Ah yes, "land of the free". Where if you don't like the government, you can move to Somalia. And if you don't like the designated public school in your area, you relocate to another area. So you're free to move, but you're not free to choose the school your kids go to. Good thing you didn't pay for that, right? Right?
Those businesses are run by people. People that are very much indoctrinated and taught into thinking that "government can fix everything". I've said this before; you can say that businesses are doing bad things by petitioning government, but then you have to look at the real problem. The fact that government enables such corruption to be imposed over the rest of us, without our consent. That's what a state implies, special-interests and minority groups get the government to impose their petitions by virtue of "law". Those groups can be large corporations, religious groups, minority groups, unions, whatever; they're all entities that in no way represent the majority, much less everyone.
If they want to be Capitalists, they should be providing those low cost student loans as an investment to improve their supply. They should improve working conditions so people will want to work for them specifically.
They are being capitalists. My first comment on this thread explains that businesses are not moral. On a side note, only people can be moral, and if their business is not being run in agreement with _your_ morals, then perhaps the owner of that business has different morals than you. For all we know, the owners value money over moral issues such as ageism. One thing we do know, is that discrimination will incur costs on them. That is why it is imperative that we don't allow any minority groups such as corporations/unions to enact laws that govern the rest of us.
You put caps on how much someone's net worth can be.
I've been poor, now I make $60k/year (for the past 10 years avg 50k)
but still don't feel financially stable even with $200k saved
So how would you feel about your hard-earned money if that cap was 100k? Do you want the government to tell you that you don't deserve to have that 200K saved up? To tell you that you didn't earn it? That it doesn't belong to you and that it should be given away to the guy that can't save up for 15K? Does he deserve it more than you by virtue of being less motivated or skilled than you?
You're fine and dandy when it comes to taking _other_ peoples' money. And as a consequence you'll set that cap somewhere arbitrarily high, so only the "really evil/rich" have their money taken away. Sooner or later, you'll realize that such as system would just lead to people squandering their money away or not saving up as much, and then without you noticing you'll find that there are magically no more people to tax. So then your next move will be to lower that cap, because who needs that much anyways? Sigh, I really don't think you've thought your jealousy through. In fact, I can't believe you were poor, worked your way up out of being poor, and still feel that lazy slobs that work less than you somehow deserve your money.
they expect to make a good living providing valuable (and essential) skills.
What they expect and what they're worth are two different things. If they indeed possessed skills that are valuable and essential to the company, then their salary would reflect exactly how much the company was willing to pay for such skills, negotiation aside. Instead, you have the government stepping in and messing up the entire process by putting incentives and pressures on the market. Both with cheap student loans, H1B3's and a host of other nonsense. What you end up with is a complicated mess of a landscape where skills are disconnected from remuneration. Not to mention the whole market is thrown in disarray with all the different agents trying to follow the government subsidies/forces.
I don't think you quite understand how capitalism works. Companies are not in the business of charity. They're there to drive down costs, and increase efficiency in order to maximize profit. That's it. All those things you described are features, not bugs, for lack of a better way to explain it. They're not there to enforce fairness and they're most certainly not there to enforce the morality you deem noble.
You can't have a "loosened" immigration policy when your entire economy rests on protectionism. Almost every single country does it in one way or another. That's why these H13B visa things are such a touchy subject in America. Sure, it's good to have "competition", but it's also bad to make your own country's workers work worth less. It's simply the natural extension of having different standards of living, and costs of living.
They've built their protectionist tower of cards up really nicely, and for a very long time. And then they blame "free-market" and "capitalism" when cracks start showing in their little protectionist castle. Typical statist redirection, so please don't be fooled by it.
It's currently very popular in our society to blame a specific group's problems on external factors. In that it's almost never the groups fault for their situation. It's some form of convenient, feel-good denial, I reckon. It's nice to tell a person in a bad situation that it's someone else's fault, not theirs. It's also quite nice to tell people that are guilt-ridden over this group's poor situation that _they_ can fix it, if only they .
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. With the current US welfare budget, poverty could be wiped out in the US entirely. There just isn't any incentive to do so. Nor the political will due to our society's idiotic obsession with political correctness and blame externalization as I mentioned above. We all want to play the armchair game of "fix-the-world's-problems". Most of the population does it by getting government to fix it, which they magically never do. While some of the rest of us decide to personally help/volunteer, instead of just throwing money at a problem in the hopes that it will stop nagging us.
