How about dropping Boomers into the volcanoes? That'd at least open up a lot of management positions from old farts who can't let go and spread some of that stockpiled wealth around. Boomers generally caused all of the problems we're dealing with now as it is. Greediest most self centered generation the US has ever created.
It didn't hurt that every economic competitor the US had after WWII was too busy rebuilding all their infrastructure to stand much chance against US companies.
You point to regressive taxes as the reason for Globalization being "abused" but you are overlooking the much larger problem of wage shopping. If you can have a product made for 1/10th the wages and shipped to your country through a plethora of trade agreements that make the shipping as fast and cheap as possible then that's what is going to happen. There is also the differences in labor laws. Steve Jobs once said one of the reasons Apple manufactures in China is they can make a change in their product lines and overnight Foxconn will have every one of their million or so employees working 12 hour shifts servicing that change.
Foxconn's employees live in barracks and they can pull in prisoners and students if they need to and work them as many hours as they want. There's no way that would ever happen in a modern Western nation unless our economy went seriously downhill.
Windows RT lost out mostly due to the spectacularly crappy Microsoft App Store, and they didn't push enough units out to justify developers investing in creating Windows Apps. Even with all the desktops using Windows 10 on PCs, their app store is pretty lame still.
If Microsoft can get some energy into Windows app development, they could put Windows 10 on any CPU.
Good grief I'm tired of you people attempting to blame the system for human nature.
Almost as tired as I am of people who go on and on about how wonderful their system is, if it weren't for those pesky people. Any system that can't recover from and balance out failure is a terrible system.
You can go on and on all you want about theories of Capitalism and how it's supposed to work, but it doesn't work in reality. No pure Capitalist system would because there's some magical assumption of free money in there. Oh, start a business to compete! With what money??? You're starting this supposed competition already from a point of economic disadvantage or you wouldn't have broken away from the company that was underpaying you.
Then there's the problem of patents and copyrights, exclusive rights to resources and all of the myriad other ways companies protect themselves from competitors. It has to exist or else no one will put their money into a system where anyone can just start making copies of your product after you did all the R&D. So again, your notion of "Just start a competing business!" is the ravings of an idiot, because you have to surmount all of that and the inevitable "all his ideas he got working for us" lawsuits.
The Capitalist system has also created more corruption, more poverty, more pollution, more trash and more needless products than any other system in the history of mankind.
The reason Shkreli could raise the price like that is because the government granted him a monopoly.
Okay, so you're insane. Good to know.
Medicare could easily negotiate prices, it just chooses not to because government is in bed with drug companies and insurance companies.
Medicate can NOT negotiate drug prices, as a matter of law. It is illegal for them to do so.
Replacing expensive US workers with cheaper foreign workers when possible certainly does lower costs for companies. And why are US workers so expensive? Largely because government mandates make it so.
Oh it lowers costs for companies, that will never pass those cost reductions on to you the customer.
The beauty about free markets is that selfishness and greed are checked by competition. The reason that isn't happening in the health care market is because government has eliminated competition, by granting artificial monopolies, socializing costs, and standardizing the product.
So, you're right: workers are not to blame, bad government and selfish and greedy politicians are.
Oh I wish I weren't an atheist so I could call you a God damn loon with more emotional meaning!
I have one response to your complaints about health care costs: For Profit Healthcare.
Do you think it's the workers who "forced" Martin Shkreli to raise the price of Daraprim 5,556 percent? Do you think it's the workers who paid congress to ensure Medicare can't negotiate drug prices? If you want to complain about rising health care costs, it's not the workers who are causing it, it's the selfish profiteering CEO's and the expectations of a stock market that stopped caring about investment over absurd ROI expectations of day traders and microsecond traders.
Here's a plan for you. Why don't you hire some big guys to do some work around your house. Then at the end of the day, stiff them. Tell them that they're merely rent seekers and mock their request for pay with phrases like "for reasons."
Your analogy is crap. It's more like I hire some guys to do some work, my wealthy neighbor takes a few pictures and posts them on Twitter and the builders sue him for stealing from them.
You just pass law making sure you can't register a gas powered car and put a hefty tax on gas powered cars crossing the border unless they're just passing through.
....It failed to comprehend the very real potential harm to authors resulting from its decision.
How can a potential harm be real harm? Until the harm is actually done it's just all hot air.
The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture."
This won't effect American culture. It probably will effect American publishing companies and force them to find better ways to survive than artificially inflating the prices of ebooks to $9.99 or higher when the paperback is $6.99. You know, stop being thieves and maybe we'll have sympathy for your plight?
Aristotle didn't know jack shit. Even what we call poor today is 1000 times richer than he can even imagine.
So effing what? The rich today are 1 billion times richer than he could ever imagine. It changes nothing. The poor are poor by our standards, not Aristotle's.
This argument that the poor aren't reaaaallly poor is some conservative nonsense to justify being tightfisted a-holes incapable of empathy. It's the modern equivalent of the welfare queen myth.
