Marxist != Totalitarian Communist Capitalist != Fascist
Stalin was not a Marxist. He was a totalitarian murderous dictator who claimed to be a Marxist. Just like Hitler wasn't a Christian, even though all of his soldiers had "Gott mit uns" or "God is with us" engraved on their belt buckles. Corrupt leaders will exploit whatever ideology is necessary in order to stay in power.
My first question when a client asks for an upgrade is, "Why?"
If the answer is to have the latest version, I always tell them no. If the answer is to have another feature, I ask them to estimate how much time it will save their employees once it's integrated and in regular use. If you can rework a process to provide more quantitative information with real gains in productivity, then you're spending good money. If you get slightly shinier buttons with menus in different places, you may as well have flushed the money you paid for the upgrade and the money lost on changes in workflow down the toilet.
This has lost me a few jobs, but gained me more long term clients, and I don't have to deal with irate customers who are upset after spending tens of thousands of dollars for zero gains in productivity.
I absolutely hate people who look at a successful product, grow to depend on it, and think its success should be a valid reason to impose regulations, or that it should enter public ownership.
When your civilization depends on a technology, are you saying you trust a private, for profit corporation more than you trust a democratically controlled government? To ask the question in another way, since Google can now afford to arm themselves with fighter jets and tanks and a few hundred thousand secret police to help them achieve better profits, should they be allowed to?
There's a reason utilities are so heavily regulated. When a private company has the ability to screw their customers over, they will. That's their soul reason for existence: screwing customers to their benefit. Overcharging is having a "profit margin." Bullshit fees are "profit centers." This is all well and good when you're talking apples and cars and computers, but becomes very problematic when you're talking about media control and health care and defense.
To give you an idea about some unintended consequences concerning market share, fast food companies are unsurprisingly the nations number one consumer of hamburger patties. Since our factory farms are so putrid, people started dying from e.coli from eating those hamburgers. So what was the industry solution? Inject those hamburgers with ammonia (yes, the kind in Windex) to kill the bacteria instead of cleaning up the factory farms. You may think that doesn't matter to you because you don't eat fast food, but now that method is so popular that pretty much any hamburger patty you buy will be tainted with ammonia. And thanks to deregulation, they don't have to list that as an ingredient, since it's a "processing agent."
There are thousands of examples like this, and it's the rule, not the exception. Even the unintended consequences of monopolies are bad enough to understand why we need to return corporations to what they are: temporary organizational units that serve at the pleasure of the people, which should be dismantled when they stop performing their function. If there was simply an arbitrary limit of 15% on the market share of internet advertising, we would have a standardized way of allowing competition as we have for broadband resellers, and the market would be more competitive and better for it.
I called your ideas bullshit, and used a nice visual (Rush Limbaugh throwing up in your mouth) to illustrate my distaste for regurgitated talking points. That's not ad hominem. It probably isn't civil, but the difference remains. And it still remains that you said nothing substantive, either about the gap between Obama's campaign promises and his two years in office, or in your petite little tantrum that followed.
But, honestly: big rubber dick? That's as angry as you get? Let me guess, you're a writer for Jay Leno, but you just got fired because you aren't edgy enough for the 65+ demo.
You didn't say shit for two paragraphs. "Tax and spend Democrat?" You left a little Limbaugh vomit dripping from your cheek. Might want to hit that with some sanitizer.
The bottom line is that Bush was a complete fucking disaster. He lowered taxes and started two intractable wars, despite making campaign promises to avoid nation building, which are going to end up costing our country 3 trillion dollars. He refused to balance the budget after making campaign promises to do just that. He refused to regulate Wall Street, and eliminated the one guy in the Treasury department who had the balls to call him what he was: unquestioning and incurious. He appointed a witless crony to run FEMA with disastrous results. He failed on the economy, he failed on the war on terror, and he failed to uphold the constitution.
When people asked what they could do to help their country, he literally said, "go shopping." This is not leadership. Erasing the very foundations of our personal liberty with the PATRIOT ACT is not leadership. Ordering the torture of prisoners is not leadership. Pretending that the Iraq war would cost 50 billion dollars is not leadership. Not telling your citizens the real truth about war and the costs in honor and treasure and blood is not leadership.
