(Bracing for incoming negative moderation, insults, incoherent babbling about 'rights' or somesuch, death threats, etc etc etc)
Oh, come on, leave off with the irrational nonsense, bitcoin is used at least as much for illegal things, if not more, than it is for legitimate things. If you can't see that, then you're not looking in the right places. If you're just denying it, then one has to wonder what questionable, if not outright illegal, things you're up to.
I know I'm probably feeding a troll by asking you this, but if 'everything is garbage' then how about you give a few examples of what YOU think is good?
Most of the 'content' on YouTube is garbage, isn't it? We sure this didn't come from some North Korean knock-off of YouTube? Sure sounds like Best Korea flavor of bragging to me.
I'm well past sick and tired of you jackasses who WANT to not work anymore, think you're going to get free money to live and party on the rest of your life, and think you'll have robot slaves or somesuch shit to wait on you hand and foot. You're living in a fantasy world that will NEVER EXIST. You're going to WORK your shitty job the rest of your life, GET USED TO IT. Oh and fuck you.
How about we remove subsidies from ALL and then wait and see what and who can stand on their own?
Are you a paid troll for the oil and gas industry? Because they'd like nothing better, I think, than to have the playing field 'leveled' for them that way. Comparatively speaking they have a gigantic amount of installed infrastructure compared to any alternative sources, and exerting some political pressure they could manage to squeeze the alternative sources right out of the running. From there they might just scoop up bankrupted alternative energy companies, and bury all of it in warehouses somewhere, until all the oil and gas is gone -- then they'd start selling the alternatives to us, at a higher rate, ensuring their profits the entire time. Never mind the environment in the meantime, they don't care about that, just profit.
Friend, I'm probably as far from being a kid as you are (based on your low user ID number here), so we've both been around and seen life and the world, yes? Now, remember seeing predictions from 50 to 100 years ago, where people were going around talking about how life would be like that old cartoon The Jetsons, and we'd have flying cars, and robots everywhere, and so on and so forth? Notice how none of those things happened? Have you ever read or seen Brave New World? Another (IMO) cautionary tale. 1984 hasn't totally come true, although, sadly, parts of it has. The point I'm trying to make is: you live long enough, you begin to see the cyclic patterns in things. At some regular points in history someone starts talking about how such-and-such is going to 'change the world', and 'nothing will be the same ever again', and it's going to 'destroy our way of life', and so on and so forth, but it never actually happens that way now does it? For the most part, people like dealing with other people, not machines. There are jobs that are done so much better by a human being than by a machine. There are things that are just not safe for a machine to do for another human being. And so on. At the very worst, I see a world where we may not have a human being doing a certain job, but they'll have to be there to supervise a machine, because it won't be able to cover every single exception like a human being can. Honestly, if I had the time I could sit here for an hour or more just coming up with things that maybe you can make a machine to do, but that a human would, in the long run, still do better for that reason alone, or for safety reasons (e.g. so-called 'self-driving cars' for instance). Your example of bank tellers? I don't know about you, but if I need to physically go into a bank, it's usually because I need to talk to a person about something human, and I'd be seriously annoyed if all there was, was another machine.
The core of what I'm talking about is the misnomer of 'AI'; there is not, currently, such a thing as actual 'artificial intelligence'. The term is widely misused; what we actually have is 'expert systems' and 'learning systems', but they're not actually intelligent, just clever. They can't replace a human being! Not even close. If you really want to know, my standard for 'artificial intelligence' is both simple and difficult: You have to be able to sit down with it, and have a conversation with it, and not be able to tell the difference between a human being and a machine. Kind of like the Turning Test, but I'm probably tougher than they are about it. So far I've seen nothing that can even come close to making me believe. So far, I've seen no research or examples that even come close to leading me to believe that they're on the right track. So far, I've also seen no research that leads me to believe that they even come close to understanding how our own brain produces consciousness, self-awareness, and sentience, and so far as I'm concerned there's no reason to believe they can create 'artificial intelligence' until they get a handle on that. Therefore any of these so-called 'AI' systems they trot out, are just pale imitations, very limited, and prone to having big gaps in what it's capable of doing -- and therefore not eligible to 'replace' a human being, not fully; it'd have to be supervised at the very least, it won't likely be capable of dealing with the general public except in a limited-scope sort of way, and really no different than a voicemail-type customer service system, there'll have to be human beings there to cover the things it can't figure out given it's limited scope of understanding.
