telomeres -- the ends of our chromosomes that indicate our genetic age
Huh. I knew all that. But then it hit me. After a certain point we should really start talking about people's genetic age as a decreasing value of their telomeres' lengths. Probably an average? Or the minimum? Not all your cells divide at the same rate for sure.
People will go into the negative numbers. When they run out of telomeres and start losing genetic code each division.
It'll show 40 year old people that have a genetic age of T -10 years and 60 year old people that have a genetic age of T -20 years. Plan your savings and health needs accordingly.
but that money must come from somewhere: from reduced returns to investors in the company,
That one. That's the one we want to encourage. The complaint of TFA is that the owners of automation are getting richer far faster than the rest of the society. That sort of inequality has historically lead to a lot of problems that we want to avoid.
We have a system of capitalism, so with proper competition, the end-price to the customer should be as low as possible. If it's higher, they'll just shop elsewhere and the company will be hurt.
We have a system of minimum wages to protect the lower-end and in-demand professionals can go elsewhere, possibly to new companies trying to compete. If you can't demand a wage, you ARE the lower-end. If the company can't afford it's workers, it's not a viable company.
Investors though, the shareholders, if you pay them less the worry is that they'll go invest elsewhere. So fucking what? They sell their stock. Someone else buys it, possibly for cheaper. The company is still there, the workers are still there, the product is still there, it's all still owned by someone. The workers who were paid in equity take it in the pants, but they're not just workers, they're also owners and by and far that only happens for start-ups or the super-rich CEO types. Which is a great setup. It removes that divide, and workers are working not just for a paycheck, but for the company. It's only them and the customers.
We want venture capitalists to get things off the ground. To make new companies from ideas and moxy. After a company's IPO, or issueing new stock, or issuing fucking bonds or something,investors don't actually help business. They're just leeches earning gains on work done by others. Hey, I've got investments and a 401K. I get about $20K each year for nothing. If automation really kicks ass and outperforms other markets by 75%, great news, but me buying that stock from someone else doesn't help the company do business. Me, getting some other shmuck to pay me a lot for said stock doesn't help the company do business.
But the economy is built on smoke and mirrors and way more psychology and sociology than people like to admit. They think a high stock price means something, and so it does mean something. By fiat.
So if you want to pay for cable TV, but would rather pay Google and get it online? Possibly over a cable modem? Woo?
I guess I don't get it.
Isn't cable-cutting going in the opposite direction? I mean, this has got to be a real kick in the balls to the telecoms. Competition from Google is going to be expensive. It cost them a lot to starve Google out of the ISP business. But isn't the trend of customers going AWAY from buying this sort of thing?
What's he's mistaken about is that the Internet fundamentally operates on the principle of network neutrality. The net has been more or less neutral since it's inception. To call NN a mistake just shows that he's conflating NN and regulations trying to keep NN in place.
Now, there's plenty of ways to screw up regulation. But we don't want the handful of consolidated ISPs to be allowed to tear down the neutral networks as they've been trying to do. I'd fully support any alternative choices for an ISP that competed with the telecoms, and I was excited for google-fiber, but the telecoms kill those off as fast as they can.
They have complete control over what an Uber ride actually costs, right?
Is the counter-argument that people won't use them if they're more expensive? Isn't that why they're getting as large of a market share as they can right now?
Once there is self driving cars, the taxis will be as cheap as private cars on per mile basis when averaged over entire year.
I think people keep forgetting that self-driving cars will have an additional cost.
First off, Google's self-driving car has $150,000 strapped to it. The LIDAR on top is worth $70,000 alone. If the car can't see, then it can't drive. If you try to go cheap with the sensors, then it's going to miss things. Like red lights and bikers. Maybe they'll get some economy-of-scale factors when they start selling more. But they won't be as cheap as a $5000 used car with someone moonlighting as a taxi-driver. Not for a long time.
If you're talking about a future where everyone has a self-driving car and you'd have to be crazy to drive a manual, that's decades away.
