Again, I disagree. Unlike AOL, Grandma will continue using Facebook for years to come. And their middle-aged parents will too. Unless something comes along which is so compelling that all these older people switch over to it (or FB does something so bad that they abandon it), it's likely all these middle-aged-and-up people could be on there for decades, being very active users. AOL isn't like this, because when it became nearly impossible to use the internet with dial-up and broadband services became more widely available, even the older people switched over, leaving AOL without much of a userbase. Some people continue to use it for email, but that's about it. And even there, a lot of people have probably switched to superior alternatives.
This is the key difference: AOL was made obsolete by broadband services. It just isn't doable to even use dial-up these days; webpages are far too bloated. AOL wasn't able to transition; they tried for a while to bill themselves as a useful add-on on top of broadband, but that didn't fly; the only reason people used them was for email and dial-up internet access; they were an ISP. The added services weren't enough to keep people subscribing.
Facebook isn't likely to be made obsolete by anything. It's possible, but they're not a gateway like an ISP, they're a platform, a destination. People use it because all their friends are on there and they can socialize there. The only way I see for Facebook to fail hard and fast is for them to do something awful to drive users away (like MS is doing with Win10), or for something so great to come along and replace them. But with the latter, I really can't imagine what that would be (then again, back in 1998 I wouldn't have imagined Facebook).
So my prediction is that they plateau in users and then slowly lose their userbase as people die off. Maybe I'm wrong though; maybe some other social network will come along that people will love and all abandon FB to use. But usually when something is really mature and has "critical mass", people are loathe to leave it. Just look at how few people are actually leaving Windows despite it turning into a spyware-infested POS with a horrible UI; they sure complain about it a lot, but they don't actually leave because the alternatives are too much work for them and don't support their apps. But you never know; maybe people will finally wake up to these privacy issues and all switch to Diaspora (an open-source decentralized social networking system). But I seriously doubt it.
I disagree. Even if all the younger people abandon FB, it's going to take a very long time for it to die out. The older people aren't dying off that fast.
AOL isn't even really dead yet: there's still tons of people who have AOL email accounts for some odd reason. A lot of them are old-timers who got those accounts in the 90s and just never gave them up. Now of course, AOL doesn't make nearly as much revenue as they used to back then, because their ISP business has mostly dried up due to broadband choices: even the tech-ignorant oldsters couldn't deny that multi-megabit speeds were far preferable to 56k dial-up, so they switched. FB doesn't have this issue, since it's not an ISP, it's a "content delivery platform". Basically, as long as the old peoples' friends are all on Facebook talking about the Bundys or FEMA camps or whatever it is they talk about on there, those people are going to continue to be active FB users and a source of advertising revenue. Obviously, this isn't a great strategy for growth (just look at Cadillac and Lincoln, struggling to stay relevant and appeal to younger crowds but mostly failing, but surviving because they have loyal older customers who are slowly dying off), but worst-case, FB can continue this way for a long time.
No, not necessarily: in some places, the land just ends at a cliff or a bunch of big rocks. Beaches usually take some time to form by erosion. It also depends a lot on the local geology.
Government does work; a bunch of high standard-of-living nations in western Europe have proven that.
The problem is that democratic government requires an educated, non-greedy populace to work well. When it's tried in places full of uneducated religious idiots, it doesn't work very well, and that's what we see in many places in America, especially Florida.
One thing that does need to be done is that states need to (in defiance of the Federal government if necessary) prevent Floridians and other southerners from moving out when they start getting impacted by climate change. They need to suffer the consequences for their voting choices, instead of just being able to move to states where the people are smarter and screw things up there too like they did in their home states.
It has nothing to do with what Floridians prefer, it has to do with what they're capable of.
Do you think Somalians could, within a year, accomplish land reclamation works on the level of what the Dutch have accomplished? (Without just hiring the Dutch, of course, not that Somalia would have any money to do so.) Pick any dirt-poor ocean-bordering nation in Africa or southeast Asia and ask yourself the same question. So if you wouldn't expect Somalia to start building massive dikes and pumps and reclaiming land, what makes you think Florida could do it?
