I've made two trips from Pittsburgh to Dallas in the past two months.... Both cost around $50.
Ok, I gotta ask, why would you take either Uber or a cab from Pittsburgh PA to Dallas TX instead of a plane, and how could such a long trip possibly only cost $50?
(I did look up whether there's a Dallas in PA or a Pittsburgh in TX and the answer is no to each. There is a "Pittsburg" in TX about 2.25 hours away from Dallas though, but surely that's not what you meant.)
Anyway....
From sexual harassment issues to illegal use of software they have repeatedly shown a culture of sociopathy at heights few other companies reach.
The problem here is that, as the AC you responded to clearly shows, as does Uber's continued great popularity, Americans in general are extremely sociopathic and are happy to support a company that gives them what they want, regardless of the social cost. Uber could be using actual slaves and average Americans would happily support them. You can also see this with Americans' steadfast support for blatantly sociopathic politicians, as well as other companies that clearly have horrible business practices.
Cell phones wouldn't be much further along today if they'd been introduced in the '40s. They simply would've existed for 50~60 years as rich people toys rather than 20~30.
I completely disagree. Adoption of a technology drives development of the technology: when cellphones were adopted by more of the population, there was more development of the technology, making it smaller, more power efficient, and better featured. The same could have happened with cellphones; the development curve may have been slower (because modern cellphones have benefited from developments in other related industries such as microprocessors/computing), but it probably would have been faster than what we've experienced. In fact, earlier adoption of cellphones could have driven other technological developments much earlier than what actually happened: electronics miniaturization, batteries, digital communication, etc.
The only benefit tabs had/has is the ability to visually change how much indentation they represent on the fly without modifying the content.... you can quickly switch back and forth at will, with no impact on the data in the document. While I do recall using that decades ago, I can't remember the last time I needed/wanted to do that.
It's useful when you're not the only person working on that code, and your cow-orkers have different ideas of how many spaces each indentation level should be. If you have one weirdo on the team who insists on 8-space or 2-space indents, then using tabs keeps you from fighting over this all the time and filling up the git repo with constant whitespace changes.
Here's one site showing domestic box office totals. It shows attendance is actually decreasing slowly since 2001, but revenues are basically holding steady (thanks to higher ticket prices).
And Here's an article about 2015 numbers showing that global box office revenues hit a record $38B+ that year.
Over here, a sound-bite box mentions that (presumably domestic) revenues from at-home movie-viewing surpassed the box office in 2015 (11B to 10B).
So, AFAICT, the movie industry is whining about something that isn't a true problem: their box-office revenues are higher than ever, and they're even making more money on home viewing (the legal kind that people have to pay for) than they're making in theaters. Another sound-bite box at that last link mentions cinema advertising, so they (not sure which 'they') are making even more money that way, since you can't ad-block ads in a cinema; who knows how much they're pulling in from that. So for them to complain about piracy smacks of pure greed. "We're making more money than ever, but it's not enough! People are stealing our content and it must stop!"
That's true: box office revenues are doing just fine. Now of course, that's across the industry worldwide; certain theaters probably aren't doing that great. Also, theaters get their money mainly from concessions, while most of the ticket price goes to the movie studio, so lots of people watching movies worldwide doesn't necessarily translate into a healthy movie theater business, but it does seem to be doing fine overall really, even if there has been a contraction in the American market over the last several decades, esp. if you look at it on a per-capita basis (the US population has grown significantly over the last 50 years). Far greater worldwide ticket sales (esp. in Asia) more than make up for the drop-off in American attendance.
But still, if they want to be *more* successful than they already are, you can still make the argument that they need to provide their content in more convenient formats and channels. As I noted, American attendance has dropped off, particularly on a per-capita basis. Also, the movies that seem to do best are mindless CGI-packed action movies since foreign audiences don't have to understand subtle nuances of American culture and speech to enjoy them, so they're missing out on other genres of movies to some extent.
make shows and films so god damned awful that no one will bother to pirate them
Exactly; Hollywood's been doing a great job of this for at least 10 years now. When I want to watch any movies, it's only stuff that's over 10 years old, and usually from the 70s and 80s, with some in the 90s, 60s, 40s, and a few things before that, and some stuff in the early 2000s. After about 2008, Hollywood movies went straight down the toilet.
50 years from now there will no doubt be somebody waxing nostalgic about the good ole days of the early 2000s, remembering our movies that have stood the test of time
What movies from the 2010s will stand the test of time? Can you name even one? I can't.
I can think of a few good ones from the 2000s, esp. the early 2000s (LotR comes to mind first), but not much, and certainly nothing really fantastic and memorable after about 2005.