There will always be bad things that happen to people. Unfortunate circumstances that are quite unforeseeable and out of that individual's hands to prevent. However, using those unfortunate events as some sort of scapegoat and example in order to justify our continuous coddling of the lowest performing x% of the population is quite sad. And I'd imagine that if one of those unfortunate events happened to me, and I was unable to cope and ended up poverty-stricken, I'd find it quite insulting to be lumped together with most of the people that are currently on welfare/disability.
The fuck is wrong with you? What's the point of enacting a law if you don't do your utmost best to enforce it to the letter? Oh, you want "selective enforcement"? So that police can use their "discretion" when applying the law? Law, you know, that thing we told government to enforce for us. The thing that we hold on a mighty pedestal as the ultimate expression of our collective morals?
To create a law and then not enforce it properly is not only morally corrupt, but it will lead to individuals finding that law corrupt if not finding the whole law-making process unjust and immoral. You shouldn't be making a law that you can not feasibly enforce, or have no intention of fully enforcing. This is what the people above you said, yet your little attack of calling someone a 14 year old gets modded up. Fuck you and the morally corrupt collective you hail from.
George Carlin was kind of wrong. It's more that 17% are stupider than the average. The first standard deviation is 66%, which means that 34% fall outside what's reasonably average. Of that 34%, 17% are above and 17% are below. That means 17% of the population is notably dumb, the rest is pretty much on the same level or notably smarter than average.
Finally, I wanted to state for the record that I hold no ill will towards those who drive for a living - my uncle and one of my best friends are both lifetime OTR drivers, and without guys like that our economy would grind to a standstill.
Ah yes, now the reason for your anger/fear is crystal clear. Thanks for that.
See, that's the real problem - I'm sure we can all come up with a million ideas for work the next few generations can do, but that means precisely jack shit to the current generation who will lose their only source of income.
You'd rather the government prop up their unneeded jobs at our expense for a long time? Until when? Forever? Eventually the scale will tip and people will quickly and absolutely revolt at the propping up of a then quite unneeded job. The same drivers you've been propping up with government-imposed laws and regulations will then be probably generations behind the times and definitely unable to find any job.
What's the stop-gap for the time period between auto-cars taking work from humans, work they need to pay their bills, and the creation of these ephemeral 'new jobs' that won't exist for a good while?
It's not up to us to provide you with an alternative as a reason for something. It's up to you to admit that it is not these workers' right in any remote way to force us to prop up their dying industry. It'll just make things worse for them in the long run. But to people like you that is just another way of putting it off until it's someone else's problem. Because that's exactly what propping up dying industries is. Delaying the inevitable, and seeking that next "quick fix".
And who forced you to base your retirement on investments? Oh, that's right... Inflation and fear.
Either way, you're a sick human being if you think innocent people should die because "your retirement account lost money" due to their supposed actions.
How on earth can you expect such a thing? You give them effective control over yourself, and everyone around you. And yet, you never pick them based on "honor". You do, however, pick them based on such silly things as: "immigration", "job creation", "taxes", "gay rights", "anti-gay rights", "religion", "feel-good rhetoric", and a multitude of other, non-consequential traits and promises. I'm not saying those things aren't important, just that in the grand scheme of things, they're pretty divisive and distracting, even when some of the populace eventually get around to trying to enact change in government.
If you really expected them to act honorably, you'd be out right now protesting their dishonorable acts, and violent acts. And you may very well be doing just that, but I doubt the rest of your brethren are doing the same. They're too busy watching Survivor Island, and the Kardashian sisters.
Yes, but you can tell it to size the pdf pages exactly to the size of your device's screen. So then the pdf fits perfectly onto the device, and there is no need to alter the flow of the text due to the width of the device.
The way that the legal and legislative system is right now corporations wield a HUGE amount of power.
Emphasis mine. You see the root of problem, yet you blame the corporations for it. That's the one thing I've never quite understood about "anti-corporation" people. They are so quick to blame the corporations for playing the rules that the supposed majority laid down. And yes, that includes the making of the rules, because those are governed by meta-rules.