What's this "we" business? There is no "we", there's "us" and "you guys".
Sure, the Dutch could pull off some great engineering feats in Florida if they really wanted to. But asking Americans to do something like what the Dutch can do is like asking people in Somalia to suddenly set up a prosperous first-world nation.
Quite simply, it just can't be done. Drowning is the only option in Florida. People there are not capable of fixing this problem.
Did you miss the part about how you can't build walls? How are you going to pump water away when there's no wall?
You can't build a wall because the reason these idiots live there is because of the view. They're not going to allow a wall to be built. And they Floridians: they don't believe in the sea levels rising, no matter how much evidence you show them, even if water is in their houses.
You Europeans seem to find it impossible to grasp just how stupid a lot of us Americans are. Here's a clue: go read your own history books about how Europeans were back when they were burning people at the stake for believing the "wrong" theology. That's similar to the mentality of about half of America's population today. And Florida has an especially high concentration of them.
I see a simple solution to this: refuse aid to the refugees. Anyone who chooses to live in Florida is on their own, and when their house gets flooded, too bad. They've been warned, but they're all a bunch of conservative religious morons who believe "global warming is a myth", so let them suffer the consequences. They can be hoist by their own petard.
I don't really care much about what some 0.01%ers feel about taxation. Cry me a river.
But you're absolutely right, it's where the thresholds are set that makes all the difference. 250k individual income is very much in the 1% territory. Lots of CEOs make about that much money or less (they end up getting more from the rest of their compensation package later). But yeah, for joint income then that means dual-earner households where both people are at $125k will get hit. Maybe that is a bit high, I'm really not sure.
But when you say "60-70% taxes for "high-income taxpayers" without any thresholds or anything, that makes me think about people making $1M getting that level of taxation, and I don't have a problem with that at all.
I will say, however, I think that one really, really big problem in this country today is the cost of housing. It's gone way up in the last 15 years, largely thanks to the housing bubble. I'm not exactly sure about what can be done, but I do think the government has a responsibility to try to fix that somehow. People could live well on a lot less if they didn't have to pay so much in rent.
Most of the oil we use goes to gas for our cars, and solar doesn't power our cars. Yea, yea, EVs and all, but EVs won't be a major thing for decades.
Teslas and Leafs are already proving that EVs are perfectly viable right now, just a bit too expensive compared to comparable gas cars and not that suitable for road trips. Cars like the GM Volt (50-mile range plug-in hybrid) are also very viable, not using any gas for commuting but still allowing road trips. Battery costs are coming down so pretty soon EVs will make even more sense for commuters. However, cheap gas hampers adoption; if gas taxes were jacked up a lot to account for the true costs of gasoline cars to society, EVs would become a lot more popular.
With a lot more EVs on the road, power generation switching to renewable sources will have a big effect on oil demand.
I'm sorry, I don't see the distinction. The government is charging him with a crime, but the government itself is committing crimes, and not just any other crimes, but crimes involving interfering with cellular signals, just like him. It's clear hypocrisy. And no, it isn't OK just because the exact same people in government aren't involved: the government is a singular entity AFAIC. When the government goes to court, it's a singular entity there, whether it's prosecuting or defending; individual employees are not named.
Well maybe we could compromise and be more like Germany, a country that values engineering and manufacturing and is the world leader in exports (by value).
As for 60-70% taxes for high-income taxpayers, what's the problem with that? How many Americans would be in that bracket? Denmark is one of the best counties for standard of living, so obviously they're doing something right. If you're getting the best standard of living in the world, why would you care about your taxes being high?
An excellent and cogent post; I would mod you up if I had points.
But to answer this question: People who really don't understand ethics seem to jump right onto the ad bandwagon, I wonder why that is?