I'm really tired of this trope about "we only remember the good stuff and forget the crap". There hasn't been any good stuff for about 10 years now. It all coincides with the collapse of the real estate bubble in 2008 and the economic disaster that caused.
The thing is, the antique houses and furniture that are still around were well-built. The crap furniture and shoddy housing of the 19th century? There was plenty of it I am sure, but it is long gone. We look around at what's left and say "Man, they knew how to build *widget*", but it's kind of naive.
This is bullshit too. Things have changed, and we can see it in mass-produced items. Go look at laser printers from 20-30 years ago; they were much longer-lasting than modern ones. What's different is that a lot of things back then were over-engineered. They weren't nearly as good at predicting component lifespans as they are now, so they had larger safety factors, and certain things generally lasted much longer. There was a price to this though: those things were expensive. An HP Laserjet III was not a cheap printer at all, but it was built like a tank. Modern lasers cost a fraction of much (after adjusting for inflation), but they're a lot more delicate and wear out faster. This doesn't apply to everything though: cars last a lot longer than they used to. You used to get rid of cars after 50k miles, now it's easy to get 200k+ out of them.
Sorry, this is just plain bullshit, because the simple fact that disproves your argument is that the industries have changed. Go back to the 80s and 90s and look at how many remakes there were: very few (and what few there were were radically different from whatever ancient B&W 50s movie they remade, such as John Carpenter's "The Thing" in 1982). Look how many superhero movies there were back then: almost none. Now, all the movies are superhero franchise installments, remakes, sequels, prequels, etc. In short, Hollywood has become extremely risk-averse, and only invests in high-cost high-FX action movies because they're virtually guaranteed to be profitable, even if the profit multiplier isn't that high. They won't attempt any risky movies now like they did in decades past, so you don't see much in the way of truly new material, and instead they play it safe by making continued installments in franchises which have proven profitable. Look at the new Alien movie, a new installment of a 40-year-old franchise! That simply did not exist in the 80s.
The music industry, similarly, is fundamentally different these days too. New music isn't being made and marketed the way it was in the 60s-90s.
However, the same idea usually doesn't work for areas like movies or computer software, where the production costs are often much higher,
All the latest figures show that Hollywood is making more money than ever. A lot of this is due to foreign sales (esp. China's market), but still, they're raking in money hand over fist now.
Then the nation needs to split into at least 2-3 smaller independent nations. That way the Christian theocrats can have their version of Sharia Law, the Libertarians can have their minimal-government free-fire zone, and the rest of us can try to move forward.
I'm a little curious. Obviously, the southeast would be the new nation where the Christian theocrats take over. But what region would be the Libertarian zone, in your view? I don't see the Northeast going that way; Vermont/NH maybe, but they're a tiny, tiny fraction of the overall NE population. Or the west coast? But here again, that region is very liberal, just in a different way from places like NYC. My guess is that the southwest is probably most likely to become a "minimal-government free-fire zone", but CA and the northwest aren't going to want to be part of that.
Also, it isn't just the southeast where the Christian theocrats rule. New Jersey's Bergen County, part of the NYC metro area, has the most restrictive blue laws in the country, forbidding most businesses and work on Sundays. Chris Christie (yep, the crappy Republican) tried to repeal them but failed. He managed to get the blue law suspended for only 1 week after Hurricane Sandy. And Bergen County seems to vote pretty reliably Democrat, and they voted for Hillary in November. In "liberal" New York, alcohol sales are prohibited on Sunday mornings statewide, and most counties have even more restrictive blue laws of their own. In "liberal" Massachusetts, alcohol sales are prohibited on Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Memorial days. In Pennsylvania, alcohol sales are restricted on Sundays, and car dealerships are prohibited from operating on Sundays. And those are just northeast states; there's tons of such laws in the interior states. North Dakota seems to have the strictest blue laws in the country (at the state level), and that's nowhere near the Bible Belt.
The way I see it, the Christian theocrats are a strong and reliable voting bloc in most parts of the country, except for some large coastal cities. And since the theocrats have lots of kids while the liberals don't, the problem is getting worse, not better. Liberals are basically relying on "defection" to keep their numbers up, and a fanciful (and basically religious) notion that social mores will inevitably become more liberal over time, which has been disproven by history many times. Just look at the "roaring 20s", and contrast that to the decades that came after.
I haven't read the article or looked at the photos, but TFS did say that the office was so under-used that each employee had 3000 square feet of space.
I hate open-plan offices with a passion, but if I had that much room around me it wouldn't be so bad...
The alt-left/antifa movement is to the left what the alt-right movement is to the right: an embarrassment.
