When you can do full on video editing and conversion, run virtual machines, etc...basically do all the things millions of people do every single day on their PC...on a tablet, then maybe, but until then the PC ain't going anywhere. If these companies want to push to eliminate their offerings on that front because tablets are more profitable, hey, more power to them, but pronouncing the death of the PC is just as stupid now as it was 10 years ago when everyone predicted modern gaming consoles and laptops would do the same. Clearly that has still not come to pass...
I think the implied distinction is that it's "illegal" foreigners that are doing the job stealing. At least, that's been my experience. I honestly haven't heard a "foreigners" rant in it's own right since my grandfather passed away 15 years ago. Pretty much everyone accepts the people that come here properly and follow the law (although you do have rants about people not learning English and such, but I'd bet that happens in any country that has a universal language if not a national one).
Pundits just WANT the PC to go away because they realize they screwed up in that early product cycle by giving all the power to the users. Users have the ability to change anything or do anything they want and can un-cripple anything they do to that class of devices. They want to introduce something shiny and new that is locked down and sealed box like smart phones where they can cripple them and sell the features back to you piecemill.
Wish I had mod points, but looks like others are taking care of that...
As for where they are, electronics using vacuum tubes are popular with audiophiles and people who like playing with old radio equipment, particularly ham radio operators with a bit of nuclear war paranoia...
Or guitar players that realize a tube amp sounds better than 95% of solid-states.
For multiplayer, fine. put cheat detection, require Battle.NET, whatever. If I am playing with other people I want to feel that the games are fair.
The funny thing is, the online portion of the game still won't really be fair because you're going to end up with a metric shit tonne of kids with their parents credit card paying to win, not to mention the hordes of Chinese gold farmers that are going to be grinding the items out to sell to them. Online play in Diablo 3 is gonna suck without a group of people you know in real life to play with.
Let me give you an example (there is a problem with it and I reckon right from the start): It's a matter of only 2 or 3 years that Blizzard changed the maintenance cycle of their oceanic servers in WoW to coincide with the Oceanic timezone. Before that, any WoW player in Australia (for example) would get home on Tuesday and find that the maintenance cycle had just started. And that it was later extended another another for whatever reason.
Square-Enix was notorious for doing that with Final Fantasy XI; the maintenance cycle always fell during Japanese off-hours (since they are a Japanese company and all) so when they'd turn the servers off in the middle of the night there us North American players would get the shaft in our prime time. They also never heard of the concept of doing many small updates as opposed to one big one, so every couple months the game would just be down for hours...and because the updates were coming from the same place in Japan (i.e., no swarm-based updates like Blizzard) and you had the entire North American market logging in together to get that ginormous update, what would have been a 4 hour download on a good connection turned into an 8 hour one. I once had an update literally take 14.5 hours to complete in that game on a high-speed connection.
I'm sure Blizzard will do better than that, but still, tying more games to the functionality of my already shaky internet connection (Charter fucking sucks) seems like it's just going to hamper me from playing the game. The hackers and cheats will find a way around their DRM, they always do.
You don't complain about lack of single player in MMO games either, do you?
No, but Diablo III isn't an MMO. If they wanted to make it an MMO, they should have just done that. Instead it seems like they want to make a half-assed Single-Player/MMO-ish hybrid.
I can't wait until the Chinese gold farmers descend upon Diablo 3, though. That's definitely gonna make for an awesome online experience for the rest of us
I'm not gonna bother picking out each assertion you made and responding to it like you did, but the reason why we do not allow things to revert to how they were at the birth of the industrial age when there were no social programs whatsoever is because it is in the interests of the greater good to provide these basic things.
The alternative is to end up with situations where you have large quantities of street rats banging on car windows at every intersection in every major city in the US, crime skyrocketing, property values plummeting, urban blight, disease due to poor living conditions and malnutrition. Basically, look at how the poor live in Mumbai or Rio, or hell, even here in the US in cities like Detroit and Cleveland. Those people are getting assistance and look at how bad off those areas are. Can you even imagine what it's gonna look like when they're cut off? Detroit is gonna burn to the ground.