If you're talking about the time when there are a few self-driving cars out there sharing the road with regular cars, that was years ago. We're there now.
Self-driving cars are going to be a big thing. But they won't be cheap. And unless they get outlawed, you'll find the less fortunate driving themselves around. Transitions are hard.
Most people would stop owning cars and large families may keep only one car.
Unless they're in some weird situation where two different people have to be at two different and distant locations at around the same time. Like if they both work.
Also, this naturally leads to all electric cars as well.
Unless you want it to do 3 commutes in a row. Because I imagine a lot of people will stagger their schedules. In which case the range of the car is really important and it won't be able to charge in between.
Cars will still need power one way or another. And parts, and insurance. (Thank god the dealers are in trouble. Screw those people. ) I'm not sure we'll need fewer cars if everyone still needs to get to work at 8am.
Right, we need journalists. We need them to be professionals. And they need to get paid.
But they suck. Nearly universally. For a while, it looked like crowd-sourced non-paid journalism was doing a better job at journalism than professional journalists. That lead to a decline of professional journalists and so many of them reaching for ad revenue, which has made them suck more. But it turns out that trusting the crowd for your news really sucks when half of them are off their meds. It also sucks at international affairs.
And they always have. If you don't read the news, you're uninformed. If you do read the news, you're misinformed.
in a time of such turmoil
When has there NOT been a time of turmoil? Remember the absolute chaos and turmoil from the 90's when someone had the gall to lie to congress. Scandalous times. They certainly thought so.
"As for winning, what about Andrew Jackson?" This is a Republican talking point made in defense of Bush 2. When people say that Bush 2 was the worst president ever, this is the Republican counter.
Holy cow dude, in case you missed it the last guy who won the election and lost the popular vote was "Bush 2". How does someone lambasting both Jackson and Bush fit into your talking-point narrative?
The parties change so much every 50 years it hardly matters to current politics what either of them did back then. Yeah, the democrats were real jackasses... back in 1830.
The thing is, even if you blame the Indian Removal Act and its consequences entirely on Jackson (not reasonable)
Not reasonable? What kind of terse, un-cited, and unexplained counter point is this? You might as well end you post with "sad". Are your words great? Are they the best words?
He signed the bloody law. He fought Indians in wars prior to his presidency. He was generally a racist asshat. But wanted all white men to vote, which was a progressive step for the time. No, I don't think any elected official ever really deserves ALL the blame for anything they do in office, but the guy was clearly... Involved.
If we didn't have super-delegates and an establishment forcing a choice down our throats, I think we'd have seen what Bernie could have gotten done.
the kind of crisis that hasn't been seen since Iran-Contra or the Lewinsky affair, and, as with Watergate before it
Isn't it terrible that the Iran-Contra affair is more well known that the 1953 Iranian Coup d'état.
But if you want to draw comparisons to history, I'd go with pretty much everything about Andrew Jackson.
Before getting elected the "Democratic-Republican Party became factionalized" Kinda like the GOP and the TEA partiers.
Campained for "ending what he termed a "monopoly" of government by elites"
The election was personal, crude, and "the press accused Jackson's wife Rachel of bigamy". But he did win by a landslide.
"they favored geographical expansion, justifying it in terms of Manifest Destiny."
Hey, and some good things. Like pro-democracy. Voting for judges instead of appointing them. Power to the people. In that sense, he was a demagogue.
Then again, it's not democracy for everyone: "Jackson's expansion of democracy was largely limited to Americans of European descent, and voting rights were extended to adult white males only. There was little or no progress (and in some cases regression) for the rights of African-Americans and Native Americans."
He was "elected by the common man".
"Jackson created a spoils system to clear out elected officials in government of an opposing party and replace them with his supporters as a reward for their electioneering."
He kicked out a bunch of native Americans. Trump is trying to kick out a bunch of native central Americans.