I disagree. The alt-right now represents the entirety of the right. If it didn't, they wouldn't have elected Trump, who was the standard-bearer for the alt-right and still has Steve Bannon (who's a self-proclaimed alt-righter) as one of his main advisors. The old-fashioned conservatives you're thinking of are basically extinct now; the mainstream IS the alt-right now, as the mainstream conservatives have mostly converted.
I have not as of yet, seen a mob of conservatives get in a shouting match with a professor in class
That's because climate-denialist conservatives do not attend college in sufficient numbers for this kind of thing to happen. When they do attend college in high concentrations, it's at some bullshit "school" like Liberty University where they explicitly deny science in the curriculum.
The fact is, you're not going to find a bunch of conservative nutcases at a school like Evergreen; places like that attract leftist nutcases instead.
However, conservatives are disposed to violence just like anyone; just look at the various protests going on lately. There have been a bunch of documented cases of them attacking counter-protesters, and it's been documented that the local police look the other way.
That's bullshit. The anti-vax crap is on both sides of the political spectrum. The current President (a far right-winger) has spouted anti-vax BS, and there's been a bunch of it among religious groups who've then had outbreaks.
But it's not just religious idiots who've latched onto the anti-vax hysteria, it's also some elements on the left, namely the loony ones who are also into various other "alternative medicine" hokum.
Remember, the "left" isn't a coherent, homogeneous group of people by any stretch, in fact it's a coalition of basically everyone who isn't right-wing. The right-wingers are generally conservative, which means they like the status quo, "traditional values", etc., so anyone who departs from this mindset is automatically left-wing, even though that can mean completely different philosophies ranging from simple "progressivism" (basically what Nordic countries have--democratic republics with a bunch of welfare state services and heavier regulation) all the way to actual communism. So the "left" includes irreligious people who want science and evidence-based thinking to determine public policy, and also fruity people who believe in garbage like "metaphysics" and the "ascended masters".
No, don't blame the devs, or Apple either. Blame the users. It's their fault for continuing to use these ancient 32-bit iPads. Don't they know that you're supposed to upgrade your Apple iDevices every 2 years at a minimum? What's wrong with these people? It's their responsibility to stay current with Apple's latest equipment, even if they have to feed their kids Ramen noodles to pay for it.
There are a reasonable number of AAA games, and it generally doesn't make much sense to treat each individual one as a monopoly, since there are other AAA games.
You're treating these games as interchangeable cogs. Someone who's interested in Game X is quite likely to not be so interested in Game Y. Your logic is a lot like saying that someone who can't find a theater playing Wonder Woman nearby will instead just watch The Mummy. This is quite likely false: the former has excellent reviews, and the latter poor reviews. Or that they'll happily watch "It Comes At Night"; again likely false, they might not be in the mood for a horror movie. Creative works (as games are) aren't interchangeable.
Luxury buyers are price-conscious just like anyone else, they just have a different demand curve.
Luxury buyers are *far less* price-conscious than regular people. Depending on how luxury it is, and how rich they are, there's a lot of room. Someone who wants a Rolls isn't going to switch to a BMW (whatever the top-end model is) because it's cheaper; to a buyer like that, the price isn't that big a deal. $400k isn't that much money to them. For cheaper luxury stuff, it has more of an effect: BMW could lose customers if they raise their prices too much and they can buy a Mercedes or Audi instead.
Why should we care if luxury goods are a monopoly? Partly because almost all of us in developed countries buy luxury goods. By your definition, a luxury good might cost very little; for example, an AAA game is usually under $70 or so, and plenty of people are interested in those prices.
That doesn't explain why we should care if they're a monopoly. Luxury goods are, by definition, non-essential. So if they're a monopoly, too bad: either pay the price, or go without. You don't *need* AAA games, just like no one *needs* a Rolls-Royce. There's plenty of far cheaper cars out there (which definitely aren't monopolies; there's plenty of direct competition between, say, Hondas and Toyotas), and for games, just playing games itself is a luxury, and besides, there's plenty of free games out there. archive.org has a bunch of them you can play in your web browser. If you decide you're absolutely going to buy and play some new AAA game, that's your own decision, and if that means you're locked into some other company's OS, that again is your own decision and your own doing, no one else's.
You seem to think someone who plays AAA Windows games is beneath notice,despite the loss in personal satisfaction such a player would suffer from changing OSes.
What exactly do you expect me to do? Cry for them? They put themselves in this position. They have easy alternatives: 1) Don't play the AAA game, contact the company and tell them why not, and spend their time/money playing some other game on their preferred OS (or one of the free ones I mentioned). 2) Dual-boot. Usually, when you're playing some immersive game, you're not that interested in multi-tasking anyway. There's also VMs and WINE, which may or may not work acceptably depending on the game and system.
