If you want to understand US politics, it's often good to look at the beta test area that is England (Scotland and NI are increasingly doing their own thing):
Thatcher: best Reaganite. Blair: best Thatcherite. Clegg: best opposition.
It's hard not to look slightly off when what's going through your head is, "I hate everything you stand for and, come revolution, your masters will be the first against the wall. But, as long as you're not being a jackass, I kinda feel sorry for you."
It's very hard to train yourself to not set off behavioral queues for evasion, and so on...
...which is why militaries and paramilitaries offer hard training for the sort of people who need to evade behavioural queues (sic, intentional? because that's all they're going to create).
I can think of a few recent marches in London involving thousands or tens of thousands of people which have made no difference whatever. Some of them barely received a small article in the national press.
Speech and demonstration are important, but if you really want to make your country listen you have to refuse to work.
Not sure what you are addressing. The question is whether accessibility of news in the USSR proper made any significant influence to its downfall. Glasnost certainly rekindled nationalist elements, but the outcome of the referendum was clear.
Your summary is vaguely good, but for some reason you insist upon flourishing each of my points while ignoring the detail. Consider:
- I didn't say that family commitments (related to having a kept man/woman or making babies) were optional once in place: I just indicated that you are to blame for them in the first place. If you feel you must do something immoral to help the child you decided to have then the fault lies with you. There is no special exemption for having children which makes following decisions "for the sake of the child" somehow exempt from moral judgement. Your child is no more important in society than the adult you harm with your immoral decision.
- I made it clear several times that my point applies to healthy young men (or women, usually). I acknowledged that there were occasionally untenable consequences of voluntarily raising a fuss when in a bad job. But mostly it's about a person who could suffer temporary hardship and uncertainty being too scared to suffer temporary hardship and uncertainty, and in doing so harming his lot and the lot of his fellow man. Organise, unionise, resist!
- I posted in detail about the UK benefits system, acknowledging the bureaucratic difficulties and explaining one of several things to do if you're in immediate trouble. I particularly focused on the difficulties experienced by the disabled - those with very obvious/"visible" conditions tend to receive help, while those with mild problems can usually handle themselves; there is an in-between of people with complex, fluctuating decisions such as depression where obtaining financial help (and NHS help) can be much more difficult.
- The horror of being briefly homeless is often overestimated by those who have never had experience with homelessness. Lots of people get through it. It is tough but it will not kill a healthy young man. If it scares you so much, it's possible that you've never experienced it and you're in some emotional "anything but that!" mentality.
- I didn't suggest immediately walking away. My first post was trying to correct an attitude, not instruct. I began it, "They made you?" to highlight that you have other options than following orders. In later posts, I clarified that you can discuss, organise, whistleblow, strike, etc.
Internet extremism in argument aside, I think we agree on the fundamental points. You're frustrated that I appear to be shouting "workers are cowards!", rightly pointing out that sometimes the worker is in a very difficult situation. But the worker can only win by showing strength and willingness to face manageable hardship through actions which, in the long term, improve his conditions and the conditions of people like him. Only then shall we not be moved.
the Soviets could not contain the info coming out about the strikes and subsequent negotiations.
This was certainly relevant in some satellite states, no class therein content to be a servant of the USSR, but not to the USSR itself. What was happening in Eastern Europe might have influenced Soviet thinking, but those who mattered wouldn't have had the goings on there hidden from them anyway.
The West have this habit of looking back at the strength of Solidarity or the fall of the Berlin Wall and thinking events in Eastern Europe were the harbinger of the USSR's inevitable destruction. It's a quaint, prejudiced image of slaves flooding out to freedom, sending the good news back East. But these events were all symptoms, not causes, and the final death blows were yet to come.
the best alternative to outright censorship, which turns out to actually be more effective, while providing the illusion of 'freedom of press'.
Absolutely. America's learnt that, once you have the infrastructure, it's much better to drown speech out than to censor it.
Also note the the replacements in Tunisia and Egypt are hardly any better than the previous regimes. "Arab Spring" is a propaganda masterpiece.
