Re-read mine. It said "invalid test," as in claims to statistically show something that it doesn't show, in particular that some certain percentage(s) of user(s) can be said to act in relation to spyware in particular way(s) based on the aggregate results of this quiz.
Nothing you have said even addresses this. You're so concerned with following the "rules" of this test and engaging in Slashdot trolling that you don't bother to ask yourself whether it actually achieves what they claim it achieves. It doesn't. As I originally said.
In short, you haven't managed to be on point with regard to any of the "crap" you say I'm posting, nor have you made a single on-point statement in this thread.
I didn't bother to go past the first page for precisely the reasons I stated.
If you're really believe that examining (and believing!?!) the visual cues and printed text on a site can protect you from malware/spyware/trojans, then you're very naive indeed. There's no reason a single one of those links has to go where they say they do, and no reason a site that seems perfectly legit and bills your CC for $14.99 for a piece of software won't deliver software with a payload, much less steal your CC number right out from under you.
But if it looks slick and has text on it saying, "We won't send you spyware, we promise!" it MUST be legit, right? Wow.
I'm sorry if it hurts YOUR pride, but you actually think you're able to tell which sites push malware just by eyeballing them, and you're not only wrong but embarassingly so.
The problem is that by saying that users can't tell the difference, the quiz implies that that users were fairly tested and failed, when in truth, the test is effectively rigged to be impossible to pass by anything other than pure chance, thereby providing a guaranteed result for the seller of the product in question.
I completely agree that most users don't have the technical skill to spot a spoof email or determine whether a link actually goes where it says it does... so there was NO NEED for this rigged, idiotic test that simply helps to miseducate users further by implying (to their understanding) that the only way to try to make such determinations is by staring dumbly at a screen. In short, not only is the test rigged and pointless, but it also effectively spreads misinformation to the very users most in need of the sort of help it purports to provide.
That's my point. There's nothing slimier than being slimy just for the sake of it when you can achieve smiliar results by being fair and open. It speaks very ill of the company that produced the quiz.
It contains no technical information or interactivity whatsoever. No status bar information, no ability to view page source, just screen grabs of random web sites.
This is a completely invalid, unsound test, as there is no technical way to determine the presence of malicious software simply by looking at a page as it initially loads in the absence of any ability to interact with it or at the very freaking least scroll up or down or hover a mouse... sheesh...
It's like blindfolding someone and then blaming them for not being able to catch a baseball pitch, facing away from the thrower, with their bare hands. Of course they won't be able to, if you take away every single useful tool for them to accomplish the task.
I had Applix 5 years ago and didn't end up using it as my primary office suite. I've often wondered what it had evolved into, but I always figured that I wouldn't be willing to pay enough to find out.
Turns out, though, that it's now apparently downloadable for multiple platforms, though I haven't seen the EULA yet (I'm gonna download it now and we'll see what the license terms are...)
Absolutely not. Open Source developers see zero profit, and thus should have zero civil liability. Criminal liability on the other hand, should apply to everyone. Naturally, willfully malicious or intentionally destructive code should be prosecuted regardless of who writes it. But anyone who contributes generously should not be penalized for their contribution, even if it is poor. Those who demand tribute, on the other hand, must be prepared to justify (and later to defend in retrospect) that demand, and to pay the consequences if they have overreached.
It is precisely because Microsoft has accepted (or demanded, often virtually at gunpoint) billions from society, both public and private sector, that they should be liable for their mistakes. A corporation's ability to be sued for damages should correlate directly to the amount of profit they take in. To each according to need, from each according to ability. (Yes, I know where the quote comes from).
Harassing companies? Hardly. Or, if you like, it is our just demand in exchange for the harassment that they visit upon us. It is merely asserting that with the undeniably leveraged demand for rights (EULAs, extortion-quantity monies through intellectual property and leverage, government support and contracts) come responsibilities and liabilities that should (and sooner or later will) be buoyed by the force of law and that will sooner or later be buoyed by the force of popular will and anger if nothing is done before that.
It's Microsoft's liability for having released buggy software to begin with. There are responsibilities that come with dominating the marketplace and being granted a foundational position for a great deal of society's infrastructure.
Microsoft should be held financially, if not criminally, liable for every bug, just like any engineering company, construction company, or medical practitioner. So should other software companies, true, but in particular anyone in Microsoft's position should be held liable.
Saying "there's only so much they can do so fast" belies the fact that they're the ones who have manipulated the marketplace and risked others time, safety, and investments by releasing the broken software to begin with. When they've been negligent in doing so, it's time to punish them, not to pretend that buggy software is some sort of natural disaster and say "well, there's only so much they can do so fast."
Microsoft is a multibillion dollar corporation stuffed full of multibillion dollar men. They have a monopoly on the marketplace, power half of the world, and want to power the rest.
They can, will, and had better do both:
- Release patches quickly - Release patches with adequate testing
In fact, it is questionable that we even value what we claim to value anymore.
Americans don't. Everyone complains about the Chinese communist government in a story like this, when a) China isn't even close to communist, and b) the capitalists are fully complicit, happily doing anything, no matter how distasteful, to keep the dollars flowing.
