Psst, they profit off of my labors, or else I wouldn't have the fucking job in the first place. So clearly, they're getting a little something out of the arrangement, too.
Oh, sorry, is that not properly deferential? Or are we going to suspend all logic and pretend that these guys hire us out of civic virtue alone?
Oh, those poor, poor millionaires. How hard their lives are.
You honestly don't expect anyone to have sympathy for these guys, do you? If their fortunes are too much of a burden, I'm sure they can find plenty of people willing to take it off their hands and pay 10 times the tax rate these fucking assholes do with a fucking smile on their face the whole time.
Yes, better to continue prostituting ourselves and our future. Dignity costs far too much, nay?
The U.S. is the largest consumer market in the world and these guys all depend on being able to sell their shit here to continue making their immense fortunes. Think not? Tell them to pack up their shit and take their products with them. Watch how fast they back the fuck down and start paying taxes.
Because those people are ignorant, either naturally or deliberately, and think that somehow their own upbringing wasn't just as subsidized by the nanny state they bitch about as anyone else that grew up in a first-world country.
They were all raised by wolves in the forest and had to fight to the death for every bit of sustenance in their lives, didn't ya know? Remember the movie 300? They grew up like those guys, except for without the helots that made it all fucking possible.
In other words, they're full of shit and just don't want to pay it forward now that it's their turn to do like their parents and everyone before them did.
I don't know if there is a solution to that or not.
Sure there is, deny them the right to peddle their wares here. Apple wants to pull up the tent stakes and move to a tax haven like Somalia? Fine, we'll just tax your products at 100% and use the proceeds to fund businesses that hire locally and pay their taxes.
Believe it or not, this country would survive just fine if every iDevice disappeared off store shelves tomorrow. There are other companies manufacturing tablets, MP3 players, cell phones, and computers. With the size of our consumer market (still the largest in the world), a company like Apple would never in a million years dare to write us off, and I think people forget that. They're not going to torpedo the billions in revenue they earn here. The fallout among consumers if Apple really did decide to fire all it's U.S. employees in retaliation would be extraordinary. There would be mass boycotts overnight, and their market valuation would plummet.
Somewhere over the last 30 years we got it into our collective heads that these corporations own us and that we depend on them for our continued existence. Bullshit on that. They depend on us for their continued existence. Our consumer market is a bargaining chip that our government is either too chickenshit to invoke or too corrupt. None of these companies would dare pull out of our market completely, and even if by some miracle they found the balls to try, there would be another company right behind them that wouldn't.
Yeah? And how much money are those new jobs going to earn Apple? Did I miss something about them opening a charity center where every employee was a complete liability and contributed nothing to Apple's profit margin?
Subsidies are meant to give start-ups and small business the ability to compete in order to prevent a few large players from simply shutting them out of a given market. They're not meant to subsidize the fucking profit margins of the most profitable corporations on the planet.
This is the moral turpitude I'm talking about. Cutting all the bullshit about job creators, it comes down to one simple fact: Apple doesn't need this money in any way, shape or form. They could build ten of those plants and pay cash for every single one and not even feel a pinch in their operational budget, yet they approach local, state, and even the federal government greedily licking their lips as they ask what we're willing to hand over for the privilege of having Apple hire the locals? Are you kidding me? If they didn't need the work done, they wouldn't fucking hire the people to do it, and if they didn't need the plant, they wouldn't build it. They're not a charity, right? They're going to profit off of this plant, obviously. We can all agree that's a reasonable assumption to make, right? Given that assumption, why the fuck do the citizens of Texas need to take money away from people and programs that actually fucking need it to bribe a corporation that's got more capitalization potential than many countries around the world?
Yeah, it's totally reasonable that we should have to kick in a little extra to sweeten the deal on their end. Sure it is.
If it wasn't for the fucking tax dollars our country put into tech research during the cold war, Apple wouldn't even fucking exist today. Who paid for the equipment that Wozniak learned on? Taxpayers. Who paid for the fucking schools that they went to all their lives? Taxpayers. Who paid for the environment that afforded them the ability to even do what they did? Taxpayers. Think not? Think Steve Jobs would have become what he became if he'd been born in fucking Mogadishu? Get real...
