Oh for fucks sake... You think that Microsoft not allowing pictures of guns on a service they provide is evidence of The Man trying to take away your actual weapons? How paranoid can you be?
You might as well say the fact I can't drink at work is evidence that prohibition will be reinstated any day now.
In the 1940s, transistors were right around the corner (being developed in the second half of the decade), so it's not like we had time to give up on them. Not to mention we were already past the industrial revolution. We had interchangeable parts, assembly line manufacturing, higher precision machining. And, of course, vacuum tubes. Interchangeable little devices that could be easily replaced when they broke, and were much easier to design with than clockwork. Oh, and on top of all of that, we had a major war in which both sides were searching for any technological miracle to give them an edge.
You're engaging in magical thinking. You can't bring one piece of technology back in time without all of the other bits of technology to support it. Babbage was never able to complete his device, and not because he was lazy. That was just one machine. It takes a lot more than that to have a "computer revolution".
Handing someone a gun doesn't instantly make them an idiot.
But handing an idiot a gun doesn't instantly make them sane. Let's work on fixing the laws so that people like Jared Loughner can't get guns. Once we're no longer providing lethal, long range weapons to crazies and felons, then we can work on easing up the restrictions on the responsible citizens.
And before you even respond with the two biggest cliches:
1) "Outlaw guns and only outlaws have guns." The fact that some bad guys get guns doesn't mean we should make it easy for them. 2) "If people were allowed to carry, they could defend themselves from the crazies." There were people with guns present when Loughner opened fire, and they did precisely jack. The sad fact is that most people are not action heroes. In the chaos of an actual shooting, you probably won't react fast enough to fire, and if you do there is a serious risk of killing a bystander.
Those desktop adding machines came many decades later, and for good reason. Remember that interchangeable parts were just an idea being tossed around in France at that point, and it wasn't until the middle of the next century that a few Americans actually got it to work in practice (and it wasn't Eli Whitney... he just demonstrated the French idea to the US Congress; the actual innovation came later by some other people whose names I forget). Without interchangeable parts, such a large machine would be prohibitively expensive and very difficult to repair if it broke. And it's not as though interchangeable parts could have been developed sooner, because that innovation was based on the discovery of how to make harder steels for machining.
Technology is very interconnected. Everyone knows the quote about standing on the shoulders of giants. What we forget is that the giants themselves are actually just a bunch of people sitting on each other's shoulders.
A Victorian computer revolution was not possible, as should be obvious to anyone who understands how computers work. Just think of how massive (and weak) computers were back in the days of vacuum tubes. Now imagine how massive, weak, and prone to break downs they'd be if they were made of clockwork. You'd have an entire warehouse filled with moving parts that might be equivalent to a digital watch... at least until one of the gears breaks. The technology simply didn't exist to make computing feasible.
There are things you can't easily learn without graph paper, and it's dirt cheap. There's nothing that you can't learn without an iPad, and they're expensive.
Their chart says Chinese labor earns 2% of each iPad sold, so about $10 per device. There have been millions of devices sold. Are we now claiming that fifty million dollars is trivial? And since it's such a small portion, Apple could easily double or even triple the wages without a major impact to their profit margin. And don't forget, that's just the iPad. Throw in the iPhones and the iPods, not to mention all the non-Apple devices. And then you have to account for all the support jobs... people who build and maintain the factories, or sell things to the workers. In the end, you have billions of dollars in wages fluttering out of the country every year, all in the name of enriching the executive staff.
I get why cheap trinkets need to be made overseas. But on objects that cost hundreds of dollars and have a profit margin north of 20%, there's no reason for it, except to make the rich richer while making the country poorer.
What we need is a new generation of publishers that do that actual value-added work: editing, formatting, paperwork... maybe marketing, though that could probably be handled by a dedicated marketing firm. In exchange, they take a smaller cut and no claim to the copyright, reflecting their reduced role in society. A start-up company doing exactly this could probably be disruptive enough in the market to force a change in the behavior of the traditional publishers, and I think it's only a matter of time before we see such companies popping up.