Really, seriously though, to show I'm fair and not a Luddite about this: I'd love it if I could fire up a piece of software that I could have a human-level conversation with, and know that it actually understands at least as well as a human being would, and that is self-aware, fully consci
The fact that you have disposable income that you use for Internet access instead of giving it all to the local homeless people in your area tells me how unacceptable you think the problem is. You say the charities "hound" people -- but you keep your money from them. That's because you think it is a problem that OTHER people should pay to solve. OTHER people should be forced to pay up. OTHER people, OTHER people...M
Yeah, sure, my $40000 per year that I make I should give away to everyone else, and live in a cardboard box myself. I don't own property, I don't have investments, I don't have retirement, I don't have savings, and I don't have any luxuries, and I'm supposed PAY when rich fucks hide their money in the Caymans so they don't have to pay taxes? Shove it up your ass, your fucking piece of shit troll. I hope you get sent to prison for tax evasion.
Slashdot: Please stop posting these alarmist, FUD-spreading articles, please? While you're at it, stop posting these bullshit 'UBI' articles, too; none of this is going to happen. Seriously, nothing to see here, folks, just more trolling, FUD, and nonsense. For fuck's sake, are we in an Irwin Allen or Michael Bay film?
Basic personal freedom to choose how you live your life, that's what. If you or someone else can legislate that tobacco products are illegal, then who's to say that they can't take something that you enjoy that isn't 'necessary' for you to do, and say that's 'too risky' and make that illegal? People like you always forget: 'What's good for the goose, is good for the gander'.
Their so-called 'feat' of installing on 300 million devices is on the same list as talking about 300M computers being infected with malware and becoming part of a bot-net! How many of those 300M devices were voluntarily, intentionally installed, and how many of them had it forced on them or snuck in while the owner wasn't looking? Microsoft is nothing but a gigantic scammer.
As I have said in my own comment: This is a MEDICAL INSTRUMENT, not a general-purpose computer, and as such there should not be any non-approved-by-the-manufacturer software installed on it, EVER. I worked for a company that built a medical instrument and we'd have this sort of problem all the time, and it would take some pretty hard pounding with rather large mallets to get it through the thick skulls of some IT departments that they can't just install whatever the hell they want on our medical instrument and expect it to function correctly. Eventually we had to have our software engineers vet and approve a specific antivirus for use, and threaten them with voided warranties if they installed anything else.
That wasn't the end of it, though, either. They'd install all sorts of remote access crap on it, screencap crap, and other nonsense that had nothing to do with it being a medical instrument, then they'd complain about how it's not working correctly as a medical instrument. We'd get it back, uninstall all their extraneous nonsense, then magically it starts working correctly again. Sadly, though: Rinse, repeat several times, before they get the clue that they can't just treat it like a desktop computer!
Then there's the doctors who can't be bothered to learn how the gods-be-damned thing works before going to use it. I swear, if I'd've gotten even one more support call from an operating room with a patient on the table, and the sound of a heart monitor beeping in the background, I was going to lose it. I kid you not on this!
They mumbled something about "all machines must have AV".
That's pretty much the long and the short of it, yes. They don't seem to understand that it's primary function is as a medical instrument, and that compromising that may compromise the health or even the life of a human being. I'm surprised the FDA doesn't get more involved in things like this, since there is extensive testing of any medical instrument before it is allowed to be sold in the U.S., and especially so in the case of anything computerized. Of course I've always thought it was absurd that any medical instrument (or measuring instrument -- Tektronix oscilliscopes run Windows!) would have any version of Windows running on them, too. Most would be better off running Linux tailored for the specific application, which would also more or less preclude the possibility of virus or malware infection in the first place.
I used to work for a company that built ophthalmic ultrasound machines. It was Windows based (unfortunately). IT departments, being who they are, wanted to put things like antivirus on it. Then the doctors would complain that the MEDICAL INSTRUMENT wasn't performing as advertised. They send it in to us for 'repair'. We remove the shitty antivirus (and all the other crap that IT guys would install on it), then it works perfectly again. We return it.. and IT guys would screw it up again. Rinse, repeat, ad infinitum.
MEMO TO IT GUYS: Stop treating medical instruments like they're desktop computers! Find another solution, or AT LEAST be smart about how you're installing your junk on it, IT IS A MEDICAL INSTRUMENT, DAMNIT!
1. The rich don't pay their 'fair share' of taxes because they have ways to hide their money (offshore accounts, shell corporations, etc).