That's because a significant portion of the American populace has turned into corporate apologists, happy to defend the very worst examples of corporate behavior possible.
For #3, I believe you are. Go to the filter lists, and there should be another list you can enable under "Social Media" which blocks FB/G+ buttons and tracking. I believe it's not enabled by default because for people who use FB a lot it can have undesirable side effects.
If the ad industry teams up with the major OS and hardware companies and come up with some crap that prevents user space software from accessing streaming video data directly
This is what I'd like to see personally: the ad companies need to team up with Microsoft to make it technically nearly impossible to block ads (of all types) on Windows machines. MS is basically reinventing itself as an advertising/marketing company anyway, so this would be a great fit for them.
It'll be fun listening to Windows users whine and complain about ads while I'm happily blocking them on my Linux box.
(Trump, as vile as he is, should not be silenced by mob action no matter how disgusting his views... he should be countered by intelligent speech that decries and exposes his bigotry, not forced to cancel appearances. Way to play into his hands, Bernie supporters),
What evidence is there that the anti-Trump protesters were Bernie supporters?
From what I see on all the discussion boards, the Bernie supporters are most concerned and angry about Hillary, not Trump. Heck, a bunch of Bernie supporters have even claimed they're going to vote for Trump if Hillary wins the Dem nomination! (Who knows what they'll really do; a bunch of Hillary supporters said the same thing about Obama in 2008 but voted for him anyway.)
I think blaming the Bernie supporters for anti-Trump protests is probably disingenuous. They could be a diverse crowd of supporters of other candidates (or just Dems), or they could be a high concentration of Hillary voters, which is what I suspect personally. Polls show that Bernie has the most appeal across the entire population, and in a fair runoff-type election between all the surviving candidates now (D and R), Bernie would actually win. It's pretty easy to understand why: he's the least hated. Lots of people hate Trump and Hillary, along with the other GOP candidates; Bernie just isn't all that disliked by anyone. Hillary is the Dem who has the most to worry about in a direct race against Trump, so it stands to reason that it's her supporters who are probably most active against Trump.
My point is that the technological barrier with using free software prevents others from using them. As these barriers drop adoption will rise.
No, it doesn't, as I just pointed out with cars. You don't have to be a mechanic to understand that it's better to be able to get your car serviced at a practically infinite number of independent mechanics rather than being stuck with the dealership. The exact same principle applies with software. Most people are not mechanics and don't work on their own cars, but independent mechanics generally do very well because most car owners are apparently savvy enough to understand that the dealership is not going to give them the best price or service.
Bernie is a democratic socialist. His ideal country is Denmark, or maybe Norway, and his plan is basically to copy those countries. Maybe you're an ignorant American who's never even looked at a map and probably thinks Sweden and Switzerland are the same country, but the Scandinavian nations have the highest standards of living in the world today, so they're doing just fine with their socialism.
It's unbelievable how many retards think Denmark is somehow akin to Cuba or Russia.
Wow, are you really such a retard that you think someone with a 35 year long record in politics is somehow going to do a 180 like a guy who voted "present" a few times and never served a full term as a politician?
I think it's a toss-up. Hillary has alienated a lot of people too, on both sides, and she's a war hawk. If it comes down to her vs. Trump, I'll have to vote for Trump because he's much less likely to start another war, as stated in this HuffPost article.
When the choice is a) ban all immigration by Muslims, or b) start another war in the middle east, which is just going to strengthen groups like ISIS, I'll pick a).
Slashdot Mirror
Again, I disagree. Unlike AOL, Grandma will continue using Facebook for years to come. And their middle-aged parents will too. Unless something comes along which is so compelling that all these older people switch over to it (or FB does something so bad that they abandon it), it's likely all these middle-aged-and-up people could be on there for decades, being very active users. AOL isn't like this, because when it became nearly impossible to use the internet with dial-up and broadband services became more widely available, even the older people switched over, leaving AOL without much of a userbase. Some people continue to use it for email, but that's about it. And even there, a lot of people have probably switched to superior alternatives.
