The American Dream didn't turn into a lie until the late 60's early 70's. The 80's was when everyone was too high to notice, and by the 90's the dream was crashing.
Why did this happen? Whatever combination of events that did it, they happened early 1970's.
Like I said in another reply in this thread, I lost friends due to the collapse of Eastern and Pan Am. I myself dreamed of flying for Pan Am since early childhood, didn't get to do it. Anyway, in a book called "Skygods - The Fall of Pan Am" by Robert Gandt, Chapter 8, it is mentioned in a meeting between then President Lyndon Johnson - on March 30 1966 - where LBJ told Trippe (Pan Am) and Allen (Boeing) that things are REALLY bad, that there will have to be "mutual sacrifice" between industry and government. THat they'd have to pull back expansions and new projects. One such project became the 747. Trippe and Allen somehow cajoled the administration into allowing 747 to proceed. And it did, and it made a lot of jobs in Seattle and other places that made parts for it.
But my point of the above is this: They knew the economy was already sinking hard in 1966. Johnson and his advisors were trying to slow the crash. The American Dream wasn't always a lie, it just gradually vanished. The consumerism you point out has always been there, at least since the late 40's early 50's
50's - 70's : One parent could sustain the house, rather well.
70's - 80's: Both parents likely work, out of necessity, not liberation.
80's - 00's: Both parents barely make it, some have to work multiple jobs. I myself tasted this, I did moonlighting assembly line work while in the USAF, with the wife (now ex, heh) working too.
01-now: It's all burning and sinking.
I've been meaning to deep-trawl that event(s) mentioned in the book I paraphrased above. I didn't know about this until I read it, and I was taken aback that such closed-door meetings were happening and that our economy was already tanking as far back as '66.
I didn't lose friends until 1991, after I had left Puerto Rico. What happened to them and their families was the implosion of Eastern Airlines and then Pan American. Those two employed a huge chunk of people who lived in my neighborhood. From letters and phone calls, pretty much all of them sold out and left for the US, and over time I lost touch with all of them.
I also remember, in the 70's, consumer interest rate was 13% or somesuch? Gold was through the roof at 700-ish?
We're not in that shape now, but I think it's artificially good. I think our real unemployment rate is more than the 6%-ish we keep hearing about. I don't know how much worse than that it is, but that official number doesn't count people who gave up looking for a job after being unemployed for an extended time.
Economic expansion is slowing yet again. I don't think we've seen the second shoe drop (first one was 2007-8)
Our politics are at a standstill, their own parties divided, and if one choses to believe the media, so is our country -- far worse than ever, save maybe the Civil War.
Energy is cheap now because OPEC is flooding the market, hell-bent on destroying our own oil industry.
The media does what the media does, but there's no denying that now, like in the 70's, we're still in countries where we have no business being. The world may be more peaceful now, but the US is still where it doesn't belong, fighting wars we should let the locals fight out.
Unemployment is one of the numbers I think are being fudged for our benefit -- I think it's much worse than the official number. The official number doesn't take into account people who've given up on a new job - long-term unemployment.
I think the real number is worse than 6%, but how much worse I don't know.
While that may sound mawkish, isn't it possible that many more folk are falling into depression, given the long-term downturn in the economy, the bleakness of the foreseeable future, and just a sense of "Man, nothing we can do will fix this?"
I'm sure I'm projecting a bit here, but... I'm also sure a lot of y'all are thinking exactly the same thing. There's an ugly mood about America right now, and the media and politicos are trying to paper it over.. but it's there. The numbers are lying. We're not as well as they tell us we are. To me it feels like the mid to late 70's did. Ugh, that was ugly. I was 10 going into 1980, and I could sense it was ugly.
So what I'm saying is.. maybe more people are dying off because things have been rotten for a couple of decades, and there's no end in sight?
Could just be me, though. I'm a pessimist by nature and by training. Meteorology and then IT? Yeah. Expect the worst, always =o)
I have no use for a smart TV. The only smarts I would like in a display is the ability to alter its brightness via a sensor, like phones and tablets do. Where my main PC is the light changes all the time, being in a room that's mostly windows.
But people that read slashdot are hardly representative of the People at Large, no? There's no telling why Joe Sixpack would want such a thing as a smart TV. The convenience of having the streaming apps built in? Last I played with one (bought by a friend 2014, Samsung curved 65" the built-ins were atrocious. He drives everything from a built-it-himself game / HTPC so the TV is not hooked up to the lan after the initial experimentation period.