"Jackson became the most influential and controversial political figure of the 1820s and 1830s."
Sorry, but if we don't self-police this sort of bullshit we'll end up as bad as the other side.
Drumph Hil-bot 62,985,106 65,853,625 45.9% 48.0%
She won by 2.1%. That's not a landslide.
she just won them in the wrong places, but polls don't really measure THAT.
What the hell are you smoking? Polls most certainly measure the location of the poll and the state of the voter. You could argue about how the delegates vote as opposed to their constituents, but they don't appear to have been faithless.
-he was the worst choice to ever RUN let alone WIN a presidency in the USA.
You're not looking at anyone other than republican or democrats are you? Plenty of people "run". As for winning, what about Andrew Jackson? All those dead Indians? The last guy who won the election and lost the popular vote also got a few people killed. I'm not too hip on that. Trump hasn't gotten hundreds of thousands killed... Yet.....Point taken about the train full of dynamite.
there's no point in crying that Clinton didn't win
We should reform the Democrat's election process, remove super-delegates, reprimand the DNC for so blatantly playing favorites, and reaffirm our belief in democracy. Also, teach our bloody leaders a thing or two about internal security. And maybe re-establish the 4th estate as something trustworthy.
I care about a lot of things. Tunnel vision will ruin us.
So you maintained the same service for 18 years? That's fairly impressive.
But network neutrality wasn't supposed to magically increase your speed. It ensured that your 1-5MBps could get everything on the Internet. Get ready to shell out extra to the ISP for the right to access netflix, HBOGO, Amazon, Facebook, and/or wikipedia. Or you'll have the choice between the "comcast family" which includes Hulu and ebay and infopedia, or the "ATT-space" which has Netflix, Amazon, and Wikipedia. HAHA, just joking, ATT doesn't compete with comcast's turf since you're in the boondocks. Your only choice is comcast and if you want Netflix you'll have to shell about about 4x as much for the "ultra premium open Internet".
huh. Went looking to call bullshit on some flimsy anonymous coward's lie....But here you go. He meet with Softbank who is... investing in the deal with foxconn? They leaked some information about a deal with Foxconn investing in PA. Foxconn's CEO Gao admitted to the plan shortly after.
I wonder what sort of incentive was given to make this thing happen. I mean, I imagine that's why it's happening. Trump needs to show some results and he can certainly buy business. Pay $11 for every $10 in wages or investment it brings in. But it's tax breaks or profit guarantees, so it's hard to count. And hey, end of the day, it might be a net win. But if they get paid $5 million to talk about a $7 Billion plant that never gets built, it's a scam.
Sorry for being skeptical. I'll call it a win once people start collecting paychecks and the deal is transparent.
Jesus, focus. This ISN'T a "social or political system". It's an economic one.
How to actually build such systems I don't really know.
FOCUS. The proposal is to charge people for their software according to their ability to pay. Specifically charging nations with less GDP a lower rate.
And that might seem like a great idea. But people would take advantage of it. You can look at nearly any other post in this thread for examples, but we've got:
A) People will buy the software in el-cheapo land and bring it to the rich nation.
B) It requires nightmare dystopian levels of DRM to enforce.
C) It won't necessarily stop piracy.
D) It's not necessarily more fair.
E) GDP is a really rough-cut metric.
Because of those problems, it's a bad idea and we shouldn't do it. How about, instead of selling things cheaper to poor people, we tax rich people at a larger rate than poor people? That seems easier to control and manage. As for international inequality, let them freaking pirate it until they make enough money to be worth sueing. You can't sue poor people, they don't have anything to take. Get over it.
Some fundamental shifts in the way we divide up our society's immense riches between its members in light of the impact of automation, AI, and other advances seems likely to be necessary.
The proposal is how we divide up the costs, not the riches, but sure, close enough. Automation, AI, and advances are kinda moot in the discussion. There's plenty of inequality already and the issue is here and now not some far-off impending impact of future tech.
