Looks like your reading comprehension has failed you, here let me try again in the far easier to read list format:
* Increase average wages to better keep pace with the inflation of housing costs. * Set a maximum prices for homes to bring them down into the realm of attainability regardless of income level. * Require builders to set aside 20-40% of the homes / units in a condo for low income earners. * Encourage renters to base rents on a proportion of the applicants income and provide tax incentives to make up the difference in unit cost. * Spend the money spent on invading a country for their oil and give everyone a modest 3 bedroom home or condo.
Can we do all those. Damn right we can. Will the people in power do it, no way in hell. It would require them to have less, since they make the rules they will never vote to willingly give themselves less. It really does boil down to "I got mine, sucks to be you, now go fuck off!"
As for your "Can we" list, I agree with a lot of that. Classic Unions are great, 5 day - 40 hour work weeks, 2 day weekends, vacation time, minimum wages, work-place safety standards... None of those things would exist without the Classic Unions taking a stand for them, I like them and I think they're important. The problem is with Modern Unions. When was the last time you heard on TV about unsafe working conditions, or shifts that were too long, or vacations that weren't being granted?
You don't, or at least very seldom do. Its always three things, Wages, Job Security, and Benefits. We want more money, we never want to be fired, and we want all our health care needs covered by the company in perpetuity. What. The. Fuck? I agree with you. Its stuff like that, the ever rising cost of wages, that has priced lifes necessities out of the reach of the common low wage person. When a significant portion of the country can pay a specific amount it makes financial sense to price things to those people's wages. Its why houses cost so much, its why food costs so much, cars, pretty much everything.
Although you are being just a bit dishonest with your list. So let me clean it up:
Can we build a better factory? Unions say: "No we can't, not at the wages you're willing to pay us." Can we get cheaper energy? Environmentalists say: "No we can't, it costs money to clean up the mess after you've made building and maintaining it. Those costs have to be factored in." Can we cut the cost of our insurance? Lawyers say: "No we can't, shareholders won't like that 'cause it'll cut into profits." Can we educate our children? The teachers union says: "No we can't, not for the wages you're willing to pay us.." Can we cut local taxes? Citizens say: "I want you to, but you better not cut Service X!" Can we cut crime in the neighborhoods? Community organizers say: "Don't fall for the lie, crime rates are steadily dropping." Can we improve anything? Slashdot says: "No we can't, not with a system so corrupt and no political will to change it."
A house is a somewhat high value item. If you only have low value skills to offer, you probably can't afford to buy a house.
And yet 40 years ago people who were making low skilled wages could afford to buy a house, something that's quite impossible now. Where do you think these low skilled people are going to live? Got any ideas?
Now we could start talking about increasing the average wages to better keep pace with the inflation of housing costs, or forcing maximum prices on homes to bring them down into the realm of attainability, or requiring builders to set aside 20-40% of the homes / units in a condo for low income earners, or forcing renters to base it in proportion to income and provide tax incentives on the difference for them to do it. Hell, with the cost of invading a country for their oil we could have bought everyone in the country a modest 3 bedroom home or condo! But don't you dare suggest any of those things, loads of people would start complaining about a welfare state, or that you're attacking success, or any other conservative nonsense that amounts to the abdication of shared social responsibility, basically boiling down to "I got mine, sucks to be you, now go fuck off!"
So you're saying a low skilled person should go back in time 40 years? This keeps getting brought up, as if living in the past were some sort of solution. The past is gone.
Certainly the past is gone, but it would be foolish to ignore the lessons history has gives us.
Or don't you think there is something wrong with a society that has allowed homes, something everyone needs to survive, to jump in value by 944% but yet only increased the average wage by 152%? People keep bringing this up not because we all want to hop into our DeLoreans and go back to the simpler times in 1970, we point it out because its important to illustrate disparity between what we earn and what it costs us to buy the stuff we need to live! The fact that wages didn't keep pace with the rising costs of inflation in relation to housing should be of tremendous concern to everyone, low skilled jobs and wages make up the bulk of an economy but are unsustainable when a person is unable to make enough to support themselves and their families.
In 1970 a low skilled wage earner could buy a decent home and have a good life, even in the city, now they make about 50% more but have to live in a crime ridden slum. Think about that. Got any ideas on how we can fix it?
They involve eliminating artificial costs in the US - money that goes to lawyers, union bosses, government red tape, regulations, other government services, etc.
Never going to happen as the people in charge will never allow it, they make far too much money from the status quo. Hell, the US is a country where rich bankers can cause a worldwide global economic collapse and still get a Trillion dollar bail out package for their "troubles". Right now some rich Wall Streeter, who should be rotting in a jail cell for what he / she pulled, earned a big fat bonus and a pat on the head for screwing everyone out of their money and were basically told to just keep doing what they were doing.
Meanwhile some guy with low wage skills, who could have bought a nice place for his family 40 years ago, has to live in an impoverished crime ridden neighborhood because its all he can afford. We more than have the money as a society to fix this, as you said there is a lot of unnecessary government spending, but anyone who even comes close to suggesting fixes for this disparity will get immediately labelled a communist, socialist, and "out to Destroy America!".
This is something I often have trouble with. How does a belief that there is no God not count as a belief system?
Because belief in something should require evidence.