2. Do you even listen to/watch/read the news? In many places homelessness itself is literally treated like a criminal act, and in fact there are laws that are leveraged/perverted into 'anti-homelessness' laws; they are incarcerated for being homeless.
2a. Never mind the fact that sometimes in some places they're just scooped up and dropped off in some other town because they don't want the visual of homeless people on their streets.
2b. Quit saying homeless people are arrested for committing crimes, that's utter bullshit! They're being arrested in places just for being homeless!
3. You keep saying it's a 'local problem' but it's ALL OVER THE UNITED STATES, it's time for it to be handled on a NATIONAL LEVEL, you nitwit!
4. You keep acting like people with money are 'handling' the homelessness problem; then how come charity organizations keep hounding working people for their money to 'combat homelessness'? Clearly people with millions (or BILLIONS) of dollars need to ante up, instead of sitting on their wealth, hiding it all over the place, not paying their taxes (as described above!) and stop using the homeless as a 'warning' to everyone else to not get 'uppity' (which doubtlessly you're going to scoff at and mock me for saying, now).
Clearly you have your head in the sand, or you just don't give a fuck, or maybe you're one of the rich people who has deluded yourself into believing that there's no 'homeless problem' and therefore you don't need to do anything. Either way: stop spreading non-truth. We're more or less the richest nation on the planet, and we have even ONE person living on the streets? Unacceptable!
Ah I see the problem here. You think I mean 'The Government' when I say "top down", when I mean "rich people". Either directly or through more taxation. But don't sit there and keep repeating to me that the rich are paying all the taxes they should be paying, because I and many others don't believe it. The rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer; you care to explain that? And if the homeless problem isn't a problem, then why is it still a problem? You can sit there and write figures and percentages all day long and the simple fact remains that rich people keep getting richer, poor people keep getting poorer, people in the middle are getting squeezed more and more, and there are still homeless people who are homeless, and worse, are being treated like criminals in many places. If everything is working as well as you make it out to be, then why do we have these problems? Or are you part of the problem and are just protecting yourself?
Given the current record of jackasses and their drones, they'll probably use them to cheat on tests and spy on girls' locker rooms, and generally be obnoxious with them.
I heard this story on NPR yesterday before it was posted here. A sizeable portion of the parents of these 'addicted' teenagers are also addicted to their phones.
It's stupid. It's a phone, not a lifestyle; stop making it into one. Just one more thing to add to the list of reasons I'd never want a so-called 'smartphone': being associated with these sort of people. If it wasn't for safety reasons, and if it didn't cost any less money, I'd skip having any sort of wireless phone and just go back to a landline.
Never mind the Doomsday Clock, we need a Trump Doomsday Clock. If this fat bastard becomes POTUS, it's Game Over for the United States, and maybe the rest of the Free World, too. No, I'm not kidding. He'll ruin us.
If she's backing more U.S. citizens being employed instead of more overseas workers brought in on H1-B's, then I'm all for it, otherwise I couldn't care less.
I think it would really suck if all TV became pay TV, regardless of whether you have to pay for an internet connection to get it, or that plus paying some service like Netflix. Also, what about local news broadcasts? Local public access? OTA broadcast television and radio have always served these purposes as well as entertainment, or has everyone forgotten that? Anyway.. I dumped cable TV years ago and haven't regretted it once. I also dumped Netflix before that, because it just didn't offer enough to justify the cost -- but that was before companies like Netflix started creating their own content; still, it isn't attractive enough to me to pay for it. Between the antenna on my roof and a DVR, I've always got more than enough new programming to watch than I have time to watch it all. If streaming over the internet and paying Netflix or whoever for your entertainment works for you, great, I'm happy for you, but at the same time I don't think I'm alone in my preferences.
Also, your numbers suck, the 1% doesn't have 99% of the wealth.
Oh come on could we please knock off being so pedantic all the time? This is a casual discussion, we're not setting policy for the rest of the country here.
Now, then.. why wouldn't it work? The people and organizations at the top of the financial foodchain are the ones with the money, why shouldn't they be the ones who are paying to solve problems like homelessness, either directly, or through taxation? Why should the burden be put on people who don't have wealth? Explain your position.
Slashdot Mirror
..which is exactly what should happen to Bitcoin.
(Bracing for incoming negative moderation, insults, incoherent babbling about 'rights' or somesuch, death threats, etc etc etc)
Oh, come on, leave off with the irrational nonsense, bitcoin is used at least as much for illegal things, if not more, than it is for legitimate things. If you can't see that, then you're not looking in the right places. If you're just denying it, then one has to wonder what questionable, if not outright illegal, things you're up to.