I'm so sick and fucking tired of this meme where we pretend successful people just magically became successful all of their own volition with no outside help from anyone. The nanny state that so many people in this country bitch and complain about subsidized all of their lives just the same as everyone else's that grew up in this country. Even if they are "self-made", they stood on the shoulders of those that came before, they benefited from a nurturing environment...even something as simple as the 40-hour work week, imposed by that evil nanny state, not to mention the minimum wage, imposed by that evil nanny state, afforded them the spare time and the spare change to develop their hobbies and dreams into the lucrative, multinational corporations they are today.
We don't owe Apple any fucking thing. They owe us, because without the American taxpayer, they would not fucking exist.
That's totally easier than just downloading a DRM-free copy of the work and giving someone a copy via email or even sneakernet...
Oh, right, we're still pretending that there's something morally wrong with copying a bunch of ones and zeros that have no inherent value and convey no rights to the purchaser regarding First-Sale doctrine...
How long do you think Belgium (and the rest of Europe) can afford this?
As long as those companies that wish to do business there are forced to participate in the social contract.
Once they ease that restriction, and allow them to offshore all their labor and dodge taxes left and right, then they'll be on the same path towards a corporate-controlled neo-fuedalist society that we are. The only reason American corporations get away with this shit is because our representatives allow them to. They're both at fault, but I'm not going to excuse the moral turpitude prevalent in corporate society in this country just because there's no specific law against their antisocial behavior on the books. We all know that they're playing these games, the difference is, half of the people in this country, for some reason, think it's excusable. Funny how those same people often bitch and complain about the "parasites" collecting welfare and food stamps but ignore the fucking billion dollar corporations taking billions in subsidies and paying zero net tax year after year.
Whee, let's just race all the way to the fucking bottom! "What gives you the right to complain about your gruel, serf?!? There are people in Africa that don't even have gruel to eat! We'll show you, we'll just move our factory there instead!!"
I suppose we should just be grateful these companies allow us to draw breath at all.
Imagine if they publicized the underhanded shit done by the banks/corporate America with as much diligence. Hell, imagine if American citizens had to work a few months in one of those Foxconn factories...how long would it be before this whole "oh, those poor, poor multibillion dollar corporations that are making more money than they ever have in history are forced to employ slave labor on the other side of the world" nonsense went out the fucking window?
Half the people in this country still believe they're going to be part of that club of the super wealthy one day, and until that changes, we're going to continue being ruled by the real parasites on society, limited liability corporations.
We all know they shouldn't be, but they're going to anyway, whether it's legal or illegal. The days of having a separate private life are over in this increasingly 24/7 work environment.
Discrimination is one of those things that pretty much impossible to prove unless it's egregious. Even if a lawsuit is justified, many lawyers won't touch a discrimination case with a 10-foot pole. Plus, discrimination in itself requires the victim to be in a "protected class", which is why all the assholes posting job openings with "Long-term unemployed need not apply" can get away with their shit. Unemployment is not a protected class, therefore, an employer has every right to discriminate against you there. Neither is participation in social media. Neither is political persuasion, which how employers here in Wisconsin are getting away with checking potential applicants against a database of recall petition signers, because they don't want to hire people supportive of unions (in the words of one assho^H^H^H^H^Hgentlemen, who chose to remain anonymous of course, "this makes it easy to see who the parasites are").
I don't participate in social media much (outside of commenting on websites like this, which are obviously not tied to my real name in any way), and I'm lucky in the fact that my name is about as common as 'John Smith', plus there are professional athletes, musicians, and actors that have the same name also, so any potential employer trying to Google me is going to come up with about a billion garbage results before they get around to something that could actually be tied to me (I tried myself just to see and made it 20 pages in before I gave up). It allows me to kind of hide in plain sight, and that's just fine with me. If an employer truly wishes to discriminate against me for a lack of a window into my personal life, I rationalize it by recognizing that I would not want to work for an employer that does that shit, anyway.
I'm not going to give Lincoln too much shit over his increase in federal powers. The "States Rights" argument was just a bullshit way of saying "We want to continue enslaving people, and you have no right to tell us no".
Whatever Lincoln's true motivations were for freeing the slaves, if ever there was a justifiable reason for an increase in federal power, that would be one. If he hadn't been assassinated, Reconstruction likely wouldn't have been the huge bag of shit it turned into, and the following hundred years of Jim Crow and the Klan in the south would likely never have occurred (certainly not to the degree that it did).