Yeah yeah, you're gearing up for the UBI rant. We get it.
the death toll of capitalism. Those people who starve to death because they can't afford food, die of curable disease because they can't afford medicines.
The 1890's? When late-stage capitalism was so bad and inequality was rampant and the robber-barons forced millions into deadly working conditions and overcharged them for basic needs?
Yeah, capitalism killed plenty. The riff-raff rebelled, fought, unionized, regulated the industries, busted up the trusts and took power away from the oligarchy. Been there, done that. We've learned that being too capitalistic is poisonous. Now we're capitalistic, but temper it with socialistic ideas like a progressive tax structure, regulation on industries, and monopoly/anti-competition laws. And if we were sane, we'd socialize healthcare. My dad's a diabetic. What's going to kill him is when he can no longer afford the doctor's visits and medicine.
The centralized economy that Stalin and Mao tried in the name of communism got a whole ton of people killed.
The ideas of capitalism and communism have killed plenty.
As a poor college student with no income paying American cost of living expenses, I desperately wanted to pay the cheaper foreign prices. And you could if you knew the right foreigner student who illegally sold them at profit.
Also, while I understand cheaper material and soft-covers, I think it's really going out of their way to edit the book to be more boring. That just seems vindictive.
and many times the professors would prefer the local books (local authors many times connect better),
The hell? You had professors that didn't demand you shell out for THEIR book? Huh, I guess America is just ahead of the curve when it comes to corruption.
Slashdot Mirror
How many years did he spend in space? Go on. Round it.
telomeres -- the ends of our chromosomes that indicate our genetic age
Huh. I knew all that. But then it hit me. After a certain point we should really start talking about people's genetic age as a decreasing value of their telomeres' lengths. Probably an average? Or the minimum? Not all your cells divide at the same rate for sure.
People will go into the negative numbers. When they run out of telomeres and start losing genetic code each division.
It'll show 40 year old people that have a genetic age of T -10 years and 60 year old people that have a genetic age of T -20 years. Plan your savings and health needs accordingly.
but that money must come from somewhere: from reduced returns to investors in the company,
That one. That's the one we want to encourage. The complaint of TFA is that the owners of automation are getting richer far faster than the rest of the society. That sort of inequality has historically lead to a lot of problems that we want to avoid.
We have a system of capitalism, so with proper competition, the end-price to the customer should be as low as possible. If it's higher, they'll just shop elsewhere and the company will be hurt.
We have a system of minimum wages to protect the lower-end and in-demand professionals can go elsewhere, possibly to new companies trying to compete. If you can't demand a wage, you ARE the lower-end. If the company can't afford it's workers, it's not a viable company.
Investors though, the shareholders, if you pay them less the worry is that they'll go invest elsewhere. So fucking what? They sell their stock. Someone else buys it, possibly for cheaper. The company is still there, the workers are still there, the product is still there, it's all still owned by someone. The workers who were paid in equity take it in the pants, but they're not just workers, they're also owners and by and far that only happens for start-ups or the super-rich CEO types. Which is a great setup. It removes that divide, and workers are working not just for a paycheck, but for the company. It's only them and the customers.
We want venture capitalists to get things off the ground. To make new companies from ideas and moxy. After a company's IPO, or issueing new stock, or issuing fucking bonds or something,investors don't actually help business. They're just leeches earning gains on work done by others. Hey, I've got investments and a 401K. I get about $20K each year for nothing. If automation really kicks ass and outperforms other markets by 75%, great news, but me buying that stock from someone else doesn't help the company do business. Me, getting some other shmuck to pay me a lot for said stock doesn't help the company do business.
But the economy is built on smoke and mirrors and way more psychology and sociology than people like to admit. They think a high stock price means something, and so it does mean something. By fiat.
But what do we do when the Captcha-breaking bots start making meaningful and insightful comments?
So if you want to pay for cable TV, but would rather pay Google and get it online? Possibly over a cable modem? Woo?