Egypt right now is precisely a country with a suspended constitution under military dictatorship. Ostensibly preparing for a Free And Fair[tm] election, as always. A few of the moderate and figurehead officials awaiting show trial; a few of the less sane opposition party reps back in the wild and ready to enjoy pluralism. Good luck, Egypt, at the rate every neighbouring country in your situation has done...
The Soviet people didn't want the end of the Union. Its downfall was orchestrated from the top: Who reallocated to defence? Who gradually dismantled the command economy? Who implemented Glasnost and Perestroika?
"Popular revolutions" exist, but the one ending the USSR was absolutely not one of them. What effect do you think Western media did to influence what actually happened in the USSR, and how?
paved roads, working streetlights, decent healthcare, indoor plumbing, the right to determine your own future and some semblance of a future for your children
When you list all these things, to which proportion of which country do you refer?
Well, yes they do, though net migration is inward, as in many richer nations.
But the US advertises itself to the whole world as the "other side", while no-one really advertises the same to the US. The US is the place to go if you're poor enough to make a good wage slave or clever enough to make a killing, with a visa lottery system to scoop up the former (you won't find e.g. a British citizen allowed to enter on the lottery scheme).
In a practical sense, most young, healthy men living in the UK do have the choice to quit a job on the grounds that their employer was asking them to do something outrageous like cold-call vulnerable people and lie to or bully them to sell products.
If such people choose to continue when their conscience begs them otherwise and the consequences are not drastic then they are cowards. It may be painful to hear yourself being called a coward but the truth isn't always kind.
N.B. Having to ask for support from the state is not drastic. Being behind on your rent is not drastic. Even having to sleep rough a couple of nights until suitable temporary accommodation can be arranged is not the end of the world if you are a healthy young man, though it's certainly not easy. Even the most conservative estimate puts the number of households (being single/partnership plus optional children) in England either living rough or in temporary accommodation around 70,000. But reaching such a stage usually means a pre-existing mental health problem, deinstitutionalisation being a euphemism for leaving the mentally ill to starve - a healthy young man is statistically usually able to call on the support of the welfare state and follow its procedures if nothing else is available to him.
Your last paragraph is such madly and badly written handwaving that I'm not even going to try to fully decipher it. Something about telling me a hundred times that the only reason I tell people to be courageous is because I'm a basement dweller... then telling me that calling me a basement dweller was actually a really clever way of saying something else. No sale.
Freedom of speech is overrated. Why do you think that Westerners have a monopoly on knowing that powerful people are generally both corrupt and living a life of comparative luxury? It's not as if the side of my family living under dictatorship could not see the nice cars and the big palace that the leaders drove into and out of every day.
Also, Western quality of life - Anglo-Saxon in particular - is overrated. We have a negligible sense of family, community and loyalty. But the grass is always greener on the other side, so I have no doubt that effective external propaganda helps tip the balance. Recall, of course, the oft-repeated quality of revolutions that you only need about one third in favour and another third apathetic: the fall of the USSR, for example, followed not soon after a referendum in which only around a quarter wanted to see the end of the Union.
Your point, when we boil right down to it, is that in the Western world, anyone can just leave their job at any time if they disagree with what's happening there (or for any reason) and be just fine and dandy.
Actually, I said nothing of the sort. What I said was that your employer does not make you do stuff, nor do you need a job to survive. I made a careful point through a careful choice of vocabulary which certainly does not necessarily lead to an assertion that things are "just fine and dandy" if you leave your job.
Workers should stop regarding themselves as helpless pawns and understand that they have a gamut of choices available to them which, while in some cases leading to short term hardship, may in the long term benefit them and others. Everyone has the choice to discuss with their workmates, to bargain collectively, to whistleblow, to strike, to walk out, etc. The consequences are usually painful and sometimes untenable, but if the number of people who could afford long term to exercise them did exercise them then life would be much easier for the average human.
I'm not expecting everyone to have the courage to do this. Maybe you don't, and I accept that. But you're doing something worse: you are standing up for cowardice by painting a false dichotomy.