The two-party system has the entire country locked into the Prisoner's Dilemma. We don't vote for the candidate we want, we vote for the opposite of the candidate we don't want, just as those two prisoners will fuck each other even though cooperation would result in freedom for them both.
Oh, believe me, I know that Congress and the Senate voted for these fucking loopholes, but that's not a valid excuse for this crap. You don't think that Steve Jobs knew that he was paying an effective tax rate well below the entry-level guys he had working 70 hour weeks? This is a guy that parked in handicapped spaces looooooong before he actually got sick we're talking about here. He rationalized it as "Horray for me, fuck everyone else", and that's a trait you see a lot among these 'Master of the Universe' types. People all over the world metaphorically polish his knob every time the subject of Apple comes up, but rarely do people talk about what an unbelievable prick he was, and I don't just mean the way he treated his employees, he treated everyone that way.
Yes, congress passed laws allowing these companies to do this shit. Congress didn't make them move their "offices" to tax havens all over the world. They didn't make them send all that money to banks in the Caribbean to hide it from the IRS. Nobody forced them to be leeches, sucking in subsidies while raking in billions. Apple's sucking up $30 million in Texan taxpayer dollars despite the fact that they are literally the most valuable corporation in the fucking world. They've got $10 Billion (with a b) in cash in the bank, and they still need Texans to cough up a little extra to build that fucking plant? Come the hell on. That's the extortion bullshit I'm talking about. They're taking $30 million from who knows how many social programs, schools, infrastructure...and in exchange we get what? The privilege of working for them so they can earn more money off of our labors?
I mean, an unemployed mother looking for food stamps, she's a fucking leech on society, but the most valuable corporation on earth gleefully taking huge transfers of wealth from public coffers into their private accounts is what? A goddamn pillar of the community? A company to admire? Please. They're the real leeches. Let these mother fuckers move their corporate offices to fucking China, or better yet, let them take their shit and go to Africa, far from these pesky taxes and everything else. I don't really much give a shit, but I'll be damned if I'm going to sit here and subsidize their goddamn profit margin while half the houses in my neighborhood are sitting fucking vacant because the families that lived in them lost their jobs and then lost their homes, and then, when they hit the lowest point and have to go get some sort of assistance to make sure their kids eat decent food, get called "parasites". Fuck that shit. You want to see the real parasites, go fucking read Forbes.
it would be other incentives to encourage companies to create jobs.
You mean, outside of the profit they earn on our labors? That not enough incentive anymore, now the taxpayers have to kick in a little extra, too?
God, what I would give to have a government with the sack to tell these extortionist fucks to go pound sand. Think Apple is going to risk the boycotts and bullshit if they fired all their employees? I doubt it very fucking much...
Steve Jobs benefited from all the things taxpayers fund growing up, just like all of us did. He wasn't raised by wolves in the fucking forest, he grew up in California, the nanny state to end all nanny states, and all those things these assholes bitch about today played a part in making him who he was, as successful as he was. Now that the company is successful, what, they have no moral obligation to pay it fucking forward?
I mean, that's what all this shit comes down to. These guys stood on the shoulders of who knows how many giants before them, giants that were subsidized by the tax dollars of the people of this country, and now that it's their turn to give a little back, they want to cry and complain about how unfair that idea is and do everything they can to hide their profits. It's no different than knowingly hiring illegals in this fucking country. People that do that shit, and play these fucking games where they only get paid a dollar on fucking paper so they don't have to pay taxes...they're doing more harm to our country than ANY fucking terrorist or gang member or welfare queen, and we all know this, so why the fuck are we playing this game?
Not only that, but when they fucking break (and they will), how much is that going to cost to replace? $2,000?
A friend of mine had an SUV with a digital dash (think it was a Jeep but I don't remember), it was just so fucking cool...until it died on her. Then she took it in and found out the replacement alone was gonna cost a grand, not to mention how labor intensive it was going to be (probably another grand on top). It was literally more expensive than the value of the vehicle as a whole (she put a lot of miles on that car). She obviously said, "uh, no thanks" and, for a while, she literally had no instrumentation in her car at all and had to eyeball her speed, get gas every few days to make sure she didn't run out...
While a car is under warranty, great, but some of us like to drive cars until they die, not trade them in every other fucking year.
However given that >90% of those who actually vote, vote for one of the Two Parties, go figure.