Obama is no saint, but at least his cronies have two brain cells to rub together. He may be another member of the Business Party, but at least he has a slight interest in not pissing on the middle class and telling them that it's just raining.
Bush is a fucking disgrace, probably executed the worst eight years of foreign policy decisions in American history, and none of your historical whitewashing will change that.
The day after corporations don't have an incentive to privatize every aspect of government for their own profit motives, using a tried and true combination of propaganda, campaign payoffs, and market manipulation.
Have no fear, libertarians. I'm sure there are no historical examples of immoral financial incentives destroying human liberty and society for the enrichment of a few. As long as we keep making the government subservient to the will of corporations, we should be alright.
Now, you may claim that the unions are speaking with the voice of the members, but that is far from true. They speak with the voice of the leadership. The members are lucky if they can get their politically-based dues back without repercussions.
$10 says you're full of shit. Prove me wrong with a specific example.
So far in 2010, the oil and gas industries have contributed $12.8 million to all candidates, with 71% of that money going to Republicans. During the 2008 election cycle, 77% of the industry's $35.6 million in contributions went to Republicans, and in the 2008 presidential contest, Republican candidate Sen. John McCain received more than twice as much money from the oil and gas industries as Obama: McCain collected $2.4 million; Obama, $898,000.
As wireless internet access becomes even more robust, the first company that can deliver a solution to keep a user's "state" consistent across all of their devices is going to be the winner. It's a problem that the industry has been working on since the dark days of syncing your contacts up through a USB1 connection to a palm pilot. I imagine it's why Apple is building their enormous data center - they are about to make manual data management a thing of the past. A slick interface could yield some badass results for stepping your data to a network volume if it's unusually large, and then streaming backups during off-peak hours to iBackup or whatever you want to call it. Otherwise, every time you start to edit a doc, the filesystem is intelligently streaming the backup directly to their data center. If your laptop gets nicked, then you log in to your me.com account, destroy the encrypted volume if they connect it to the internet, and grab another laptop and a few hours later you are back up and running.
Computers are going to disappear - your information will be always available from any device with an internet connection. You'll just have a variety of interfaces to it, from your phone, to your media viewer (iPad) to your netbook (I mean MacBook Air, Steve!) and your desktop. They will all sync intelligently, and store larger, non-streamable information locally on SSD drives. Only video creators will be forced to continue managing physical volumes until 4g goes nationwide and uncapped.
It's a good idea, and a fucking bummer that Apple is the only company doing it.
America is #170 in the world for exports per GDP. That means, relative to the size of our economy, our manufacturing sector is dead compared to the rest of the world. Take a look at trade balances for a real look at how our manufacturing sector is doing. Comparing us to far smaller and less developed economies is meaningless unless you adjust per GDP or per capita.
To use an analogy you may be able to comprehend, this is like Alabama beating a community college football team and celebrating as if it were a meaningful victory.
It has the App Store. How are they going to provide an iPad like app store without iPad like DRM?
And along the way, Apple is taking some of the most successful parts of iOS, like the App Store—with automatic installation of applications—and the springboard—rechristened launchpad in Lion. http://gizmodo.com/5668805/
The words are right there. All you have to do is read them.
They just released the hybrid device (MacBook Air) that will eventually replace all consumer devices with built-in DRM. Steve will have no incentive to allow you to buy any software outside of the App Store, since he gets a 30% cut.
No, seriously guys. You already consented. He's going to stick it all the way in.
China's kind of like the neighbor kid that knocks on my door and offers to mow the lawn for $20. It's not that I can't mow myself, but when it's so cheap to pay someone else why do it myself? If he ever didn't show up for a couple weeks I'd just do it myself, but as long as he's offering I'll keep paying him.
China has 97% of the rare earth metals rights across the world. It is the world's number one exporter. It has the largest reserves of cash and raw material in the world. (I even submitted a story about this back in April.) I've read the GAO report on restarting our mines. Forgive me for taking their estimate with a grain of salt, but something tells me 15 years is a long time to be out of the technology manufacturing business.