Now, I'm sure I'll get some sort of "so?" response to that, or how it's their own fault for being lazy, or whatever the hell sin they committed to end up poor (since nobody has ever had problems outside of their control, like illness or job loss), but regardless, getting them aid is better than playing the "survival of the fittest" game that you seem to be championing for. This isn't a third world country; there are plenty of them to choose from if that's what you're looking for. Hell, I bet your money will go pretty damn far there, too, and I doubt there'd be too many tears shed if more like minded people followed suit, but that's not the type of country that so many people have given their lives defending.
You're still looking at it from the wrong point of view. We use that money to keep these areas from turning into the slums of Rio or Mumbai, which in turn keeps property values up, which in turn benefits the property owners. This also keeps the crime from spiraling out of control and spilling out into the surrounding area, which unchecked would further lower property values, which would kill the businesses in these areas, adding to the number of people living in these depressed areas, which then pushes crime farther out, and the cycle continues...
In the end, keeping poverty under control is in their best interests. They can either spend a little today in the form of raised taxes or they can spend a lot later trying to turn their home into a fucking fortress and living like they do in Somalia, where every trip to the grocery store has to be planned tactically to avoid the roving gangs stopping people and shaking them down. We have evidence of this from all over the globe, we have seen where it all ends up if we start cutting people off and letting them twist in the wind and live the "dog eat dog" lifestyle the neocons seem to want so bad.
I mean, do people deliberately ignore the link between crime and poverty, or did a large portion of the population just become suddenly blind to that fact?
You mean those crime-ridden hell-holes that your wise and benevolent government built for you as part of the myriad of social programs that you're vehemently arguing against cutting?
Yeah, those ones, because (and I'm sure this is going to blow your mind) it is still better than being homeless and living in a car, or on the fucking street. Where do you think these people are going to go? Oh, right:
the alternative isn't poor people starving and dying in the streets, it's poor people getting married to support their children in low-cost private housing, instead of being raised by government-subsidized single mothers only to become bastards who commit rape, robbery, murder, and other mayhem.
Really? It's that simple?! Oh my God!! Hey guys, looks like Mike here solved the problem with poverty in the US, we just need to pair them up and make them get married, then they will magically have all the means to raise those kids just fine without any assistance! We'll just put them in all that low-cost private housing! You know, all those decent neighborhoods filled with benevolent landlords that are waiting to receive all the people from the projects with open arms? How could we forget about them?!
You have no concept of what you speak of. The vast majority of the people in those situations didn't choose to be there, they ended up there due to circumstances outside of their control. With all the stories of people losing their homes and shit, with all the people getting laid off, are you seriously still holding to that ridiculous notion that only the dregs of society and the undeserving are desperate or on government assistance? Have you ever actually met a poor person, or do you just see them on TV and read about them in the paper?
The biggest tragedy is all the people calling for the end to social security. In civilized cultures the elderly are revered and taken care of because they raised us and everything we have today was built upon their hard work and sacrifices when they were our age. They take care of them because they fucking deserve it and because it's the morally right thing to do. Anyone that's calling for those cuts, go down to Walmart and look at that 80 year old people greeter that is handing out shopping carts and struggling with stickers due to their arthritis. Really look. If you can do that and not be completely ashamed, then you are a far colder man than I, and frankly, if that's the type of society you want to live in where we can't even take care of our forebears, then I want no part of it.
I mean, what the hell did we spend all these billions defending our country if we can't even take care of our own? We have fucking veterans sleeping under bridges. We can't even take care of the people that risked their lives to defend the country that made these assholes rich and they're supposed to "tighten their belts"?!
