I'm not clear. If you are at $150,000, and are thus at the 95% level, then you are part of the 99%. And you do in fact state that despite doing okay, you struggle, and you think you should be doing better. What's the controversy? You sound like you belong with the protestors. Obviously most of the 99% isn't poor, we just aren't ultra-rich. You are moderately rich (me too, lucky us), but even moderate riches don't get you very far.
around half the people that ever lived are alive now
I've heard that, but I've also heard that is total bullshit, and I'm inclined toward the source which told me it is bullshit. I don't feel like looking it up, but you might want to if you feel strongly about it.
My elementary understanding of communism is that the state directly controls the means of production, which is a bit different than the state controlling capital. Socialism? Socialism is when the municipality picks up your rubbish and paves your roads and makes sure granny isn't begging for food.
I don't really think state-controlled capital is well described by "communism" or "socialism".
And plenty of Canadians trace their ancestry to American loyalists who fled their homes to avoid potentially fatal persecution.
This is something I learned at age 29 when traveling in Canada, and it totally blew my mind. Nobody in any history class had ever mentioned, nor had I ever thought to ponder, what happened to the people who didn't agree politically with the Revolution. Up there in Canadia [sic], they have Loyalist Highway and Loyalist High School other landmarks named for Loyalists.
They aren't so loyal now, though, are they! Now Canadia is it's own country, since way back in the 1980s. Good for you, guys!
That rant was stupid. Low, variable inflation is the savior of the economy. Without inflation, there would be no disincentive to accumulating and sitting on gigantic wealth. With inflation, you can still sit on your money, but later on you'll be sitting on less of it, so you may as well spend some or most or all of it, which is what we want. Meanwhile, yes of course wages go up when inflation goes up. If not nobody could afford anything. And in the shuffle of different goods and different salaries slowly increasing in cost at slightly different rates, the economy has the ability to change priorities for different things, allowing the relative values of goods to change. This is very good and healthy, and if your wages don't rise so fast as inflation, then the economy is telling you that your labor isn't worth as much as it used to be, and you should get a different job. Finally, money is whatever shopkeepers accept, which means that in America in 2011 money is made of paper (or electrons); gold and silver are not money. Who the heck takes silver for payment? If I tried to pay for an oil change with a tiny chip of silver, I don't think I'd get my oil change.
I think everything you said would solve the problem, would actually make the problem worse. I'm fine with keeping the federal government within the bounds of the Constitution, but only if we change the Constitution to cover almost all of what the federal government does. There is very little of the federal government that I would currently do away with, and most of that is the military, which is perfectly Constitutional*.
* except for the Air Force, which is unconstitutional, according to a plain reading of the text.
Other people who replied have correctly deduced that $8 per month isn't too much for me to AFFORD, it's simply too much for me to WANT TO PAY. The question isn't whether I have an extra eight dollars in my budget -- if I didn't, I wouldn't even spend the first eight dollars on silly moving pictures. The question is how much are the moving pictures "worth" to me, and if the price is more than the worth, then I don't pay it. I had the one-and-one plan for ten bucks; the "worth" to me I figured was about twelve bucks; so when the price went to sixteen bucks, then that was no longer "worth it". And my twelve-dollar value is much lower than the average person's value for moving pictures, because I like them less than average.
I don't have cable internet, nor dish or anything like that, nor Hulu, and now no longer Netflix.
Well, okay, but that's not quite true. The content owners are trying to get a premium price from Netflix, and Netflix won't pay it. In this disagreement, I'm personally with Netflix: I think movies are vastly, vastly overpriced. But alas, the market apparently disagrees, because many people do pay the premium prices. Not me, but others do. You can hardly blame the movie producers for demanding the maximum possible price.
Apple could have advanced computing greatly. Instead they advanced lockin, lawsuits, form over function, and trendy fad expensive disposable products.
You don't think they did both? I do. The lock-in is the reason I'm no longer an Apple customer (I'm five years clean, thank you) but the nicely integrated systems make me wish they were open enough to be purchased ethically.