"When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope." I'm sure the Chinese have heard this one. You cannot give absolute loyalty to both freedom and capitalism at the same time, since capitalism is merely an alternate form of economic domination and exploitation.
Hammer? Sickle? Yahoo is doing this thanks to a love for money. Me things you have your signals crossed, it's not the hammer and sickle that are creeping into their logo, but rather its opposite, the almighty dollar.
The decaying European economy? The world is moving to the euro and away from the dollar. That's one of the reasons the US invaded Iraq: it was about to become the first major oil player to switch away from dollar-based production and tie itself to the euro, and the US couldn't afford to cede that.
Europe isn't acting like a prostitute, it's acting like the consumer protector that the US has never, ever been, much to its shame.
All these years people weren't buying ThinkPads so much as they were buying IBM. No matter how hard Lenovo tries, they won't be IBM.
Even if the workmanship remains (and I doubt it will, since Lenovo has to make ThinkPads profitable enough to stay in business, a problem IBM didn't have), the service can't possibly. Lenovo doesn't have the resources or the infrastructure to compete on that point.
The buyout was the end of an era. For myself, as a decades-long ThinkPad user, when I buy next I'll probably buy Apple, since they seem to have taken IBM's niche in the notebook/laptop market as of late in terms of build quality and service. I run Linux on them anyway and have done for over a decade, so I'm OS-agnostic in terms of included software.
Just give me quality hardware that isn't trying to compete with Wal-Mart or CompUSA or Sears and I'll do the rest.
When Republicans end up being convicted for crimes against humanity (and don't worry, they will, sooner or later), I think it would be very pleasantly ironic for them to all be shipped off to Guantanamo, hopefully after we release it to Castro and pay him to run it as a prison with very strict "discipline."
If they complain, we'll say, "Hey, at least you bastards got a fucking trial."
You have exactly as much control over the world as your resources (money, talent, and intelligence) will buy you.
I don't even know where to begin. Your claim is that there is no:
- government - finance - laws of physics - political reality - social reality
In short, your argument is that everyone is Superman with X-Ray vision, unless he/she sucks far too much not to be. You blame the Jews for their time in the camps because they were simply too lacking in talent to dominate the Nazis?
What exactly are you trying to say, other than that you want what you want when you want it and if other people try to interfere with that based on their own ideas of justice, you resent it?
Well, too bad. You are as subject to the whims of others as they are subject to your whims, and we are all subject to Wal-Mart's whims. Interconnectivity is a fact of life. Unless you make your own laws, provide your own law enforcement, fabricate all of your own goods, protect your own little sphere of the environment, deliver your own wife's babies, etc., etc., etc. then it is NOT entirely up to your "talent" to manufacture (or fail to manufacture) reality.
99.5% of your life is dependent on what other people do. The problem with Americans is that you all think that 100.0% percent of everyone's lives are completely independent and solo acts, and thus, anyone who has a problem has fucked themselves, and anyone who sits atop a pile of billions has earned it.
In short, you smoke crack and cry "foul" when anyone calls you on bad behavior or selfishness, and in the meantime you commit crimes, exploit everyone, and implement destrucive policies because you assume that it's "kill or be killed" out there.
It's only "kill or be killed" if you're willing to kill, and people like you are determined to kill because you think that all success and leverage is individual. People like you who are willing to exploit anything and blame any crime on the victim are manufacturing the abortion of human rights and common decency that is capitalist modernity.
There are currently over 400 empty Wal-Marts in the United States and due to their size, they are almost always unleasable/unsellable, becoming blights on the landscape that no-one will front the capital to tear down and/or replace.
An older article on the problem is here, but the numbers are higher four years on. See also this piece, and notice the sidebar at the top of the first page.
Center Texas is living inside the Wal-Mart bubble. A Wal-Mart store can't survive on a base of 5,000. The other customers that sustain the location come from surrounding areas, into the area where Wal-Mart is, to shop. Yes, Wal-Mart becomes a destination. And as a result, while the area immediately around Wal-Mart becomes an oasis (for as long as Wal-Mart is able to make a profit there, then historically they leave), the towns from which its other customers are drawn or the surrounding areas lose their business, and as a further consequence the towns themselves lose their tax base.
Of course, it's always easy for people to say "well, then, they should move to where the Wal-Mart is and set up business there" and "well, then, they should switch businesses to one that Wal-Mart doesn't compete in." Yes, all from the surrounding areas should just move right to Center Texas and start new businesses in the shadow of the Wal-Mart.
Great. Except that moving costs money, switching businesses costs money, learning how to operate a new businesses that you've never been in before costs money and time (i.e. money). In short, it's very flip of people to say that "all anyone has to do when Wal-Mart moves in is start a new business and move around a little, maybe to the next town over where the Wal-Mart is." Moving, losing your family business of 20 years, and starting a new business and being successful at it are real costs that must be weighed against the cost savings that they experience on doughnuts and ping-pong balls.