I get what you're saying, and you're absolutely right, but I'll tell you something, I voted my conscience twice, in both 2000 and 2004, and we ended up with that fucking asshole Bush both times. You'll have to forgive the proles if they're reticent to keep bashing their heads against the wall and "voting their conscience". I've argued and debated and circulated petitions and fact-checked and provided evidence until I've been blue in the face and it doesn't fucking make a difference, not because people are unintelligent necessarily, but because the fact that they're working their fucking asses off and trying to keep their heads above water precludes the majority being informed on the issues even cursorily. All they get is the couple hours between dinner and bedtime to get their information and then it's back to work. If they've got young kids, forget it.
This entire country is caught up in a giant Prisoner's Dilemma, and unfortunately, I don't see that changing anytime soon, and certainly not peacefully. Nobody wants it to get to that point (nobody sane, anyway) but I really honestly believe we're in a positive feedback loop now. Civil disobedience begets the curtailing of our rights in the name of 'security' which begets civil disobedience and on and on we go. Hell, Thomas Jefferson thought revolution was a sign of a healthy society.
That's the beauty in this: it's like the "Won't someone please think of the children?!" bullshit fallacies got turned right back around and used for good. If they want to pursue this (which I doubt), they have to go after a 92 year old vet that's spent $30,000 out of pocket sending DVDs to our troops. In what universe could that possibly have a positive result for them?
What are you talking about? There are literally dozens (maybe hundreds) of different types of screws alone, engineered vastly different from one another to be best at their application. Wood screws are much different from sheet metal screws which are much different from concrete screws, phillips-head versus flat-head versus torx versus proprietary heads...
Everything from the length of the screw, the spacing of the threading, whether it's self-tapping or not...they're all engineered to be best at a particular application. Once you extend the set to include fasteners of any type, there are probably a million different types, be it mechanical, chemical, magnetic...
Try drilling a flat-head sheet metal screw into concrete. That's pretty much the same result you'll have trying to shove a one-size-fits-all CPU into every embedded computer system in the nation.
As the summary surmises, a unified architecture could make it easier to build in a common backdoor for spying.
Given the sheer amount of hacking originating in China, I would think the last thing they'd want to do is apply a homogeneous solution to critical systems. It seems to me like that's just an invitation to hackers world-wide to exploit the shit out of it.
I'd guess that has more to do with the fact that the Xbox 360 is approaching 7 years old and the market is saturated. Didn't all the major players post a reduction in sales last quarter, even Nintendo?
Once the new Xbox comes out, provided they don't fuck it up with some anti-used game bullshit (among other things), I'm sure they'll be raking in the dough again. In all honesty, I thought that Xbox Live, with it's (imho) high fees, was going to be annihilated by Playstation Network, but Sony completely shit the bed in so many ways there (What good is a free service if it fucking sucks?), and Nintendo really doesn't seem to give a shit about building a real online community, so I'm sure that XBL will be making them a pretty penny and will for a long time.
Oh don't worry, once they make sharing any pirated material on the web punishable by death, it'll slow down dramatically.
I'm being facetious, of course, but I fully expect the penalties for piracy to become more and more draconian to the point of absurdity within the next decade. The financial penalties and even the inconveniences imposed by 3-strikes rules are never going to be effective because the odds of getting caught are so low, so as the MAFIAA fuckheads get more desperate, you're going to see more and more money getting thrown at governments all over the world to harshly criminalize the behavior. Once every other tool at their disposal has failed, they'll resort to that one, and many of our reps will gladly agree that yes, file sharing should be punishable by death, because piracy is treason and sedition.
Seriously, though, as someone that proctored the TSA tests for years, believe me, I'm not surprised at all. Half the people I sat for the tests seemed to be under the influence of some type of narcotics, not to mention the gang tattoos and shit.
The test itself was stellar, too, asking hard hitting questions like "Have you ever lived in a house you thought was haunted?" I wish I could say I was kidding, but I'm not.
Remember this next time they've got their hand in your 8 year old's waistband....
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Psst, they profit off of my labors, or else I wouldn't have the fucking job in the first place. So clearly, they're getting a little something out of the arrangement, too.
Oh, sorry, is that not properly deferential? Or are we going to suspend all logic and pretend that these guys hire us out of civic virtue alone?
Oh, those poor, poor millionaires. How hard their lives are.