Man, what I would give just to lock a group of millionaires in a room with those "bastards" and have them justify why they can't pay a few more percentage points a year in taxes...I bet they could suggest a few ways they could trim their budgets without fucking over the disadvantaged...
Yet another person placing the blame for the US economy on the people living in the ghetto and the elderly...
There's a reason for those social programs, and that reason is the greater good. Cut welfare and social security and all of that and you know what we end up with? Groups of kids banging on car windows at every light begging for money. Rampant disease due to poor living conditions and malnutrition. Entire neighborhoods that are run by drug lords and gang bangers with no police presence whatsoever. People being murdered in the streets while others walk by.
Go watch the movie Slumdog Millionaire and look at the living conditions of those people. That is what the U.S. will look like if we cut social programs and let people twist in the wind. Hell, there are some parts of this country that already look like that, like Detroit, Cleveland, parts of L.A.
Raising the tax rate on the wealthy by a few percentage points isn't going to mean a fucking thing to them either financially or in terms of the lifestyle they are able to afford. But that same amount of money conferred upon the needy makes a world of difference. But the have's in this country have all gotten it into their head that they are being stolen from by undeserving thieves, conveniently ignoring all the times in their own lives that they got benefit from money others spent to help get them where they are today. It's like they think they grew up in a vacuum with no government or something, but as we all know how ridiculous that notion is, it's plainly bullshit.
I'm all for going after fraud and waste in government spending; Medicare fraud in particular is obscene. Remember, these are doctors scamming the government for thousands of dollars a year with bogus Medicare claims. Doctors. What, they don't make enough money a year being a fucking doctor? What the hell kind of lifestyle are they trying to live? They can't be happy with what they have that they need to try and take advantage of the system to scam taxpayers? Meanwhile, the women in the ghetto that buys her kids a used 360 for Christmas so they have something enjoyable in their lives, she's the evil one?
We need to put things in their proper perspective. I'm perfectly fine with paying a little more to help get us out of this mess, and I don't even make very much money as it is, but goddamnit, I am not gonna sit here and listen to millionaires cry poor. If we're tightening belts, let's start with the biggest belts and work our way down for a fucking change...rather than telling the poor and elderly that they're going to have to switch it up from Kraft Macaroni and Cheese to the generic to make up the difference.
The poor? Those guys with government housing, free health care, food stamps, welfare, WIC and government cheese?
The guys with a PS3 and an Xbox on their 42" LCD TV?
You know, it amazes me how many people think being poor is just so awesome...
As someone that's actually been poor and lived in the projects, (really poor, not "my parents can't afford to buy me a car for my 16th birthday" poor) that's a bunch of crap. More right-wing propaganda to justify their moral bankruptcy and not being satisfied with what they have, nor grateful that they are successful enough not to be in that position. I went to sleep every night listening to gun shots, police sirens, dogs barking, and helicopters, watched families get torn apart by drugs as they sought some escape from their dismal existence, seen fist-fights break out over job openings at McDonald's and Walmart because there's nowhere else to work. Yeah, that sure is an awesome lifestyle. Highly recommend it...if you want to grow up without a childhood.
Meanwhile, the right finds that one guy out of a thousand that made it out and broke the cycle and holds him up as being some sort of proof that anyone can do it, conveniently ignoring how ridiculously lucky that guy really was. Throw 1,000 darts at a dartboard and you're probably going to get a bullseye, but that doesn't count for shit when the other 999 are embedded all over the bar.
While I agree wholeheartedly that our government is ridiculously corrupt and that the people of this country no longer have representation (unless they make $250,000+ or are one of those new "people", i.e., a major Corporation), I don't think we need to leverage our financial solvency strictly on the backs of the poor and disadvantaged. Cutting these social programs isn't going to effect the crack dealers and hustlers in the ghetto, it's going to hurt the kids, the elderly, and the infirm. The kids that the right all professes to care about when they're railing against Planned Parenthood, they're the ones that are going to go hungry. What the hell did they do to deserve their lives? They were born to the wrong mother and father so screw 'em, that's what they get for being poor? Yeah, right...