I guess I don't get it.
Isn't cable-cutting going in the opposite direction? I mean, this has got to be a real kick in the balls to the telecoms. Competition from Google is going to be expensive. It cost them a lot to starve Google out of the ISP business. But isn't the trend of customers going AWAY from buying this sort of thing?
Is $35 cheaper than cable TV?
What's he's mistaken about is that the Internet fundamentally operates on the principle of network neutrality. The net has been more or less neutral since it's inception. To call NN a mistake just shows that he's conflating NN and regulations trying to keep NN in place.
Now, there's plenty of ways to screw up regulation. But we don't want the handful of consolidated ISPs to be allowed to tear down the neutral networks as they've been trying to do. I'd fully support any alternative choices for an ISP that competed with the telecoms, and I was excited for google-fiber, but the telecoms kill those off as fast as they can.
Can't they just raise the rates?
They have complete control over what an Uber ride actually costs, right?
Is the counter-argument that people won't use them if they're more expensive? Isn't that why they're getting as large of a market share as they can right now?
Once there is self driving cars, the taxis will be as cheap as private cars on per mile basis when averaged over entire year.
I think people keep forgetting that self-driving cars will have an additional cost.
First off, Google's self-driving car has $150,000 strapped to it. The LIDAR on top is worth $70,000 alone. If the car can't see, then it can't drive. If you try to go cheap with the sensors, then it's going to miss things. Like red lights and bikers. Maybe they'll get some economy-of-scale factors when they start selling more. But they won't be as cheap as a $5000 used car with someone moonlighting as a taxi-driver. Not for a long time.
If you're talking about a future where everyone has a self-driving car and you'd have to be crazy to drive a manual, that's decades away.
If you're talking about the time when there are a few self-driving cars out there sharing the road with regular cars, that was years ago. We're there now.
Self-driving cars are going to be a big thing. But they won't be cheap. And unless they get outlawed, you'll find the less fortunate driving themselves around. Transitions are hard.
Most people would stop owning cars and large families may keep only one car.
Unless they're in some weird situation where two different people have to be at two different and distant locations at around the same time. Like if they both work.
Also, this naturally leads to all electric cars as well.
Unless you want it to do 3 commutes in a row. Because I imagine a lot of people will stagger their schedules. In which case the range of the car is really important and it won't be able to charge in between.
Cars will still need power one way or another. And parts, and insurance. (Thank god the dealers are in trouble. Screw those people. ) I'm not sure we'll need fewer cars if everyone still needs to get to work at 8am.
Right, we need journalists. We need them to be professionals. And they need to get paid.
But they suck. Nearly universally. For a while, it looked like crowd-sourced non-paid journalism was doing a better job at journalism than professional journalists. That lead to a decline of professional journalists and so many of them reaching for ad revenue, which has made them suck more. But it turns out that trusting the crowd for your news really sucks when half of them are off their meds. It also sucks at international affairs.
And they always have. If you don't read the news, you're uninformed. If you do read the news, you're misinformed.
in a time of such turmoil
When has there NOT been a time of turmoil? Remember the absolute chaos and turmoil from the 90's when someone had the gall to lie to congress. Scandalous times. They certainly thought so.
Just out of curiosity... Where do you think those new crisp $20 bills come from?
Bonus question: Other than physical money, how do you think new money is introduced into the system?
I'd love to hear a frustrated anonymous citizen of this country try to explain it.
2.1% is a landslide in anything? Sounds like mental gymnastics.
(Who ARE these people/guy?)
(unreasonable) (sad)
"As for winning, what about Andrew Jackson?" This is a Republican talking point made in defense of Bush 2. When people say that Bush 2 was the worst president ever, this is the Republican counter.
Holy cow dude, in case you missed it the last guy who won the election and lost the popular vote was "Bush 2". How does someone lambasting both Jackson and Bush fit into your talking-point narrative?