As it happens I have an excellent relationship with both of my parents
Your obsessive critique of the stereotypical basement dweller followed by an overcompensating announcement of the "excellent relationship" you have with your parents suggests otherwise.
Yes, there's no reason you can't have the playback device offer it, but that's a fallback and the output device has the opportunity to do a better job. Indeed, there are many ways to present a text stream other than simply overlaying the supplied letters on the picture.
This is another result of needless complexity. In the UK, for example, most TVs could decode teletext accompanying the video stream, and the standard was that subtitles were supplied on page 888. Anyone wanting to read subtitles accompanying a broadcast simply switched to Telext page 888 (where the analogue signal has not been switched off, this still applies). Anyone wanting to supply text accompanying the video/audio to a TV simply encodes Teletext data. (*)
I don't know why you need a universal way to "display & save subtitle preferences", though.
(*) Bonus points for retorting that regular VHS VCRs didn't successfully record the teletext part of the signal, although most SVHS did. Of course, you can record with subtitles on if you know you want them, but that's not so good for prerecorded video...
Multiple streams - of audio... is video really supported? As for various streams of video and audio on the same cable, It's a shame the US never adopted SCART.
Hating - no, I'm saying that the lack of support for compression today cannot be excused by where the standard stood 10 years ago: there's all sorts of new bullshit in later iterations of HDMI. If you want to improve a standard, surely the endpoints end up negotiating for the most efficient/error-corrected stream anyway?
I'm also making the aligned point that many new digital standards seem to be more about pleasing the producer (of the licence and the chipset) rather than the consumer.
Resolution -you can do fairly high resolutions by today's nomenclature, but compression would allow even higher, or multiple video streams. It's not as if a few decades ago anyone imagined we'd routinely want the kind of resolutions we crave today.
Since birth rate has taken a dive in Western countries as people see that having children is a choice and not an obligation, it's hardly an edge case. It's just the precursor to the logical understanding that having a family is not a predestined burden but a free decision which comes with a slew of restrictions which you have put on yourself and you are responsible for.
Also, about half a dozen of your posts are about accusing me (as a conduit for anyone who happens to disagree with you) of living in my mother's basement, being fortunate for having a loving family, etc. What issue is it that you really have, jo_ham? Are you angry at your mother over something? Did she neglect you when you called out for help? If the answers to any of these questions trouble you then I recommend that you ask for counselling as a first step to resolving whatever issue it is you have. Attacking me instead isn't going to do you any good - what I do from day to day means I get more difficult language in person from people who can't even help it, so even the harshest e-insult is pretty much meaningless to me.
and even jobseekers' allowance is pretty thin when you have more than the most lean of expenses.
Which country? I'm hoping it's the UK because I know enough about the benefits system from helping others to know that it's perfectly possible to live off JSA + HB short term, the difficulty being bureaucracy which can be particularly challenging for the disabled (although those needing or providing significant care or mobility assistance will still get DLA/CA regardless of their employment status, at least until the Tories rape that in 2013). JSA even has terms in law to protect people who refuse a particular job for reasons of conscience or who face constructive dismissal. If you have problems or delays claiming anything and you really have zero to live on, the correct procedure is a short term interest-free crisis loan from the Social Fund.
Anyone whining about JSA + HB being not enough for their lifestyle is demonstrating just how comparatively well off they are: many people over the last three decades have had to live at this "very thin end of the wedge" for months or longer while trying hard to find jobs in areas where supply of workers so far outstrips demand that they're wasting their time in sadistic ritual. Of course, living long term off benefits makes for a fairly miserable existence if you have no other sources of income or support - contrary to the opinions of the Daily Heil - but in the short term it's very doable for any healthy young man.
Of course, I don't know enough about every Western welfare state, and yours may be a lot worse in others. The US is still pretty difficult to get assistance from by comparison with the UK, although parity is being approached from both sides.
Compression: I was arguing that HDMI has none of the usual advantages of digital transmission; if it's "meant" to be that way then you're just confirming it. And why wouldn't you want to transmit multiple streams, or one very high resolution stream, over one cable? There's been so much feature tweaking in HDMI, as is typical of modern for-the-benefit-of-the-licensor-and-chipset-manufacturer digital standards, so "it's 10 years old" is no excuse.