Oddly enough, his *fridge* is wifi'd into the lan!
I personally use a 1920 x 1080 home cine projector in a room built to be a true miniature cinema, fed by an AVR, which in turn is fed from an apple tv, a blu-ray player and a comcast HD DVR, all controlled by a harmony 700 remote. None of them hear nor see me. The only one that pitches ads at me is the comcast box, it puts banner ads at the bottom of the Guide screen -- and only there. It has done this since I got it in 2007.
I haven't had a "TV" since 2005, when I got my first home cine projector. That last TV was a sweet 35" Trinitron.. sold it to a co-worker. Best "TV" I ever had.
No, not free. But not outrageous, either. A buck or three?
They're not the ROMs like you'd get in mame, but most of these guys have done a really good job on keeping it real.
Dragon's Lair on iphone was amazing, it was the actual footage used in the actual game, but it stopped working (crash on launch) after iOS 8 and it seems it never got updated.
I'm an iOS user. (just so we're clear that I don't play in the Google ecosystem)
At first (2009) I was app-crazy and tried out a large array of things. But within a year, I found I had settled on a core set of apps:
1. Games. Old games, like PacMan, Battleship, Sonic, Centipede, etc etc etc). Hell, the folder they're in is called "Time-Out" (Anyone remember Time-Out arcades?)
2. Audio utilities: DB meter, DB grapher, spectrum analyzer
3. Timekeepers -- a clock utility to detect and correct problems with clocks - mechanical, pendulum clocks, an addiction of mine, a watch log, to keep time of how my windup watches are doing
4. Creative: Painting, animation, not that I have any talent for this at all. And iBooks and Kindle, both which see much use, moreso in the ipad than in the phone. Also a video editor, video effects, and in the ipad, imovie. One can make a passable little movie with just a phone. An app to put speech balloons and make multi-panel photos out of many other photos.
After that, just a smattering of weird stuff like a Roman to Arabic number converter, a useless light meter that reads in foot-candles, crossword / anagram app, and ookla's speed test.
I haven't bought or downloaded a new app in more than a year. Why? I got all I need! Oh yeah, my first real nice app was Calcbot, because i like having a paper tape like in the old days.
The People didn't ask for NAFTA, which just made it easier for companies, to get bottom of the race buyers, to move manufacturing to Mexico -- killing jobs here.
The People DO share a slice of blame, for constantly asking for lower prices for everything. But perhaps that need didn't need to happen -- because:
The People didn't ask to de-couple the dollar from gold. That was Nixon, to lower umemployment and keep inflation in check. He "intended" to bring back the GOld Standard, but that didn't happen. AT THAT POINT IN HISTORY America at large got robbed, and we've not recovered. And we never will. At that point GDP and salaries of the 1% mirror each other and they still do but the wages you and I make remain as they were then. We flatlined.
Now, the citation for what I'm about to say is an essay found here. It was written the other day by a 91 year old WWII vet - a generation I personally feel set us up for this disaster - yet his eloquence and clarity spoke to me. And when I think of what happened in the early 70's, the gist of his message passes the smell test: If normal people's salaries would've kept with the pace of GDP and the 1%'ers, people making minimum wage today would be making low 40k USD.
The People didn't ask for "trickle-down" economics. Yeah... a few pennies trickled down, the big bucks stayed where they were.
You ever wonder why back in the 60's Mommy didn't have to work? Oh, she could've if she wanted to, plenty did. But then in the 80's Mommy HAD to work, it took Daddy and Mommy together to make it. And now in the 00's and 10's, no matter how much you work, it's likely you're on thin ice. There are exceptions and outliers, sure. I do fine on my own. But that's out of sheer dumb luck and being in IT.
That's why Trump and Bernie get so much ear. The People are starting to realize -- way late in the game -- that we got robbed. There's a line in the calendar showing us when.
I think it's high time The People realize we got played, and yell a huge, politically-incorrect "FUCK YOU! We got played by y'all!" at Government and Commerce. It's going to take a century to fix this. If it can be even fixed. And I fear the fix will hurt as badly as severing one's own arm. Yeah.
That's how you win here, folks. That's how Walmart and Target to go where they are now. Sell the cheapest shit to the bottom of the pond, and profit like crazy. Oh yeah, squeeze your suppliers until they bleed and move manufacturing offshore to keep your business.