I know I'm probably feeding a troll by asking you this, but if 'everything is garbage' then how about you give a few examples of what YOU think is good?
Most of the 'content' on YouTube is garbage, isn't it?
We sure this didn't come from some North Korean knock-off of YouTube? Sure sounds like Best Korea flavor of bragging to me.
I'm well past sick and tired of you jackasses who WANT to not work anymore, think you're going to get free money to live and party on the rest of your life, and think you'll have robot slaves or somesuch shit to wait on you hand and foot. You're living in a fantasy world that will NEVER EXIST. You're going to WORK your shitty job the rest of your life, GET USED TO IT. Oh and fuck you.
Fuck you.
How about we remove subsidies from ALL and then wait and see what and who can stand on their own?
Are you a paid troll for the oil and gas industry? Because they'd like nothing better, I think, than to have the playing field 'leveled' for them that way. Comparatively speaking they have a gigantic amount of installed infrastructure compared to any alternative sources, and exerting some political pressure they could manage to squeeze the alternative sources right out of the running. From there they might just scoop up bankrupted alternative energy companies, and bury all of it in warehouses somewhere, until all the oil and gas is gone -- then they'd start selling the alternatives to us, at a higher rate, ensuring their profits the entire time. Never mind the environment in the meantime, they don't care about that, just profit.
I'll respond to you and not the AC..
Friend, I'm probably as far from being a kid as you are (based on your low user ID number here), so we've both been around and seen life and the world, yes? Now, remember seeing predictions from 50 to 100 years ago, where people were going around talking about how life would be like that old cartoon The Jetsons, and we'd have flying cars, and robots everywhere, and so on and so forth? Notice how none of those things happened? Have you ever read or seen Brave New World? Another (IMO) cautionary tale. 1984 hasn't totally come true, although, sadly, parts of it has. The point I'm trying to make is: you live long enough, you begin to see the cyclic patterns in things. At some regular points in history someone starts talking about how such-and-such is going to 'change the world', and 'nothing will be the same ever again', and it's going to 'destroy our way of life', and so on and so forth, but it never actually happens that way now does it? For the most part, people like dealing with other people, not machines. There are jobs that are done so much better by a human being than by a machine. There are things that are just not safe for a machine to do for another human being. And so on. At the very worst, I see a world where we may not have a human being doing a certain job, but they'll have to be there to supervise a machine, because it won't be able to cover every single exception like a human being can. Honestly, if I had the time I could sit here for an hour or more just coming up with things that maybe you can make a machine to do, but that a human would, in the long run, still do better for that reason alone, or for safety reasons (e.g. so-called 'self-driving cars' for instance). Your example of bank tellers? I don't know about you, but if I need to physically go into a bank, it's usually because I need to talk to a person about something human, and I'd be seriously annoyed if all there was, was another machine.
The core of what I'm talking about is the misnomer of 'AI'; there is not, currently, such a thing as actual 'artificial intelligence'. The term is widely misused; what we actually have is 'expert systems' and 'learning systems', but they're not actually intelligent, just clever. They can't replace a human being! Not even close. If you really want to know, my standard for 'artificial intelligence' is both simple and difficult: You have to be able to sit down with it, and have a conversation with it, and not be able to tell the difference between a human being and a machine. Kind of like the Turning Test, but I'm probably tougher than they are about it. So far I've seen nothing that can even come close to making me believe. So far, I've seen no research or examples that even come close to leading me to believe that they're on the right track. So far, I've also seen no research that leads me to believe that they even come close to understanding how our own brain produces consciousness, self-awareness, and sentience, and so far as I'm concerned there's no reason to believe they can create 'artificial intelligence' until they get a handle on that. Therefore any of these so-called 'AI' systems they trot out, are just pale imitations, very limited, and prone to having big gaps in what it's capable of doing -- and therefore not eligible to 'replace' a human being, not fully; it'd have to be supervised at the very least, it won't likely be capable of dealing with the general public except in a limited-scope sort of way, and really no different than a voicemail-type customer service system, there'll have to be human beings there to cover the things it can't figure out given it's limited scope of understanding.