I think you're confused on who the kid with the lawnmower is.
You seem to be making the argument that no one in the middle class owns any stock. This is not going to help your larger argument. Regardless, let's assume that 100% of rich people have sunk their entire wealth into the stock market as of today's date in 2006. The DJIA on that date was at 12,002.
Today, the DJIA closed at 10,978.
You wouldn't be working in one of those Koch funded anti-environmental outfits, would you? You wouldn't be one of those shills trying to claim that the world is going to end because the Dow is 1,000 points lower than what it was in 2006, or that we are considering raising taxes 3.9% for the top 3% of Americans, would you?
Because you have the knack for being fucking wrong.
No, they've had phenomenal success by rolling back a large portion of their bureaucratic interference in their economy. Limiting trade *never* benefits a country overall, although it can benefit those who are politically connected.
German exports per capita: $12,300 American exports per capita: $3,100
Ultimately, American consumers caused this problem.
No.
Look at corporate profits and income for the top 1% of income earners from 1980 to the present. See how both of those numbers skyrocketed? Yes, the top 1% of income tripled from 1980 to 2006 when adjusted for inflation. See how the middle class stopped growing, and barely kept pace with inflation?
Now go look at the data for Germany. See how their strong unions kept their manufacturing sector competitive, and how they remain competitive with China for raw exports, and blow them out of the water on a per capita basis? All while having a stellar environmental record?
The business community dismantled unions and regulations, the government allowed the wealthy to change the rules to enrich themselves and destroy the middle class, all while telling us we were being liberated by the market. Well, guess what: the market apparently decided to sell all of our debt and manufacturing capacity and raw materials processing to China, and send the check to a few thousand already wealthy douchebags. It seems some needs were "peculiarly attended to" and others were forgotten. Ain't that a bitch.
It cannot be very difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole mercantile system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose interest has been entirely neglected; but the producers, whose interests has been so carefully attended to; and among this later class our merchants and manufactures have been by far the principal architects. In the mercantile regulations, which have been taken notice of in this chapter, the interest of our manufacturers has been most peculiarly attended to; and the interest, not so much of the consumers, as that of some other sets of producers, has been sacrificed to it. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations Book IV, Chapter VIII, pg.721
Thanks for perfectly illustrating why we are in this situation. "This is America!" is a meaningless phrase. You didn't do shit when they busted the unions. You didn't do shit when the easier jobs were shipped over there. You didn't do shit while the Congress continued to cut taxes for corporations so they could sell us out. You just sat there, with that smug look on your face, saying "Yeah boy! This is America! We believe in the Market, not in that damn Government interference. Why pay more for TV set? That's stupid, when we can all just put it on a credit card for half the price."
Do me a fucking solid favor. Go find the largest object you can imagine shoving up your ass, and then sit on it. Because it's a good primer on what the next thirty years is going to be like for you.
The developers on our panel unanimously agreed that Mac OS X will eventually be subsumed by iOS, but that the Mac has plenty of life left. "Mac is the awesome old grandma, whose kids (iPhone & iPad) have left home," Atebits' Loren Brichter said. "Not dead; not really dying. But it's our job to keep her comfortable until she's gone."
Slashdot Mirror
Marxist != Totalitarian Communist
Capitalist != Fascist
Stalin was not a Marxist. He was a totalitarian murderous dictator who claimed to be a Marxist. Just like Hitler wasn't a Christian, even though all of his soldiers had "Gott mit uns" or "God is with us" engraved on their belt buckles. Corrupt leaders will exploit whatever ideology is necessary in order to stay in power.
My first question when a client asks for an upgrade is, "Why?"
If the answer is to have the latest version, I always tell them no. If the answer is to have another feature, I ask them to estimate how much time it will save their employees once it's integrated and in regular use. If you can rework a process to provide more quantitative information with real gains in productivity, then you're spending good money. If you get slightly shinier buttons with menus in different places, you may as well have flushed the money you paid for the upgrade and the money lost on changes in workflow down the toilet.