They save $2500 a year by shopping at Wal-Mart, and by shopping at Wal-Mart they lose $10000 a year in their own salary levels, local community services, and lost quality of goods. But they think they're richer.
Meanwhile, the megainvestors and fund billionaires actually are richer, having skimmed all of that wealth right off the family's coffers. The family's own mutual fund invests in the megaretailers too, of coure, but their investment is so small and working-family-sized it doesn't even come close to making up the loss. It does, however, convince them that they out to support Wal-Mart, which they continue to do, losing thousands a year alongside all of their neighbords until the community's a ghost town, the remaining people are all working at Wal-Mart (there are no other jobs in the community) until Wal-Mart leaves next year (their sales have dried up in the area as surrounding communities have become impoverished, they've sucked the area dry and it's time to go), and in the meantime everyone left is on welfare and still having trouble making ends meet.
And once Wal-Mart does leave, there will be nothing left to hold the town together, since the entire downtown area was decimated to make space for one more multi-hundred-thousand-square-food building that once empty no-one will be able to justify renting in a small town, and there's no interest or capital anywhere to reconstruct the area as it once was before they gave Wal-Mart the incentives to come an build and destroy all of the sanely-sized space and properties that might sustain small, local businesses.
In short, saved a few dollars on groceries, lost a lot of wealth in income and savings, plus an entire community and its neighbords. And at the end of the story, everyone is jobless, no-one has savings left, the area is abandoned, a massive warehouse-sized space stands empty in the middle of nowhere for the rest of time, and megaivestors smile all the way to the bank.
Wal-Mart is a giant purple community eater whose bait is to make unsophisticated people like yourself think that they are saving money. And yes, it does make capitalism look bad.
So what you're saying (like a lot of other people here, it seems) is that you, too, have had to deal with your share of shit in life, but unlike this kid, you were too weak and subject to others opinion of you (i.e. that you were powerless and should remain so) to actually do something about it.
Too bad, but your impotence is your own damn fault, and when you blast other people for not being quite so impotent when someone tries to take a pound of flesh out of them, it just makes you look, well... envious, jealous, and inferior.
Republicans are suits. It's what's in their soul. They're suspicious of anyone who's not a player "in business" in one way or another, and they really feel least threatened around PHB types, whom they see as "normal" and "regular" people (i.e. fellow white bread borgeouis suits).
It's no wonder, therefore, given the current American political climate and composition at the federal level, that the suits are taking over. When the powers that be select a head for anything, they don't begin with a long line of people that have expertise in that area. They begin with "let's gather up all our fellow suits in the private sector" and then, from those mindless, leeching suits, they select whomever has operated, in his/her suit capacity, in the nearest field, at the highest level on the corporate ladder.
It's a dream market for PHBs, they can all move into the public sector, pad their resumes, gain undreamed of policy power, and enjoy cushy federal retirements.
The rest of us, of course, get fucked, but then I'm sure the suits would say that if we're the types of people who "get fucked" just becuase the suits are in charge, then we're probably not suits, therefore not "normal" and "American," and therefore deserve to get fucked anyway. They'll be sympathetic to us once we get a job as a middleman in the "service economy," buy an Eddie Bauer hummer, and start holding "power barbecues" at the office as we manage our outsourced Indian underlings. Until then, we're just lazy, or worse, terrorists.
Um, CENTOS is just Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat won't release binary RHEL ISO's for free, but because of the GPL they have to provide source. So they do. Then CENTOS scrapes off the "Red Hat" logo, recompiles that source, and ships it as CENTOS.
Artifacts of modernity/capitalism. Institutions and corporations are more human than are their human constituents. Inter-institutional and inter-corporate grappling is seen in a darwinistic way -- nature dictates that they "survive" or "compete" on the open market and this is seen as ultimately most beneficial for society. Once the dogma begins to flow its banks, however, any contradiction or interference in the macro-ecosystem of political economics by individuals humans begins to be seen as parasitic, something "unnatural" to the process that interferes in the evolutionary process that governs institutions and corporations.
Don't ever let yourself think that it isn't purely ideological because it is, it's the same philosophy that guides the IMF and Bush's conquest of the Middle East.
One more result is the belief that malware from companies/organizations = marketplace should decide, and that's good, while malware from individuals = individual must be punished for causing (seen to be parasitic) difficulties for aforementioned companies/organizations.
It's not only that mom and pop don't have Wal-mart's distribution and bulk buying infrastructure and ability to monopolize a mobile production base directly connected to their distribution chain.
To add insult to injury, most Wal-mart stores are also subsidized through "incentives" given by local governments hoping to ensure that Wal-mart doesn't go to the next town over or just over the state line (and take the sales tax or income tax revenue with it).
So mom and pop pay full taxes and have to rent/build their shop with their own savings or with investment dollars that no-doubt come with some interest rate or other. Meanwhile, Wal-mart, whose goods are already 50% cheaper for them to produce, is offered $20 million in cash and tax breaks to open up a megastore right next door.