This is one of the rare cases where the free market might actually be able to work as advertised.
Not even that. My mother converted from Judaism to Catholicism a long time ago, so we celebrate both holidays. I also have atheist and Buddhist friends whom I occasionally buy Christmas presents for, as Christmas has long since ceased to be a truly religious holiday. (I like the Futurama solution of calling the non-religious holiday Xmas, but I don't see it catching on.)
And really, why does Amazon even want this information? Are they going to stop showing me ads for Dawkins polemics because someone sent me a gift with Santa Claus on the wrapping paper?
The problem is precisely that the supply is controlled by mathematics and thus rigid. When I say controllable, I mean by people. We want a currency that can be adjusted on the fly to soften recessions and slow excessive growth. And while geeks certainly will encrypt and back up their wallets, the typical user won't. In order for the currency to gain acceptance, it has to be used by the sort of people that fall for fake antivirus scams or who call tech support when their computer is turned off.
Silencers can be used on supersonic ammo. You still get a loud noise, but it's quiet enough that you don't need ear protection, which would be a plus if you're trying to rob a bank or something. And really, that's even true with subsonic ammo. The whisper quiet silenced guns used in movies are a Hollywood invention.
Also, the idea of a gangster sniping a victim from a safe distance is laughable. These guys typically don't know how to hold a pistol, and get all their gun handling techniques from crappy action movies. The idea of highly trained professional gang hitmen posting up on rooftops, like in Lucky Number Slevin or Smokin' Aces, is a another Hollywood invention. Actual criminal sharpshooters, like the DC sniper, typically have military training, something which is not common (though not unheard of) among gang members.
If you're going to nitpick, at least be accurate about it.
Because your would-be clients have armies of lawyers to dig through any proposed contracts and make sure they're really covered. If you leave in loopholes to get out of paying, while Company X offers real coverage with audits to set the price, most customers will choose Company X... and those that don't will next time.
Those words you typed only have meaning because we all "pretend" they do.
The fact is that bitcoin has some serious flaws that prevent it from gaining acceptance as an actual currency. Those flaws have nothing to do with the fact that, like all monetary systems, it's based off a shared agreement of value. The flaws have much more to do with an uncontrollable supply, a reliance on machines that not everyone has, the risk of losing your wealth in a computer crash, and so on.
It's the difference between assault rifles with silencers and armor piercing rounds, compared to regular hunting rifles. Both can be used for criminal purposes, but one is particularly well suited to those purposes while only having minor benefits for legal purposes.
I'm not saying bitcoin should be illegal, since the criminal purposes aren't nearly as dangerous as those involving high powered weaponry, but it is an obstacle that would need to be dealt with if the people behind bitcoin want it to actually gain acceptance.
What do you consider to be SV that Santa Clara isn't part of it? Maps like this, which get put up as posters in offices throughout the area, make it pretty clear than Santa Clara is a major part of SV.
Offshoring is alive and well. If you do work in Silicon valley, just pull your head out of the sand and look around. We're doing fine for now, but not a year goes by that I don't see some company wipe out a department and have the work done in India or Taiwan or the Philippines.
And while Facebook may be about to make some more millionaires, professional sports does the same thing every year. It's the same thing -- if you're good, and really, really lucky, you might get rich. But you probably won't. (Although at least with a tech career, you can live comfortably for now -- a not-quite-good-enough athlete wouldn't be so lucky.)
It's easy to say a business model is "obviously" flawed after the fact. We've wasted orders of magnitude more money on even more obvious blunders -- Iraq springs to mind.
That is so much bullshit. Only people like you, who have money, can afford to claim that you don't need money to be happy.
Enjoy that snowball fight with your kids. And tonight, once they're in bed, think about what would happen if you were one of the long-term unemployed masses. If you had to leave your home for someplace cheaper, where your kids might get caught up in gang violence. If you couldn't reliably put food on the table, so sometimes they have to go to bed hungry. If, God forbid, you couldn't afford necessary healthcare for them, and lost one.