This has lost me a few jobs, but gained me more long term clients, and I don't have to deal with irate customers who are upset after spending tens of thousands of dollars for zero gains in productivity.
Virtually indestructible waterproof color e-ink tablet with WiFi and replaceable scratchable surfaces, so I can toss it around like a book.
Bonus round: built in drivers to act as a USB display.
I absolutely hate people who look at a successful product, grow to depend on it, and think its success should be a valid reason to impose regulations, or that it should enter public ownership.
When your civilization depends on a technology, are you saying you trust a private, for profit corporation more than you trust a democratically controlled government? To ask the question in another way, since Google can now afford to arm themselves with fighter jets and tanks and a few hundred thousand secret police to help them achieve better profits, should they be allowed to?
There's a reason utilities are so heavily regulated. When a private company has the ability to screw their customers over, they will. That's their soul reason for existence: screwing customers to their benefit. Overcharging is having a "profit margin." Bullshit fees are "profit centers." This is all well and good when you're talking apples and cars and computers, but becomes very problematic when you're talking about media control and health care and defense.
To give you an idea about some unintended consequences concerning market share, fast food companies are unsurprisingly the nations number one consumer of hamburger patties. Since our factory farms are so putrid, people started dying from e.coli from eating those hamburgers. So what was the industry solution? Inject those hamburgers with ammonia (yes, the kind in Windex) to kill the bacteria instead of cleaning up the factory farms. You may think that doesn't matter to you because you don't eat fast food, but now that method is so popular that pretty much any hamburger patty you buy will be tainted with ammonia. And thanks to deregulation, they don't have to list that as an ingredient, since it's a "processing agent."
There are thousands of examples like this, and it's the rule, not the exception. Even the unintended consequences of monopolies are bad enough to understand why we need to return corporations to what they are: temporary organizational units that serve at the pleasure of the people, which should be dismantled when they stop performing their function. If there was simply an arbitrary limit of 15% on the market share of internet advertising, we would have a standardized way of allowing competition as we have for broadband resellers, and the market would be more competitive and better for it.
I called your ideas bullshit, and used a nice visual (Rush Limbaugh throwing up in your mouth) to illustrate my distaste for regurgitated talking points. That's not ad hominem. It probably isn't civil, but the difference remains. And it still remains that you said nothing substantive, either about the gap between Obama's campaign promises and his two years in office, or in your petite little tantrum that followed.
But, honestly: big rubber dick? That's as angry as you get? Let me guess, you're a writer for Jay Leno, but you just got fired because you aren't edgy enough for the 65+ demo.
(See? That was ad hominem.)
You didn't say shit for two paragraphs. "Tax and spend Democrat?" You left a little Limbaugh vomit dripping from your cheek. Might want to hit that with some sanitizer.
The bottom line is that Bush was a complete fucking disaster. He lowered taxes and started two intractable wars, despite making campaign promises to avoid nation building, which are going to end up costing our country 3 trillion dollars. He refused to balance the budget after making campaign promises to do just that. He refused to regulate Wall Street, and eliminated the one guy in the Treasury department who had the balls to call him what he was: unquestioning and incurious. He appointed a witless crony to run FEMA with disastrous results. He failed on the economy, he failed on the war on terror, and he failed to uphold the constitution.
When people asked what they could do to help their country, he literally said, "go shopping." This is not leadership. Erasing the very foundations of our personal liberty with the PATRIOT ACT is not leadership. Ordering the torture of prisoners is not leadership. Pretending that the Iraq war would cost 50 billion dollars is not leadership. Not telling your citizens the real truth about war and the costs in honor and treasure and blood is not leadership.
Obama is no saint, but at least his cronies have two brain cells to rub together. He may be another member of the Business Party, but at least he has a slight interest in not pissing on the middle class and telling them that it's just raining.
Bush is a fucking disgrace, probably executed the worst eight years of foreign policy decisions in American history, and none of your historical whitewashing will change that.