This is the key difference: AOL was made obsolete by broadband services. It just isn't doable to even use dial-up these days; webpages are far too bloated. AOL wasn't able to transition; they tried for a while to bill themselves as a useful add-on on top of broadband, but that didn't fly; the only reason people used them was for email and dial-up internet access; they were an ISP. The added services weren't enough to keep people subscribing.
Facebook isn't likely to be made obsolete by anything. It's possible, but they're not a gateway like an ISP, they're a platform, a destination. People use it because all their friends are on there and they can socialize there. The only way I see for Facebook to fail hard and fast is for them to do something awful to drive users away (like MS is doing with Win10), or for something so great to come along and replace them. But with the latter, I really can't imagine what that would be (then again, back in 1998 I wouldn't have imagined Facebook).
So my prediction is that they plateau in users and then slowly lose their userbase as people die off. Maybe I'm wrong though; maybe some other social network will come along that people will love and all abandon FB to use. But usually when something is really mature and has "critical mass", people are loathe to leave it. Just look at how few people are actually leaving Windows despite it turning into a spyware-infested POS with a horrible UI; they sure complain about it a lot, but they don't actually leave because the alternatives are too much work for them and don't support their apps. But you never know; maybe people will finally wake up to these privacy issues and all switch to Diaspora (an open-source decentralized social networking system). But I seriously doubt it.
I disagree. Even if all the younger people abandon FB, it's going to take a very long time for it to die out. The older people aren't dying off that fast.
AOL isn't even really dead yet: there's still tons of people who have AOL email accounts for some odd reason. A lot of them are old-timers who got those accounts in the 90s and just never gave them up. Now of course, AOL doesn't make nearly as much revenue as they used to back then, because their ISP business has mostly dried up due to broadband choices: even the tech-ignorant oldsters couldn't deny that multi-megabit speeds were far preferable to 56k dial-up, so they switched. FB doesn't have this issue, since it's not an ISP, it's a "content delivery platform". Basically, as long as the old peoples' friends are all on Facebook talking about the Bundys or FEMA camps or whatever it is they talk about on there, those people are going to continue to be active FB users and a source of advertising revenue. Obviously, this isn't a great strategy for growth (just look at Cadillac and Lincoln, struggling to stay relevant and appeal to younger crowds but mostly failing, but surviving because they have loyal older customers who are slowly dying off), but worst-case, FB can continue this way for a long time.
No, not necessarily: in some places, the land just ends at a cliff or a bunch of big rocks. Beaches usually take some time to form by erosion. It also depends a lot on the local geology.
Government does work; a bunch of high standard-of-living nations in western Europe have proven that.
The problem is that democratic government requires an educated, non-greedy populace to work well. When it's tried in places full of uneducated religious idiots, it doesn't work very well, and that's what we see in many places in America, especially Florida.
One thing that does need to be done is that states need to (in defiance of the Federal government if necessary) prevent Floridians and other southerners from moving out when they start getting impacted by climate change. They need to suffer the consequences for their voting choices, instead of just being able to move to states where the people are smarter and screw things up there too like they did in their home states.
It has nothing to do with what Floridians prefer, it has to do with what they're capable of.
Do you think Somalians could, within a year, accomplish land reclamation works on the level of what the Dutch have accomplished? (Without just hiring the Dutch, of course, not that Somalia would have any money to do so.) Pick any dirt-poor ocean-bordering nation in Africa or southeast Asia and ask yourself the same question. So if you wouldn't expect Somalia to start building massive dikes and pumps and reclaiming land, what makes you think Florida could do it?
What's this "we" business? There is no "we", there's "us" and "you guys".
Sure, the Dutch could pull off some great engineering feats in Florida if they really wanted to. But asking Americans to do something like what the Dutch can do is like asking people in Somalia to suddenly set up a prosperous first-world nation.