Just like there is no credible evidence for Zeus, Ra, Horus, Thor, Loki, Odin, Hercules, Xena the Warrior Princess, Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, Jack Frost, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, the Giant Invisible Pink Unicorn that lives in my basement, or any other number of ideas put forth to explain the universe, there is really no credible evidence for God; pointing at an ancient poorly translated text filled with contradictions, xenophobia, racism, and rampant misogyny, and from which people cherry pick their moral values from on a whim, does not count as evidence. No one says "Not believing in Zeus is a belief!" because we all know, and understand, that Zeus is just a story made up by people from a primitive time in an effort to explain the scary world they lived in. For people who didn't know about static electricity, electrons, and conduction, and who had no way of learning those things, lightning would be this scary thing that couldn't be explained and so saying that "Zeus did it!" was just fine.
Eventually though people figured out where lightning comes from and, even if we don't know with 100% certainty how its generated, we now recognize it as a natural phenomenon and not Zeus making battle with his enemies.
Sure, I'll admit, we don't know the answers to everything. Some things, like the origin of the universe, are only guesses. And while there is evidence pointing to potential answers for many of our unanswered questions, it also unlikely they'll be fully answered in our lifetime or the lifetimes of our children, or even our children's children, or perhaps never at all. But we do know enough about how the world works now, and we learn more every day, that the idea of God doing it just doesn't make sense and so his story can be treated the same as the primitive stories of Zeus, Ra, Horus, Thor, Loki, Odin, Hercules, Xena the Warrior Princess, Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, Jack Frost, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and the Giant Invisible Pink Unicorn that lives in my basement. I don't believe in any of them just as much as I don't believe in God. To me, they're all stories from a primitive people in a simpler time making their best effort to explain a universe they couldn't understand.
Unlike Religion, no belief system is required when one looks at the available evidence and makes the rational choice to recognize a fairy tale, as a fairy tale.
If we don't allow low wage jobs, then low skilled people can't get work at all.
True. The flip side to that problem though is that most everything in North America is priced for people that have High Wage jobs.
Try buying a house in a decent neighborhood on $24K per year, it just can't be done because most everything is priced for people earning 2 - 4 times that! Or haven't you noticed the increasing trend where families need to have both parents, and sometimes the kids, chipping in to buy a house?
In 1970 the average US home cost 23,400.00 and the average worker made 6,186.24, in other words a house cost 3.78 times what a person made.
Contrast that with 2004, same links as above, where the average US wage is now 35,648.55 but the price of homes has skyrocketed to an average of 221,000.00, or about 6.19 times what a person made. In order to get back to the 3.78 times value from the 70's a person needs to make at least 58,465.61, or the equivalent of 1.64 jobs at the average rate of pay. So you can take on two jobs or amortize your mortgage until your well into your retirement. And I haven't even really touched on the disparity in cities where the 24K wage job still exists but housing costs are so far above the average that the only place you can afford to live is a slum in a crime ridden neighborhood.
I'm sure if I went digging for 2011 numbers the disparity for wages vs housing would be even larger. So yeah, you're right, the 24K wages can and should exist because not everyone has the skills to command a higher wage job. But unlike the 70's the average wage earners can no longer to afford a home for their families, housing ownership is now solely in the purview of people who can command higher wages. Its unsustainable, particularly with the wage gap increasing, and we as a society better get our act together to ensure we're providing affordable housing in nice neighborhoods so people making that small amount of money can actually afford it, otherwise those "Occupy" movements are going to get worse and start getting violent.
But, it's Silverlight-only, isn't it? That would be a deal-breaker.
You're correct in it being Silverlight only, of course that only affects you if you plan on playing it on a PC that doesn't support it. Just keep in mind that Netflix is enabled on many devices now, it works just fine on my X-Box, Wii, and the Samsung Blu-Ray player hooked up to the big-screen. Many Blu-Rays can support Netflix now and even older ones can do it with a software update, you'd have to check to see if your equipment is compatible.
You just listed about the best content on Netflix Canada. Didn't take very long did it?
You definition of "best" must be so narrowly defined as to eliminate just about anything because I have often found the opposite to be true.
The breadth of content available often leaves me paralyzed with indecision, there are so many good shows and movies to watch that I simply cannot decide what to check out on any given night. I have to actually force myself to pick something otherwise I'll sit there for hours trying to figure out if I'm going to watch this movie or that movie, or finish one of the shows I've started, or check out that documentary I've been wanting to see.
All for the price of a combo at Subway or a couple of Tim Horton's specialty coffees.
On the other hand, services like Netflix are far more limited in Canada, and really not of much value.
People keep saying this but its a bald faced lie.
For the price of two movie rentals at the video store you get access to a wide range of movies and TV shows, as long as you watch a minimum of two movies a month it basically pays for itself. Hell, I've been enjoying watching episodes of Farscape, Xena, Buffy, The Walking Dead, and re-watching the Star Trek movies again. Hell, they just got Bones the other week, I'd never seen it from the beginning so now I've got the chance to; I'm hoping they get NCIS and JAG, I'd never seen those from the beginning either. My young nieces and nephews have been having a blast watching the Land Before Time movies, Astroboy, Pingu, Thomas the Tank Engine, Curious George, The Pink Panther, etc...
Unless you're looking for the latest and greatest, which is usually reserved for the Cable/Satellite providers VOD channels for a premium fee, there is plenty of value on Netflix for the paltry 8.00 bucks a month that they charge.
During the dotcom bust I spent three years unemployed, it sucked graduating from college on an economic downturn. Sure, I had the odd job fed my way by the temp agencies I'd registered with but it was sporadic at best, a month here, six weeks there, followed by months of nothing; I ended up working 6 months out of every twelve, just enough to continue qualifying for Unemployment Benefits. No matter how many resumes, interviews, call backs, meetings, and hitting the job boards I did I got no nibbles. It was demoralizing as hell trying to find full time work.