Rest assured, your CEO doesn't care about any of that. You're just a cog, to be used up and replaced as soon as someone cheaper (more desperate) comes along. If you don't fight for your family and their futures, who will?
To answer the first question, yes, because deficit spending is necessary during a recession.
To answer the second question, why should the Democrats waste time creating a budget in the Senate? Traditionally, the House is supposed to put forward the first draft of financial bills, and besides, the Republicans would just filibuster anything the Democrats proposed. That's been their game plan for years.
They intentionally added tons of unrelated, partisan crap to the one year bill. Essentially, they were taking the American people hostage. Obama and the Senate refused to play that game, and so came up with a two month extension to buy time in the hopes that the Republicans will stop taking hostages.
It's a vain hope, and we'll be right back where we started in two months -- the Republicans with a gun to the head of the American people, demanding that we give them the world. Same as they did with the unemployment benefits last year, and the debt ceiling some months ago. So don't you dare try to pretend that the Republicans were behaving ethically in proposing that "one year extension". To do so makes you either ignorant or a liar.
No Democrat has ever claimed that all tax cuts are evil. That's just a flagrant lie. By contrast, the Republicans do claim that taxes are always bad and should only ever go down. So why are they set against this one?
Answer: They're not. They're just taking hostages, again. Just as when they secured the extension of the Bush tax cuts on the rich by threatening to cut off unemployment benefits around this time last year. Or when they forced cuts to discretionary spending by threatening to force the country into default. This time they're trying to secure a new oil pipeline, and probably other concessions, by threatening to raise taxes on the middle class.
Astounding. You know that the corporate media is filling your head with lies about unions, and even say as much, and yet in the very same post you repeat those lies as gospel. If ever there was a clear demonstration of the insidious power of propaganda, this is it.
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Oh for fucks sake... You think that Microsoft not allowing pictures of guns on a service they provide is evidence of The Man trying to take away your actual weapons? How paranoid can you be?
You might as well say the fact I can't drink at work is evidence that prohibition will be reinstated any day now.
In the 1940s, transistors were right around the corner (being developed in the second half of the decade), so it's not like we had time to give up on them. Not to mention we were already past the industrial revolution. We had interchangeable parts, assembly line manufacturing, higher precision machining. And, of course, vacuum tubes. Interchangeable little devices that could be easily replaced when they broke, and were much easier to design with than clockwork. Oh, and on top of all of that, we had a major war in which both sides were searching for any technological miracle to give them an edge.
You're engaging in magical thinking. You can't bring one piece of technology back in time without all of the other bits of technology to support it. Babbage was never able to complete his device, and not because he was lazy. That was just one machine. It takes a lot more than that to have a "computer revolution".
Handing someone a gun doesn't instantly make them an idiot.
But handing an idiot a gun doesn't instantly make them sane. Let's work on fixing the laws so that people like Jared Loughner can't get guns. Once we're no longer providing lethal, long range weapons to crazies and felons, then we can work on easing up the restrictions on the responsible citizens.
And before you even respond with the two biggest cliches:
1) "Outlaw guns and only outlaws have guns." The fact that some bad guys get guns doesn't mean we should make it easy for them.
2) "If people were allowed to carry, they could defend themselves from the crazies." There were people with guns present when Loughner opened fire, and they did precisely jack. The sad fact is that most people are not action heroes. In the chaos of an actual shooting, you probably won't react fast enough to fire, and if you do there is a serious risk of killing a bystander.
Those desktop adding machines came many decades later, and for good reason. Remember that interchangeable parts were just an idea being tossed around in France at that point, and it wasn't until the middle of the next century that a few Americans actually got it to work in practice (and it wasn't Eli Whitney... he just demonstrated the French idea to the US Congress; the actual innovation came later by some other people whose names I forget). Without interchangeable parts, such a large machine would be prohibitively expensive and very difficult to repair if it broke. And it's not as though interchangeable parts could have been developed sooner, because that innovation was based on the discovery of how to make harder steels for machining.