Honestly, of all the reasons people might cry about application lock-in with Windows, AAA gaming is the least valid. At least with office/business applications, you can argue that X business app (like Quickbooks or whatever, or various CAD packages) is essential to your business and with too many of these apps, that going the VM route becomes pointlessly burdensome. But AAA gaming isn't a business activity, it's a home activity, and it's purely a luxury, and it's not even something you normally want to multitask with anyway, so dual-booting is really the easy option here.
You're talking about full-service moving. That's for rich people. If you're too fucking lazy to pack your own boxes, then yeah, it's going to cost you a lot to move, just like it costs a lot to have someone else wash your dog or cut your toenails.
If you're short on cash, between jobs, etc., you don't use full-service moving companies unless you're a fucking moron. And these companies are great ways of getting your stuff smashed or stolen anyway; they have a long history of holding your belongings hostage and stealing silverware.
Motel? Food? Drink? Other externalities like maps/guides, did you happen to hire someone to pack up the house for you? Guarantee that alone for a true cross-country trip (which I almost did, TN to CA) would've eaten up another $2K.
I only spent 1 night in a motel, and 1 night at a friend's house along the way. Maps? Are you kidding? Back then, that was a couple dollars at most. I'm sure I already had a US map anyway, and the route was all interstate. No, I didn't hire someone to pack, I'm perfectly capable of that myself. Is that why your costs were so high? You had to hire people to do your work for you? People on a strict budget (which is what we're talking about here, this thread was about people having trouble getting employment needing to move) do not hire other people to pack boxes; that's a luxury. Do it yourself, and maybe get your friends/family to help.
Neither is some AAA game, unless you want to try to argue that RR has a monopoly on RR cars the way [game publisher] has a monopoly on [game title]. There are other makers of games.
(In practice, this would mean that other manufacturers would start producing really nice cars, so the monopoly wouldn't last. This isn't the case with Windows.)
There are other OS makers out there, including Apple with MacOS, just like there's other luxury carmakers. Of course, Windows and MacOS are very different, but so are Rolls vs. Maybach.
It's entirely possible to have a monopoly on something people can do without.
Right, but if it's a luxury good, then why should we care? Of course, "luxury" is a relative term, since you could argue that electricity is a luxury, but if somehow BMW managed to dominate the over-$150k luxury car market and put all the others out of business, why should I or anyone else who can't afford such cars care? It's not like it'd affect the price anyway; true luxury goods don't have prices affected by competition, they charge whatever the market will bear, because the people willing to pay those prices aren't comparison-shopping, they're set on that brand and it's just a matter of whether they can afford it or not (e.g., a Rolls customer is not going to compare to an Audi; if they were price-sensitive, they'd get a cheaper car).
If one manufacturer makes something that is vital to the survival of a business, and there are no alternatives, then there's a monopoly that can't be evaded.
Are we talking about business applications or AAA games here? Up above, I wrote, and you quoted, "If you can't play some AAA game on anything but Windows, that's not a monopoly problem; that's a luxury". Games are luxuries. You do have a valid argument for some payroll application or whatever, but games are not necessary to run any business unless you're running some kind of arcade or something. So no, the monopoly thing doesn't fly there. You don't need to run a game, just like you don't need a Rolls or a Coach handbag.
Then you start talking about ways to run Windows, which means that you're still hooked on Windows, and you're going to have to put up with Microsoft.
This just isn't true really. Are we talking about some business app that *all* of your employees need to run continuously, or are we talking about some app that some or a few of your employees need to run occasionally? If it's just a few employees, there's no need to make all your employees put up with MS just because of that one app that they don't use. Even if they all use it, but only for a minority of their time, using it within a VM means they only need to put up with Windows for that one app, not for everything they do, and that also means you don't have to run your whole company infrastructure on Windows servers. It isn't an all-or-nothing thing: it's entirely possible to run a single app or two in a VM on a different OS, without having to do everything on that OS. Lots of developers run Linux this way: it's inside a VM, running on Windows, because the company's infrastructure (shared drives, email, documents) are all MS, but to get their dev work done requires Linux. If it can be done that way (Linux-on-Windows), it can certainly work the reverse way too.
I moved into an apartment once with a trailer; it wasn't 40ft, but it was 26ft. Yes, they do do this; they take up a bunch of parking spaces though. It's not really any worse than someone bringing in a big U-Haul truck though.
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I've made two trips from Pittsburgh to Dallas in the past two months. ... Both cost around $50.
Ok, I gotta ask, why would you take either Uber or a cab from Pittsburgh PA to Dallas TX instead of a plane, and how could such a long trip possibly only cost $50?