People who have tried to research this say that money does, in fact, buy happiness, but only up to an upper-middle-class income of about $65,000/year (in recent dollars).
You never thought "I want to use an app that competes with Apple's built-in features"? I bet that's close to what he meant. Or maybe you want to use Flash, or sync via a standard cable, or copy songs off your iPod.
Telecommunications Act (1996) Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI)
Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003
Shall I keep going? or are you prepared to admit that in this very same universe that we share, here in America, there are in fact laws governing the use, protection, and sharing of personal information? The laws aren't what I personally want them to be, but they exist, and the whole point of what I was saying is that the current hands-off free-market approach is BAD, and would be LESS BAD if there were MORE LAWS in this area -- a point which survives your assertion that the laws don't exist. Actually I don't have time to keep looking things up for you, so if you aren't prepared to admit it, then your denial will have to be the end of the discussion.
My final point, as a question to you, would be why would Borders even have a contract, if the contract didn't expand its rights beyond the legal defaults? Why would it bother to pay a lawyer to make up such a contract? Why would it bother to present the contract to consumers? If there were no laws governing it, and they could do whatever they want, then they would, no contract required. It doesn't even make sense that they would tie their own hands with their own contract, resulting in a lesser ability for them to do what they want to do.
But to be "accepted", don't you have to have a "meeting of the minds"? (I don't know the answer to that; IANAL.) If I click a checkbox saying I read a contract, but I didn't actually read the contract, then no reasonable person could say that I did in fact read and understand the contract. For instance, when I bought my house, a human being sat me down in a room and went through the mortgage document with me paragraph-by-paragraph and explained it and had me sign it on each page.
Here's what Wiki says:
Meeting of the minds (also referred to as mutual agreement, mutual assent or consensus ad idem) is a phrase in contract law used to describe the intentions of the parties forming the contract. In particular it refers to the situation where there is a common understanding in the formation of the contract. This condition or element is often considered a necessary requirement to the formation of a contract.
That last sentence is interesting -- especially the word "often". Maybe fore click-thru licenses, the minds don't have to meet. I mean, APPARENTLY they don't, since the licenses have in fact been enforced, and it is obvious that the minds did not meet.
Yeah. I wish the law were different, but it's not. What country are you from, which protects you so?
I hope you don't say Britain; I'd rather live in a country where B&N can buy Borders' customer records, than a theocratic monarchy where government cameras watch over me while I don't have the free-speech rights to call quacks out for their nonsense.
Totally agreed. In very similar ways, I count on other people caring about feeding starving Africans, fighting against human rights abuses in Iran and China, building housing projects in Atlanta, prosecuting wars in Afghanistan -- pretty much everything. I do have opinions on those matters, I just don't feel them strongly enough to do much about them, aside from vote. I happen to be the kind of person who cares about the effects of copyrights and the legal ramifications of click-though licenses, so I do a small amount of advocacy in those areas. How grand to live in a world where we can specialize.
No. I don't realize that. I realize that if I didn't agree to a contract, Borders would do with my data what the law allows, which is a lot LESS than what their contract stipulates.
My guess is that the judge "suddenly decided" that way because the terms of the program license as well as the governing law determined the decision. I'm not a lawyer, though, and I haven't read this case either.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not clear. If you are at $150,000, and are thus at the 95% level, then you are part of the 99%. And you do in fact state that despite doing okay, you struggle, and you think you should be doing better. What's the controversy? You sound like you belong with the protestors. Obviously most of the 99% isn't poor, we just aren't ultra-rich. You are moderately rich (me too, lucky us), but even moderate riches don't get you very far.
around half the people that ever lived are alive now
I've heard that, but I've also heard that is total bullshit, and I'm inclined toward the source which told me it is bullshit. I don't feel like looking it up, but you might want to if you feel strongly about it.
Even more, nearly zero of "financial services" is traditional banking activities.