Oddly though it was also the best part of my life so far.
I got up every morning and would check the job sites, call the temp agencies to let them know I was still available, comb through the newspaper, do my call backs, check my e-mail, set up interviews and then send out the next batch of resumes. Most days I was done "work" by 11:00 AM. Once I had done what I could to find a job I had the entire rest of the day to myself and damn, was that ever freeing. Knowing the unemployment cheque was still coming meant I didn't need to worry about the roof over my head or the food in my stomach, I actually got to live. One of my favourite things to do on a nice day was to sit under a shaded tree at the park on a weekday afternoon curled up with a good book, I'd watch all the worker drones quietly grumbling about how much they hated their jobs and would just love to take the afternoon off and curl up with a good book under a tree.
I got to catch up on my reading, watch movies and interesting documentaries, play games, try new recipes in a cook book, look up things online solely for the pleasure of attaining knowledge, etc... Hell, I even found time to use the workout equipment I'd bought when I was previously employed and was on my way to getting a six pack. I was technically "poor" but I was amazed at just how much living a person can do with a limited budget and loads of free time. With all that freedom, and keeping in mind my limited budget, I found I could do what I wanted when I wanted and not have to worry about my basic existence.
Once a person's basic needs are taken care of anyone with even the tiniest hint of imagination will be able to figure out what to do with their day and be fully and completely fulfilled with it. Up to the point of my unemployment I had never had as much satisfaction or enjoyment in my life as I did when I wasn't working. Now, I make enough money to be considered on the low end of the middle class and have all kinds of cool toys and tonnes of spending money but I'm not happy. I've tasted real freedom and now so much of my day is filled with doing things I don't want to do but need to in order to survive. If I knew I could collect a cheque that would keep my stomach full and a roof over my head and there were no strings attached, I'd quit my job right now and spend the rest of my life doing what I want to do when I want to do it.
And so would a lot of other people.
Until the day someone invents Star Trek replicators, giving people the bare necessities with incentives to work doesn't work. Someone will have to work to provide the tax dollars we're going to divert to those who are on the basic allowance, eventually we would have a very small number of the population supporting the majority. The people who are working are going to get angry at being the only ones working while every one else stays at home and lives a happy fulfilling life.
It doesn't matter if Boing-Boing sucks or not because for the purposes of this story it has a copy of the ad in question and was the first hit on Google, I literally found it in two seconds.
Its three needlessly long paragraphs reiterating what was said in the summary and contains links or scans to the ad in question. How did something like this get voted to the front page?
If you're going to link to a site talking about it, at least link to a site that has the ad! Two seconds with Google people, was that really all that hard? I just wish these guys would have mentioned in the ad the combined net worth of all their companies and contrasted it to the net worth of the media empires trying to ram this shit through. Would have really gotten people talking and asking the hard questions.
In my experience ergonomic all too often means "uncomfortable as all hell". Find a chair and desk where you can sit pain free for a while and, like the poster above suggests, get up and walk around.
My in office set up gives the Ergonomic Coordinator fits but it's comfortable for me and, assuming I take regular breaks, I suffer no joint or back pain.
In other words, do what works for you; chances are something similar to what you use at home will come out on top.
The fist Apple video talking about the Knowledge Assistant was so creepily prophetic that when the guy says "Get me the data from 5 years ago." and the computer is all like "Checking records from 2006." I had a tiny freak out. Here its 2011 and a long forgotten Apple tech vision video talking about the kinds of things computers should be able to do in 2011, and seeing them about to be implemented, is amazing. Get Siri on the iPad and accessible during a video chat, you're pretty much there.
We should merely shoot the lowest 10% every year to weed out those who are holding the others back!
Not to mention solve the problem of those damned bullying jocks that make school life a living hell for so many.
Though to be fair to the 10%, and give them a second chance at life, we should have some kind of sporting event for them. On the last day of the school year we put them in a ring and let them battle it out for a crystal trophy in the middle, first one who gets out of the ring with it intact gets to live. The people who come to watch will undoubtedly sit in rapt attention ringside, cheering for their chosen combatant, while chants of "Renew, Renew, Renew" fill the air as way of communal encouragement.
Thanks for this, I haven't heard this song in years! I've got it on a cassette tape around here somewhere, but I haven't broken out my cassette tapes in years. Hmmm... I wonder what other gems I have in that box under the stairs, I'll have to go check, I just hope my old Milli Vanilli tape is still there!:-D
This means TFA is advertising download speeds of up to 12.5MB/s, not 100MB/s.
And with latency, network congestion, and signal quality that means an internet user with a 50GB cap will blow through their entire months allotment in around 90 minutes. With the cost of overages being so absurdly don't be shocked if you start seeing the telco's and cableco's be super eager to spend the money to get this into homes quickly.
Its a veritable cash cow waiting to happen, especially as hi-def streaming sites get more and more common (which would be even more the case if you could 100Mbps speeds became common).
My Mac Mini G4 has been running almost non-stop since 2005 when it replaced my K6-2 - 500. The Mini remained my primary computer until I bought a 24" iMac after the spring 2009 refresh. The Mini is whisper quiet (so is the iMac) and is currently sitting in the other room churning out work units for Rosetta@home and the World Community Grid, two distributed computing projects that strive to find cures for various diseases and model different energy and water usage patters.