They admit homelessness is a problem, but the protestant work ethic makes it clear that giving someone resources they didn't work for is out of the question - unfair to the giver and degrading to the recipient.
Funny thing is, these same people will throw money at a church to do the same thing the government is doing. Guess they're okay with being slaves to their God.
Have you ever been homeless? Because you sound clueless. Are there social services? Yes, if you fit certain categories. Women with children top the charts (as they should). Out of work men, not so much.
Moving and getting established in a new area takes.. *drumroll*!... MONEY. What good does it do you to hitchhike to a lower cost area if you don't have money to afford shelter there? Zero!
Also, ponder why it's cheap in other areas.. perhaps because THEY aren't so economically amazing themselves and there might not actually be any jobs, or the jobs available never quite match your qualifications. Sorry you're too old, oh you're too educated, oh you don't have the right qualifications, oops you're inexperienced/overexperienced.. etc etc.
The problem with homelessness is it's pervasive and its mutability. It's not a problem with one quick easy tweetable answer and a lot of people want the homeless to just go away more than they want a solution to homelessness. Gotta have somebody you can look down on after all.
The irony is that 50 years from now, our cars might not run on gas derived from Petroleum, but rather from Coal. The irony...:)
50 years from now the only people burning hydrocarbons for energy will be die hard nutjobs who put smokestacks on their electric cars so they can "burn coal" at people.
Most cars will be electric, most electricity will be from wind, solar, tides or thorium, or some exotic source not yet invented, possibly fusion.
I wouldn't say the only win is reduced costs. Part of the purpose of programs like this are to spur innovation, create new industries and eventually grow the economy. Just because some few people can't see the immediate value of space exploration is exactly why the government needs to intercede, as they did for telephones, electrical utilities and other markets that require long term investment with no immediate returns for 20-30 years.
A bridge doesn't pay back 25% ROI the first quarter after it opens, which is why Wall Street will never build bridges.
Slashdot Mirror
How about dropping Boomers into the volcanoes? That'd at least open up a lot of management positions from old farts who can't let go and spread some of that stockpiled wealth around. Boomers generally caused all of the problems we're dealing with now as it is. Greediest most self centered generation the US has ever created.
It didn't hurt that every economic competitor the US had after WWII was too busy rebuilding all their infrastructure to stand much chance against US companies.
You point to regressive taxes as the reason for Globalization being "abused" but you are overlooking the much larger problem of wage shopping. If you can have a product made for 1/10th the wages and shipped to your country through a plethora of trade agreements that make the shipping as fast and cheap as possible then that's what is going to happen. There is also the differences in labor laws. Steve Jobs once said one of the reasons Apple manufactures in China is they can make a change in their product lines and overnight Foxconn will have every one of their million or so employees working 12 hour shifts servicing that change.
Foxconn's employees live in barracks and they can pull in prisoners and students if they need to and work them as many hours as they want. There's no way that would ever happen in a modern Western nation unless our economy went seriously downhill.
1) Your paper map experiences folding errors.
2) Your paper map won't tell you to make a turn.
3) Your paper map has to be replaced for a refresh.
Google maps are used by millions of people daily for getting from point A to point B. You're dumb.
Windows RT lost out mostly due to the spectacularly crappy Microsoft App Store, and they didn't push enough units out to justify developers investing in creating Windows Apps. Even with all the desktops using Windows 10 on PCs, their app store is pretty lame still.
If Microsoft can get some energy into Windows app development, they could put Windows 10 on any CPU.
Good grief I'm tired of you people attempting to blame the system for human nature.
Almost as tired as I am of people who go on and on about how wonderful their system is, if it weren't for those pesky people. Any system that can't recover from and balance out failure is a terrible system.
You can go on and on all you want about theories of Capitalism and how it's supposed to work, but it doesn't work in reality. No pure Capitalist system would because there's some magical assumption of free money in there. Oh, start a business to compete! With what money??? You're starting this supposed competition already from a point of economic disadvantage or you wouldn't have broken away from the company that was underpaying you.
Then there's the problem of patents and copyrights, exclusive rights to resources and all of the myriad other ways companies protect themselves from competitors. It has to exist or else no one will put their money into a system where anyone can just start making copies of your product after you did all the R&D. So again, your notion of "Just start a competing business!" is the ravings of an idiot, because you have to surmount all of that and the inevitable "all his ideas he got working for us" lawsuits.
The Capitalist system has also created more corruption, more poverty, more pollution, more trash and more needless products than any other system in the history of mankind.
What's your point?
The reason Shkreli could raise the price like that is because the government granted him a monopoly.
Okay, so you're insane. Good to know.
Medicare could easily negotiate prices, it just chooses not to because government is in bed with drug companies and insurance companies.
Medicate can NOT negotiate drug prices, as a matter of law. It is illegal for them to do so.