Error: Data islands have TERC4 but I don't think video does. The video stream afaict uses 8b/10b encoding for DC balancing - you could have pointed out that this provides bounded disparity, i.e. an incidental limited opportunity for error detection.
you're now clutching at straws because people called you on your naive statement that has the wash of "mom and dad's support mechanism" decision making.
No, you're just angry because you're not willing to make sacrifices that others are. If more people weren't fooled into thinking that they're only one paycheque away from death, it would be much harder to exploit people in general. Some people refuse the opportunity for comfort - even shelter - because of what they would have to do to retain it. That doesn't mean I expect anyone to choose this (yes, it is society's fault), nor does it mean that it's sensible for everyone to do so, but a healthy young man has much less to fear than he thinks.
I did work as a door to door salesman for a few weeks because I had no choice and I had bills and rent to pay.
What would have happened if you didn't pay those bills/rent? It sounds like you chose the easy, immoral option and you're hiding your own shame by shaking your fists in the air at those who wouldn't (and don't). Of course, you may have sabotaged your employer by deliberately performing "badly", i.e. being honest, in which case - bravo!
Protip: some people actually live in the real world.
Of those people, we need some who have the strength to risk their home and comfort. This will help the whole workforce move on from the pathetic helplessness/slavery/only-following-orders mindset you seem already to have absorbed.
Maybe you lack the courage and you shamelessly insist that everyone's like you, but there are lots of people who are hard up because they refuse to do something they consider immoral.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to understand US politics, it's often good to look at the beta test area that is England (Scotland and NI are increasingly doing their own thing):
Thatcher: best Reaganite.
Blair: best Thatcherite.
Clegg: best opposition.
It's hard not to look slightly off when what's going through your head is, "I hate everything you stand for and, come revolution, your masters will be the first against the wall. But, as long as you're not being a jackass, I kinda feel sorry for you."
It's very hard to train yourself to not set off behavioral queues for evasion, and so on...
...which is why militaries and paramilitaries offer hard training for the sort of people who need to evade behavioural queues (sic, intentional? because that's all they're going to create).
So nonconsenting nonmedical mutilation is acceptable providing you think it doesn't interfere with someone else's enjoyment of their own body?
Weird.
Also, I think you can function well enough without your tongue.
Tell me, what proportion of infant boys have their genitals mutilated in the US?
Thread starter = fine troll, btw.
I can think of a few recent marches in London involving thousands or tens of thousands of people which have made no difference whatever. Some of them barely received a small article in the national press.
Speech and demonstration are important, but if you really want to make your country listen you have to refuse to work.
Not sure what you are addressing. The question is whether accessibility of news in the USSR proper made any significant influence to its downfall. Glasnost certainly rekindled nationalist elements, but the outcome of the referendum was clear.
Your summary is vaguely good, but for some reason you insist upon flourishing each of my points while ignoring the detail. Consider:
- I didn't say that family commitments (related to having a kept man/woman or making babies) were optional once in place: I just indicated that you are to blame for them in the first place. If you feel you must do something immoral to help the child you decided to have then the fault lies with you. There is no special exemption for having children which makes following decisions "for the sake of the child" somehow exempt from moral judgement. Your child is no more important in society than the adult you harm with your immoral decision.
- I made it clear several times that my point applies to healthy young men (or women, usually). I acknowledged that there were occasionally untenable consequences of voluntarily raising a fuss when in a bad job. But mostly it's about a person who could suffer temporary hardship and uncertainty being too scared to suffer temporary hardship and uncertainty, and in doing so harming his lot and the lot of his fellow man. Organise, unionise, resist!
- I posted in detail about the UK benefits system, acknowledging the bureaucratic difficulties and explaining one of several things to do if you're in immediate trouble. I particularly focused on the difficulties experienced by the disabled - those with very obvious/"visible" conditions tend to receive help, while those with mild problems can usually handle themselves; there is an in-between of people with complex, fluctuating decisions such as depression where obtaining financial help (and NHS help) can be much more difficult.