Quite simply, it just can't be done. Drowning is the only option in Florida. People there are not capable of fixing this problem.
We can't afford to build dikes like that; we're too busy lowering taxes for the rich and giving handouts to Wall Street.
If we can't even afford to keep our bridges from falling down, what makes you think we can afford to build a sea wall?
Did you miss the part about how you can't build walls? How are you going to pump water away when there's no wall?
You can't build a wall because the reason these idiots live there is because of the view. They're not going to allow a wall to be built. And they Floridians: they don't believe in the sea levels rising, no matter how much evidence you show them, even if water is in their houses.
You Europeans seem to find it impossible to grasp just how stupid a lot of us Americans are. Here's a clue: go read your own history books about how Europeans were back when they were burning people at the stake for believing the "wrong" theology. That's similar to the mentality of about half of America's population today. And Florida has an especially high concentration of them.
I see a simple solution to this: refuse aid to the refugees. Anyone who chooses to live in Florida is on their own, and when their house gets flooded, too bad. They've been warned, but they're all a bunch of conservative religious morons who believe "global warming is a myth", so let them suffer the consequences. They can be hoist by their own petard.
I don't really care much about what some 0.01%ers feel about taxation. Cry me a river.
But you're absolutely right, it's where the thresholds are set that makes all the difference. 250k individual income is very much in the 1% territory. Lots of CEOs make about that much money or less (they end up getting more from the rest of their compensation package later). But yeah, for joint income then that means dual-earner households where both people are at $125k will get hit. Maybe that is a bit high, I'm really not sure.
But when you say "60-70% taxes for "high-income taxpayers" without any thresholds or anything, that makes me think about people making $1M getting that level of taxation, and I don't have a problem with that at all.
I will say, however, I think that one really, really big problem in this country today is the cost of housing. It's gone way up in the last 15 years, largely thanks to the housing bubble. I'm not exactly sure about what can be done, but I do think the government has a responsibility to try to fix that somehow. People could live well on a lot less if they didn't have to pay so much in rent.
Most of the oil we use goes to gas for our cars, and solar doesn't power our cars. Yea, yea, EVs and all, but EVs won't be a major thing for decades.
Teslas and Leafs are already proving that EVs are perfectly viable right now, just a bit too expensive compared to comparable gas cars and not that suitable for road trips. Cars like the GM Volt (50-mile range plug-in hybrid) are also very viable, not using any gas for commuting but still allowing road trips. Battery costs are coming down so pretty soon EVs will make even more sense for commuters. However, cheap gas hampers adoption; if gas taxes were jacked up a lot to account for the true costs of gasoline cars to society, EVs would become a lot more popular.
With a lot more EVs on the road, power generation switching to renewable sources will have a big effect on oil demand.
I'm sorry, I don't see the distinction. The government is charging him with a crime, but the government itself is committing crimes, and not just any other crimes, but crimes involving interfering with cellular signals, just like him. It's clear hypocrisy. And no, it isn't OK just because the exact same people in government aren't involved: the government is a singular entity AFAIC. When the government goes to court, it's a singular entity there, whether it's prosecuting or defending; individual employees are not named.
Well maybe we could compromise and be more like Germany, a country that values engineering and manufacturing and is the world leader in exports (by value).
As for 60-70% taxes for high-income taxpayers, what's the problem with that? How many Americans would be in that bracket? Denmark is one of the best counties for standard of living, so obviously they're doing something right. If you're getting the best standard of living in the world, why would you care about your taxes being high?
What's the point of this? There isn't much to listen to on the radio these days anyway.
An excellent and cogent post; I would mod you up if I had points.
But to answer this question:
People who really don't understand ethics seem to jump right onto the ad bandwagon, I wonder why that is?
That's because a significant portion of the American populace has turned into corporate apologists, happy to defend the very worst examples of corporate behavior possible.