You honestly don't expect anyone to have sympathy for these guys, do you? If their fortunes are too much of a burden, I'm sure they can find plenty of people willing to take it off their hands and pay 10 times the tax rate these fucking assholes do with a fucking smile on their face the whole time.
Yes, better to continue prostituting ourselves and our future. Dignity costs far too much, nay?
The U.S. is the largest consumer market in the world and these guys all depend on being able to sell their shit here to continue making their immense fortunes. Think not? Tell them to pack up their shit and take their products with them. Watch how fast they back the fuck down and start paying taxes.
Because those people are ignorant, either naturally or deliberately, and think that somehow their own upbringing wasn't just as subsidized by the nanny state they bitch about as anyone else that grew up in a first-world country.
They were all raised by wolves in the forest and had to fight to the death for every bit of sustenance in their lives, didn't ya know? Remember the movie 300? They grew up like those guys, except for without the helots that made it all fucking possible.
In other words, they're full of shit and just don't want to pay it forward now that it's their turn to do like their parents and everyone before them did.
I don't know if there is a solution to that or not.
Sure there is, deny them the right to peddle their wares here. Apple wants to pull up the tent stakes and move to a tax haven like Somalia? Fine, we'll just tax your products at 100% and use the proceeds to fund businesses that hire locally and pay their taxes.
Believe it or not, this country would survive just fine if every iDevice disappeared off store shelves tomorrow. There are other companies manufacturing tablets, MP3 players, cell phones, and computers. With the size of our consumer market (still the largest in the world), a company like Apple would never in a million years dare to write us off, and I think people forget that. They're not going to torpedo the billions in revenue they earn here. The fallout among consumers if Apple really did decide to fire all it's U.S. employees in retaliation would be extraordinary. There would be mass boycotts overnight, and their market valuation would plummet.
Somewhere over the last 30 years we got it into our collective heads that these corporations own us and that we depend on them for our continued existence. Bullshit on that. They depend on us for their continued existence. Our consumer market is a bargaining chip that our government is either too chickenshit to invoke or too corrupt. None of these companies would dare pull out of our market completely, and even if by some miracle they found the balls to try, there would be another company right behind them that wouldn't.
Yeah? And how much money are those new jobs going to earn Apple? Did I miss something about them opening a charity center where every employee was a complete liability and contributed nothing to Apple's profit margin?
Subsidies are meant to give start-ups and small business the ability to compete in order to prevent a few large players from simply shutting them out of a given market. They're not meant to subsidize the fucking profit margins of the most profitable corporations on the planet.
This is the moral turpitude I'm talking about. Cutting all the bullshit about job creators, it comes down to one simple fact: Apple doesn't need this money in any way, shape or form. They could build ten of those plants and pay cash for every single one and not even feel a pinch in their operational budget, yet they approach local, state, and even the federal government greedily licking their lips as they ask what we're willing to hand over for the privilege of having Apple hire the locals? Are you kidding me? If they didn't need the work done, they wouldn't fucking hire the people to do it, and if they didn't need the plant, they wouldn't build it. They're not a charity, right? They're going to profit off of this plant, obviously. We can all agree that's a reasonable assumption to make, right? Given that assumption, why the fuck do the citizens of Texas need to take money away from people and programs that actually fucking need it to bribe a corporation that's got more capitalization potential than many countries around the world?
According to the estimate of Apple's market capitalization at $460 billion, that puts them at 27th of 182 countries by GDP according to IMF rankings in 2011. That's just under Taiwan and just above Argentina. Apple is now worth more than the entire yearly output of 155 countries.
Yeah, it's totally reasonable that we should have to kick in a little extra to sweeten the deal on their end. Sure it is.
If it wasn't for the fucking tax dollars our country put into tech research during the cold war, Apple wouldn't even fucking exist today. Who paid for the equipment that Wozniak learned on? Taxpayers. Who paid for the fucking schools that they went to all their lives? Taxpayers. Who paid for the environment that afforded them the ability to even do what they did? Taxpayers. Think not? Think Steve Jobs would have become what he became if he'd been born in fucking Mogadishu? Get real...
I'm so sick and fucking tired of this meme where we pretend successful people just magically became successful all of their own volition with no outside help from anyone. The nanny state that so many people in this country bitch and complain about subsidized all of their lives just the same as everyone else's that grew up in this country. Even if they are "self-made", they stood on the shoulders of those that came before, they benefited from a nurturing environment...even something as simple as the 40-hour work week, imposed by that evil nanny state, not to mention the minimum wage, imposed by that evil nanny state, afforded them the spare time and the spare change to develop their hobbies and dreams into the lucrative, multinational corporations they are today.