The race to the bottom is already won. Thinking people lost. The bottom won. Now we need to deal with the aftermath and reverse the effects.
Or perhaps more disturbingly, the socioeconomic strata that has always worked at fast food places has degraded, and this is what society is now producing.
From South Florida's perspective, I think your last blurb there is the correct one.
And as it spreads to other jobs.. well, $DEITY help us all.
Is it just me, or has the quality of worker at fast food places really hit rock bottom in the last couple of years?
It's not just you. Now, I don't know where you live, but I live in South Florida. I will say it with conviction: The people staffing the franchises (Burger King, McDonalds, Wendy's, Taco Bell, Subway) * are rude, the way they present themselves is appalling. And worst of all, they treat customers like the customer is bothering the worker. They roll their eyes when they have to do actual work, like taking an order or putting one together.
The non-franchises seem to not suffer from this. My favorite burger joint is called Char-Hut, it's a South Florida thing. Clean, attentive, efficient, pleasant staff. Like a blast from the past. Like the franchises were 20 years ago.
It's enough to drive one to despair. This.. condition.. of a downward spiral of society is spreading to other sectors, not just fast food.
I feel like I'm trapped in Idiocracy.
* These are stores I've personally visited and observed.
If they are being made in the US, the losses from fry-baggers could be largely made up by the increase in robot arm company employees/repairpeople
Really? I hear this argument over and over again, and I fail to see how it would work.
At the risk of sounding like a stereotyping insensitive clod, the number of fry-baggers that have the skills -- or are trainable -- in making and fixing robots is likely minimal. Since all stats are made-up to order, let's assume 5% of the fry-baggers are employable or trainable to make and fix robots.
Now, Smith, Jones and Brown all turn to you and say 'Alright, no Facebook, no FB app, it's all gone. Where do I go to do all the stuff that I would have done on Facebook? Real time chat, picture hosting, messaging, silly stuff, groups. It's not the 90s so we're not using "Yahoo!" but what do we do now?'
Moral of the story: If I didn't use anything I ethically objected to, I'd be sitting in a cave somewhere.
I have given the subject some thought. Right now the benefits of whoring myself out to commercial and government interests (by being a "consumer," by paying taxes, etc) outweigh my desire to cut all ties with commerce and government.
The desire for total independence is there. But not the cojones. *
Not yet, anyway. Ask me again in 10 years. 'way things are going... yeah.
* God damn it slashdot, it's 2016, and it's $@#! ridiculous I can't type alt-162 to get an accented lowercase "o"! I mean, I can TYPE it in, but when previewed or viewed it shows up as A(someothergarbage)
In that case, you only need to do what you already expect to do. Get naturally deselected. We'll take it from there.
Won't happen, at least not in the US and UK. We have so many laws to prevent Natural Selection from happening that it simply won't. At least not with humans.
Which means we're stuck with the stupidest of the stupid mucking up the already mucked-up gene pool.
Yes the upgrade tactics have been heavy handed. But so has the push back, the FUD from sites like Slashdot and other supposed "tech" blogs. If you have an Android phone and are bitching about Windows 10 you're a fucking hypocrite, full stop.
That'd the majority of/. users, judging from that recent poll "what OS does your phone run." and the comments seen.
The only google I consciously use is search and youtube and gmail. And as far as gmail goes, that's strictly for job searches and the like. Gmail isn't my "real" email. Oh, and Docs, because I'm too cheap to have Word on any of my home gear. But then again, all I use Docs for is.. resumes.
Chrome? No thanks. I use firefox. Android? No thanks (for many reasons, not just privacy concerns) Chromebook? Nope.
For computers I have an old optiplex 740 for a desktop and a dell 6420 for a laptop. both on win 7.
For "mobile" I use an iphone and an ipad. I'm sure apple is collecting data too, despite going through settings and disabling the obviously intrusive ones. But whom do I trust more? Not MS, for sure, and I trust Google even less.
The lesser of the three commercial evils is Apple. Purely my own opinion, of course, and I expect serious amounts of hatred from defenders of the other two.
My next OS will be either OS X or Linux. 7 is my last windows. Been a long road, having used it daily since.. 1992? But, it's over, Microsoft. It's over, and you did it to yourself.
I can't think of anything the fruit peddler has done that comes close to the arrogance Microsoft is showing regarding anything about Windows 10.