The parties change so much every 50 years it hardly matters to current politics what either of them did back then. Yeah, the democrats were real jackasses... back in 1830.
The thing is, even if you blame the Indian Removal Act and its consequences entirely on Jackson (not reasonable)
Not reasonable? What kind of terse, un-cited, and unexplained counter point is this? You might as well end you post with "sad". Are your words great? Are they the best words?
He signed the bloody law. He fought Indians in wars prior to his presidency. He was generally a racist asshat. But wanted all white men to vote, which was a progressive step for the time. No, I don't think any elected official ever really deserves ALL the blame for anything they do in office, but the guy was clearly... Involved.
If we didn't have super-delegates and an establishment forcing a choice down our throats, I think we'd have seen what Bernie could have gotten done.
the kind of crisis that hasn't been seen since Iran-Contra or the Lewinsky affair, and, as with Watergate before it
Isn't it terrible that the Iran-Contra affair is more well known that the 1953 Iranian Coup d'état.
But if you want to draw comparisons to history, I'd go with pretty much everything about Andrew Jackson.
Before getting elected the "Democratic-Republican Party became factionalized" Kinda like the GOP and the TEA partiers.
Campained for "ending what he termed a "monopoly" of government by elites"
The election was personal, crude, and "the press accused Jackson's wife Rachel of bigamy". But he did win by a landslide.
"they favored geographical expansion, justifying it in terms of Manifest Destiny."
Hey, and some good things. Like pro-democracy. Voting for judges instead of appointing them. Power to the people. In that sense, he was a demagogue.
Then again, it's not democracy for everyone: "Jackson's expansion of democracy was largely limited to Americans of European descent, and voting rights were extended to adult white males only. There was little or no progress (and in some cases regression) for the rights of African-Americans and Native Americans."
He was "elected by the common man".
"Jackson created a spoils system to clear out elected officials in government of an opposing party and replace them with his supporters as a reward for their electioneering."
He kicked out a bunch of native Americans. Trump is trying to kick out a bunch of native central Americans.
"Jackson became the most influential and controversial political figure of the 1820s and 1830s."
+5 insightful?
Sorry, but if we don't self-police this sort of bullshit we'll end up as bad as the other side.
Drumph Hil-bot
62,985,106 65,853,625
45.9% 48.0%
She won by 2.1%. That's not a landslide.
she just won them in the wrong places, but polls don't really measure THAT.
What the hell are you smoking? Polls most certainly measure the location of the poll and the state of the voter. You could argue about how the delegates vote as opposed to their constituents, but they don't appear to have been faithless.
-he was the worst choice to ever RUN let alone WIN a presidency in the USA.
You're not looking at anyone other than republican or democrats are you? Plenty of people "run". As for winning, what about Andrew Jackson? All those dead Indians? The last guy who won the election and lost the popular vote also got a few people killed. I'm not too hip on that. Trump hasn't gotten hundreds of thousands killed... Yet. ....Point taken about the train full of dynamite.
there's no point in crying that Clinton didn't win
We should reform the Democrat's election process, remove super-delegates, reprimand the DNC for so blatantly playing favorites, and reaffirm our belief in democracy. Also, teach our bloody leaders a thing or two about internal security. And maybe re-establish the 4th estate as something trustworthy.
I care about a lot of things. Tunnel vision will ruin us.
Large embedded systems too. My C code flies on satellites.
I tried, but my carrier doesn't support IoT traffic unless I pay extra.
So you maintained the same service for 18 years? That's fairly impressive.
But network neutrality wasn't supposed to magically increase your speed. It ensured that your 1-5MBps could get everything on the Internet. Get ready to shell out extra to the ISP for the right to access netflix, HBOGO, Amazon, Facebook, and/or wikipedia. Or you'll have the choice between the "comcast family" which includes Hulu and ebay and infopedia, or the "ATT-space" which has Netflix, Amazon, and Wikipedia. HAHA, just joking, ATT doesn't compete with comcast's turf since you're in the boondocks. Your only choice is comcast and if you want Netflix you'll have to shell about about 4x as much for the "ultra premium open Internet".