My elementary understanding of communism is that the state directly controls the means of production, which is a bit different than the state controlling capital. Socialism? Socialism is when the municipality picks up your rubbish and paves your roads and makes sure granny isn't begging for food.
I don't really think state-controlled capital is well described by "communism" or "socialism".
And plenty of Canadians trace their ancestry to American loyalists who fled their homes to avoid potentially fatal persecution.
This is something I learned at age 29 when traveling in Canada, and it totally blew my mind. Nobody in any history class had ever mentioned, nor had I ever thought to ponder, what happened to the people who didn't agree politically with the Revolution. Up there in Canadia [sic], they have Loyalist Highway and Loyalist High School other landmarks named for Loyalists.
They aren't so loyal now, though, are they! Now Canadia is it's own country, since way back in the 1980s. Good for you, guys!
That rant was stupid. Low, variable inflation is the savior of the economy. Without inflation, there would be no disincentive to accumulating and sitting on gigantic wealth. With inflation, you can still sit on your money, but later on you'll be sitting on less of it, so you may as well spend some or most or all of it, which is what we want. Meanwhile, yes of course wages go up when inflation goes up. If not nobody could afford anything. And in the shuffle of different goods and different salaries slowly increasing in cost at slightly different rates, the economy has the ability to change priorities for different things, allowing the relative values of goods to change. This is very good and healthy, and if your wages don't rise so fast as inflation, then the economy is telling you that your labor isn't worth as much as it used to be, and you should get a different job. Finally, money is whatever shopkeepers accept, which means that in America in 2011 money is made of paper (or electrons); gold and silver are not money. Who the heck takes silver for payment? If I tried to pay for an oil change with a tiny chip of silver, I don't think I'd get my oil change.
Who wants to manufacture iPods? Wouldn't people rather be educated, and then DESIGN AND ENGINEER iPods?
Actually those are rhetorical questions, because the answer do "wouldn't people rather be educated" is "no".
I think everything you said would solve the problem, would actually make the problem worse. I'm fine with keeping the federal government within the bounds of the Constitution, but only if we change the Constitution to cover almost all of what the federal government does. There is very little of the federal government that I would currently do away with, and most of that is the military, which is perfectly Constitutional*.
* except for the Air Force, which is unconstitutional, according to a plain reading of the text.
Other people who replied have correctly deduced that $8 per month isn't too much for me to AFFORD, it's simply too much for me to WANT TO PAY. The question isn't whether I have an extra eight dollars in my budget -- if I didn't, I wouldn't even spend the first eight dollars on silly moving pictures. The question is how much are the moving pictures "worth" to me, and if the price is more than the worth, then I don't pay it. I had the one-and-one plan for ten bucks; the "worth" to me I figured was about twelve bucks; so when the price went to sixteen bucks, then that was no longer "worth it". And my twelve-dollar value is much lower than the average person's value for moving pictures, because I like them less than average.
I don't have cable internet, nor dish or anything like that, nor Hulu, and now no longer Netflix.
They had three price increases in two years. They'd better be done for a long time.
The third price increase was too much for me; they finally priced me out.
Seriously. Was it not clear before a million customers told him so? Really?
Holy crap. Did you say dialup?
Well, okay, but that's not quite true. The content owners are trying to get a premium price from Netflix, and Netflix won't pay it. In this disagreement, I'm personally with Netflix: I think movies are vastly, vastly overpriced. But alas, the market apparently disagrees, because many people do pay the premium prices. Not me, but others do. You can hardly blame the movie producers for demanding the maximum possible price.
Don't feed the trolls.
Apple could have advanced computing greatly. Instead they advanced lockin, lawsuits, form over function, and trendy fad expensive disposable products.
You don't think they did both? I do. The lock-in is the reason I'm no longer an Apple customer (I'm five years clean, thank you) but the nicely integrated systems make me wish they were open enough to be purchased ethically.