For #3, I believe you are. Go to the filter lists, and there should be another list you can enable under "Social Media" which blocks FB/G+ buttons and tracking. I believe it's not enabled by default because for people who use FB a lot it can have undesirable side effects.
If the ad industry teams up with the major OS and hardware companies and come up with some crap that prevents user space software from accessing streaming video data directly
This is what I'd like to see personally: the ad companies need to team up with Microsoft to make it technically nearly impossible to block ads (of all types) on Windows machines. MS is basically reinventing itself as an advertising/marketing company anyway, so this would be a great fit for them.
It'll be fun listening to Windows users whine and complain about ads while I'm happily blocking them on my Linux box.
Even that is questionable, if they use javascript to verify the display of the ads and refuse to deliver the content unless that is verified
It'd be pretty trivial to intercept the JS and alter it to send back the code that the ads were viewed even though they weren't.
(Trump, as vile as he is, should not be silenced by mob action no matter how disgusting his views ... he should be countered by intelligent speech that decries and exposes his bigotry, not forced to cancel appearances. Way to play into his hands, Bernie supporters),
What evidence is there that the anti-Trump protesters were Bernie supporters?
From what I see on all the discussion boards, the Bernie supporters are most concerned and angry about Hillary, not Trump. Heck, a bunch of Bernie supporters have even claimed they're going to vote for Trump if Hillary wins the Dem nomination! (Who knows what they'll really do; a bunch of Hillary supporters said the same thing about Obama in 2008 but voted for him anyway.)
I think blaming the Bernie supporters for anti-Trump protests is probably disingenuous. They could be a diverse crowd of supporters of other candidates (or just Dems), or they could be a high concentration of Hillary voters, which is what I suspect personally. Polls show that Bernie has the most appeal across the entire population, and in a fair runoff-type election between all the surviving candidates now (D and R), Bernie would actually win. It's pretty easy to understand why: he's the least hated. Lots of people hate Trump and Hillary, along with the other GOP candidates; Bernie just isn't all that disliked by anyone. Hillary is the Dem who has the most to worry about in a direct race against Trump, so it stands to reason that it's her supporters who are probably most active against Trump.
My point is that the technological barrier with using free software prevents others from using them. As these barriers drop adoption will rise.
No, it doesn't, as I just pointed out with cars. You don't have to be a mechanic to understand that it's better to be able to get your car serviced at a practically infinite number of independent mechanics rather than being stuck with the dealership. The exact same principle applies with software. Most people are not mechanics and don't work on their own cars, but independent mechanics generally do very well because most car owners are apparently savvy enough to understand that the dealership is not going to give them the best price or service.
I wouldn't be so sure. Rubio is a neo-con just like W Bush, and I still remember Bush's "free speech zones".
Wow, this is some stupid shit here.
Bernie is a democratic socialist. His ideal country is Denmark, or maybe Norway, and his plan is basically to copy those countries. Maybe you're an ignorant American who's never even looked at a map and probably thinks Sweden and Switzerland are the same country, but the Scandinavian nations have the highest standards of living in the world today, so they're doing just fine with their socialism.
It's unbelievable how many retards think Denmark is somehow akin to Cuba or Russia.
Wow, are you really such a retard that you think someone with a 35 year long record in politics is somehow going to do a 180 like a guy who voted "present" a few times and never served a full term as a politician?
What a moron.
I think it's a toss-up. Hillary has alienated a lot of people too, on both sides, and she's a war hawk. If it comes down to her vs. Trump, I'll have to vote for Trump because he's much less likely to start another war, as stated in this HuffPost article.
When the choice is a) ban all immigration by Muslims, or b) start another war in the middle east, which is just going to strengthen groups like ISIS, I'll pick a).
a nuke that's much smaller than anything from 40 years ago.
I completely disagree. No one's made nuclear bombs the size of a cigarette box yet.
Back in the 50s and 60s, they had one-man-portable nuclear devices, like this one and this one.