But, by all means, keep talking about that awesome welfare existence. It helps identify those that truly have no clue what they're talking about...
Yeah, and God Forbid the people that can afford to give a little more to help the country that allowed them the opportunity to become wealthy in the first place actually do so. They didn't write those big bribe checks...oh, I'm sorry, campaign contributions... to have someone turn around and raise their taxes and cost them an extra percent a year. I mean, what is that, a few thousand dollars less a year? How will they ever survive?!
I'm all for spending cuts, but without taxes being raised on the wealthy, it's just more of the same BS. Tell the people living on 12 grand a year in the projects that it's time to tighten their belts so that the asshole speculators on Wall Street can get away with their ridiculously low effective tax rates. Oh, but I forgot, all that paper being traded back and forth "creates jobs". That's why these there's so many jobs out there now, right? That's why these companies are all sitting on record amounts of cash in the bank both here and abroad, meanwhile they're laying people off left and right...
This is just Part II of the extortion scheme that started with the bailouts as the rich try to snatch up an even bigger piece of the pie than they already have.
Nah, I think we need tax reform more than anything. Every other time in history we've raised taxes in war time to pay for it; that is, until Bush II comes along, he does the opposite, goes to war and lowers taxes. Add to that idiocy the enormous amount of speculation going on, the obscenely low tax rates on income from hedge funds, and the fact that multi-billion dollar corporations not only pay no effective tax at all but collect checks from the government in the form of refunds...
Sorry, but let's cut the bullshit. All this talk about raising taxes on the wealthy "killing small business" is crap. Something like 80% of businesses in this country bring in less than $75,000 a year, the statistics are all on the various government agencies that do the reporting. All this crap about taxes "hurting business" is just more emotional game playing. Then we hear about how it's all a liberal agenda to foster "class warfare", c'mon, we're already at war. It's the problem of the corporate mentality...no system can grow indefinitely. But the corporate cycle demands growth every single quarter, as do the investors in our economy. But that's unsustainable...and current events show this to be true. Business is hitting the point where there is very little wealth left for them to suck up and now they are simply looking for more creative ways to suck.
Atlas is shrugging, all right, but it's not the wealthy that are shrugging, it's the poor, who as they get more desperate are going to start reacting with force. It's a historical inevitability. Crime is going through the roof all over the U.S. and it's because there is no opportunity. For all the "stimulation" of Big Business the tax payer has been paying for none of the fucking wealth is trickling down. The businesses are sitting on it, the largest companies are all sitting on record amounts of cash both here and abroad. Meanwhile, they're laying people off and then crying how the little in taxes they do pay is hurting them and they need more of a break. Yeah, right.
Ayn Rand was just another person trying to justify to the masses why it's okay for one person to have more wealth than they could spend in 100 lifetimes while others starved outside of the gates of their compound. It was disingenuous then and it's disingenuous now. We've got 30 years of "Trickle Down" and nothing to show for it but more debt and social problems. Time to give "Trickle Up" a shot now...that is, if they're not afraid of actually having to compete again...
If you clicked through TFA and read the actual abstract, you'd find that they found that stuff behind the screen with the screen at distance was more likely to cause discomfort, and stuff coming out of the screen with the screen at a short distance also more likely.
So basically you're saying that they've discovered the discomfort when viewing 3D movies has to do with the 3D effect? Amazing!
And the need to wear glasses exacerbates it, given the changes it makes to the focal point of the eyes, a core component of stereoscopic vision? Mind Blowing!
I'm all for layering, but I have a feeling that I would get sent home if I removed enough layers to be comfortable in our office in the summer time.
Funny though, suggest that they put on a sweater in the winter to keep warm, as opposed to turning the heat up so high paper starts to char, and you'd think you'd asked them for sexual favors or something. You know it's bad when fighting over the thermostat settings spills over into email and ends up going like 4 steps up the ladder before a random VP tells everyone to stop wasting their fucking time...