It's enough to make a cynical paranoid think Microsoft is being paid to be this obnoxious and intrusive. Paid by whom? I'll leave that to the conspiracy theorists.
Win 10 sounds like a data-collecting piece of spyware, don't it?
I don't exactly live in the sticks, just very far from any AT&T CO. The best DSL I could get form them was 1.5 (really 1.25) down. And I put up with it for a long time, because I really don't do much online. I have all the bandwith I need in the form of a good blu-ray player and 1.25 is good enough for basic-to-moderately complex web sites.
I asked about better speeds. Repeatedly. No can do. No UVerse for me, not at any price. And having had DirecTV back in the late 90's I wasn't keen on repeating the experience.
So when my AT&T "modem" broke last year, that was the final straw. I told them to kill not only DSL, but my landline as well. I went to Comcast for internet, since I've had them since the late 90's for TV. Much as I loathe them and their business practices, I've found their internet to be fast-ish and reliable.
The only thing from AT&T I kept was the mobile. I've had Sprint and Verizon too, but I've had AT&T the longest, and it gives me the best overall service as far as mobile goes.
But aside from all that, there seems to be something funny going on:
1. Netflix just became the sole online distributor of Disney and related (Lucas, Marvel, Pixar).
2. Comcast has elevated their internet cap to 1TB (I don't know if that applies to internet-only plans)
3. AT&T drops UVerse for TV (yes, folks, from now own AT&T TV is ONLY DirecTV) and decides to enforce limits for internet-only users.
Coincidence? I don't believe in that, but.. convenient convergence sure seems plausible!
Slashdot Mirror
The American Dream didn't turn into a lie until the late 60's early 70's. The 80's was when everyone was too high to notice, and by the 90's the dream was crashing.
Why did this happen? Whatever combination of events that did it, they happened early 1970's.
Like I said in another reply in this thread, I lost friends due to the collapse of Eastern and Pan Am. I myself dreamed of flying for Pan Am since early childhood, didn't get to do it. Anyway, in a book called "Skygods - The Fall of Pan Am" by Robert Gandt, Chapter 8, it is mentioned in a meeting between then President Lyndon Johnson - on March 30 1966 - where LBJ told Trippe (Pan Am) and Allen (Boeing) that things are REALLY bad, that there will have to be "mutual sacrifice" between industry and government. THat they'd have to pull back expansions and new projects. One such project became the 747. Trippe and Allen somehow cajoled the administration into allowing 747 to proceed. And it did, and it made a lot of jobs in Seattle and other places that made parts for it.
But my point of the above is this: They knew the economy was already sinking hard in 1966. Johnson and his advisors were trying to slow the crash. The American Dream wasn't always a lie, it just gradually vanished. The consumerism you point out has always been there, at least since the late 40's early 50's
50's - 70's : One parent could sustain the house, rather well.
70's - 80's: Both parents likely work, out of necessity, not liberation.
80's - 00's: Both parents barely make it, some have to work multiple jobs. I myself tasted this, I did moonlighting assembly line work while in the USAF, with the wife (now ex, heh) working too.
01-now: It's all burning and sinking.
I've been meaning to deep-trawl that event(s) mentioned in the book I paraphrased above. I didn't know about this until I read it, and I was taken aback that such closed-door meetings were happening and that our economy was already tanking as far back as '66.
I didn't lose friends until 1991, after I had left Puerto Rico. What happened to them and their families was the implosion of Eastern Airlines and then Pan American. Those two employed a huge chunk of people who lived in my neighborhood. From letters and phone calls, pretty much all of them sold out and left for the US, and over time I lost touch with all of them.
I also remember, in the 70's, consumer interest rate was 13% or somesuch? Gold was through the roof at 700-ish?
We're not in that shape now, but I think it's artificially good. I think our real unemployment rate is more than the 6%-ish we keep hearing about. I don't know how much worse than that it is, but that official number doesn't count people who gave up looking for a job after being unemployed for an extended time.
Economic expansion is slowing yet again. I don't think we've seen the second shoe drop (first one was 2007-8)
Our politics are at a standstill, their own parties divided, and if one choses to believe the media, so is our country -- far worse than ever, save maybe the Civil War.
Energy is cheap now because OPEC is flooding the market, hell-bent on destroying our own oil industry.
The media does what the media does, but there's no denying that now, like in the 70's, we're still in countries where we have no business being. The world may be more peaceful now, but the US is still where it doesn't belong, fighting wars we should let the locals fight out.
