even with a 40 hour a week job would be able to spend lots of time with her kids. I'm not going to require her to work 60-80 hours a week for benefits.
That was one of the reasons I said I liked it - th
>>RE: Your sig - I started doing your poll, but I stopped a few questions in. I can recognize a loaded poll when I see one.
>Not my poll... Just liked it and stuck it in my sig. Unfortuantly with the sig character limits being for the raw code, I can't add a disclaimer that it's not my site. However, I DO possess concealed carry permits for two states. Oh how I wish they were treated like driver's licenses(get one for the home state, good in all 50). I DO carry, but I'm don't tell random people that I do.
Fair enough
>>(in my country more than 50% of all shootings occur to steal the fire-arms of the victims - most common TARGET for such attacks are policemen. Shoot him in the head from behind while on patrol, steal his gun to use in other crimes) or force you to choose one answer when CLEARLY there are two that BOTH matter.
>Man, what country are you in if shooting police officers for their weapons is common? In the whole USA on average just over a hundred police officers die 'in the line of duty' each year, and that includes things like car accidents.
That would be South Africa - officially the most dangerous not-at-war country in the world. I have personally been a crime victim twice, once stabbed during a mugging in broad daylight- no warning, no threat, guy just walked past me on the side of the road and knifed me in passing and then grabbed my girlfriends handbag.
Once I was kidnapped by three people at gunpoint and dropped in a dark street after having my wallet and cellphone removed. In both cases - I am quite sure that if I had been carrying - I would be dead.
>>Well this was the one I stopped on. It forces me to choose between "my safety" or "my attacker's safety" as if they are mutually exclusive. The law in the full developed world for THOUSANDS of years have CLEARLY felt differently.
>Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure the law has normally been on the side of the 'noble' party, and failing that, on allowing the defender to use any means, up to and including killing their attacker. Heck, 'cattle rustling' carrying the possibility of the death penalty wasn't a new thing for the 'old west', it was hallowed tradition from europe.
Im quite sure - both the Dutch Roman and Anglican legal traditions require minimum necessary force. Though in case of DOUBT the court is allowed to accept the word of the noble party over the attacker (assuming both are alive to testify).
>>In very situational cases, a gun could be a good defense, if you're driving through a hijack-notorious area, and give it to a passenger who may get a shot off and let him drive BEFORE the 4 other hijackers can fire a killing shot, maybe.
>Depends on the threat, as you mention. This starts to make me think you're in Mexico, though I'm not familiar with any military that uses a .33 caliber weapon.
The SA Police used them during the riot years in the 80's as did some branches of the Military. That particular rifle is a good 30 years old now.
>In the USA, we don't have to worry about hijackers, and generally speaking, if, on average, most people were armed and willing to use their arms in self defense, hijacking would be a thing of the past. It's a predator-prey thing. The predator has survive, normally without significant injury, every attack.
Four against-one is the typical MO, follow the chosen target home from a mall, hijack it in the driveway. Two stay out of sight and keep a gun trained on you. If you so much as move funny, they kill you.
Trust me - being armed REDUCES your survival rate by a massive margin in this country. You can be the fastest drawer in the west all you want, it's useless against a sniper you can't see.
>hijackers normally don't kill, but the predator relation remains - they'll go after people with bodyguards less frequently than people without. They'll target those with the best payoff-risk ratios.
In South Africa they do. Hell even if you fully cooperate they will S
>Then what simply happens is that you get a seperate company to do it. A different company builds a factory in the cheap country, then starts importing the product. The in-country company ends up shuttering the factory because they can't compete.
>Otherwise you're looking at tariffs and blockades, and those generally harm the country doing more than it does the foreign country; indeed it's worse all around.
These are valid critiques, but I think more practical than philosophically wrong - and practical problems can be solved.
>Let's say welfare pays $10k if you have no job. Get a job earning $10k and your welfare drops to $7500, so you're now earning $17.5k, you're MUCH better off, whereas the current situation would have you now with a job earning $10k and NOT getting any welfare, thus you're actually better off on welfare.
>Get a job earning $40k a year and your benefits completely cease, but at that point do you really care?
I like your idea to an extent... except how on earth do you finance it ? I cannot imagine ANYTHING more stupid than a person paying tax AND getting a wellfare bonus (of any sort at all) - why not just let him keep the tax and lose the wellfare then ? Which means your cut off point needs to below the lowest income-tax bracket to make sense (sorry - I have NO idea what the tax-brackets in the US are).
Then the question becomes - can 30% or 40% of people pay enough tax to fund the running of the country AND pay those sliding scale wellfare checks ? Well possibly - in my country only 20% of people earn enough to pay any taxes at all- and we manage a fairly successful welfare state with 40% unemployment (but that 20% pay between 35 and 40 percent tax on average).
It's quite harsh to lose half your income to taxes.
The only practical way to reduce it however would be to significantly reduce that 40% number - and THAT will take at least one more generation, because almost ALL of that 40% are illiterate and this economy simply doesn't HAVE that much manual labor.
Mind you -when a minimum wage law for all workers here were first proposed, the rich 20% vocally complained... until they heard what the minimum wage WAS - then they all supported it. For the vast majority of them - it was LESS than they were paying their maids and gardeners before.
I always thought that little bit of history said sooo much about human nature.
I must say I do like your proposal in principle, it seems like a suitable one - but like mine I see practical problems with - and I am not sure what the sollutions for either would be (yet).