Except for things like the Monty Hall problem where people "should" switch their choice.
Language is hard.
huh. Went looking to call bullshit on some flimsy anonymous coward's lie. ...But here you go. He meet with Softbank who is... investing in the deal with foxconn? They leaked some information about a deal with Foxconn investing in PA. Foxconn's CEO Gao admitted to the plan shortly after.
I wonder what sort of incentive was given to make this thing happen. I mean, I imagine that's why it's happening. Trump needs to show some results and he can certainly buy business. Pay $11 for every $10 in wages or investment it brings in. But it's tax breaks or profit guarantees, so it's hard to count. And hey, end of the day, it might be a net win. But if they get paid $5 million to talk about a $7 Billion plant that never gets built, it's a scam.
Sorry for being skeptical. I'll call it a win once people start collecting paychecks and the deal is transparent.
Jesus, focus. This ISN'T a "social or political system". It's an economic one.
How to actually build such systems I don't really know.
FOCUS. The proposal is to charge people for their software according to their ability to pay. Specifically charging nations with less GDP a lower rate.
And that might seem like a great idea. But people would take advantage of it. You can look at nearly any other post in this thread for examples, but we've got:
A) People will buy the software in el-cheapo land and bring it to the rich nation.
B) It requires nightmare dystopian levels of DRM to enforce.
C) It won't necessarily stop piracy.
D) It's not necessarily more fair.
E) GDP is a really rough-cut metric.
Because of those problems, it's a bad idea and we shouldn't do it. How about, instead of selling things cheaper to poor people, we tax rich people at a larger rate than poor people? That seems easier to control and manage. As for international inequality, let them freaking pirate it until they make enough money to be worth sueing. You can't sue poor people, they don't have anything to take. Get over it.
Some fundamental shifts in the way we divide up our society's immense riches between its members in light of the impact of automation, AI, and other advances seems likely to be necessary.
The proposal is how we divide up the costs, not the riches, but sure, close enough. Automation, AI, and advances are kinda moot in the discussion. There's plenty of inequality already and the issue is here and now not some far-off impending impact of future tech.
Yeah yeah, you're gearing up for the UBI rant. We get it.
the death toll of capitalism. Those people who starve to death because they can't afford food, die of curable disease because they can't afford medicines.
The 1890's? When late-stage capitalism was so bad and inequality was rampant and the robber-barons forced millions into deadly working conditions and overcharged them for basic needs?
Yeah, capitalism killed plenty. The riff-raff rebelled, fought, unionized, regulated the industries, busted up the trusts and took power away from the oligarchy. Been there, done that. We've learned that being too capitalistic is poisonous. Now we're capitalistic, but temper it with socialistic ideas like a progressive tax structure, regulation on industries, and monopoly/anti-competition laws. And if we were sane, we'd socialize healthcare. My dad's a diabetic. What's going to kill him is when he can no longer afford the doctor's visits and medicine.
The centralized economy that Stalin and Mao tried in the name of communism got a whole ton of people killed.
The ideas of capitalism and communism have killed plenty.
Ok, fine. It's SOUNDS like a great idea, but it'll be abused by evil people for their own gain. Therefore we shouldn't do it.
Does that little distinction make you happy?
And then you work your ass off for a few years making money. Then you take a break, earn zero income, and upgrade.
As a poor college student with no income paying American cost of living expenses, I desperately wanted to pay the cheaper foreign prices. And you could if you knew the right foreigner student who illegally sold them at profit.
Also, while I understand cheaper material and soft-covers, I think it's really going out of their way to edit the book to be more boring. That just seems vindictive.
and many times the professors would prefer the local books (local authors many times connect better),
The hell? You had professors that didn't demand you shell out for THEIR book? Huh, I guess America is just ahead of the curve when it comes to corruption.