Sure its slow, it can only churn out a work unit every 10-12 hours or so, but considering that the Mini doesn't use much power and would otherwise sit there doing nothing I figured I might as well use it for a good purpose. What impressed me about the Mini is that outside of power failures the machine has practically never been turned off, has been run pretty much full out the whole time and yet still keeps going. Say what you will about Apple, but their build quality is excellent and they make computers that can continue to be used long after most others would be relegated to the trash bin.
Honestly, for all I've read about the "silent PC" it just convinces me that it's all in people's heads and the "silent PC" has become the new expensive Monster Cables pushed at you by the sales reps at Best Buy. I used a G4 Mac Mini for years in my living room, and sitting twelve feet away I can honestly tell you I never heard the damn thing. I then went out and replaced it with an Early 2009 24" iMac, put it on an end table less than 3 feet away, and connected three external hard-drives to it and they're all happily spinning away.
The battery operated clock on the other side of the room is louder than all that put together and the clock itself isn't even that loud.
Even when putting the iMac under a heavy load the thing barely makes a sound, its whisper quiet just like the old G4 was before it. Of course if it *was* making a lot of noise its unlikely I'd notice what with the fact I'd be engrossed in what it is I'm doing and having the volume cranked up a bit; I wouldn't be able to hear the fans even if I was listening for them!
Because let's be serious here original poster, you're trying to convince yourself that when you've got a good game going with the surround sound turned up to comfortably enjoyable levels you can still somehow hear a tiny little fan blowing from the bottom of your AV cabinet on the other side of the room? And that somehow that tiny little fan is throwing out so much noise it overpowers the combined power of your enjoyment of the game and your kick ass 5.1 surround sound and subwoofer setup? (Taking poetic license here, you might not have a kick ass surround sound set up. But hell, even the speakers on your TV should be more than loud enough to overpower any sound coming off the computer!)
Go get the Mac Mini back, you've already got it configured to play the games you want, and turn up the volume on your TV a bit more. Spending a metric shit tonne of money for what amounts to the sonic equivalent of a Monster Cable when a quick flick of the volume control knob will take care of your problem is about as stupid a buying a Monster Cable because the sales guy told you a hundred dollar cable makes the picture on your TV look a bazillion times better.
just as Wendy's now uses call centers instead of hiring someone to work the window at each location.
I'm going to have to call "citation needed" on this one because I went to Wendy's Drive-Thru the other day, the guy who took my order was the guy working the window.
I think it depends on the Doll and the choices the person made during its construction, I would agree that many of the gallery shots on the site itself make the dolls look ghastly. That being said I've seen some pictures of Real Dolls where I initially didn't know it was a doll, its actually how I found that site the first time.
For some "doll done right" shots, take a look at Stacy Leigh's work. She has this picture of an Asian woman in a black and white striped top lying down with a cat, if I didn't already know it was a doll I would have had a hard time believing it was. There's also a really good head shot of a red-head with freckles, hard to tell its a doll too.
*sigh*....are there really that few people today that care about quality audio and video?
Snip a bunch of stuff
why so many people settle for streaming when they spent so much $$ on a quality HDTV?
I think you're missing the point actually. I too have a nice TV, a Toshiba 51HX83 that I spent quite a bit of money on back in 2003, that produces a beautiful crisp clear picture. I have to admit my sound system isn't the best though, my hearing isn't what it used to be. I honestly can't tell the difference between someone's $5,000.00 reference set up and my own cheap ass set up, at the time I figured I'd spend the money on the better TV that I could tell the difference on than worry about sound.
I also have my 24" 2009 iMac hooked up to it and I LOVE Netflix, even the cheap ass knock off us Canadians get. Sure the streaming quality isn't always the best but for all the stuff I care about and want the higher quality, well, I've already bought that! For stuff I don't care about the Netflix Hi-Def Streaming quality is more than good enough, I don't even care that its not 5.1 surround sound (though I have to admit that would be nice), and if I see something I like I usually end up buying that too.
At 7.99 monthly Netflix is a great way for me to see new stuff without spending a fortune in rental fees at Blockbuster or Rogers Video. Besides, crap is going to be crap whether its on a Blu-Ray in true 1080p and 7.1 surround sound or streaming on Netflix, at least with Netflix I didn't just spend 5.99 to rent the crap.
Automation and robotics are replacing jobs faster than they are being created now.
Damn, this has reminded me of a story I read once a long time ago. Hopefully Team Slashdot can help me remember the name:
Pseudo Plot Summary
As robotics and automation became more and more commonplace fewer and fewer jobs were available for the population. When the ranks of the unemployed became so large and homelessness so rampant, the rich who occupied the cities didn't want to see them anymore and forced the government to create housing for them away from the cities. Those unemployable homeless people were put into tenements where they were given free food, TV, and the Internet; guarded by robots they were jails in everything but name. When a resident tried to leave the robots would stop them and ask if they had a job outside the complex. Since the robots knew ahead of time whether or not the answer was true and if they didn't have a job outside the complex the robots would taze them and put them back in their room.
The only way out of the tenements were to be gainfully employed or if someone on the outside would agree to be responsible for their financial needs.
The only country on the planet that was "free" was Australia. Turns out that a rather rich benefactor, who quickly realized money was pretty much pointless once you could have robots work in every aspect of the supply chain for human consumption, used the bulk of his fortune to purchase Australia and then sold "shares" to people who could see the coming storm thereby guaranteeing them Australian citizenship.
It was around this time that the lead protagonist's parents agreed with what the rich benefactor was saying and used their entire assets and the early cancellation of their life insurance to ensure that their only son, and his potential future spouse, would have a spot in the new Australia. After their death an emissary from the Australian government came and took him and his best friend, he ended up not being married and being an only child had no other family to take, to the new Australia.