Mom and pop have no chance. Not only are their goods more expensive from the start because of Wal-mart's production and distribution advantage, but mom and pop also have to account for their property overhead and the government's cut in their pricing, while Wal-mart now gets a building and plot of land 40x the size in square footage virtually for free as the result of cash incentives, then gets 10 years of income tax freedom on top of that from local governments as further incentive to effectively come and chase mom and pop out of business.
Long before the ten years is up, mom and pop will be gone and working at the Wal-mart that opened next door to their store. And because their retirement assets are now gone as well and their wages lower, they will be supporting Wal-mart with their buying dollars since it's less expensive than anywhere else (if anywhere else is still in business) and because they get a minor discount as employees. They will also probably be using more social services (driving their taxes up) and investing in mutual funds (further supporting the very same retail megasector that put them out of business) in an attempt to get back to where they were and have a retirement once again. And everyone in town will be in the same boat, since Wal-mart and the rest of the retail megasector is so broadly based and can put so many mom and pops out of business.
You're missing the point. The middle class are the primary shareholders behind the mutual funds. They are being duped into sending their money straight to the top. They invest because there is no safety net. Their investments, however, support the very trap that the parent described: downward pressure on wages, on quality, and on security.
They're told to invest because companies have to be lean and mean to support themselves and can't afford to provide a safety net. Then after being forced to invest in order to try to survive, they must demand "lean and mean" fast returns from the companies that they invest in, because they have to get enough of a return to compensate for the lack of the social safety net that led them to invest in the first place.
The only people who get rich are those at the top. Everyone else has been tricked into paying (by investing) for the reduction in their own wages, which causes them to need an even greater immediate return from their investments, and additional investments to try to compensate. Wash, rinse, repeat.
It is a race to the bottom for everyone who must work to make ends meet, and a race to the top for a small group of investors wealthy enough to not need to work, other than managing their assets, who are tied to no particular country and are thus happy to earn by transferring wealth from the U.S. to China, or from China to South America, or whatever. Pure investment capital will always travel to cheap labor and maximum return, and can do so with almost no penalty. Savings/living capital held by the middle class is tied to their physical lives and is always in danger of being consumed rather than increased. The bulk of shareholders who are in the middle class lose, even as their return increases, because their wages go down, taxes go up, and goods are less durable (i.e. worse investments). The small margin of shareholders who don't work and can move production to wherever conditions are most favorable make out like bandits on the backs of the rest.
Yes and no. Those taxes are (theoretically) separate once they arrive in the feds' pockets. But they originate in personal wealth. Much of the middle class is now heavily invested because there is no social safety net and employers no longer provide pensions and banks can't keep up with inflation, much less exceed it.
So for example a mom and pop put their nestegg at least in part in the retail sector. Then, true to American values, they shop at the cut-rate retailers they're invested in because a) the retailers are doing well (that's why they invested!) and b) they want to support their investment, and of course c) the retailer is doing well because their prices are so low or their prices are low because they're doing well, it's the same thing. So mom and pop shop there to "make their buck go as far as possible" and to support the shops they're invested in. It makes sense to them. Most of the other investors do the same, and this middle-class group whose retirement and savings are in the market is a sizable portion of the U.S. investment economy now.
They are going to pay taxes on whatever their investments make for them, and they take these taxes as fair because their retail sector stocks are "making them money" and helping to grow their modest nestegg. But they are also paying into SSM through withholding, and the SSM program is likely to need to be bailed out any number of times from federal coffers anyway. So ultimately these people are inevitably subsidizing Wal-mart multiple times, once with their investment, again when their investments pay, and yet again when they pay in to SSM. Are these expenditures justified by the return that they do see, especially in context of a larger economy in which these same sectors exert heavy downward wage pressure, reduce job security for all, and the quality of goods is also dropping like a rock? No, it's not really making them richer overall. But they often fail to see the big picture.
So my point was (and I suppose the I felt that getting into mechanics would muddy it), it makes no difference to the middle-class investor which tax is which. He pays his taxes and it's all just "taxes" to him, but he figures that it's offset by his growing investments. Unfortunately, the growth in investments is indirectly being supported by the very taxes that he pays, and in combination with downward wage/wealth pressure (the sucking sound delivering wealth to china) and lower quality goods (that ultimately demand more expenditure over time, not less, again, more sales for China) he is actually getting poorer despite the apparent rise in his nestegg's value, because the rest of his life (from taxes to long-term goods expenses to wages) is losing value at a faster rate than his return is gaining-- all wealth that is moving offshore.
I have no ideological problem with wealth moving offshore, I think it's inevitable and probably fair, no reason the U.S. should have a standard of living that exceeds everyone else's. But too many free-market pro-neoliberal minds talk only about "return on investment" without placing that return in the context of the rest of the economy, in which any returns are offset by increased expenses and (and this may be the most important part) an increasing inability to turn back the clock or halt the slide as more and more communities, economies, businesses, personal budgets, and personal retirements come to rely on this sector. But you're right, I did run a couple of things together in my attempt to post quickly. My apologies.