We don't owe Apple any fucking thing. They owe us, because without the American taxpayer, they would not fucking exist.
That's totally easier than just downloading a DRM-free copy of the work and giving someone a copy via email or even sneakernet...
Oh, right, we're still pretending that there's something morally wrong with copying a bunch of ones and zeros that have no inherent value and convey no rights to the purchaser regarding First-Sale doctrine...
How long do you think Belgium (and the rest of Europe) can afford this?
As long as those companies that wish to do business there are forced to participate in the social contract.
Once they ease that restriction, and allow them to offshore all their labor and dodge taxes left and right, then they'll be on the same path towards a corporate-controlled neo-fuedalist society that we are. The only reason American corporations get away with this shit is because our representatives allow them to. They're both at fault, but I'm not going to excuse the moral turpitude prevalent in corporate society in this country just because there's no specific law against their antisocial behavior on the books. We all know that they're playing these games, the difference is, half of the people in this country, for some reason, think it's excusable. Funny how those same people often bitch and complain about the "parasites" collecting welfare and food stamps but ignore the fucking billion dollar corporations taking billions in subsidies and paying zero net tax year after year.
Whee, let's just race all the way to the fucking bottom! "What gives you the right to complain about your gruel, serf?!? There are people in Africa that don't even have gruel to eat! We'll show you, we'll just move our factory there instead!!"
I suppose we should just be grateful these companies allow us to draw breath at all.
Fuckin' A right.
Imagine if they publicized the underhanded shit done by the banks/corporate America with as much diligence. Hell, imagine if American citizens had to work a few months in one of those Foxconn factories...how long would it be before this whole "oh, those poor, poor multibillion dollar corporations that are making more money than they ever have in history are forced to employ slave labor on the other side of the world" nonsense went out the fucking window?
Half the people in this country still believe they're going to be part of that club of the super wealthy one day, and until that changes, we're going to continue being ruled by the real parasites on society, limited liability corporations.
We all know they shouldn't be, but they're going to anyway, whether it's legal or illegal. The days of having a separate private life are over in this increasingly 24/7 work environment.
Discrimination is one of those things that pretty much impossible to prove unless it's egregious. Even if a lawsuit is justified, many lawyers won't touch a discrimination case with a 10-foot pole. Plus, discrimination in itself requires the victim to be in a "protected class", which is why all the assholes posting job openings with "Long-term unemployed need not apply" can get away with their shit. Unemployment is not a protected class, therefore, an employer has every right to discriminate against you there. Neither is participation in social media. Neither is political persuasion, which how employers here in Wisconsin are getting away with checking potential applicants against a database of recall petition signers, because they don't want to hire people supportive of unions (in the words of one assho^H^H^H^H^Hgentlemen, who chose to remain anonymous of course, "this makes it easy to see who the parasites are").
I don't participate in social media much (outside of commenting on websites like this, which are obviously not tied to my real name in any way), and I'm lucky in the fact that my name is about as common as 'John Smith', plus there are professional athletes, musicians, and actors that have the same name also, so any potential employer trying to Google me is going to come up with about a billion garbage results before they get around to something that could actually be tied to me (I tried myself just to see and made it 20 pages in before I gave up). It allows me to kind of hide in plain sight, and that's just fine with me. If an employer truly wishes to discriminate against me for a lack of a window into my personal life, I rationalize it by recognizing that I would not want to work for an employer that does that shit, anyway.
I'm not going to give Lincoln too much shit over his increase in federal powers. The "States Rights" argument was just a bullshit way of saying "We want to continue enslaving people, and you have no right to tell us no".
Whatever Lincoln's true motivations were for freeing the slaves, if ever there was a justifiable reason for an increase in federal power, that would be one. If he hadn't been assassinated, Reconstruction likely wouldn't have been the huge bag of shit it turned into, and the following hundred years of Jim Crow and the Klan in the south would likely never have occurred (certainly not to the degree that it did).
The two-party system has the entire country locked into the Prisoner's Dilemma. We don't vote for the candidate we want, we vote for the opposite of the candidate we don't want, just as those two prisoners will fuck each other even though cooperation would result in freedom for them both.