Replacing expensive US workers with cheaper foreign workers when possible certainly does lower costs for companies. And why are US workers so expensive? Largely because government mandates make it so.
Oh it lowers costs for companies, that will never pass those cost reductions on to you the customer.
The beauty about free markets is that selfishness and greed are checked by competition. The reason that isn't happening in the health care market is because government has eliminated competition, by granting artificial monopolies, socializing costs, and standardizing the product.
So, you're right: workers are not to blame, bad government and selfish and greedy politicians are.
Oh I wish I weren't an atheist so I could call you a God damn loon with more emotional meaning!
I have one response to your complaints about health care costs: For Profit Healthcare.
Do you think it's the workers who "forced" Martin Shkreli to raise the price of Daraprim 5,556 percent? Do you think it's the workers who paid congress to ensure Medicare can't negotiate drug prices? If you want to complain about rising health care costs, it's not the workers who are causing it, it's the selfish profiteering CEO's and the expectations of a stock market that stopped caring about investment over absurd ROI expectations of day traders and microsecond traders.
Here's a plan for you. Why don't you hire some big guys to do some work around your house. Then at the end of the day, stiff them. Tell them that they're merely rent seekers and mock their request for pay with phrases like "for reasons."
Your analogy is crap. It's more like I hire some guys to do some work, my wealthy neighbor takes a few pictures and posts them on Twitter and the builders sue him for stealing from them.
It's easier and more cost effective to manage the emissions from a few power plants than it is to manage the emissions from millions of small engines.
Yet the person who works 12 months out of the year never takes the time off to enjoy what they're working for like someone who only works 10.
You just pass law making sure you can't register a gas powered car and put a hefty tax on gas powered cars crossing the border unless they're just passing through.
Why not, the company is acting antagonistically against them. The only people who benefit if the workers remain quiet is the company.
They don't want to hear it because it interferes with their narrative that Google owes them money. For.. reasons.
....It failed to comprehend the very real potential harm to authors resulting from its decision.
How can a potential harm be real harm? Until the harm is actually done it's just all hot air.
The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture."
This won't effect American culture. It probably will effect American publishing companies and force them to find better ways to survive than artificially inflating the prices of ebooks to $9.99 or higher when the paperback is $6.99. You know, stop being thieves and maybe we'll have sympathy for your plight?
Aristotle didn't know jack shit. Even what we call poor today is 1000 times richer than he can even imagine.
So effing what? The rich today are 1 billion times richer than he could ever imagine. It changes nothing. The poor are poor by our standards, not Aristotle's.
This argument that the poor aren't reaaaallly poor is some conservative nonsense to justify being tightfisted a-holes incapable of empathy. It's the modern equivalent of the welfare queen myth.
They admit homelessness is a problem, but the protestant work ethic makes it clear that giving someone resources they didn't work for is out of the question - unfair to the giver and degrading to the recipient.
Funny thing is, these same people will throw money at a church to do the same thing the government is doing. Guess they're okay with being slaves to their God.
Have you ever been homeless? Because you sound clueless. Are there social services? Yes, if you fit certain categories. Women with children top the charts (as they should). Out of work men, not so much.
Moving and getting established in a new area takes.. *drumroll*! ... MONEY. What good does it do you to hitchhike to a lower cost area if you don't have money to afford shelter there? Zero!
Also, ponder why it's cheap in other areas.. perhaps because THEY aren't so economically amazing themselves and there might not actually be any jobs, or the jobs available never quite match your qualifications. Sorry you're too old, oh you're too educated, oh you don't have the right qualifications, oops you're inexperienced/overexperienced.. etc etc.
The problem with homelessness is it's pervasive and its mutability. It's not a problem with one quick easy tweetable answer and a lot of people want the homeless to just go away more than they want a solution to homelessness. Gotta have somebody you can look down on after all.
Become a corporation.
Enjoy the radioactive fly ash. Who needs to visit Fukushima when you can reenact it in your own home?!
The irony is that 50 years from now, our cars might not run on gas derived from Petroleum, but rather from Coal. The irony... :)
50 years from now the only people burning hydrocarbons for energy will be die hard nutjobs who put smokestacks on their electric cars so they can "burn coal" at people.
Most cars will be electric, most electricity will be from wind, solar, tides or thorium, or some exotic source not yet invented, possibly fusion.
That, frankly, is the fault of voters, who don't mind the corporate graft so much when it benefits their state.
I'll get upset when he stands on an aircraft carrier with a big "Mission Accomplished" banner.
I wouldn't say the only win is reduced costs. Part of the purpose of programs like this are to spur innovation, create new industries and eventually grow the economy. Just because some few people can't see the immediate value of space exploration is exactly why the government needs to intercede, as they did for telephones, electrical utilities and other markets that require long term investment with no immediate returns for 20-30 years.
A bridge doesn't pay back 25% ROI the first quarter after it opens, which is why Wall Street will never build bridges.