Slashdot Mirror
Re-read mine. It said "invalid test," as in claims to statistically show something that it doesn't show, in particular that some certain percentage(s) of user(s) can be said to act in relation to spyware in particular way(s) based on the aggregate results of this quiz.
Nothing you have said even addresses this. You're so concerned with following the "rules" of this test and engaging in Slashdot trolling that you don't bother to ask yourself whether it actually achieves what they claim it achieves. It doesn't. As I originally said.
In short, you haven't managed to be on point with regard to any of the "crap" you say I'm posting, nor have you made a single on-point statement in this thread.
[bow]
I didn't bother to go past the first page for precisely the reasons I stated.
If you're really believe that examining (and believing!?!) the visual cues and printed text on a site can protect you from malware/spyware/trojans, then you're very naive indeed. There's no reason a single one of those links has to go where they say they do, and no reason a site that seems perfectly legit and bills your CC for $14.99 for a piece of software won't deliver software with a payload, much less steal your CC number right out from under you.
But if it looks slick and has text on it saying, "We won't send you spyware, we promise!" it MUST be legit, right? Wow.
I'm sorry if it hurts YOUR pride, but you actually think you're able to tell which sites push malware just by eyeballing them, and you're not only wrong but embarassingly so.
The problem is that by saying that users can't tell the difference, the quiz implies that that users were fairly tested and failed, when in truth, the test is effectively rigged to be impossible to pass by anything other than pure chance, thereby providing a guaranteed result for the seller of the product in question.
I completely agree that most users don't have the technical skill to spot a spoof email or determine whether a link actually goes where it says it does... so there was NO NEED for this rigged, idiotic test that simply helps to miseducate users further by implying (to their understanding) that the only way to try to make such determinations is by staring dumbly at a screen. In short, not only is the test rigged and pointless, but it also effectively spreads misinformation to the very users most in need of the sort of help it purports to provide.
That's my point. There's nothing slimier than being slimy just for the sake of it when you can achieve smiliar results by being fair and open. It speaks very ill of the company that produced the quiz.
It contains no technical information or interactivity whatsoever. No status bar information, no ability to view page source, just screen grabs of random web sites.
This is a completely invalid, unsound test, as there is no technical way to determine the presence of malicious software simply by looking at a page as it initially loads in the absence of any ability to interact with it or at the very freaking least scroll up or down or hover a mouse... sheesh...
It's like blindfolding someone and then blaming them for not being able to catch a baseball pitch, facing away from the thrower, with their bare hands. Of course they won't be able to, if you take away every single useful tool for them to accomplish the task.
I had Applix 5 years ago and didn't end up using it as my primary office suite. I've often wondered what it had evolved into, but I always figured that I wouldn't be willing to pay enough to find out.
Turns out, though, that it's now apparently downloadable for multiple platforms, though I haven't seen the EULA yet (I'm gonna download it now and we'll see what the license terms are...)
Link to download page is here.
Absolutely not. Open Source developers see zero profit, and thus should have zero civil liability. Criminal liability on the other hand, should apply to everyone. Naturally, willfully malicious or intentionally destructive code should be prosecuted regardless of who writes it. But anyone who contributes generously should not be penalized for their contribution, even if it is poor. Those who demand tribute, on the other hand, must be prepared to justify (and later to defend in retrospect) that demand, and to pay the consequences if they have overreached.
It is precisely because Microsoft has accepted (or demanded, often virtually at gunpoint) billions from society, both public and private sector, that they should be liable for their mistakes. A corporation's ability to be sued for damages should correlate directly to the amount of profit they take in. To each according to need, from each according to ability. (Yes, I know where the quote comes from).
Harassing companies? Hardly. Or, if you like, it is our just demand in exchange for the harassment that they visit upon us. It is merely asserting that with the undeniably leveraged demand for rights (EULAs, extortion-quantity monies through intellectual property and leverage, government support and contracts) come responsibilities and liabilities that should (and sooner or later will) be buoyed by the force of law and that will sooner or later be buoyed by the force of popular will and anger if nothing is done before that.
It's Microsoft's liability for having released buggy software to begin with. There are responsibilities that come with dominating the marketplace and being granted a foundational position for a great deal of society's infrastructure.
Microsoft should be held financially, if not criminally, liable for every bug, just like any engineering company, construction company, or medical practitioner. So should other software companies, true, but in particular anyone in Microsoft's position should be held liable.
Saying "there's only so much they can do so fast" belies the fact that they're the ones who have manipulated the marketplace and risked others time, safety, and investments by releasing the broken software to begin with. When they've been negligent in doing so, it's time to punish them, not to pretend that buggy software is some sort of natural disaster and say "well, there's only so much they can do so fast."
The crime has already been committed.
Microsoft is a multibillion dollar corporation stuffed full of multibillion dollar men. They have a monopoly on the marketplace, power half of the world, and want to power the rest.
They can, will, and had better do both:
- Release patches quickly
- Release patches with adequate testing
If they don't, they should be punished.
In fact, it is questionable that we even value what we claim to value anymore.