For the record, some don't even believe Bush won the election in 2000 at all. Regardless of what you believe there, I'm betting most people in this country would agree we need some serious election reform in this country (and especially campaign finance reform) but that's just not going to happen as long as the people that make the laws benefit from the way the laws are currently set up. We'd probably be better off if we selected our representatives at random via lottery, but that's obviously never going to happen.
Oh, believe me, I know that Congress and the Senate voted for these fucking loopholes, but that's not a valid excuse for this crap. You don't think that Steve Jobs knew that he was paying an effective tax rate well below the entry-level guys he had working 70 hour weeks? This is a guy that parked in handicapped spaces looooooong before he actually got sick we're talking about here. He rationalized it as "Horray for me, fuck everyone else", and that's a trait you see a lot among these 'Master of the Universe' types. People all over the world metaphorically polish his knob every time the subject of Apple comes up, but rarely do people talk about what an unbelievable prick he was, and I don't just mean the way he treated his employees, he treated everyone that way.
Yes, congress passed laws allowing these companies to do this shit. Congress didn't make them move their "offices" to tax havens all over the world. They didn't make them send all that money to banks in the Caribbean to hide it from the IRS. Nobody forced them to be leeches, sucking in subsidies while raking in billions. Apple's sucking up $30 million in Texan taxpayer dollars despite the fact that they are literally the most valuable corporation in the fucking world. They've got $10 Billion (with a b) in cash in the bank, and they still need Texans to cough up a little extra to build that fucking plant? Come the hell on. That's the extortion bullshit I'm talking about. They're taking $30 million from who knows how many social programs, schools, infrastructure...and in exchange we get what? The privilege of working for them so they can earn more money off of our labors?
I mean, an unemployed mother looking for food stamps, she's a fucking leech on society, but the most valuable corporation on earth gleefully taking huge transfers of wealth from public coffers into their private accounts is what? A goddamn pillar of the community? A company to admire? Please. They're the real leeches. Let these mother fuckers move their corporate offices to fucking China, or better yet, let them take their shit and go to Africa, far from these pesky taxes and everything else. I don't really much give a shit, but I'll be damned if I'm going to sit here and subsidize their goddamn profit margin while half the houses in my neighborhood are sitting fucking vacant because the families that lived in them lost their jobs and then lost their homes, and then, when they hit the lowest point and have to go get some sort of assistance to make sure their kids eat decent food, get called "parasites". Fuck that shit. You want to see the real parasites, go fucking read Forbes.
it would be other incentives to encourage companies to create jobs.
You mean, outside of the profit they earn on our labors? That not enough incentive anymore, now the taxpayers have to kick in a little extra, too?
God, what I would give to have a government with the sack to tell these extortionist fucks to go pound sand. Think Apple is going to risk the boycotts and bullshit if they fired all their employees? I doubt it very fucking much...
Steve Jobs benefited from all the things taxpayers fund growing up, just like all of us did. He wasn't raised by wolves in the fucking forest, he grew up in California, the nanny state to end all nanny states, and all those things these assholes bitch about today played a part in making him who he was, as successful as he was. Now that the company is successful, what, they have no moral obligation to pay it fucking forward?
I mean, that's what all this shit comes down to. These guys stood on the shoulders of who knows how many giants before them, giants that were subsidized by the tax dollars of the people of this country, and now that it's their turn to give a little back, they want to cry and complain about how unfair that idea is and do everything they can to hide their profits. It's no different than knowingly hiring illegals in this fucking country. People that do that shit, and play these fucking games where they only get paid a dollar on fucking paper so they don't have to pay taxes...they're doing more harm to our country than ANY fucking terrorist or gang member or welfare queen, and we all know this, so why the fuck are we playing this game?
Not only that, but when they fucking break (and they will), how much is that going to cost to replace? $2,000?
A friend of mine had an SUV with a digital dash (think it was a Jeep but I don't remember), it was just so fucking cool...until it died on her. Then she took it in and found out the replacement alone was gonna cost a grand, not to mention how labor intensive it was going to be (probably another grand on top). It was literally more expensive than the value of the vehicle as a whole (she put a lot of miles on that car). She obviously said, "uh, no thanks" and, for a while, she literally had no instrumentation in her car at all and had to eyeball her speed, get gas every few days to make sure she didn't run out...
While a car is under warranty, great, but some of us like to drive cars until they die, not trade them in every other fucking year.