Face it. The majority fucked up, badly. They didn't anticipate that giving the state absolute power will allow minority interests (including corporations) to leverage that absolute power over the rest of us.
The real reason it costs so much is because of fiddling by the government and professor unions. Loans, subsidies, mandated maximum working hours by professors, and a host of other, "minor" things as you call them. Not only that, but the colleges themselves are more than willing to raise the barrier for entry into the college market through supposed "accreditation" rules, stiffling competition from leaner/more efficient colleges that might spring up.
And some more info on the subject, from Thomas Sowell here.
Discriminate? You make it sound dirty... It's cleaning up the market place so that it's easier to find apps that are truly useful, to a moderately sized group of people. At some point, having thousands of useless/trivial apps will lower the value of the entire marketplace.
I would pay a monthly subscription fee for such an app store. Really, I would. Even if I wasn't buying every month, I'd still do it. I want it entirely unlikely for useless apps to ever find it profitable to spam the marketplace, even from the tiny tiny proportion of people that will buy the app by accident and forget to ask for a refund.
The state is inherently violent. There are numerous examples of that. How about you tell me how it is not violent to lock someone up in a jail (where they will be physically raped/beaten) because they had in their possession an illegal substance that they never did/plan to use on someone besides themselves.
To deny that example and it's violence, is to deny the very core of your entire legal system. Until you fix blatant immoral and violent institutions such as that, you can not preach to anyone about "American democracy", and "voting" or any other such supposedly noble concepts.
The funny thing, and I thought about it now just before I was about to post. You, or another statist, will probably retort with something along the lines of "yeah, sure, locking someone up for possessing drugs is bad, you should vote and campaign to change it". How very convenient. You can simultaneously criticize a system, and proclaim it's virtue because "you can change it", without ever having to deal with the real problem.
No, that would be the intellectuals. Not the techs. They're more like the altar-boys that sweep the church floor. And us programmers are more like the scribes, but I don't think this analogy is going quite right.
Either way, you need to look at the intellectuals. The ones that give "intellectual" sanction to the things government imposes on us.
I had the sad misfortune of reading your entire post, and I must say, the person that responded to you was fully justified. You're also perfectly right that the Romney would probably have done nearly identical things regarding the NSA scandal.
However, even talking about it in such a way really just distracts from the real problems. The real problem is the complete inabiltity for your damn populace to affect any change in your country's policies. The real problem is the fact that you have a defacto single-party "democracy". We shouldn't even care who get's voted in. Every.single.person should be worried about enacting change in the structure of government that allows such incongruencies to even occur in a supposedly democratic system. Instead, you're all so worried about assigning, explaining and arguing over partisan/presidentail blame that you're NOT looking at the problems at all. You're just not. If you did, you'd all be out on the streets protesting to have a country-wide vote/referendum on every single one of these important issues.
There is no need for a revolution as one of the earlier posters was talking about. Change can happen, but not if you work within the already rigged system. Get out and protest for a referendum. All of you. That includes you and the guy you responded to.
Oh get off your high horse already. Most people are compassionate. But compassion only goes so far. Not only do we have people to worry about people on multiple, progressively more distant levels that we actively care for...but now you expect us to have compassion for some unknown person, on the other side of the planet because they are somehow "forced" into hazardous living conditions/jobs.
How about we all stop pretending like we care about indistinct individuals that we are told to "feel sorry for", and instead help those immediate people around us. Start with your family. Then your friends.
If we all did that, individually. Then no one would have to worry about people they don't know, because they'd all mostly be just fine. And leave the guilt out of it... because any virtue obtained from doing good deeds through guilt is ultimately not virtuous.
It's rather simple to police. Just disable the ability of apps to deliver advertising. Only police that, and the majority of the apps you mention would be worthless.
And once you've instituted that policy, then you can remove apps with a less than 100 downloads per year, or at whatever level you want. Apps need to be useful, and you need to trim the list of apps down every once in a while.
The more of these silly apps and their variations exist, the more useless garbage noise I have when searching for an app I REALLY want to use.
The whole advertising model for apps may have improved the ecosystem and quantity of apps initially. But it's getting worse as app clone developers get more desperate, and people get more wise to filtering out the spam apps. This happened with normal web advertisements, and look where we are now.