The last half of the book explains all the nifty fun toys they got to play with and the fact that with robots doing most of the manual labour there was no sense of money but, to keep people from needlessly hoarding, they gave a generous daily resource credit that citizens could draw upon for basic necessities and some of the creature comforts that make life more enjoyable. A citizen could also earn more resource credits by turning in items they no longer needed, the robots broke it down to its constituent parts and add them back to the resource pool.
End Pseudo Plot Summary
I honestly can't remember the name of the story, but your comment triggered the memory. I'd love to read it again now that I'm older, it'd be interesting to see if the impact is the same with a few years extra experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Got it, you're one of those "I got mine, sucks to be you, now go fuck off!" types. No sense trying to have a reasonable conversation anymore.
Looks like your reading comprehension has failed you, here let me try again in the far easier to read list format:
* Increase average wages to better keep pace with the inflation of housing costs.
* Set a maximum prices for homes to bring them down into the realm of attainability regardless of income level.
* Require builders to set aside 20-40% of the homes / units in a condo for low income earners.
* Encourage renters to base rents on a proportion of the applicants income and provide tax incentives to make up the difference in unit cost.
* Spend the money spent on invading a country for their oil and give everyone a modest 3 bedroom home or condo.
Can we do all those. Damn right we can. Will the people in power do it, no way in hell. It would require them to have less, since they make the rules they will never vote to willingly give themselves less. It really does boil down to "I got mine, sucks to be you, now go fuck off!"
As for your "Can we" list, I agree with a lot of that. Classic Unions are great, 5 day - 40 hour work weeks, 2 day weekends, vacation time, minimum wages, work-place safety standards... None of those things would exist without the Classic Unions taking a stand for them, I like them and I think they're important. The problem is with Modern Unions. When was the last time you heard on TV about unsafe working conditions, or shifts that were too long, or vacations that weren't being granted?
You don't, or at least very seldom do. Its always three things, Wages, Job Security, and Benefits. We want more money, we never want to be fired, and we want all our health care needs covered by the company in perpetuity. What. The. Fuck? I agree with you. Its stuff like that, the ever rising cost of wages, that has priced lifes necessities out of the reach of the common low wage person. When a significant portion of the country can pay a specific amount it makes financial sense to price things to those people's wages. Its why houses cost so much, its why food costs so much, cars, pretty much everything.
Although you are being just a bit dishonest with your list. So let me clean it up:
And yet 40 years ago people who were making low skilled wages could afford to buy a house, something that's quite impossible now. Where do you think these low skilled people are going to live? Got any ideas?
Now we could start talking about increasing the average wages to better keep pace with the inflation of housing costs, or forcing maximum prices on homes to bring them down into the realm of attainability, or requiring builders to set aside 20-40% of the homes / units in a condo for low income earners, or forcing renters to base it in proportion to income and provide tax incentives on the difference for them to do it. Hell, with the cost of invading a country for their oil we could have bought everyone in the country a modest 3 bedroom home or condo! But don't you dare suggest any of those things, loads of people would start complaining about a welfare state, or that you're attacking success, or any other conservative nonsense that amounts to the abdication of shared social responsibility, basically boiling down to "I got mine, sucks to be you, now go fuck off!"
Certainly the past is gone, but it would be foolish to ignore the lessons history has gives us.
Or don't you think there is something wrong with a society that has allowed homes, something everyone needs to survive, to jump in value by 944% but yet only increased the average wage by 152%? People keep bringing this up not because we all want to hop into our DeLoreans and go back to the simpler times in 1970, we point it out because its important to illustrate disparity between what we earn and what it costs us to buy the stuff we need to live! The fact that wages didn't keep pace with the rising costs of inflation in relation to housing should be of tremendous concern to everyone, low skilled jobs and wages make up the bulk of an economy but are unsustainable when a person is unable to make enough to support themselves and their families.
In 1970 a low skilled wage earner could buy a decent home and have a good life, even in the city, now they make about 50% more but have to live in a crime ridden slum. Think about that. Got any ideas on how we can fix it?
Never going to happen as the people in charge will never allow it, they make far too much money from the status quo. Hell, the US is a country where rich bankers can cause a worldwide global economic collapse and still get a Trillion dollar bail out package for their "troubles". Right now some rich Wall Streeter, who should be rotting in a jail cell for what he / she pulled, earned a big fat bonus and a pat on the head for screwing everyone out of their money and were basically told to just keep doing what they were doing.
Meanwhile some guy with low wage skills, who could have bought a nice place for his family 40 years ago, has to live in an impoverished crime ridden neighborhood because its all he can afford. We more than have the money as a society to fix this, as you said there is a lot of unnecessary government spending, but anyone who even comes close to suggesting fixes for this disparity will get immediately labelled a communist, socialist, and "out to Destroy America!".
Because belief in something should require evidence.
Just like there is no credible evidence for Zeus, Ra, Horus, Thor, Loki, Odin, Hercules, Xena the Warrior Princess, Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, Jack Frost, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, the Giant Invisible Pink Unicorn that lives in my basement, or any other number of ideas put forth to explain the universe, there is really no credible evidence for God; pointing at an ancient poorly translated text filled with contradictions, xenophobia, racism, and rampant misogyny, and from which people cherry pick their moral values from on a whim, does not count as evidence. No one says "Not believing in Zeus is a belief!" because we all know, and understand, that Zeus is just a story made up by people from a primitive time in an effort to explain the scary world they lived in. For people who didn't know about static electricity, electrons, and conduction, and who had no way of learning those things, lightning would be this scary thing that couldn't be explained and so saying that "Zeus did it!" was just fine.