Unemployment is one of the numbers I think are being fudged for our benefit -- I think it's much worse than the official number. The official number doesn't take into account people who've given up on a new job - long-term unemployment.
I think the real number is worse than 6%, but how much worse I don't know.
"She lost the will to live."
While that may sound mawkish, isn't it possible that many more folk are falling into depression, given the long-term downturn in the economy, the bleakness of the foreseeable future, and just a sense of "Man, nothing we can do will fix this?"
I'm sure I'm projecting a bit here, but... I'm also sure a lot of y'all are thinking exactly the same thing. There's an ugly mood about America right now, and the media and politicos are trying to paper it over.. but it's there. The numbers are lying. We're not as well as they tell us we are. To me it feels like the mid to late 70's did. Ugh, that was ugly. I was 10 going into 1980, and I could sense it was ugly.
So what I'm saying is.. maybe more people are dying off because things have been rotten for a couple of decades, and there's no end in sight?
Could just be me, though. I'm a pessimist by nature and by training. Meteorology and then IT? Yeah. Expect the worst, always =o)
I have no use for a smart TV. The only smarts I would like in a display is the ability to alter its brightness via a sensor, like phones and tablets do. Where my main PC is the light changes all the time, being in a room that's mostly windows.
But people that read slashdot are hardly representative of the People at Large, no? There's no telling why Joe Sixpack would want such a thing as a smart TV. The convenience of having the streaming apps built in? Last I played with one (bought by a friend 2014, Samsung curved 65" the built-ins were atrocious. He drives everything from a built-it-himself game / HTPC so the TV is not hooked up to the lan after the initial experimentation period.
Oddly enough, his *fridge* is wifi'd into the lan!
I personally use a 1920 x 1080 home cine projector in a room built to be a true miniature cinema, fed by an AVR, which in turn is fed from an apple tv, a blu-ray player and a comcast HD DVR, all controlled by a harmony 700 remote. None of them hear nor see me. The only one that pitches ads at me is the comcast box, it puts banner ads at the bottom of the Guide screen -- and only there. It has done this since I got it in 2007.
I haven't had a "TV" since 2005, when I got my first home cine projector. That last TV was a sweet 35" Trinitron.. sold it to a co-worker. Best "TV" I ever had.
No, not free. But not outrageous, either. A buck or three?
They're not the ROMs like you'd get in mame, but most of these guys have done a really good job on keeping it real.
Dragon's Lair on iphone was amazing, it was the actual footage used in the actual game, but it stopped working (crash on launch) after iOS 8 and it seems it never got updated.
At risk of running afoul of your sig, it is Rickman (Snape) who died, not Fiennes (Voldermort)
But, this could easily be Empire Towers! "You will join us.. or die."
"Join us... or die."
I'm an iOS user. (just so we're clear that I don't play in the Google ecosystem)
At first (2009) I was app-crazy and tried out a large array of things. But within a year, I found I had settled on a core set of apps:
1. Games. Old games, like PacMan, Battleship, Sonic, Centipede, etc etc etc). Hell, the folder they're in is called "Time-Out" (Anyone remember Time-Out arcades?)
2. Audio utilities: DB meter, DB grapher, spectrum analyzer
3. Timekeepers -- a clock utility to detect and correct problems with clocks - mechanical, pendulum clocks, an addiction of mine, a watch log, to keep time of how my windup watches are doing
4. Creative: Painting, animation, not that I have any talent for this at all. And iBooks and Kindle, both which see much use, moreso in the ipad than in the phone. Also a video editor, video effects, and in the ipad, imovie. One can make a passable little movie with just a phone. An app to put speech balloons and make multi-panel photos out of many other photos.
After that, just a smattering of weird stuff like a Roman to Arabic number converter, a useless light meter that reads in foot-candles, crossword / anagram app, and ookla's speed test.
I haven't bought or downloaded a new app in more than a year. Why? I got all I need! Oh yeah, my first real nice app was Calcbot, because i like having a paper tape like in the old days.
Yep, Trump's one of those profiteers. He may have not done the actual thieving, but he profited (and still profits) from the ensuing carnage.
So how can this be fixed? How can the damage done in the early half of the 70's be reversed?
I'm drawing a blank. And I don't hear anyone talking about how to fix it.
What kind of shit is this?!