Technology is very interconnected. Everyone knows the quote about standing on the shoulders of giants. What we forget is that the giants themselves are actually just a bunch of people sitting on each other's shoulders.
A Victorian computer revolution was not possible, as should be obvious to anyone who understands how computers work. Just think of how massive (and weak) computers were back in the days of vacuum tubes. Now imagine how massive, weak, and prone to break downs they'd be if they were made of clockwork. You'd have an entire warehouse filled with moving parts that might be equivalent to a digital watch... at least until one of the gears breaks. The technology simply didn't exist to make computing feasible.
There are things you can't easily learn without graph paper, and it's dirt cheap. There's nothing that you can't learn without an iPad, and they're expensive.
Their chart says Chinese labor earns 2% of each iPad sold, so about $10 per device. There have been millions of devices sold. Are we now claiming that fifty million dollars is trivial? And since it's such a small portion, Apple could easily double or even triple the wages without a major impact to their profit margin. And don't forget, that's just the iPad. Throw in the iPhones and the iPods, not to mention all the non-Apple devices. And then you have to account for all the support jobs... people who build and maintain the factories, or sell things to the workers. In the end, you have billions of dollars in wages fluttering out of the country every year, all in the name of enriching the executive staff.
I get why cheap trinkets need to be made overseas. But on objects that cost hundreds of dollars and have a profit margin north of 20%, there's no reason for it, except to make the rich richer while making the country poorer.
Someone needs to go and burn down the Capital building already.
Most descriptive typo in history.
What we need is a new generation of publishers that do that actual value-added work: editing, formatting, paperwork... maybe marketing, though that could probably be handled by a dedicated marketing firm. In exchange, they take a smaller cut and no claim to the copyright, reflecting their reduced role in society. A start-up company doing exactly this could probably be disruptive enough in the market to force a change in the behavior of the traditional publishers, and I think it's only a matter of time before we see such companies popping up.
This is one of the rare cases where the free market might actually be able to work as advertised.
Not even that. My mother converted from Judaism to Catholicism a long time ago, so we celebrate both holidays. I also have atheist and Buddhist friends whom I occasionally buy Christmas presents for, as Christmas has long since ceased to be a truly religious holiday. (I like the Futurama solution of calling the non-religious holiday Xmas, but I don't see it catching on.)
And really, why does Amazon even want this information? Are they going to stop showing me ads for Dawkins polemics because someone sent me a gift with Santa Claus on the wrapping paper?
The problem is precisely that the supply is controlled by mathematics and thus rigid. When I say controllable, I mean by people. We want a currency that can be adjusted on the fly to soften recessions and slow excessive growth. And while geeks certainly will encrypt and back up their wallets, the typical user won't. In order for the currency to gain acceptance, it has to be used by the sort of people that fall for fake antivirus scams or who call tech support when their computer is turned off.
Silencers can be used on supersonic ammo. You still get a loud noise, but it's quiet enough that you don't need ear protection, which would be a plus if you're trying to rob a bank or something. And really, that's even true with subsonic ammo. The whisper quiet silenced guns used in movies are a Hollywood invention.
Also, the idea of a gangster sniping a victim from a safe distance is laughable. These guys typically don't know how to hold a pistol, and get all their gun handling techniques from crappy action movies. The idea of highly trained professional gang hitmen posting up on rooftops, like in Lucky Number Slevin or Smokin' Aces, is a another Hollywood invention. Actual criminal sharpshooters, like the DC sniper, typically have military training, something which is not common (though not unheard of) among gang members.
If you're going to nitpick, at least be accurate about it.
Because your would-be clients have armies of lawyers to dig through any proposed contracts and make sure they're really covered. If you leave in loopholes to get out of paying, while Company X offers real coverage with audits to set the price, most customers will choose Company X ... and those that don't will next time.
Those words you typed only have meaning because we all "pretend" they do.
The fact is that bitcoin has some serious flaws that prevent it from gaining acceptance as an actual currency. Those flaws have nothing to do with the fact that, like all monetary systems, it's based off a shared agreement of value. The flaws have much more to do with an uncontrollable supply, a reliance on machines that not everyone has, the risk of losing your wealth in a computer crash, and so on.