Eventually though people figured out where lightning comes from and, even if we don't know with 100% certainty how its generated, we now recognize it as a natural phenomenon and not Zeus making battle with his enemies.
Sure, I'll admit, we don't know the answers to everything. Some things, like the origin of the universe, are only guesses. And while there is evidence pointing to potential answers for many of our unanswered questions, it also unlikely they'll be fully answered in our lifetime or the lifetimes of our children, or even our children's children, or perhaps never at all. But we do know enough about how the world works now, and we learn more every day, that the idea of God doing it just doesn't make sense and so his story can be treated the same as the primitive stories of Zeus, Ra, Horus, Thor, Loki, Odin, Hercules, Xena the Warrior Princess, Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, Jack Frost, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and the Giant Invisible Pink Unicorn that lives in my basement. I don't believe in any of them just as much as I don't believe in God. To me, they're all stories from a primitive people in a simpler time making their best effort to explain a universe they couldn't understand.
Unlike Religion, no belief system is required when one looks at the available evidence and makes the rational choice to recognize a fairy tale, as a fairy tale.
True. The flip side to that problem though is that most everything in North America is priced for people that have High Wage jobs.
Try buying a house in a decent neighborhood on $24K per year, it just can't be done because most everything is priced for people earning 2 - 4 times that! Or haven't you noticed the increasing trend where families need to have both parents, and sometimes the kids, chipping in to buy a house?
In 1970 the average US home cost 23,400.00 and the average worker made 6,186.24, in other words a house cost 3.78 times what a person made.
Contrast that with 2004, same links as above, where the average US wage is now 35,648.55 but the price of homes has skyrocketed to an average of 221,000.00, or about 6.19 times what a person made. In order to get back to the 3.78 times value from the 70's a person needs to make at least 58,465.61, or the equivalent of 1.64 jobs at the average rate of pay. So you can take on two jobs or amortize your mortgage until your well into your retirement. And I haven't even really touched on the disparity in cities where the 24K wage job still exists but housing costs are so far above the average that the only place you can afford to live is a slum in a crime ridden neighborhood.
I'm sure if I went digging for 2011 numbers the disparity for wages vs housing would be even larger. So yeah, you're right, the 24K wages can and should exist because not everyone has the skills to command a higher wage job. But unlike the 70's the average wage earners can no longer to afford a home for their families, housing ownership is now solely in the purview of people who can command higher wages. Its unsustainable, particularly with the wage gap increasing, and we as a society better get our act together to ensure we're providing affordable housing in nice neighborhoods so people making that small amount of money can actually afford it, otherwise those "Occupy" movements are going to get worse and start getting violent.
You're correct in it being Silverlight only, of course that only affects you if you plan on playing it on a PC that doesn't support it. Just keep in mind that Netflix is enabled on many devices now, it works just fine on my X-Box, Wii, and the Samsung Blu-Ray player hooked up to the big-screen. Many Blu-Rays can support Netflix now and even older ones can do it with a software update, you'd have to check to see if your equipment is compatible.
You definition of "best" must be so narrowly defined as to eliminate just about anything because I have often found the opposite to be true.
The breadth of content available often leaves me paralyzed with indecision, there are so many good shows and movies to watch that I simply cannot decide what to check out on any given night. I have to actually force myself to pick something otherwise I'll sit there for hours trying to figure out if I'm going to watch this movie or that movie, or finish one of the shows I've started, or check out that documentary I've been wanting to see.
All for the price of a combo at Subway or a couple of Tim Horton's specialty coffees.
People keep saying this but its a bald faced lie.
For the price of two movie rentals at the video store you get access to a wide range of movies and TV shows, as long as you watch a minimum of two movies a month it basically pays for itself. Hell, I've been enjoying watching episodes of Farscape, Xena, Buffy, The Walking Dead, and re-watching the Star Trek movies again. Hell, they just got Bones the other week, I'd never seen it from the beginning so now I've got the chance to; I'm hoping they get NCIS and JAG, I'd never seen those from the beginning either. My young nieces and nephews have been having a blast watching the Land Before Time movies, Astroboy, Pingu, Thomas the Tank Engine, Curious George, The Pink Panther, etc...
Unless you're looking for the latest and greatest, which is usually reserved for the Cable/Satellite providers VOD channels for a premium fee, there is plenty of value on Netflix for the paltry 8.00 bucks a month that they charge.
It certainly would go a long way to explaining why the Mexican's are in such a rush to build their own Racoon City.
The problem is that in practice it doesn't work.
During the dotcom bust I spent three years unemployed, it sucked graduating from college on an economic downturn. Sure, I had the odd job fed my way by the temp agencies I'd registered with but it was sporadic at best, a month here, six weeks there, followed by months of nothing; I ended up working 6 months out of every twelve, just enough to continue qualifying for Unemployment Benefits. No matter how many resumes, interviews, call backs, meetings, and hitting the job boards I did I got no nibbles. It was demoralizing as hell trying to find full time work.
Oddly though it was also the best part of my life so far.
I got up every morning and would check the job sites, call the temp agencies to let them know I was still available, comb through the newspaper, do my call backs, check my e-mail, set up interviews and then send out the next batch of resumes. Most days I was done "work" by 11:00 AM. Once I had done what I could to find a job I had the entire rest of the day to myself and damn, was that ever freeing. Knowing the unemployment cheque was still coming meant I didn't need to worry about the roof over my head or the food in my stomach, I actually got to live. One of my favourite things to do on a nice day was to sit under a shaded tree at the park on a weekday afternoon curled up with a good book, I'd watch all the worker drones quietly grumbling about how much they hated their jobs and would just love to take the afternoon off and curl up with a good book under a tree.