- The horror of being briefly homeless is often overestimated by those who have never had experience with homelessness. Lots of people get through it. It is tough but it will not kill a healthy young man. If it scares you so much, it's possible that you've never experienced it and you're in some emotional "anything but that!" mentality.
- I didn't suggest immediately walking away. My first post was trying to correct an attitude, not instruct. I began it, "They made you?" to highlight that you have other options than following orders. In later posts, I clarified that you can discuss, organise, whistleblow, strike, etc.
Internet extremism in argument aside, I think we agree on the fundamental points. You're frustrated that I appear to be shouting "workers are cowards!", rightly pointing out that sometimes the worker is in a very difficult situation. But the worker can only win by showing strength and willingness to face manageable hardship through actions which, in the long term, improve his conditions and the conditions of people like him. Only then shall we not be moved.
the Soviets could not contain the info coming out about the strikes and subsequent negotiations.
This was certainly relevant in some satellite states, no class therein content to be a servant of the USSR, but not to the USSR itself. What was happening in Eastern Europe might have influenced Soviet thinking, but those who mattered wouldn't have had the goings on there hidden from them anyway.
The West have this habit of looking back at the strength of Solidarity or the fall of the Berlin Wall and thinking events in Eastern Europe were the harbinger of the USSR's inevitable destruction. It's a quaint, prejudiced image of slaves flooding out to freedom, sending the good news back East. But these events were all symptoms, not causes, and the final death blows were yet to come.
the best alternative to outright censorship, which turns out to actually be more effective, while providing the illusion of 'freedom of press'.
Absolutely. America's learnt that, once you have the infrastructure, it's much better to drown speech out than to censor it.
Also note the the replacements in Tunisia and Egypt are hardly any better than the previous regimes. "Arab Spring" is a propaganda masterpiece.
Egypt right now is precisely a country with a suspended constitution under military dictatorship. Ostensibly preparing for a Free And Fair[tm] election, as always. A few of the moderate and figurehead officials awaiting show trial; a few of the less sane opposition party reps back in the wild and ready to enjoy pluralism. Good luck, Egypt, at the rate every neighbouring country in your situation has done...
The Soviet people didn't want the end of the Union. Its downfall was orchestrated from the top: Who reallocated to defence? Who gradually dismantled the command economy? Who implemented Glasnost and Perestroika?
"Popular revolutions" exist, but the one ending the USSR was absolutely not one of them. What effect do you think Western media did to influence what actually happened in the USSR, and how?
paved roads, working streetlights, decent healthcare, indoor plumbing, the right to determine your own future and some semblance of a future for your children
When you list all these things, to which proportion of which country do you refer?
Well, yes they do, though net migration is inward, as in many richer nations.
But the US advertises itself to the whole world as the "other side", while no-one really advertises the same to the US. The US is the place to go if you're poor enough to make a good wage slave or clever enough to make a killing, with a visa lottery system to scoop up the former (you won't find e.g. a British citizen allowed to enter on the lottery scheme).
In a practical sense, most young, healthy men living in the UK do have the choice to quit a job on the grounds that their employer was asking them to do something outrageous like cold-call vulnerable people and lie to or bully them to sell products.
If such people choose to continue when their conscience begs them otherwise and the consequences are not drastic then they are cowards. It may be painful to hear yourself being called a coward but the truth isn't always kind.
N.B. Having to ask for support from the state is not drastic. Being behind on your rent is not drastic. Even having to sleep rough a couple of nights until suitable temporary accommodation can be arranged is not the end of the world if you are a healthy young man, though it's certainly not easy. Even the most conservative estimate puts the number of households (being single/partnership plus optional children) in England either living rough or in temporary accommodation around 70,000. But reaching such a stage usually means a pre-existing mental health problem, deinstitutionalisation being a euphemism for leaving the mentally ill to starve - a healthy young man is statistically usually able to call on the support of the welfare state and follow its procedures if nothing else is available to him.
Your last paragraph is such madly and badly written handwaving that I'm not even going to try to fully decipher it. Something about telling me a hundred times that the only reason I tell people to be courageous is because I'm a basement dweller... then telling me that calling me a basement dweller was actually a really clever way of saying something else. No sale.