So, no, you don't have any evidence to support your claim. Thanks.
The day after corporations don't have an incentive to privatize every aspect of government for their own profit motives, using a tried and true combination of propaganda, campaign payoffs, and market manipulation.
Have no fear, libertarians. I'm sure there are no historical examples of immoral financial incentives destroying human liberty and society for the enrichment of a few. As long as we keep making the government subservient to the will of corporations, we should be alright.
Now, you may claim that the unions are speaking with the voice of the members, but that is far from true. They speak with the voice of the leadership. The members are lucky if they can get their politically-based dues back without repercussions.
$10 says you're full of shit. Prove me wrong with a specific example.
Apple leans very far to the left.
So far in 2010, the oil and gas industries have contributed $12.8 million to all candidates, with 71% of that money going to Republicans. During the 2008 election cycle, 77% of the industry's $35.6 million in contributions went to Republicans, and in the 2008 presidential contest, Republican candidate Sen. John McCain received more than twice as much money from the oil and gas industries as Obama: McCain collected $2.4 million; Obama, $898,000.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_05/023945.php
Sure, you can single out Exxon and Obama in 2008, because that's the exception to the rule you're pretending doesn't exist.
As wireless internet access becomes even more robust, the first company that can deliver a solution to keep a user's "state" consistent across all of their devices is going to be the winner. It's a problem that the industry has been working on since the dark days of syncing your contacts up through a USB1 connection to a palm pilot. I imagine it's why Apple is building their enormous data center - they are about to make manual data management a thing of the past. A slick interface could yield some badass results for stepping your data to a network volume if it's unusually large, and then streaming backups during off-peak hours to iBackup or whatever you want to call it. Otherwise, every time you start to edit a doc, the filesystem is intelligently streaming the backup directly to their data center. If your laptop gets nicked, then you log in to your me.com account, destroy the encrypted volume if they connect it to the internet, and grab another laptop and a few hours later you are back up and running.
Computers are going to disappear - your information will be always available from any device with an internet connection. You'll just have a variety of interfaces to it, from your phone, to your media viewer (iPad) to your netbook (I mean MacBook Air, Steve!) and your desktop. They will all sync intelligently, and store larger, non-streamable information locally on SSD drives. Only video creators will be forced to continue managing physical volumes until 4g goes nationwide and uncapped.
It's a good idea, and a fucking bummer that Apple is the only company doing it.
America is #170 in the world for exports per GDP. That means, relative to the size of our economy, our manufacturing sector is dead compared to the rest of the world. Take a look at trade balances for a real look at how our manufacturing sector is doing. Comparing us to far smaller and less developed economies is meaningless unless you adjust per GDP or per capita.
To use an analogy you may be able to comprehend, this is like Alabama beating a community college football team and celebrating as if it were a meaningful victory.
It has the App Store. How are they going to provide an iPad like app store without iPad like DRM?
And along the way, Apple is taking some of the most successful parts of iOS, like the App Store—with automatic installation of applications—and the springboard—rechristened launchpad in Lion.
http://gizmodo.com/5668805/
The words are right there. All you have to do is read them.
No, seriously guy. No one consented to anything. It's a product announcement and evil DRM wasn't part of it.
Lion doesn't have DRM, huh? Well, that's one way to ignore reality. Good luck with that.
The DRM will be in the new operating system that replaces it. iOS 5, probably.
Apple can keep all of their promises, and you'll still get fucked. One Vendor; One Master. There is no apologizing your way out of it.
They just released the hybrid device (MacBook Air) that will eventually replace all consumer devices with built-in DRM. Steve will have no incentive to allow you to buy any software outside of the App Store, since he gets a 30% cut.
No, seriously guys. You already consented. He's going to stick it all the way in.
If anything you just said is true, why is Germany the #2 exporter in the world, and kicking our ass in exports per capita? ($12,000 vs $3,000)
Your bullshit diversions are meaningless.
China's kind of like the neighbor kid that knocks on my door and offers to mow the lawn for $20. It's not that I can't mow myself, but when it's so cheap to pay someone else why do it myself? If he ever didn't show up for a couple weeks I'd just do it myself, but as long as he's offering I'll keep paying him.