Really, seriously though, to show I'm fair and not a Luddite about this: I'd love it if I could fire up a piece of software that I could have a human-level conversation with, and know that it actually understands at least as well as a human being would, and that is self-aware, fully consci
The fact that you have disposable income that you use for Internet access instead of giving it all to the local homeless people in your area tells me how unacceptable you think the problem is. You say the charities "hound" people -- but you keep your money from them. That's because you think it is a problem that OTHER people should pay to solve. OTHER people should be forced to pay up. OTHER people, OTHER people ...M
Yeah, sure, my $40000 per year that I make I should give away to everyone else, and live in a cardboard box myself. I don't own property, I don't have investments, I don't have retirement, I don't have savings, and I don't have any luxuries, and I'm supposed PAY when rich fucks hide their money in the Caymans so they don't have to pay taxes? Shove it up your ass, your fucking piece of shit troll. I hope you get sent to prison for tax evasion.
Picture of Bill Gross as he was writing this article
Not anytime in this century, or maybe EVER.
Slashdot: Please stop posting these alarmist, FUD-spreading articles, please? While you're at it, stop posting these bullshit 'UBI' articles, too; none of this is going to happen. Seriously, nothing to see here, folks, just more trolling, FUD, and nonsense. For fuck's sake, are we in an Irwin Allen or Michael Bay film?
Basic personal freedom to choose how you live your life, that's what. If you or someone else can legislate that tobacco products are illegal, then who's to say that they can't take something that you enjoy that isn't 'necessary' for you to do, and say that's 'too risky' and make that illegal? People like you always forget: 'What's good for the goose, is good for the gander'.
Their so-called 'feat' of installing on 300 million devices is on the same list as talking about 300M computers being infected with malware and becoming part of a bot-net! How many of those 300M devices were voluntarily, intentionally installed, and how many of them had it forced on them or snuck in while the owner wasn't looking? Microsoft is nothing but a gigantic scammer.
As I have said in my own comment: This is a MEDICAL INSTRUMENT, not a general-purpose computer, and as such there should not be any non-approved-by-the-manufacturer software installed on it, EVER. I worked for a company that built a medical instrument and we'd have this sort of problem all the time, and it would take some pretty hard pounding with rather large mallets to get it through the thick skulls of some IT departments that they can't just install whatever the hell they want on our medical instrument and expect it to function correctly. Eventually we had to have our software engineers vet and approve a specific antivirus for use, and threaten them with voided warranties if they installed anything else.
That wasn't the end of it, though, either. They'd install all sorts of remote access crap on it, screencap crap, and other nonsense that had nothing to do with it being a medical instrument, then they'd complain about how it's not working correctly as a medical instrument. We'd get it back, uninstall all their extraneous nonsense, then magically it starts working correctly again. Sadly, though: Rinse, repeat several times, before they get the clue that they can't just treat it like a desktop computer!
Then there's the doctors who can't be bothered to learn how the gods-be-damned thing works before going to use it. I swear, if I'd've gotten even one more support call from an operating room with a patient on the table, and the sound of a heart monitor beeping in the background, I was going to lose it. I kid you not on this!
They mumbled something about "all machines must have AV".
That's pretty much the long and the short of it, yes. They don't seem to understand that it's primary function is as a medical instrument, and that compromising that may compromise the health or even the life of a human being. I'm surprised the FDA doesn't get more involved in things like this, since there is extensive testing of any medical instrument before it is allowed to be sold in the U.S., and especially so in the case of anything computerized. Of course I've always thought it was absurd that any medical instrument (or measuring instrument -- Tektronix oscilliscopes run Windows!) would have any version of Windows running on them, too. Most would be better off running Linux tailored for the specific application, which would also more or less preclude the possibility of virus or malware infection in the first place.
I used to work for a company that built ophthalmic ultrasound machines. It was Windows based (unfortunately). IT departments, being who they are, wanted to put things like antivirus on it. Then the doctors would complain that the MEDICAL INSTRUMENT wasn't performing as advertised. They send it in to us for 'repair'. We remove the shitty antivirus (and all the other crap that IT guys would install on it), then it works perfectly again. We return it.. and IT guys would screw it up again. Rinse, repeat, ad infinitum.
MEMO TO IT GUYS: Stop treating medical instruments like they're desktop computers! Find another solution, or AT LEAST be smart about how you're installing your junk on it, IT IS A MEDICAL INSTRUMENT, DAMNIT!
1. The rich don't pay their 'fair share' of taxes because they have ways to hide their money (offshore accounts, shell corporations, etc).
2. Do you even listen to/watch/read the news? In many places homelessness itself is literally treated like a criminal act, and in fact there are laws that are leveraged/perverted into 'anti-homelessness' laws; they are incarcerated for being homeless.