(I did look up whether there's a Dallas in PA or a Pittsburgh in TX and the answer is no to each. There is a "Pittsburg" in TX about 2.25 hours away from Dallas though, but surely that's not what you meant.)
Anyway....
From sexual harassment issues to illegal use of software they have repeatedly shown a culture of sociopathy at heights few other companies reach.
The problem here is that, as the AC you responded to clearly shows, as does Uber's continued great popularity, Americans in general are extremely sociopathic and are happy to support a company that gives them what they want, regardless of the social cost. Uber could be using actual slaves and average Americans would happily support them. You can also see this with Americans' steadfast support for blatantly sociopathic politicians, as well as other companies that clearly have horrible business practices.
Cell phones wouldn't be much further along today if they'd been introduced in the '40s. They simply would've existed for 50~60 years as rich people toys rather than 20~30.
I completely disagree. Adoption of a technology drives development of the technology: when cellphones were adopted by more of the population, there was more development of the technology, making it smaller, more power efficient, and better featured. The same could have happened with cellphones; the development curve may have been slower (because modern cellphones have benefited from developments in other related industries such as microprocessors/computing), but it probably would have been faster than what we've experienced. In fact, earlier adoption of cellphones could have driven other technological developments much earlier than what actually happened: electronics miniaturization, batteries, digital communication, etc.
The only benefit tabs had/has is the ability to visually change how much indentation they represent on the fly without modifying the content. ... you can quickly switch back and forth at will, with no impact on the data in the document. While I do recall using that decades ago, I can't remember the last time I needed/wanted to do that.
It's useful when you're not the only person working on that code, and your cow-orkers have different ideas of how many spaces each indentation level should be. If you have one weirdo on the team who insists on 8-space or 2-space indents, then using tabs keeps you from fighting over this all the time and filling up the git repo with constant whitespace changes.
Here's one site showing domestic box office totals. It shows attendance is actually decreasing slowly since 2001, but revenues are basically holding steady (thanks to higher ticket prices).
And Here's an article about 2015 numbers showing that global box office revenues hit a record $38B+ that year.
Over here, a sound-bite box mentions that (presumably domestic) revenues from at-home movie-viewing surpassed the box office in 2015 (11B to 10B).
So, AFAICT, the movie industry is whining about something that isn't a true problem: their box-office revenues are higher than ever, and they're even making more money on home viewing (the legal kind that people have to pay for) than they're making in theaters. Another sound-bite box at that last link mentions cinema advertising, so they (not sure which 'they') are making even more money that way, since you can't ad-block ads in a cinema; who knows how much they're pulling in from that. So for them to complain about piracy smacks of pure greed. "We're making more money than ever, but it's not enough! People are stealing our content and it must stop!"
That's true: box office revenues are doing just fine. Now of course, that's across the industry worldwide; certain theaters probably aren't doing that great. Also, theaters get their money mainly from concessions, while most of the ticket price goes to the movie studio, so lots of people watching movies worldwide doesn't necessarily translate into a healthy movie theater business, but it does seem to be doing fine overall really, even if there has been a contraction in the American market over the last several decades, esp. if you look at it on a per-capita basis (the US population has grown significantly over the last 50 years). Far greater worldwide ticket sales (esp. in Asia) more than make up for the drop-off in American attendance.
But still, if they want to be *more* successful than they already are, you can still make the argument that they need to provide their content in more convenient formats and channels. As I noted, American attendance has dropped off, particularly on a per-capita basis. Also, the movies that seem to do best are mindless CGI-packed action movies since foreign audiences don't have to understand subtle nuances of American culture and speech to enjoy them, so they're missing out on other genres of movies to some extent.
No, they didn't. It was a laughably small fine, far smaller than the amount of money they saved by engaging in the illegal behavior.
make shows and films so god damned awful that no one will bother to pirate them
Exactly; Hollywood's been doing a great job of this for at least 10 years now. When I want to watch any movies, it's only stuff that's over 10 years old, and usually from the 70s and 80s, with some in the 90s, 60s, 40s, and a few things before that, and some stuff in the early 2000s. After about 2008, Hollywood movies went straight down the toilet.
50 years from now there will no doubt be somebody waxing nostalgic about the good ole days of the early 2000s, remembering our movies that have stood the test of time
What movies from the 2010s will stand the test of time? Can you name even one? I can't.
I can think of a few good ones from the 2000s, esp. the early 2000s (LotR comes to mind first), but not much, and certainly nothing really fantastic and memorable after about 2005.
I'm really tired of this trope about "we only remember the good stuff and forget the crap". There hasn't been any good stuff for about 10 years now. It all coincides with the collapse of the real estate bubble in 2008 and the economic disaster that caused.