I got to catch up on my reading, watch movies and interesting documentaries, play games, try new recipes in a cook book, look up things online solely for the pleasure of attaining knowledge, etc... Hell, I even found time to use the workout equipment I'd bought when I was previously employed and was on my way to getting a six pack. I was technically "poor" but I was amazed at just how much living a person can do with a limited budget and loads of free time. With all that freedom, and keeping in mind my limited budget, I found I could do what I wanted when I wanted and not have to worry about my basic existence.
Once a person's basic needs are taken care of anyone with even the tiniest hint of imagination will be able to figure out what to do with their day and be fully and completely fulfilled with it. Up to the point of my unemployment I had never had as much satisfaction or enjoyment in my life as I did when I wasn't working. Now, I make enough money to be considered on the low end of the middle class and have all kinds of cool toys and tonnes of spending money but I'm not happy. I've tasted real freedom and now so much of my day is filled with doing things I don't want to do but need to in order to survive. If I knew I could collect a cheque that would keep my stomach full and a roof over my head and there were no strings attached, I'd quit my job right now and spend the rest of my life doing what I want to do when I want to do it.
And so would a lot of other people.
Until the day someone invents Star Trek replicators, giving people the bare necessities with incentives to work doesn't work. Someone will have to work to provide the tax dollars we're going to divert to those who are on the basic allowance, eventually we would have a very small number of the population supporting the majority. The people who are working are going to get angry at being the only ones working while every one else stays at home and lives a happy fulfilling life.
It doesn't matter if Boing-Boing sucks or not because for the purposes of this story it has a copy of the ad in question and was the first hit on Google, I literally found it in two seconds.
Its three needlessly long paragraphs reiterating what was said in the summary and contains links or scans to the ad in question. How did something like this get voted to the front page?
If you're going to link to a site talking about it, at least link to a site that has the ad! Two seconds with Google people, was that really all that hard? I just wish these guys would have mentioned in the ad the combined net worth of all their companies and contrasted it to the net worth of the media empires trying to ram this shit through. Would have really gotten people talking and asking the hard questions.
Robin Williams - Mork and Mindy
In my experience ergonomic all too often means "uncomfortable as all hell". Find a chair and desk where you can sit pain free for a while and, like the poster above suggests, get up and walk around.
My in office set up gives the Ergonomic Coordinator fits but it's comfortable for me and, assuming I take regular breaks, I suffer no joint or back pain.
In other words, do what works for you; chances are something similar to what you use at home will come out on top.
That first link, http://cryptogon.com/?p=25289 , holy shit!
The fist Apple video talking about the Knowledge Assistant was so creepily prophetic that when the guy says "Get me the data from 5 years ago." and the computer is all like "Checking records from 2006." I had a tiny freak out. Here its 2011 and a long forgotten Apple tech vision video talking about the kinds of things computers should be able to do in 2011, and seeing them about to be implemented, is amazing. Get Siri on the iPad and accessible during a video chat, you're pretty much there.
Damn... Colour me impressed.
Not to mention solve the problem of those damned bullying jocks that make school life a living hell for so many.
Though to be fair to the 10%, and give them a second chance at life, we should have some kind of sporting event for them. On the last day of the school year we put them in a ring and let them battle it out for a crystal trophy in the middle, first one who gets out of the ring with it intact gets to live. The people who come to watch will undoubtedly sit in rapt attention ringside, cheering for their chosen combatant, while chants of "Renew, Renew, Renew" fill the air as way of communal encouragement.
Thanks for this, I haven't heard this song in years! I've got it on a cassette tape around here somewhere, but I haven't broken out my cassette tapes in years. Hmmm... I wonder what other gems I have in that box under the stairs, I'll have to go check, I just hope my old Milli Vanilli tape is still there! :-D
And with latency, network congestion, and signal quality that means an internet user with a 50GB cap will blow through their entire months allotment in around 90 minutes. With the cost of overages being so absurdly don't be shocked if you start seeing the telco's and cableco's be super eager to spend the money to get this into homes quickly.
Its a veritable cash cow waiting to happen, especially as hi-def streaming sites get more and more common (which would be even more the case if you could 100Mbps speeds became common).
Yeah, here's my anecdotal evidence too!
My Mac Mini G4 has been running almost non-stop since 2005 when it replaced my K6-2 - 500. The Mini remained my primary computer until I bought a 24" iMac after the spring 2009 refresh. The Mini is whisper quiet (so is the iMac) and is currently sitting in the other room churning out work units for Rosetta@home and the World Community Grid, two distributed computing projects that strive to find cures for various diseases and model different energy and water usage patters.
Sure its slow, it can only churn out a work unit every 10-12 hours or so, but considering that the Mini doesn't use much power and would otherwise sit there doing nothing I figured I might as well use it for a good purpose. What impressed me about the Mini is that outside of power failures the machine has practically never been turned off, has been run pretty much full out the whole time and yet still keeps going. Say what you will about Apple, but their build quality is excellent and they make computers that can continue to be used long after most others would be relegated to the trash bin.