And that's just step one! Next they'll use their bitcoin monopoly to buy fluoride to put in the water supply, corrupting our precious bodily fluids!
It's the difference between assault rifles with silencers and armor piercing rounds, compared to regular hunting rifles. Both can be used for criminal purposes, but one is particularly well suited to those purposes while only having minor benefits for legal purposes.
I'm not saying bitcoin should be illegal, since the criminal purposes aren't nearly as dangerous as those involving high powered weaponry, but it is an obstacle that would need to be dealt with if the people behind bitcoin want it to actually gain acceptance.
What do you consider to be SV that Santa Clara isn't part of it? Maps like this, which get put up as posters in offices throughout the area, make it pretty clear than Santa Clara is a major part of SV.
Offshoring is alive and well. If you do work in Silicon valley, just pull your head out of the sand and look around. We're doing fine for now, but not a year goes by that I don't see some company wipe out a department and have the work done in India or Taiwan or the Philippines.
And while Facebook may be about to make some more millionaires, professional sports does the same thing every year. It's the same thing -- if you're good, and really, really lucky, you might get rich. But you probably won't. (Although at least with a tech career, you can live comfortably for now -- a not-quite-good-enough athlete wouldn't be so lucky.)
It's easy to say a business model is "obviously" flawed after the fact. We've wasted orders of magnitude more money on even more obvious blunders -- Iraq springs to mind.
That is so much bullshit. Only people like you, who have money, can afford to claim that you don't need money to be happy.
Enjoy that snowball fight with your kids. And tonight, once they're in bed, think about what would happen if you were one of the long-term unemployed masses. If you had to leave your home for someplace cheaper, where your kids might get caught up in gang violence. If you couldn't reliably put food on the table, so sometimes they have to go to bed hungry. If, God forbid, you couldn't afford necessary healthcare for them, and lost one.
Rest assured, your CEO doesn't care about any of that. You're just a cog, to be used up and replaced as soon as someone cheaper (more desperate) comes along. If you don't fight for your family and their futures, who will?
My Droid X2 got upgraded to Gingerbread. Guess I wasn't really on my own, was I?
Apple users self-report their satisfaction to be high because, like you, they convince themselves of what they want to believe, and damn the facts.
There's nothing sadder than people white knighting for a multi-billion dollar international corporation. Sorry, but that is the real truth.
To answer the first question, yes, because deficit spending is necessary during a recession.
To answer the second question, why should the Democrats waste time creating a budget in the Senate? Traditionally, the House is supposed to put forward the first draft of financial bills, and besides, the Republicans would just filibuster anything the Democrats proposed. That's been their game plan for years.
They intentionally added tons of unrelated, partisan crap to the one year bill. Essentially, they were taking the American people hostage. Obama and the Senate refused to play that game, and so came up with a two month extension to buy time in the hopes that the Republicans will stop taking hostages.
It's a vain hope, and we'll be right back where we started in two months -- the Republicans with a gun to the head of the American people, demanding that we give them the world. Same as they did with the unemployment benefits last year, and the debt ceiling some months ago. So don't you dare try to pretend that the Republicans were behaving ethically in proposing that "one year extension". To do so makes you either ignorant or a liar.
No Democrat has ever claimed that all tax cuts are evil. That's just a flagrant lie. By contrast, the Republicans do claim that taxes are always bad and should only ever go down. So why are they set against this one?
Answer: They're not. They're just taking hostages, again. Just as when they secured the extension of the Bush tax cuts on the rich by threatening to cut off unemployment benefits around this time last year. Or when they forced cuts to discretionary spending by threatening to force the country into default. This time they're trying to secure a new oil pipeline, and probably other concessions, by threatening to raise taxes on the middle class.
Astounding. You know that the corporate media is filling your head with lies about unions, and even say as much, and yet in the very same post you repeat those lies as gospel. If ever there was a clear demonstration of the insidious power of propaganda, this is it.