The thing is, the antique houses and furniture that are still around were well-built. The crap furniture and shoddy housing of the 19th century? There was plenty of it I am sure, but it is long gone. We look around at what's left and say "Man, they knew how to build *widget*", but it's kind of naive.
This is bullshit too. Things have changed, and we can see it in mass-produced items. Go look at laser printers from 20-30 years ago; they were much longer-lasting than modern ones. What's different is that a lot of things back then were over-engineered. They weren't nearly as good at predicting component lifespans as they are now, so they had larger safety factors, and certain things generally lasted much longer. There was a price to this though: those things were expensive. An HP Laserjet III was not a cheap printer at all, but it was built like a tank. Modern lasers cost a fraction of much (after adjusting for inflation), but they're a lot more delicate and wear out faster. This doesn't apply to everything though: cars last a lot longer than they used to. You used to get rid of cars after 50k miles, now it's easy to get 200k+ out of them.
Sorry, this is just plain bullshit, because the simple fact that disproves your argument is that the industries have changed. Go back to the 80s and 90s and look at how many remakes there were: very few (and what few there were were radically different from whatever ancient B&W 50s movie they remade, such as John Carpenter's "The Thing" in 1982). Look how many superhero movies there were back then: almost none. Now, all the movies are superhero franchise installments, remakes, sequels, prequels, etc. In short, Hollywood has become extremely risk-averse, and only invests in high-cost high-FX action movies because they're virtually guaranteed to be profitable, even if the profit multiplier isn't that high. They won't attempt any risky movies now like they did in decades past, so you don't see much in the way of truly new material, and instead they play it safe by making continued installments in franchises which have proven profitable. Look at the new Alien movie, a new installment of a 40-year-old franchise! That simply did not exist in the 80s.
The music industry, similarly, is fundamentally different these days too. New music isn't being made and marketed the way it was in the 60s-90s.
However, the same idea usually doesn't work for areas like movies or computer software, where the production costs are often much higher,
All the latest figures show that Hollywood is making more money than ever. A lot of this is due to foreign sales (esp. China's market), but still, they're raking in money hand over fist now.
Then the nation needs to split into at least 2-3 smaller independent nations. That way the Christian theocrats can have their version of Sharia Law, the Libertarians can have their minimal-government free-fire zone, and the rest of us can try to move forward.
I'm a little curious. Obviously, the southeast would be the new nation where the Christian theocrats take over. But what region would be the Libertarian zone, in your view? I don't see the Northeast going that way; Vermont/NH maybe, but they're a tiny, tiny fraction of the overall NE population. Or the west coast? But here again, that region is very liberal, just in a different way from places like NYC. My guess is that the southwest is probably most likely to become a "minimal-government free-fire zone", but CA and the northwest aren't going to want to be part of that.
Also, it isn't just the southeast where the Christian theocrats rule. New Jersey's Bergen County, part of the NYC metro area, has the most restrictive blue laws in the country, forbidding most businesses and work on Sundays. Chris Christie (yep, the crappy Republican) tried to repeal them but failed. He managed to get the blue law suspended for only 1 week after Hurricane Sandy. And Bergen County seems to vote pretty reliably Democrat, and they voted for Hillary in November. In "liberal" New York, alcohol sales are prohibited on Sunday mornings statewide, and most counties have even more restrictive blue laws of their own. In "liberal" Massachusetts, alcohol sales are prohibited on Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Memorial days. In Pennsylvania, alcohol sales are restricted on Sundays, and car dealerships are prohibited from operating on Sundays. And those are just northeast states; there's tons of such laws in the interior states. North Dakota seems to have the strictest blue laws in the country (at the state level), and that's nowhere near the Bible Belt.
The way I see it, the Christian theocrats are a strong and reliable voting bloc in most parts of the country, except for some large coastal cities. And since the theocrats have lots of kids while the liberals don't, the problem is getting worse, not better. Liberals are basically relying on "defection" to keep their numbers up, and a fanciful (and basically religious) notion that social mores will inevitably become more liberal over time, which has been disproven by history many times. Just look at the "roaring 20s", and contrast that to the decades that came after.
I just looked at the article, and I take that back. That place looks like sheer hell.
I haven't read the article or looked at the photos, but TFS did say that the office was so under-used that each employee had 3000 square feet of space.
I hate open-plan offices with a passion, but if I had that much room around me it wouldn't be so bad...
The alt-left/antifa movement is to the left what the alt-right movement is to the right: an embarrassment.
I disagree. The alt-right now represents the entirety of the right. If it didn't, they wouldn't have elected Trump, who was the standard-bearer for the alt-right and still has Steve Bannon (who's a self-proclaimed alt-righter) as one of his main advisors. The old-fashioned conservatives you're thinking of are basically extinct now; the mainstream IS the alt-right now, as the mainstream conservatives have mostly converted.