Freedom of speech is overrated. Why do you think that Westerners have a monopoly on knowing that powerful people are generally both corrupt and living a life of comparative luxury? It's not as if the side of my family living under dictatorship could not see the nice cars and the big palace that the leaders drove into and out of every day.
Also, Western quality of life - Anglo-Saxon in particular - is overrated. We have a negligible sense of family, community and loyalty. But the grass is always greener on the other side, so I have no doubt that effective external propaganda helps tip the balance. Recall, of course, the oft-repeated quality of revolutions that you only need about one third in favour and another third apathetic: the fall of the USSR, for example, followed not soon after a referendum in which only around a quarter wanted to see the end of the Union.
Hey, Operation Make Lazy Westerners Think That Pushing A Few Bits Is Contributing To Freedom comes first.
Your Twitter account needs you!
Ah, and now you've taken the really quite obvious bait.
No, you're just backpedalling in the classical Internet style.
Your point, when we boil right down to it, is that in the Western world, anyone can just leave their job at any time if they disagree with what's happening there (or for any reason) and be just fine and dandy.
Actually, I said nothing of the sort. What I said was that your employer does not make you do stuff, nor do you need a job to survive. I made a careful point through a careful choice of vocabulary which certainly does not necessarily lead to an assertion that things are "just fine and dandy" if you leave your job.
Workers should stop regarding themselves as helpless pawns and understand that they have a gamut of choices available to them which, while in some cases leading to short term hardship, may in the long term benefit them and others. Everyone has the choice to discuss with their workmates, to bargain collectively, to whistleblow, to strike, to walk out, etc. The consequences are usually painful and sometimes untenable, but if the number of people who could afford long term to exercise them did exercise them then life would be much easier for the average human.
I'm not expecting everyone to have the courage to do this. Maybe you don't, and I accept that. But you're doing something worse: you are standing up for cowardice by painting a false dichotomy.
As it happens I have an excellent relationship with both of my parents
Your obsessive critique of the stereotypical basement dweller followed by an overcompensating announcement of the "excellent relationship" you have with your parents suggests otherwise.
Anyway, we're all human, love ya really. :-)
Yes, there's no reason you can't have the playback device offer it, but that's a fallback and the output device has the opportunity to do a better job. Indeed, there are many ways to present a text stream other than simply overlaying the supplied letters on the picture.
This is another result of needless complexity. In the UK, for example, most TVs could decode teletext accompanying the video stream, and the standard was that subtitles were supplied on page 888. Anyone wanting to read subtitles accompanying a broadcast simply switched to Telext page 888 (where the analogue signal has not been switched off, this still applies). Anyone wanting to supply text accompanying the video/audio to a TV simply encodes Teletext data. (*)
I don't know why you need a universal way to "display & save subtitle preferences", though.
(*) Bonus points for retorting that regular VHS VCRs didn't successfully record the teletext part of the signal, although most SVHS did. Of course, you can record with subtitles on if you know you want them, but that's not so good for prerecorded video...
Multiple streams - of audio... is video really supported? As for various streams of video and audio on the same cable, It's a shame the US never adopted SCART.
Hating - no, I'm saying that the lack of support for compression today cannot be excused by where the standard stood 10 years ago: there's all sorts of new bullshit in later iterations of HDMI. If you want to improve a standard, surely the endpoints end up negotiating for the most efficient/error-corrected stream anyway?
I'm also making the aligned point that many new digital standards seem to be more about pleasing the producer (of the licence and the chipset) rather than the consumer.
Resolution -you can do fairly high resolutions by today's nomenclature, but compression would allow even higher, or multiple video streams. It's not as if a few decades ago anyone imagined we'd routinely want the kind of resolutions we crave today.
Since birth rate has taken a dive in Western countries as people see that having children is a choice and not an obligation, it's hardly an edge case. It's just the precursor to the logical understanding that having a family is not a predestined burden but a free decision which comes with a slew of restrictions which you have put on yourself and you are responsible for.