Slashdot Mirror
[...]compared to what you seem to have in the States, but I wouldn't say that a near-monopoly in education has guaranteed a bad system here...
No, that was the teacher unions.
Ah yes, "land of the free". Where if you don't like the government, you can move to Somalia. And if you don't like the designated public school in your area, you relocate to another area. So you're free to move, but you're not free to choose the school your kids go to. Good thing you didn't pay for that, right? Right?
If they want to be Capitalists, they should be providing those low cost student loans as an investment to improve their supply. They should improve working conditions so people will want to work for them specifically.
They are being capitalists. My first comment on this thread explains that businesses are not moral. On a side note, only people can be moral, and if their business is not being run in agreement with _your_ morals, then perhaps the owner of that business has different morals than you. For all we know, the owners value money over moral issues such as ageism. One thing we do know, is that discrimination will incur costs on them. That is why it is imperative that we don't allow any minority groups such as corporations/unions to enact laws that govern the rest of us.
You put caps on how much someone's net worth can be.
I've been poor, now I make $60k/year (for the past 10 years avg 50k)
but still don't feel financially stable even with $200k saved
So how would you feel about your hard-earned money if that cap was 100k? Do you want the government to tell you that you don't deserve to have that 200K saved up? To tell you that you didn't earn it? That it doesn't belong to you and that it should be given away to the guy that can't save up for 15K? Does he deserve it more than you by virtue of being less motivated or skilled than you?
You're fine and dandy when it comes to taking _other_ peoples' money. And as a consequence you'll set that cap somewhere arbitrarily high, so only the "really evil/rich" have their money taken away. Sooner or later, you'll realize that such as system would just lead to people squandering their money away or not saving up as much, and then without you noticing you'll find that there are magically no more people to tax. So then your next move will be to lower that cap, because who needs that much anyways? Sigh, I really don't think you've thought your jealousy through. In fact, I can't believe you were poor, worked your way up out of being poor, and still feel that lazy slobs that work less than you somehow deserve your money.
they expect to make a good living providing valuable (and essential) skills.
What they expect and what they're worth are two different things. If they indeed possessed skills that are valuable and essential to the company, then their salary would reflect exactly how much the company was willing to pay for such skills, negotiation aside. Instead, you have the government stepping in and messing up the entire process by putting incentives and pressures on the market. Both with cheap student loans, H1B3's and a host of other nonsense. What you end up with is a complicated mess of a landscape where skills are disconnected from remuneration. Not to mention the whole market is thrown in disarray with all the different agents trying to follow the government subsidies/forces.
I don't think you quite understand how capitalism works. Companies are not in the business of charity. They're there to drive down costs, and increase efficiency in order to maximize profit. That's it. All those things you described are features, not bugs, for lack of a better way to explain it. They're not there to enforce fairness and they're most certainly not there to enforce the morality you deem noble.
Farmers don't like their cattle wondering off into other cattle-ranches.
Linkie
You can't have a "loosened" immigration policy when your entire economy rests on protectionism. Almost every single country does it in one way or another. That's why these H13B visa things are such a touchy subject in America. Sure, it's good to have "competition", but it's also bad to make your own country's workers work worth less. It's simply the natural extension of having different standards of living, and costs of living.
They've built their protectionist tower of cards up really nicely, and for a very long time. And then they blame "free-market" and "capitalism" when cracks start showing in their little protectionist castle. Typical statist redirection, so please don't be fooled by it.
It's currently very popular in our society to blame a specific group's problems on external factors. In that it's almost never the groups fault for their situation. It's some form of convenient, feel-good denial, I reckon. It's nice to tell a person in a bad situation that it's someone else's fault, not theirs. It's also quite nice to tell people that are guilt-ridden over this group's poor situation that _they_ can fix it, if only they .
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. With the current US welfare budget, poverty could be wiped out in the US entirely. There just isn't any incentive to do so. Nor the political will due to our society's idiotic obsession with political correctness and blame externalization as I mentioned above. We all want to play the armchair game of "fix-the-world's-problems". Most of the population does it by getting government to fix it, which they magically never do. While some of the rest of us decide to personally help/volunteer, instead of just throwing money at a problem in the hopes that it will stop nagging us.