Go find your own citation, you moron. Those activities were all well-documented during the Occupy protests, particularly the pepper-spraying part.
I have not as of yet, seen a mob of conservatives get in a shouting match with a professor in class
That's because climate-denialist conservatives do not attend college in sufficient numbers for this kind of thing to happen. When they do attend college in high concentrations, it's at some bullshit "school" like Liberty University where they explicitly deny science in the curriculum.
The fact is, you're not going to find a bunch of conservative nutcases at a school like Evergreen; places like that attract leftist nutcases instead.
However, conservatives are disposed to violence just like anyone; just look at the various protests going on lately. There have been a bunch of documented cases of them attacking counter-protesters, and it's been documented that the local police look the other way.
That's bullshit. The anti-vax crap is on both sides of the political spectrum. The current President (a far right-winger) has spouted anti-vax BS, and there's been a bunch of it among religious groups who've then had outbreaks.
https://www.omicsonline.org/op...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
http://scienceblogs.com/insole...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/e...
But it's not just religious idiots who've latched onto the anti-vax hysteria, it's also some elements on the left, namely the loony ones who are also into various other "alternative medicine" hokum.
Remember, the "left" isn't a coherent, homogeneous group of people by any stretch, in fact it's a coalition of basically everyone who isn't right-wing. The right-wingers are generally conservative, which means they like the status quo, "traditional values", etc., so anyone who departs from this mindset is automatically left-wing, even though that can mean completely different philosophies ranging from simple "progressivism" (basically what Nordic countries have--democratic republics with a bunch of welfare state services and heavier regulation) all the way to actual communism. So the "left" includes irreligious people who want science and evidence-based thinking to determine public policy, and also fruity people who believe in garbage like "metaphysics" and the "ascended masters".
It'd be simpler and better for them to just tell affected users that they need to upgrade to the latest Apple iPads.
No, don't blame the devs, or Apple either. Blame the users. It's their fault for continuing to use these ancient 32-bit iPads. Don't they know that you're supposed to upgrade your Apple iDevices every 2 years at a minimum? What's wrong with these people? It's their responsibility to stay current with Apple's latest equipment, even if they have to feed their kids Ramen noodles to pay for it.
There are a reasonable number of AAA games, and it generally doesn't make much sense to treat each individual one as a monopoly, since there are other AAA games.
You're treating these games as interchangeable cogs. Someone who's interested in Game X is quite likely to not be so interested in Game Y. Your logic is a lot like saying that someone who can't find a theater playing Wonder Woman nearby will instead just watch The Mummy. This is quite likely false: the former has excellent reviews, and the latter poor reviews. Or that they'll happily watch "It Comes At Night"; again likely false, they might not be in the mood for a horror movie. Creative works (as games are) aren't interchangeable.
Luxury buyers are price-conscious just like anyone else, they just have a different demand curve.
Luxury buyers are *far less* price-conscious than regular people. Depending on how luxury it is, and how rich they are, there's a lot of room. Someone who wants a Rolls isn't going to switch to a BMW (whatever the top-end model is) because it's cheaper; to a buyer like that, the price isn't that big a deal. $400k isn't that much money to them. For cheaper luxury stuff, it has more of an effect: BMW could lose customers if they raise their prices too much and they can buy a Mercedes or Audi instead.
Why should we care if luxury goods are a monopoly? Partly because almost all of us in developed countries buy luxury goods. By your definition, a luxury good might cost very little; for example, an AAA game is usually under $70 or so, and plenty of people are interested in those prices.
That doesn't explain why we should care if they're a monopoly. Luxury goods are, by definition, non-essential. So if they're a monopoly, too bad: either pay the price, or go without. You don't *need* AAA games, just like no one *needs* a Rolls-Royce. There's plenty of far cheaper cars out there (which definitely aren't monopolies; there's plenty of direct competition between, say, Hondas and Toyotas), and for games, just playing games itself is a luxury, and besides, there's plenty of free games out there. archive.org has a bunch of them you can play in your web browser. If you decide you're absolutely going to buy and play some new AAA game, that's your own decision, and if that means you're locked into some other company's OS, that again is your own decision and your own doing, no one else's.
You seem to think someone who plays AAA Windows games is beneath notice,despite the loss in personal satisfaction such a player would suffer from changing OSes.
What exactly do you expect me to do? Cry for them? They put themselves in this position. They have easy alternatives:
1) Don't play the AAA game, contact the company and tell them why not, and spend their time/money playing some other game on their preferred OS (or one of the free ones I mentioned).