Also, about half a dozen of your posts are about accusing me (as a conduit for anyone who happens to disagree with you) of living in my mother's basement, being fortunate for having a loving family, etc. What issue is it that you really have, jo_ham? Are you angry at your mother over something? Did she neglect you when you called out for help? If the answers to any of these questions trouble you then I recommend that you ask for counselling as a first step to resolving whatever issue it is you have. Attacking me instead isn't going to do you any good - what I do from day to day means I get more difficult language in person from people who can't even help it, so even the harshest e-insult is pretty much meaningless to me.
and even jobseekers' allowance is pretty thin when you have more than the most lean of expenses.
Which country? I'm hoping it's the UK because I know enough about the benefits system from helping others to know that it's perfectly possible to live off JSA + HB short term, the difficulty being bureaucracy which can be particularly challenging for the disabled (although those needing or providing significant care or mobility assistance will still get DLA/CA regardless of their employment status, at least until the Tories rape that in 2013). JSA even has terms in law to protect people who refuse a particular job for reasons of conscience or who face constructive dismissal. If you have problems or delays claiming anything and you really have zero to live on, the correct procedure is a short term interest-free crisis loan from the Social Fund.
Anyone whining about JSA + HB being not enough for their lifestyle is demonstrating just how comparatively well off they are: many people over the last three decades have had to live at this "very thin end of the wedge" for months or longer while trying hard to find jobs in areas where supply of workers so far outstrips demand that they're wasting their time in sadistic ritual. Of course, living long term off benefits makes for a fairly miserable existence if you have no other sources of income or support - contrary to the opinions of the Daily Heil - but in the short term it's very doable for any healthy young man.
Of course, I don't know enough about every Western welfare state, and yours may be a lot worse in others. The US is still pretty difficult to get assistance from by comparison with the UK, although parity is being approached from both sides.
You do realise there are whole movements of people who think it is immoral to have children in the first place, yes?
Try to substitute reason for emotion for a moment.
Compression: I was arguing that HDMI has none of the usual advantages of digital transmission; if it's "meant" to be that way then you're just confirming it. And why wouldn't you want to transmit multiple streams, or one very high resolution stream, over one cable? There's been so much feature tweaking in HDMI, as is typical of modern for-the-benefit-of-the-licensor-and-chipset-manufacturer digital standards, so "it's 10 years old" is no excuse.
Error: Data islands have TERC4 but I don't think video does. The video stream afaict uses 8b/10b encoding for DC balancing - you could have pointed out that this provides bounded disparity, i.e. an incidental limited opportunity for error detection.
Cabling/text channel: See rest of thread.
You need to keep the job.
Because you need to look after your family.
Because you chose to have a family.
Your free choices led to an immoral act. If you don't like reality, at best try to change it or make different choices. At worst accept the blame.
But stop blaming others.
you're now clutching at straws because people called you on your naive statement that has the wash of "mom and dad's support mechanism" decision making.
No, you're just angry because you're not willing to make sacrifices that others are. If more people weren't fooled into thinking that they're only one paycheque away from death, it would be much harder to exploit people in general. Some people refuse the opportunity for comfort - even shelter - because of what they would have to do to retain it. That doesn't mean I expect anyone to choose this (yes, it is society's fault), nor does it mean that it's sensible for everyone to do so, but a healthy young man has much less to fear than he thinks.
I did work as a door to door salesman for a few weeks because I had no choice and I had bills and rent to pay.
What would have happened if you didn't pay those bills/rent? It sounds like you chose the easy, immoral option and you're hiding your own shame by shaking your fists in the air at those who wouldn't (and don't). Of course, you may have sabotaged your employer by deliberately performing "badly", i.e. being honest, in which case - bravo!
[insert personal experience here]
Protip: some people actually live in the real world.
Of those people, we need some who have the strength to risk their home and comfort. This will help the whole workforce move on from the pathetic helplessness/slavery/only-following-orders mindset you seem already to have absorbed.
Maybe you lack the courage and you shamelessly insist that everyone's like you, but there are lots of people who are hard up because they refuse to do something they consider immoral.