2a. Never mind the fact that sometimes in some places they're just scooped up and dropped off in some other town because they don't want the visual of homeless people on their streets.
2b. Quit saying homeless people are arrested for committing crimes, that's utter bullshit! They're being arrested in places just for being homeless!
3. You keep saying it's a 'local problem' but it's ALL OVER THE UNITED STATES, it's time for it to be handled on a NATIONAL LEVEL, you nitwit!
4. You keep acting like people with money are 'handling' the homelessness problem; then how come charity organizations keep hounding working people for their money to 'combat homelessness'? Clearly people with millions (or BILLIONS) of dollars need to ante up, instead of sitting on their wealth, hiding it all over the place, not paying their taxes (as described above!) and stop using the homeless as a 'warning' to everyone else to not get 'uppity' (which doubtlessly you're going to scoff at and mock me for saying, now).
Clearly you have your head in the sand, or you just don't give a fuck, or maybe you're one of the rich people who has deluded yourself into believing that there's no 'homeless problem' and therefore you don't need to do anything. Either way: stop spreading non-truth. We're more or less the richest nation on the planet, and we have even ONE person living on the streets? Unacceptable!
Ah I see the problem here. You think I mean 'The Government' when I say "top down", when I mean "rich people". Either directly or through more taxation. But don't sit there and keep repeating to me that the rich are paying all the taxes they should be paying, because I and many others don't believe it. The rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer; you care to explain that? And if the homeless problem isn't a problem, then why is it still a problem? You can sit there and write figures and percentages all day long and the simple fact remains that rich people keep getting richer, poor people keep getting poorer, people in the middle are getting squeezed more and more, and there are still homeless people who are homeless, and worse, are being treated like criminals in many places. If everything is working as well as you make it out to be, then why do we have these problems? Or are you part of the problem and are just protecting yourself?
Given the current record of jackasses and their drones, they'll probably use them to cheat on tests and spy on girls' locker rooms, and generally be obnoxious with them.
Why don't parents just take away the phones?
I heard this story on NPR yesterday before it was posted here. A sizeable portion of the parents of these 'addicted' teenagers are also addicted to their phones.
It's stupid. It's a phone, not a lifestyle; stop making it into one. Just one more thing to add to the list of reasons I'd never want a so-called 'smartphone': being associated with these sort of people. If it wasn't for safety reasons, and if it didn't cost any less money, I'd skip having any sort of wireless phone and just go back to a landline.
Never mind the Doomsday Clock, we need a Trump Doomsday Clock. If this fat bastard becomes POTUS, it's Game Over for the United States, and maybe the rest of the Free World, too. No, I'm not kidding. He'll ruin us.
If she's backing more U.S. citizens being employed instead of more overseas workers brought in on H1-B's, then I'm all for it, otherwise I couldn't care less.
homelessness is a local problem that needs to be solved at the local level
It's a national problem that needs to be solved everywhere. Oh and by the way who is going to pay for it?
They already pay the majority of the taxes.
That's debatable.
Most taxes are not levied on people who do not have wealth.
Again, that's debatable. Rich people have ways of avoiding paying taxes. Or weren't you aware of that?
I think it would really suck if all TV became pay TV, regardless of whether you have to pay for an internet connection to get it, or that plus paying some service like Netflix. Also, what about local news broadcasts? Local public access? OTA broadcast television and radio have always served these purposes as well as entertainment, or has everyone forgotten that? Anyway.. I dumped cable TV years ago and haven't regretted it once. I also dumped Netflix before that, because it just didn't offer enough to justify the cost -- but that was before companies like Netflix started creating their own content; still, it isn't attractive enough to me to pay for it. Between the antenna on my roof and a DVR, I've always got more than enough new programming to watch than I have time to watch it all. If streaming over the internet and paying Netflix or whoever for your entertainment works for you, great, I'm happy for you, but at the same time I don't think I'm alone in my preferences.
Also, your numbers suck, the 1% doesn't have 99% of the wealth.
Oh come on could we please knock off being so pedantic all the time? This is a casual discussion, we're not setting policy for the rest of the country here.
Now, then.. why wouldn't it work? The people and organizations at the top of the financial foodchain are the ones with the money, why shouldn't they be the ones who are paying to solve problems like homelessness, either directly, or through taxation? Why should the burden be put on people who don't have wealth? Explain your position.
That is what I'm saying. Please read more carefully.