The People didn't ask for NAFTA, which just made it easier for companies, to get bottom of the race buyers, to move manufacturing to Mexico -- killing jobs here.
The People DO share a slice of blame, for constantly asking for lower prices for everything. But perhaps that need didn't need to happen -- because:
The People didn't ask to de-couple the dollar from gold. That was Nixon, to lower umemployment and keep inflation in check. He "intended" to bring back the GOld Standard, but that didn't happen. AT THAT POINT IN HISTORY America at large got robbed, and we've not recovered. And we never will. At that point GDP and salaries of the 1% mirror each other and they still do but the wages you and I make remain as they were then. We flatlined.
Now, the citation for what I'm about to say is an essay found here. It was written the other day by a 91 year old WWII vet - a generation I personally feel set us up for this disaster - yet his eloquence and clarity spoke to me. And when I think of what happened in the early 70's, the gist of his message passes the smell test: If normal people's salaries would've kept with the pace of GDP and the 1%'ers, people making minimum wage today would be making low 40k USD.
The People didn't ask for "trickle-down" economics. Yeah... a few pennies trickled down, the big bucks stayed where they were.
You ever wonder why back in the 60's Mommy didn't have to work? Oh, she could've if she wanted to, plenty did. But then in the 80's Mommy HAD to work, it took Daddy and Mommy together to make it. And now in the 00's and 10's, no matter how much you work, it's likely you're on thin ice. There are exceptions and outliers, sure. I do fine on my own. But that's out of sheer dumb luck and being in IT.
That's why Trump and Bernie get so much ear. The People are starting to realize -- way late in the game -- that we got robbed. There's a line in the calendar showing us when.
I think it's high time The People realize we got played, and yell a huge, politically-incorrect "FUCK YOU! We got played by y'all!" at Government and Commerce. It's going to take a century to fix this. If it can be even fixed. And I fear the fix will hurt as badly as severing one's own arm. Yeah.
That's how you win here, folks. That's how Walmart and Target to go where they are now. Sell the cheapest shit to the bottom of the pond, and profit like crazy. Oh yeah, squeeze your suppliers until they bleed and move manufacturing offshore to keep your business.
The race to the bottom is already won. Thinking people lost. The bottom won. Now we need to deal with the aftermath and reverse the effects.
People who walk about with their noses in their screens will stand a much higher chance of dying like a bug on a windshield than from radiation.
This debate is getting as old as climate change and "does this belong in slashdot or not?"
Or perhaps more disturbingly, the socioeconomic strata that has always worked at fast food places has degraded, and this is what society is now producing.
From South Florida's perspective, I think your last blurb there is the correct one.
And as it spreads to other jobs.. well, $DEITY help us all.
I know it was fictional, but I just can't get WOPR out of my mind when reading this.
Is it just me, or has the quality of worker at fast food places really hit rock bottom in the last couple of years?
It's not just you. Now, I don't know where you live, but I live in South Florida. I will say it with conviction: The people staffing the franchises (Burger King, McDonalds, Wendy's, Taco Bell, Subway) * are rude, the way they present themselves is appalling. And worst of all, they treat customers like the customer is bothering the worker. They roll their eyes when they have to do actual work, like taking an order or putting one together.
The non-franchises seem to not suffer from this. My favorite burger joint is called Char-Hut, it's a South Florida thing. Clean, attentive, efficient, pleasant staff. Like a blast from the past. Like the franchises were 20 years ago.
It's enough to drive one to despair. This.. condition.. of a downward spiral of society is spreading to other sectors, not just fast food.
I feel like I'm trapped in Idiocracy.
* These are stores I've personally visited and observed.
If they are being made in the US, the losses from fry-baggers could be largely made up by the increase in robot arm company employees/repairpeople
Really? I hear this argument over and over again, and I fail to see how it would work.
At the risk of sounding like a stereotyping insensitive clod, the number of fry-baggers that have the skills -- or are trainable -- in making and fixing robots is likely minimal. Since all stats are made-up to order, let's assume 5% of the fry-baggers are employable or trainable to make and fix robots.
What about the other 95%?
Now, Smith, Jones and Brown all turn to you and say 'Alright, no Facebook, no FB app, it's all gone. Where do I go to do all the stuff that I would have done on Facebook? Real time chat, picture hosting, messaging, silly stuff, groups. It's not the 90s so we're not using "Yahoo!" but what do we do now?'
What do you suggest to them?