There will always be bad things that happen to people. Unfortunate circumstances that are quite unforeseeable and out of that individual's hands to prevent. However, using those unfortunate events as some sort of scapegoat and example in order to justify our continuous coddling of the lowest performing x% of the population is quite sad. And I'd imagine that if one of those unfortunate events happened to me, and I was unable to cope and ended up poverty-stricken, I'd find it quite insulting to be lumped together with most of the people that are currently on welfare/disability.
The fuck is wrong with you? What's the point of enacting a law if you don't do your utmost best to enforce it to the letter? Oh, you want "selective enforcement"? So that police can use their "discretion" when applying the law? Law, you know, that thing we told government to enforce for us. The thing that we hold on a mighty pedestal as the ultimate expression of our collective morals?
To create a law and then not enforce it properly is not only morally corrupt, but it will lead to individuals finding that law corrupt if not finding the whole law-making process unjust and immoral. You shouldn't be making a law that you can not feasibly enforce, or have no intention of fully enforcing. This is what the people above you said, yet your little attack of calling someone a 14 year old gets modded up. Fuck you and the morally corrupt collective you hail from.
George Carlin was kind of wrong. It's more that 17% are stupider than the average. The first standard deviation is 66%, which means that 34% fall outside what's reasonably average. Of that 34%, 17% are above and 17% are below. That means 17% of the population is notably dumb, the rest is pretty much on the same level or notably smarter than average.
WOOOOSH, captain pedantic to the rescue!!
Finally, I wanted to state for the record that I hold no ill will towards those who drive for a living - my uncle and one of my best friends are both lifetime OTR drivers, and without guys like that our economy would grind to a standstill.
Ah yes, now the reason for your anger/fear is crystal clear. Thanks for that.
See, that's the real problem - I'm sure we can all come up with a million ideas for work the next few generations can do, but that means precisely jack shit to the current generation who will lose their only source of income.
You'd rather the government prop up their unneeded jobs at our expense for a long time? Until when? Forever? Eventually the scale will tip and people will quickly and absolutely revolt at the propping up of a then quite unneeded job. The same drivers you've been propping up with government-imposed laws and regulations will then be probably generations behind the times and definitely unable to find any job.
What's the stop-gap for the time period between auto-cars taking work from humans, work they need to pay their bills, and the creation of these ephemeral 'new jobs' that won't exist for a good while?
It's not up to us to provide you with an alternative as a reason for something. It's up to you to admit that it is not these workers' right in any remote way to force us to prop up their dying industry. It'll just make things worse for them in the long run. But to people like you that is just another way of putting it off until it's someone else's problem. Because that's exactly what propping up dying industries is. Delaying the inevitable, and seeking that next "quick fix".
And who forced you to base your retirement on investments? Oh, that's right... Inflation and fear.
Either way, you're a sick human being if you think innocent people should die because "your retirement account lost money" due to their supposed actions.
How on earth can you expect such a thing? You give them effective control over yourself, and everyone around you. And yet, you never pick them based on "honor". You do, however, pick them based on such silly things as: "immigration", "job creation", "taxes", "gay rights", "anti-gay rights", "religion", "feel-good rhetoric", and a multitude of other, non-consequential traits and promises. I'm not saying those things aren't important, just that in the grand scheme of things, they're pretty divisive and distracting, even when some of the populace eventually get around to trying to enact change in government.
If you really expected them to act honorably, you'd be out right now protesting their dishonorable acts, and violent acts. And you may very well be doing just that, but I doubt the rest of your brethren are doing the same. They're too busy watching Survivor Island, and the Kardashian sisters.
And this is one of the reasons I read Slashdot.
Yes, but you can tell it to size the pdf pages exactly to the size of your device's screen. So then the pdf fits perfectly onto the device, and there is no need to alter the flow of the text due to the width of the device.
The way that the legal and legislative system is right now corporations wield a HUGE amount of power.
Emphasis mine. You see the root of problem, yet you blame the corporations for it. That's the one thing I've never quite understood about "anti-corporation" people. They are so quick to blame the corporations for playing the rules that the supposed majority laid down. And yes, that includes the making of the rules, because those are governed by meta-rules.
Face it. The majority fucked up, badly. They didn't anticipate that giving the state absolute power will allow minority interests (including corporations) to leverage that absolute power over the rest of us.
if you dig in, you can find lots of small places where costs could easily be cut, and together they add up to big inefficiencies.