China has 97% of the rare earth metals rights across the world. It is the world's number one exporter. It has the largest reserves of cash and raw material in the world. (I even submitted a story about this back in April.) I've read the GAO report on restarting our mines. Forgive me for taking their estimate with a grain of salt, but something tells me 15 years is a long time to be out of the technology manufacturing business.
I think you're confused on who the kid with the lawnmower is.
You seem to be making the argument that no one in the middle class owns any stock. This is not going to help your larger argument. Regardless, let's assume that 100% of rich people have sunk their entire wealth into the stock market as of today's date in 2006. The DJIA on that date was at 12,002.
Today, the DJIA closed at 10,978.
You wouldn't be working in one of those Koch funded anti-environmental outfits, would you? You wouldn't be one of those shills trying to claim that the world is going to end because the Dow is 1,000 points lower than what it was in 2006, or that we are considering raising taxes 3.9% for the top 3% of Americans, would you?
Because you have the knack for being fucking wrong.
No, they've had phenomenal success by rolling back a large portion of their bureaucratic interference in their economy. Limiting trade *never* benefits a country overall, although it can benefit those who are politically connected.
German exports per capita: $12,300
American exports per capita: $3,100
jcr, once again you unabashedly full of shit.
Ultimately, American consumers caused this problem.
No.
Look at corporate profits and income for the top 1% of income earners from 1980 to the present. See how both of those numbers skyrocketed? Yes, the top 1% of income tripled from 1980 to 2006 when adjusted for inflation. See how the middle class stopped growing, and barely kept pace with inflation?
Now go look at the data for Germany. See how their strong unions kept their manufacturing sector competitive, and how they remain competitive with China for raw exports, and blow them out of the water on a per capita basis? All while having a stellar environmental record?
The business community dismantled unions and regulations, the government allowed the wealthy to change the rules to enrich themselves and destroy the middle class, all while telling us we were being liberated by the market. Well, guess what: the market apparently decided to sell all of our debt and manufacturing capacity and raw materials processing to China, and send the check to a few thousand already wealthy douchebags. It seems some needs were "peculiarly attended to" and others were forgotten. Ain't that a bitch.
(And yeah, some of us saw it coming.)
It cannot be very difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole mercantile system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose interest has been entirely neglected; but the producers, whose interests has been so carefully attended to; and among this later class our merchants and manufactures have been by far the principal architects. In the mercantile regulations, which have been taken notice of in this chapter, the interest of our manufacturers has been most peculiarly attended to; and the interest, not so much of the consumers, as that of some other sets of producers, has been sacrificed to it.
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
Book IV, Chapter VIII, pg.721
This is america bitch.
We'll build a fucking nailgun.
In what factory, you jingoist ignorant fuck?!
Thanks for perfectly illustrating why we are in this situation. "This is America!" is a meaningless phrase. You didn't do shit when they busted the unions. You didn't do shit when the easier jobs were shipped over there. You didn't do shit while the Congress continued to cut taxes for corporations so they could sell us out. You just sat there, with that smug look on your face, saying "Yeah boy! This is America! We believe in the Market, not in that damn Government interference. Why pay more for TV set? That's stupid, when we can all just put it on a credit card for half the price."
Do me a fucking solid favor. Go find the largest object you can imagine shoving up your ass, and then sit on it. Because it's a good primer on what the next thirty years is going to be like for you.
Ahhh, childlike ignorance.
The developers on our panel unanimously agreed that Mac OS X will eventually be subsumed by iOS, but that the Mac has plenty of life left. "Mac is the awesome old grandma, whose kids (iPhone & iPad) have left home," Atebits' Loren Brichter said. "Not dead; not really dying. But it's our job to keep her comfortable until she's gone."
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/06/developers-expect-ios-and-mac-os-to-merge-over-time.ars
Tomorrow Steve will announce the planned execution of OS X.
Goodbye computers. Hello locked down iOS appliances.