People who have tried to research this say that money does, in fact, buy happiness, but only up to an upper-middle-class income of about $65,000/year (in recent dollars).
You never thought "I want to use an app that competes with Apple's built-in features"? I bet that's close to what he meant. Or maybe you want to use Flash, or sync via a standard cable, or copy songs off your iPod.
Thanks for moving the goalpost, now I can ignore you in good conscience.
Well gosh, I guess I can do your research for you. I'm a bit busy, but you can start here:
http://www.privacy.ca.gov/privacy_laws.htm
http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/glbact/glbsub1.htm
http://www.law.state.ak.us/department/civil/consumer/4548.html
http://government.dc.gov/DC/Government/Data+&+Transparency/Consumer+Protection/Consumer+Information+101/Consumer+Personal+Information+Security+Breach+Notification+Act
http://data.opi.mt.gov/bills/mca_toc/30_14_17.htm
http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/1349.19
http://www.cdt.org/privacy/guide/protect/laws.php
Telecommunications Act (1996) Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI)
Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003
Shall I keep going? or are you prepared to admit that in this very same universe that we share, here in America, there are in fact laws governing the use, protection, and sharing of personal information? The laws aren't what I personally want them to be, but they exist, and the whole point of what I was saying is that the current hands-off free-market approach is BAD, and would be LESS BAD if there were MORE LAWS in this area -- a point which survives your assertion that the laws don't exist. Actually I don't have time to keep looking things up for you, so if you aren't prepared to admit it, then your denial will have to be the end of the discussion.
My final point, as a question to you, would be why would Borders even have a contract, if the contract didn't expand its rights beyond the legal defaults? Why would it bother to pay a lawyer to make up such a contract? Why would it bother to present the contract to consumers? If there were no laws governing it, and they could do whatever they want, then they would, no contract required. It doesn't even make sense that they would tie their own hands with their own contract, resulting in a lesser ability for them to do what they want to do.
Absolutely! And that's the same reason I am still using my abacus.
But to be "accepted", don't you have to have a "meeting of the minds"? (I don't know the answer to that; IANAL.) If I click a checkbox saying I read a contract, but I didn't actually read the contract, then no reasonable person could say that I did in fact read and understand the contract. For instance, when I bought my house, a human being sat me down in a room and went through the mortgage document with me paragraph-by-paragraph and explained it and had me sign it on each page.
Here's what Wiki says:
Meeting of the minds (also referred to as mutual agreement, mutual assent or consensus ad idem) is a phrase in contract law used to describe the intentions of the parties forming the contract. In particular it refers to the situation where there is a common understanding in the formation of the contract. This condition or element is often considered a necessary requirement to the formation of a contract.
That last sentence is interesting -- especially the word "often". Maybe fore click-thru licenses, the minds don't have to meet. I mean, APPARENTLY they don't, since the licenses have in fact been enforced, and it is obvious that the minds did not meet.
Yeah. I wish the law were different, but it's not. What country are you from, which protects you so?
I hope you don't say Britain; I'd rather live in a country where B&N can buy Borders' customer records, than a theocratic monarchy where government cameras watch over me while I don't have the free-speech rights to call quacks out for their nonsense.
Totally agreed. In very similar ways, I count on other people caring about feeding starving Africans, fighting against human rights abuses in Iran and China, building housing projects in Atlanta, prosecuting wars in Afghanistan -- pretty much everything. I do have opinions on those matters, I just don't feel them strongly enough to do much about them, aside from vote. I happen to be the kind of person who cares about the effects of copyrights and the legal ramifications of click-though licenses, so I do a small amount of advocacy in those areas. How grand to live in a world where we can specialize.
No. I don't realize that. I realize that if I didn't agree to a contract, Borders would do with my data what the law allows, which is a lot LESS than what their contract stipulates.
My guess is that the judge "suddenly decided" that way because the terms of the program license as well as the governing law determined the decision. I'm not a lawyer, though, and I haven't read this case either.