How about this tiny litte place where costs can be cut: Coach Salaries Or, how about professor salaries.
The real reason it costs so much is because of fiddling by the government and professor unions. Loans, subsidies, mandated maximum working hours by professors, and a host of other, "minor" things as you call them. Not only that, but the colleges themselves are more than willing to raise the barrier for entry into the college market through supposed "accreditation" rules, stiffling competition from leaner/more efficient colleges that might spring up.
And some more info on the subject, from Thomas Sowell here.
Discriminate? You make it sound dirty... It's cleaning up the market place so that it's easier to find apps that are truly useful, to a moderately sized group of people. At some point, having thousands of useless/trivial apps will lower the value of the entire marketplace.
I would pay a monthly subscription fee for such an app store. Really, I would. Even if I wasn't buying every month, I'd still do it. I want it entirely unlikely for useless apps to ever find it profitable to spam the marketplace, even from the tiny tiny proportion of people that will buy the app by accident and forget to ask for a refund.
The state is inherently violent. There are numerous examples of that. How about you tell me how it is not violent to lock someone up in a jail (where they will be physically raped/beaten) because they had in their possession an illegal substance that they never did/plan to use on someone besides themselves.
To deny that example and it's violence, is to deny the very core of your entire legal system. Until you fix blatant immoral and violent institutions such as that, you can not preach to anyone about "American democracy", and "voting" or any other such supposedly noble concepts.
The funny thing, and I thought about it now just before I was about to post. You, or another statist, will probably retort with something along the lines of "yeah, sure, locking someone up for possessing drugs is bad, you should vote and campaign to change it". How very convenient. You can simultaneously criticize a system, and proclaim it's virtue because "you can change it", without ever having to deal with the real problem.
No, that would be the intellectuals. Not the techs. They're more like the altar-boys that sweep the church floor. And us programmers are more like the scribes, but I don't think this analogy is going quite right.
Either way, you need to look at the intellectuals. The ones that give "intellectual" sanction to the things government imposes on us.
I had the sad misfortune of reading your entire post, and I must say, the person that responded to you was fully justified. You're also perfectly right that the Romney would probably have done nearly identical things regarding the NSA scandal.
However, even talking about it in such a way really just distracts from the real problems. The real problem is the complete inabiltity for your damn populace to affect any change in your country's policies. The real problem is the fact that you have a defacto single-party "democracy". We shouldn't even care who get's voted in. Every.single.person should be worried about enacting change in the structure of government that allows such incongruencies to even occur in a supposedly democratic system. Instead, you're all so worried about assigning, explaining and arguing over partisan/presidentail blame that you're NOT looking at the problems at all. You're just not. If you did, you'd all be out on the streets protesting to have a country-wide vote/referendum on every single one of these important issues.
There is no need for a revolution as one of the earlier posters was talking about. Change can happen, but not if you work within the already rigged system. Get out and protest for a referendum. All of you. That includes you and the guy you responded to.
Oh get off your high horse already. Most people are compassionate. But compassion only goes so far. Not only do we have people to worry about people on multiple, progressively more distant levels that we actively care for...but now you expect us to have compassion for some unknown person, on the other side of the planet because they are somehow "forced" into hazardous living conditions/jobs.
How about we all stop pretending like we care about indistinct individuals that we are told to "feel sorry for", and instead help those immediate people around us. Start with your family. Then your friends.
If we all did that, individually. Then no one would have to worry about people they don't know, because they'd all mostly be just fine. And leave the guilt out of it... because any virtue obtained from doing good deeds through guilt is ultimately not virtuous.
It's rather simple to police. Just disable the ability of apps to deliver advertising. Only police that, and the majority of the apps you mention would be worthless.
And once you've instituted that policy, then you can remove apps with a less than 100 downloads per year, or at whatever level you want. Apps need to be useful, and you need to trim the list of apps down every once in a while.
The more of these silly apps and their variations exist, the more useless garbage noise I have when searching for an app I REALLY want to use.
The whole advertising model for apps may have improved the ecosystem and quantity of apps initially. But it's getting worse as app clone developers get more desperate, and people get more wise to filtering out the spam apps. This happened with normal web advertisements, and look where we are now.