2) Dual-boot. Usually, when you're playing some immersive game, you're not that interested in multi-tasking anyway. There's also VMs and WINE, which may or may not work acceptably depending on the game and system.
Honestly, of all the reasons people might cry about application lock-in with Windows, AAA gaming is the least valid. At least with office/business applications, you can argue that X business app (like Quickbooks or whatever, or various CAD packages) is essential to your business and with too many of these apps, that going the VM route becomes pointlessly burdensome. But AAA gaming isn't a business activity, it's a home activity, and it's purely a luxury, and it's not even something you normally want to multitask with anyway, so dual-booting is really the easy option here.
You're talking about full-service moving. That's for rich people. If you're too fucking lazy to pack your own boxes, then yeah, it's going to cost you a lot to move, just like it costs a lot to have someone else wash your dog or cut your toenails.
If you're short on cash, between jobs, etc., you don't use full-service moving companies unless you're a fucking moron. And these companies are great ways of getting your stuff smashed or stolen anyway; they have a long history of holding your belongings hostage and stealing silverware.
No, it's not. It's not a "vehicle" either. It's a 1-axle semi-trailer. Here's a picture of one.
Motel? Food? Drink? Other externalities like maps/guides, did you happen to hire someone to pack up the house for you? Guarantee that alone for a true cross-country trip (which I almost did, TN to CA) would've eaten up another $2K.
I only spent 1 night in a motel, and 1 night at a friend's house along the way. Maps? Are you kidding? Back then, that was a couple dollars at most. I'm sure I already had a US map anyway, and the route was all interstate. No, I didn't hire someone to pack, I'm perfectly capable of that myself. Is that why your costs were so high? You had to hire people to do your work for you? People on a strict budget (which is what we're talking about here, this thread was about people having trouble getting employment needing to move) do not hire other people to pack boxes; that's a luxury. Do it yourself, and maybe get your friends/family to help.
Rolls-Royce is not a monopoly.
Neither is some AAA game, unless you want to try to argue that RR has a monopoly on RR cars the way [game publisher] has a monopoly on [game title]. There are other makers of games.
(In practice, this would mean that other manufacturers would start producing really nice cars, so the monopoly wouldn't last. This isn't the case with Windows.)
There are other OS makers out there, including Apple with MacOS, just like there's other luxury carmakers. Of course, Windows and MacOS are very different, but so are Rolls vs. Maybach.
It's entirely possible to have a monopoly on something people can do without.
Right, but if it's a luxury good, then why should we care? Of course, "luxury" is a relative term, since you could argue that electricity is a luxury, but if somehow BMW managed to dominate the over-$150k luxury car market and put all the others out of business, why should I or anyone else who can't afford such cars care? It's not like it'd affect the price anyway; true luxury goods don't have prices affected by competition, they charge whatever the market will bear, because the people willing to pay those prices aren't comparison-shopping, they're set on that brand and it's just a matter of whether they can afford it or not (e.g., a Rolls customer is not going to compare to an Audi; if they were price-sensitive, they'd get a cheaper car).
If one manufacturer makes something that is vital to the survival of a business, and there are no alternatives, then there's a monopoly that can't be evaded.
Are we talking about business applications or AAA games here? Up above, I wrote, and you quoted, "If you can't play some AAA game on anything but Windows, that's not a monopoly problem; that's a luxury". Games are luxuries. You do have a valid argument for some payroll application or whatever, but games are not necessary to run any business unless you're running some kind of arcade or something. So no, the monopoly thing doesn't fly there. You don't need to run a game, just like you don't need a Rolls or a Coach handbag.
Then you start talking about ways to run Windows, which means that you're still hooked on Windows, and you're going to have to put up with Microsoft.
This just isn't true really. Are we talking about some business app that *all* of your employees need to run continuously, or are we talking about some app that some or a few of your employees need to run occasionally? If it's just a few employees, there's no need to make all your employees put up with MS just because of that one app that they don't use. Even if they all use it, but only for a minority of their time, using it within a VM means they only need to put up with Windows for that one app, not for everything they do, and that also means you don't have to run your whole company infrastructure on Windows servers. It isn't an all-or-nothing thing: it's entirely possible to run a single app or two in a VM on a different OS, without having to do everything on that OS. Lots of developers run Linux this way: it's inside a VM, running on Windows, because the company's infrastructure (shared drives, email, documents) are all MS, but to get their dev work done requires Linux. If it can be done that way (Linux-on-Windows), it can certainly work the reverse way too.
I moved into an apartment once with a trailer; it wasn't 40ft, but it was 26ft. Yes, they do do this; they take up a bunch of parking spaces though. It's not really any worse than someone bringing in a big U-Haul truck though.