However given that >90% of those who actually vote, vote for one of the Two Parties, go figure.
I get what you're saying, and you're absolutely right, but I'll tell you something, I voted my conscience twice, in both 2000 and 2004, and we ended up with that fucking asshole Bush both times. You'll have to forgive the proles if they're reticent to keep bashing their heads against the wall and "voting their conscience". I've argued and debated and circulated petitions and fact-checked and provided evidence until I've been blue in the face and it doesn't fucking make a difference, not because people are unintelligent necessarily, but because the fact that they're working their fucking asses off and trying to keep their heads above water precludes the majority being informed on the issues even cursorily. All they get is the couple hours between dinner and bedtime to get their information and then it's back to work. If they've got young kids, forget it.
This entire country is caught up in a giant Prisoner's Dilemma, and unfortunately, I don't see that changing anytime soon, and certainly not peacefully. Nobody wants it to get to that point (nobody sane, anyway) but I really honestly believe we're in a positive feedback loop now. Civil disobedience begets the curtailing of our rights in the name of 'security' which begets civil disobedience and on and on we go. Hell, Thomas Jefferson thought revolution was a sign of a healthy society.
That's the beauty in this: it's like the "Won't someone please think of the children?!" bullshit fallacies got turned right back around and used for good. If they want to pursue this (which I doubt), they have to go after a 92 year old vet that's spent $30,000 out of pocket sending DVDs to our troops. In what universe could that possibly have a positive result for them?
Hell yes! This guy is my fucking hero of the day...
What are you talking about? There are literally dozens (maybe hundreds) of different types of screws alone, engineered vastly different from one another to be best at their application. Wood screws are much different from sheet metal screws which are much different from concrete screws, phillips-head versus flat-head versus torx versus proprietary heads...
Everything from the length of the screw, the spacing of the threading, whether it's self-tapping or not...they're all engineered to be best at a particular application. Once you extend the set to include fasteners of any type, there are probably a million different types, be it mechanical, chemical, magnetic...
Try drilling a flat-head sheet metal screw into concrete. That's pretty much the same result you'll have trying to shove a one-size-fits-all CPU into every embedded computer system in the nation.
As the summary surmises, a unified architecture could make it easier to build in a common backdoor for spying.
Given the sheer amount of hacking originating in China, I would think the last thing they'd want to do is apply a homogeneous solution to critical systems. It seems to me like that's just an invitation to hackers world-wide to exploit the shit out of it.
Maybe they think they're hack-proof or something.
I'd guess that has more to do with the fact that the Xbox 360 is approaching 7 years old and the market is saturated. Didn't all the major players post a reduction in sales last quarter, even Nintendo?
Once the new Xbox comes out, provided they don't fuck it up with some anti-used game bullshit (among other things), I'm sure they'll be raking in the dough again. In all honesty, I thought that Xbox Live, with it's (imho) high fees, was going to be annihilated by Playstation Network, but Sony completely shit the bed in so many ways there (What good is a free service if it fucking sucks?), and Nintendo really doesn't seem to give a shit about building a real online community, so I'm sure that XBL will be making them a pretty penny and will for a long time.
Oh don't worry, once they make sharing any pirated material on the web punishable by death, it'll slow down dramatically.
I'm being facetious, of course, but I fully expect the penalties for piracy to become more and more draconian to the point of absurdity within the next decade. The financial penalties and even the inconveniences imposed by 3-strikes rules are never going to be effective because the odds of getting caught are so low, so as the MAFIAA fuckheads get more desperate, you're going to see more and more money getting thrown at governments all over the world to harshly criminalize the behavior. Once every other tool at their disposal has failed, they'll resort to that one, and many of our reps will gladly agree that yes, file sharing should be punishable by death, because piracy is treason and sedition.
Fuck if I know, I didn't score the tests; I just sat people for them and made sure they weren't cheating.
How one 'cheats' on questions like that, though, I have no idea...
Who would have thought?!?!
Seriously, though, as someone that proctored the TSA tests for years, believe me, I'm not surprised at all. Half the people I sat for the tests seemed to be under the influence of some type of narcotics, not to mention the gang tattoos and shit.
The test itself was stellar, too, asking hard hitting questions like "Have you ever lived in a house you thought was haunted?" I wish I could say I was kidding, but I'm not.
Remember this next time they've got their hand in your 8 year old's waistband....