Honestly, for all I've read about the "silent PC" it just convinces me that it's all in people's heads and the "silent PC" has become the new expensive Monster Cables pushed at you by the sales reps at Best Buy. I used a G4 Mac Mini for years in my living room, and sitting twelve feet away I can honestly tell you I never heard the damn thing. I then went out and replaced it with an Early 2009 24" iMac, put it on an end table less than 3 feet away, and connected three external hard-drives to it and they're all happily spinning away.
The battery operated clock on the other side of the room is louder than all that put together and the clock itself isn't even that loud.
Even when putting the iMac under a heavy load the thing barely makes a sound, its whisper quiet just like the old G4 was before it. Of course if it *was* making a lot of noise its unlikely I'd notice what with the fact I'd be engrossed in what it is I'm doing and having the volume cranked up a bit; I wouldn't be able to hear the fans even if I was listening for them!
Because let's be serious here original poster, you're trying to convince yourself that when you've got a good game going with the surround sound turned up to comfortably enjoyable levels you can still somehow hear a tiny little fan blowing from the bottom of your AV cabinet on the other side of the room? And that somehow that tiny little fan is throwing out so much noise it overpowers the combined power of your enjoyment of the game and your kick ass 5.1 surround sound and subwoofer setup? (Taking poetic license here, you might not have a kick ass surround sound set up. But hell, even the speakers on your TV should be more than loud enough to overpower any sound coming off the computer!)
Go get the Mac Mini back, you've already got it configured to play the games you want, and turn up the volume on your TV a bit more. Spending a metric shit tonne of money for what amounts to the sonic equivalent of a Monster Cable when a quick flick of the volume control knob will take care of your problem is about as stupid a buying a Monster Cable because the sales guy told you a hundred dollar cable makes the picture on your TV look a bazillion times better.
I'm going to have to call "citation needed" on this one because I went to Wendy's Drive-Thru the other day, the guy who took my order was the guy working the window.
I think it depends on the Doll and the choices the person made during its construction, I would agree that many of the gallery shots on the site itself make the dolls look ghastly. That being said I've seen some pictures of Real Dolls where I initially didn't know it was a doll, its actually how I found that site the first time.
For some "doll done right" shots, take a look at Stacy Leigh's work. She has this picture of an Asian woman in a black and white striped top lying down with a cat, if I didn't already know it was a doll I would have had a hard time believing it was. There's also a really good head shot of a red-head with freckles, hard to tell its a doll too.
Umm, don't they already make those?
Snip a bunch of stuff
I think you're missing the point actually. I too have a nice TV, a Toshiba 51HX83 that I spent quite a bit of money on back in 2003, that produces a beautiful crisp clear picture. I have to admit my sound system isn't the best though, my hearing isn't what it used to be. I honestly can't tell the difference between someone's $5,000.00 reference set up and my own cheap ass set up, at the time I figured I'd spend the money on the better TV that I could tell the difference on than worry about sound.
I also have my 24" 2009 iMac hooked up to it and I LOVE Netflix, even the cheap ass knock off us Canadians get. Sure the streaming quality isn't always the best but for all the stuff I care about and want the higher quality, well, I've already bought that! For stuff I don't care about the Netflix Hi-Def Streaming quality is more than good enough, I don't even care that its not 5.1 surround sound (though I have to admit that would be nice), and if I see something I like I usually end up buying that too.
At 7.99 monthly Netflix is a great way for me to see new stuff without spending a fortune in rental fees at Blockbuster or Rogers Video. Besides, crap is going to be crap whether its on a Blu-Ray in true 1080p and 7.1 surround sound or streaming on Netflix, at least with Netflix I didn't just spend 5.99 to rent the crap.
Damn, this has reminded me of a story I read once a long time ago. Hopefully Team Slashdot can help me remember the name:
Pseudo Plot Summary
As robotics and automation became more and more commonplace fewer and fewer jobs were available for the population. When the ranks of the unemployed became so large and homelessness so rampant, the rich who occupied the cities didn't want to see them anymore and forced the government to create housing for them away from the cities. Those unemployable homeless people were put into tenements where they were given free food, TV, and the Internet; guarded by robots they were jails in everything but name. When a resident tried to leave the robots would stop them and ask if they had a job outside the complex. Since the robots knew ahead of time whether or not the answer was true and if they didn't have a job outside the complex the robots would taze them and put them back in their room.
The only way out of the tenements were to be gainfully employed or if someone on the outside would agree to be responsible for their financial needs.
The only country on the planet that was "free" was Australia. Turns out that a rather rich benefactor, who quickly realized money was pretty much pointless once you could have robots work in every aspect of the supply chain for human consumption, used the bulk of his fortune to purchase Australia and then sold "shares" to people who could see the coming storm thereby guaranteeing them Australian citizenship.
It was around this time that the lead protagonist's parents agreed with what the rich benefactor was saying and used their entire assets and the early cancellation of their life insurance to ensure that their only son, and his potential future spouse, would have a spot in the new Australia. After their death an emissary from the Australian government came and took him and his best friend, he ended up not being married and being an only child had no other family to take, to the new Australia.
The last half of the book explains all the nifty fun toys they got to play with and the fact that with robots doing most of the manual labour there was no sense of money but, to keep people from needlessly hoarding, they gave a generous daily resource credit that citizens could draw upon for basic necessities and some of the creature comforts that make life more enjoyable. A citizen could also earn more resource credits by turning in items they no longer needed, the robots broke it down to its constituent parts and add them back to the resource pool.
End Pseudo Plot Summary
I honestly can't remember the name of the story, but your comment triggered the memory. I'd love to read it again now that I'm older, it'd be interesting to see if the impact is the same with a few years extra experience.
Pete...