Forums. Email. Texts. iMessage.
Moral of the story: If I didn't use anything I ethically objected to, I'd be sitting in a cave somewhere.
I have given the subject some thought. Right now the benefits of whoring myself out to commercial and government interests (by being a "consumer," by paying taxes, etc) outweigh my desire to cut all ties with commerce and government.
The desire for total independence is there. But not the cojones. *
Not yet, anyway. Ask me again in 10 years. 'way things are going... yeah.
* God damn it slashdot, it's 2016, and it's $@#! ridiculous I can't type alt-162 to get an accented lowercase "o"! I mean, I can TYPE it in, but when previewed or viewed it shows up as A(someothergarbage)
In that case, you only need to do what you already expect to do. Get naturally deselected. We'll take it from there.
Won't happen, at least not in the US and UK. We have so many laws to prevent Natural Selection from happening that it simply won't. At least not with humans.
Which means we're stuck with the stupidest of the stupid mucking up the already mucked-up gene pool.
Yes the upgrade tactics have been heavy handed. But so has the push back, the FUD from sites like Slashdot and other supposed "tech" blogs. If you have an Android phone and are bitching about Windows 10 you're a fucking hypocrite, full stop.
That'd the majority of /. users, judging from that recent poll "what OS does your phone run." and the comments seen.
The only google I consciously use is search and youtube and gmail. And as far as gmail goes, that's strictly for job searches and the like. Gmail isn't my "real" email. Oh, and Docs, because I'm too cheap to have Word on any of my home gear. But then again, all I use Docs for is.. resumes.
Chrome? No thanks. I use firefox. Android? No thanks (for many reasons, not just privacy concerns) Chromebook? Nope.
For computers I have an old optiplex 740 for a desktop and a dell 6420 for a laptop. both on win 7.
For "mobile" I use an iphone and an ipad. I'm sure apple is collecting data too, despite going through settings and disabling the obviously intrusive ones. But whom do I trust more? Not MS, for sure, and I trust Google even less.
The lesser of the three commercial evils is Apple. Purely my own opinion, of course, and I expect serious amounts of hatred from defenders of the other two.
My next OS will be either OS X or Linux. 7 is my last windows. Been a long road, having used it daily since.. 1992? But, it's over, Microsoft. It's over, and you did it to yourself.
I can't think of anything the fruit peddler has done that comes close to the arrogance Microsoft is showing regarding anything about Windows 10.
It's enough to make a cynical paranoid think Microsoft is being paid to be this obnoxious and intrusive. Paid by whom? I'll leave that to the conspiracy theorists.
Win 10 sounds like a data-collecting piece of spyware, don't it?
I don't exactly live in the sticks, just very far from any AT&T CO. The best DSL I could get form them was 1.5 (really 1.25) down. And I put up with it for a long time, because I really don't do much online. I have all the bandwith I need in the form of a good blu-ray player and 1.25 is good enough for basic-to-moderately complex web sites.
I asked about better speeds. Repeatedly. No can do. No UVerse for me, not at any price. And having had DirecTV back in the late 90's I wasn't keen on repeating the experience.
So when my AT&T "modem" broke last year, that was the final straw. I told them to kill not only DSL, but my landline as well. I went to Comcast for internet, since I've had them since the late 90's for TV. Much as I loathe them and their business practices, I've found their internet to be fast-ish and reliable.
The only thing from AT&T I kept was the mobile. I've had Sprint and Verizon too, but I've had AT&T the longest, and it gives me the best overall service as far as mobile goes.
But aside from all that, there seems to be something funny going on:
1. Netflix just became the sole online distributor of Disney and related (Lucas, Marvel, Pixar).
2. Comcast has elevated their internet cap to 1TB (I don't know if that applies to internet-only plans)
3. AT&T drops UVerse for TV (yes, folks, from now own AT&T TV is ONLY DirecTV) and decides to enforce limits for internet-only users.
Coincidence? I don't believe in that, but.. convenient convergence sure seems plausible!
Clarify your terrible reading comprehension:
From TFS:
Over the two hours attackers withdrew the equivalent of $907 in 14,000 different transactions.
$907 x 14,000 = 12,698,000
These modern cruise ships are visual abominations. Another poster said it best: "McCruises."
Contrast their great height and cargo-ship-like profiles to the long, low, graceful yacht-like lines of ocean liners of the early 20th century.
In a word, these modern ships are -- garish.