Americans don't. Everyone complains about the Chinese communist government in a story like this, when a) China isn't even close to communist, and b) the capitalists are fully complicit, happily doing anything, no matter how distasteful, to keep the dollars flowing.
"When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope." I'm sure the Chinese have heard this one. You cannot give absolute loyalty to both freedom and capitalism at the same time, since capitalism is merely an alternate form of economic domination and exploitation.
Hammer? Sickle? Yahoo is doing this thanks to a love for money. Me things you have your signals crossed, it's not the hammer and sickle that are creeping into their logo, but rather its opposite, the almighty dollar.
The decaying European economy? The world is moving to the euro and away from the dollar. That's one of the reasons the US invaded Iraq: it was about to become the first major oil player to switch away from dollar-based production and tie itself to the euro, and the US couldn't afford to cede that.
Europe isn't acting like a prostitute, it's acting like the consumer protector that the US has never, ever been, much to its shame.
All these years people weren't buying ThinkPads so much as they were buying IBM. No matter how hard Lenovo tries, they won't be IBM.
Even if the workmanship remains (and I doubt it will, since Lenovo has to make ThinkPads profitable enough to stay in business, a problem IBM didn't have), the service can't possibly. Lenovo doesn't have the resources or the infrastructure to compete on that point.
The buyout was the end of an era. For myself, as a decades-long ThinkPad user, when I buy next I'll probably buy Apple, since they seem to have taken IBM's niche in the notebook/laptop market as of late in terms of build quality and service. I run Linux on them anyway and have done for over a decade, so I'm OS-agnostic in terms of included software.
Just give me quality hardware that isn't trying to compete with Wal-Mart or CompUSA or Sears and I'll do the rest.
When Republicans end up being convicted for crimes against humanity (and don't worry, they will, sooner or later), I think it would be very pleasantly ironic for them to all be shipped off to Guantanamo, hopefully after we release it to Castro and pay him to run it as a prison with very strict "discipline."
If they complain, we'll say, "Hey, at least you bastards got a fucking trial."
You have exactly as much control over the world as your resources (money, talent, and intelligence) will buy you.
I don't even know where to begin. Your claim is that there is no:
- government
- finance
- laws of physics
- political reality
- social reality
In short, your argument is that everyone is Superman with X-Ray vision, unless he/she sucks far too much not to be. You blame the Jews for their time in the camps because they were simply too lacking in talent to dominate the Nazis?
What exactly are you trying to say, other than that you want what you want when you want it and if other people try to interfere with that based on their own ideas of justice, you resent it?
Well, too bad. You are as subject to the whims of others as they are subject to your whims, and we are all subject to Wal-Mart's whims. Interconnectivity is a fact of life. Unless you make your own laws, provide your own law enforcement, fabricate all of your own goods, protect your own little sphere of the environment, deliver your own wife's babies, etc., etc., etc. then it is NOT entirely up to your "talent" to manufacture (or fail to manufacture) reality.
99.5% of your life is dependent on what other people do. The problem with Americans is that you all think that 100.0% percent of everyone's lives are completely independent and solo acts, and thus, anyone who has a problem has fucked themselves, and anyone who sits atop a pile of billions has earned it.
In short, you smoke crack and cry "foul" when anyone calls you on bad behavior or selfishness, and in the meantime you commit crimes, exploit everyone, and implement destrucive policies because you assume that it's "kill or be killed" out there.
It's only "kill or be killed" if you're willing to kill, and people like you are determined to kill because you think that all success and leverage is individual. People like you who are willing to exploit anything and blame any crime on the victim are manufacturing the abortion of human rights and common decency that is capitalist modernity.
There are currently over 400 empty Wal-Marts in the United States and due to their size, they are almost always unleasable/unsellable, becoming blights on the landscape that no-one will front the capital to tear down and/or replace.
An older article on the problem is here, but the numbers are higher four years on. See also this piece, and notice the sidebar at the top of the first page.
Center Texas is living inside the Wal-Mart bubble. A Wal-Mart store can't survive on a base of 5,000. The other customers that sustain the location come from surrounding areas, into the area where Wal-Mart is, to shop. Yes, Wal-Mart becomes a destination. And as a result, while the area immediately around Wal-Mart becomes an oasis (for as long as Wal-Mart is able to make a profit there, then historically they leave), the towns from which its other customers are drawn or the surrounding areas lose their business, and as a further consequence the towns themselves lose their tax base.
Of course, it's always easy for people to say "well, then, they should move to where the Wal-Mart is and set up business there" and "well, then, they should switch businesses to one that Wal-Mart doesn't compete in." Yes, all from the surrounding areas should just move right to Center Texas and start new businesses in the shadow of the Wal-Mart.
Great. Except that moving costs money, switching businesses costs money, learning how to operate a new businesses that you've never been in before costs money and time (i.e. money). In short, it's very flip of people to say that "all anyone has to do when Wal-Mart moves in is start a new business and move around a little, maybe to the next town over where the Wal-Mart is." Moving, losing your family business of 20 years, and starting a new business and being successful at it are real costs that must be weighed against the cost savings that they experience on doughnuts and ping-pong balls.
They save $2500 a year by shopping at Wal-Mart, and by shopping at Wal-Mart they lose $10000 a year in their own salary levels, local community services, and lost quality of goods. But they think they're richer.
Meanwhile, the megainvestors and fund billionaires actually are richer, having skimmed all of that wealth right off the family's coffers. The family's own mutual fund invests in the megaretailers too, of coure, but their investment is so small and working-family-sized it doesn't even come close to making up the loss. It does, however, convince them that they out to support Wal-Mart, which they continue to do, losing thousands a year alongside all of their neighbords until the community's a ghost town, the remaining people are all working at Wal-Mart (there are no other jobs in the community) until Wal-Mart leaves next year (their sales have dried up in the area as surrounding communities have become impoverished, they've sucked the area dry and it's time to go), and in the meantime everyone left is on welfare and still having trouble making ends meet.
And once Wal-Mart does leave, there will be nothing left to hold the town together, since the entire downtown area was decimated to make space for one more multi-hundred-thousand-square-food building that once empty no-one will be able to justify renting in a small town, and there's no interest or capital anywhere to reconstruct the area as it once was before they gave Wal-Mart the incentives to come an build and destroy all of the sanely-sized space and properties that might sustain small, local businesses.
In short, saved a few dollars on groceries, lost a lot of wealth in income and savings, plus an entire community and its neighbords. And at the end of the story, everyone is jobless, no-one has savings left, the area is abandoned, a massive warehouse-sized space stands empty in the middle of nowhere for the rest of time, and megaivestors smile all the way to the bank.
Wal-Mart is a giant purple community eater whose bait is to make unsophisticated people like yourself think that they are saving money. And yes, it does make capitalism look bad.
Spoken like a mean person.
So what you're saying (like a lot of other people here, it seems) is that you, too, have had to deal with your share of shit in life, but unlike this kid, you were too weak and subject to others opinion of you (i.e. that you were powerless and should remain so) to actually do something about it.
Too bad, but your impotence is your own damn fault, and when you blast other people for not being quite so impotent when someone tries to take a pound of flesh out of them, it just makes you look, well... envious, jealous, and inferior.
Republicans are suits. It's what's in their soul. They're suspicious of anyone who's not a player "in business" in one way or another, and they really feel least threatened around PHB types, whom they see as "normal" and "regular" people (i.e. fellow white bread borgeouis suits).
It's no wonder, therefore, given the current American political climate and composition at the federal level, that the suits are taking over. When the powers that be select a head for anything, they don't begin with a long line of people that have expertise in that area. They begin with "let's gather up all our fellow suits in the private sector" and then, from those mindless, leeching suits, they select whomever has operated, in his/her suit capacity, in the nearest field, at the highest level on the corporate ladder.
It's a dream market for PHBs, they can all move into the public sector, pad their resumes, gain undreamed of policy power, and enjoy cushy federal retirements.
The rest of us, of course, get fucked, but then I'm sure the suits would say that if we're the types of people who "get fucked" just becuase the suits are in charge, then we're probably not suits, therefore not "normal" and "American," and therefore deserve to get fucked anyway. They'll be sympathetic to us once we get a job as a middleman in the "service economy," buy an Eddie Bauer hummer, and start holding "power barbecues" at the office as we manage our outsourced Indian underlings. Until then, we're just lazy, or worse, terrorists.
Um, CENTOS is just Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat won't release binary RHEL ISO's for free, but because of the GPL they have to provide source. So they do. Then CENTOS scrapes off the "Red Hat" logo, recompiles that source, and ships it as CENTOS.
You're still using Red Hat.
Artifacts of modernity/capitalism. Institutions and corporations are more human than are their human constituents. Inter-institutional and inter-corporate grappling is seen in a darwinistic way -- nature dictates that they "survive" or "compete" on the open market and this is seen as ultimately most beneficial for society. Once the dogma begins to flow its banks, however, any contradiction or interference in the macro-ecosystem of political economics by individuals humans begins to be seen as parasitic, something "unnatural" to the process that interferes in the evolutionary process that governs institutions and corporations.
Don't ever let yourself think that it isn't purely ideological because it is, it's the same philosophy that guides the IMF and Bush's conquest of the Middle East.
One more result is the belief that malware from companies/organizations = marketplace should decide, and that's good, while malware from individuals = individual must be punished for causing (seen to be parasitic) difficulties for aforementioned companies/organizations.
It's not only that mom and pop don't have Wal-mart's distribution and bulk buying infrastructure and ability to monopolize a mobile production base directly connected to their distribution chain.
To add insult to injury, most Wal-mart stores are also subsidized through "incentives" given by local governments hoping to ensure that Wal-mart doesn't go to the next town over or just over the state line (and take the sales tax or income tax revenue with it).
So mom and pop pay full taxes and have to rent/build their shop with their own savings or with investment dollars that no-doubt come with some interest rate or other. Meanwhile, Wal-mart, whose goods are already 50% cheaper for them to produce, is offered $20 million in cash and tax breaks to open up a megastore right next door.
Mom and pop have no chance. Not only are their goods more expensive from the start because of Wal-mart's production and distribution advantage, but mom and pop also have to account for their property overhead and the government's cut in their pricing, while Wal-mart now gets a building and plot of land 40x the size in square footage virtually for free as the result of cash incentives, then gets 10 years of income tax freedom on top of that from local governments as further incentive to effectively come and chase mom and pop out of business.
Long before the ten years is up, mom and pop will be gone and working at the Wal-mart that opened next door to their store. And because their retirement assets are now gone as well and their wages lower, they will be supporting Wal-mart with their buying dollars since it's less expensive than anywhere else (if anywhere else is still in business) and because they get a minor discount as employees. They will also probably be using more social services (driving their taxes up) and investing in mutual funds (further supporting the very same retail megasector that put them out of business) in an attempt to get back to where they were and have a retirement once again. And everyone in town will be in the same boat, since Wal-mart and the rest of the retail megasector is so broadly based and can put so many mom and pops out of business.
You're missing the point. The middle class are the primary shareholders behind the mutual funds. They are being duped into sending their money straight to the top. They invest because there is no safety net. Their investments, however, support the very trap that the parent described: downward pressure on wages, on quality, and on security.
They're told to invest because companies have to be lean and mean to support themselves and can't afford to provide a safety net. Then after being forced to invest in order to try to survive, they must demand "lean and mean" fast returns from the companies that they invest in, because they have to get enough of a return to compensate for the lack of the social safety net that led them to invest in the first place.
The only people who get rich are those at the top. Everyone else has been tricked into paying (by investing) for the reduction in their own wages, which causes them to need an even greater immediate return from their investments, and additional investments to try to compensate. Wash, rinse, repeat.
It is a race to the bottom for everyone who must work to make ends meet, and a race to the top for a small group of investors wealthy enough to not need to work, other than managing their assets, who are tied to no particular country and are thus happy to earn by transferring wealth from the U.S. to China, or from China to South America, or whatever. Pure investment capital will always travel to cheap labor and maximum return, and can do so with almost no penalty. Savings/living capital held by the middle class is tied to their physical lives and is always in danger of being consumed rather than increased. The bulk of shareholders who are in the middle class lose, even as their return increases, because their wages go down, taxes go up, and goods are less durable (i.e. worse investments). The small margin of shareholders who don't work and can move production to wherever conditions are most favorable make out like bandits on the backs of the rest.
Yes and no. Those taxes are (theoretically) separate once they arrive in the feds' pockets. But they originate in personal wealth. Much of the middle class is now heavily invested because there is no social safety net and employers no longer provide pensions and banks can't keep up with inflation, much less exceed it.
So for example a mom and pop put their nestegg at least in part in the retail sector. Then, true to American values, they shop at the cut-rate retailers they're invested in because a) the retailers are doing well (that's why they invested!) and b) they want to support their investment, and of course c) the retailer is doing well because their prices are so low or their prices are low because they're doing well, it's the same thing. So mom and pop shop there to "make their buck go as far as possible" and to support the shops they're invested in. It makes sense to them. Most of the other investors do the same, and this middle-class group whose retirement and savings are in the market is a sizable portion of the U.S. investment economy now.
They are going to pay taxes on whatever their investments make for them, and they take these taxes as fair because their retail sector stocks are "making them money" and helping to grow their modest nestegg. But they are also paying into SSM through withholding, and the SSM program is likely to need to be bailed out any number of times from federal coffers anyway. So ultimately these people are inevitably subsidizing Wal-mart multiple times, once with their investment, again when their investments pay, and yet again when they pay in to SSM. Are these expenditures justified by the return that they do see, especially in context of a larger economy in which these same sectors exert heavy downward wage pressure, reduce job security for all, and the quality of goods is also dropping like a rock? No, it's not really making them richer overall. But they often fail to see the big picture.
So my point was (and I suppose the I felt that getting into mechanics would muddy it), it makes no difference to the middle-class investor which tax is which. He pays his taxes and it's all just "taxes" to him, but he figures that it's offset by his growing investments. Unfortunately, the growth in investments is indirectly being supported by the very taxes that he pays, and in combination with downward wage/wealth pressure (the sucking sound delivering wealth to china) and lower quality goods (that ultimately demand more expenditure over time, not less, again, more sales for China) he is actually getting poorer despite the apparent rise in his nestegg's value, because the rest of his life (from taxes to long-term goods expenses to wages) is losing value at a faster rate than his return is gaining-- all wealth that is moving offshore.
I have no ideological problem with wealth moving offshore, I think it's inevitable and probably fair, no reason the U.S. should have a standard of living that exceeds everyone else's. But too many free-market pro-neoliberal minds talk only about "return on investment" without placing that return in the context of the rest of the economy, in which any returns are offset by increased expenses and (and this may be the most important part) an increasing inability to turn back the clock or halt the slide as more and more communities, economies, businesses, personal budgets, and personal retirements come to rely on this sector. But you're right, I did run a couple of things together in my attempt to post quickly. My apologies.