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What can your full-size box offer me that I don't already have?
The ability to play games beyond "Angry Birds", for one. The ability to service it yourself, the ability to customize your system to meet your needs and not buy hardware you won't use, the ability to install software from sources other than THE CLOUD®©, not to mention the fact that the fastest tablet can't touch even a mediocre PC in terms of performance...
When you can do full on video editing and conversion, run virtual machines, etc...basically do all the things millions of people do every single day on their PC...on a tablet, then maybe, but until then the PC ain't going anywhere. If these companies want to push to eliminate their offerings on that front because tablets are more profitable, hey, more power to them, but pronouncing the death of the PC is just as stupid now as it was 10 years ago when everyone predicted modern gaming consoles and laptops would do the same. Clearly that has still not come to pass...
I would recommend a music store in your local area.
I think the implied distinction is that it's "illegal" foreigners that are doing the job stealing. At least, that's been my experience. I honestly haven't heard a "foreigners" rant in it's own right since my grandfather passed away 15 years ago. Pretty much everyone accepts the people that come here properly and follow the law (although you do have rants about people not learning English and such, but I'd bet that happens in any country that has a universal language if not a national one).
Pundits just WANT the PC to go away because they realize they screwed up in that early product cycle by giving all the power to the users. Users have the ability to change anything or do anything they want and can un-cripple anything they do to that class of devices. They want to introduce something shiny and new that is locked down and sealed box like smart phones where they can cripple them and sell the features back to you piecemill.
Wish I had mod points, but looks like others are taking care of that...
You pretty much hit the nail on the head. Killing the PC would be the end of the DIY-era of home computing, which is exactly what these portables makers want. They want us all on un-upgradeable, no user serviceable parts inside, proprietary connection tablets that dial home every minute to make sure that you are only using approved software in approved ways, software that can only be downloaded from "The Cloud®©" and be crippled via remote.
Hipsters flaming hipsters. I knew this day would eventually come...
Uh, tube amps are popular because they sound better, not because we want to sit around and talk about it.
As for where they are, electronics using vacuum tubes are popular with audiophiles and people who like playing with old radio equipment, particularly ham radio operators with a bit of nuclear war paranoia...
Or guitar players that realize a tube amp sounds better than 95% of solid-states.
For multiplayer, fine. put cheat detection, require Battle.NET, whatever. If I am playing with other people I want to feel that the games are fair.
The funny thing is, the online portion of the game still won't really be fair because you're going to end up with a metric shit tonne of kids with their parents credit card paying to win, not to mention the hordes of Chinese gold farmers that are going to be grinding the items out to sell to them. Online play in Diablo 3 is gonna suck without a group of people you know in real life to play with.
Let me give you an example (there is a problem with it and I reckon right from the start): It's a matter of only 2 or 3 years that Blizzard changed the maintenance cycle of their oceanic servers in WoW to coincide with the Oceanic timezone. Before that, any WoW player in Australia (for example) would get home on Tuesday and find that the maintenance cycle had just started. And that it was later extended another another for whatever reason.
Square-Enix was notorious for doing that with Final Fantasy XI; the maintenance cycle always fell during Japanese off-hours (since they are a Japanese company and all) so when they'd turn the servers off in the middle of the night there us North American players would get the shaft in our prime time. They also never heard of the concept of doing many small updates as opposed to one big one, so every couple months the game would just be down for hours...and because the updates were coming from the same place in Japan (i.e., no swarm-based updates like Blizzard) and you had the entire North American market logging in together to get that ginormous update, what would have been a 4 hour download on a good connection turned into an 8 hour one. I once had an update literally take 14.5 hours to complete in that game on a high-speed connection.
I'm sure Blizzard will do better than that, but still, tying more games to the functionality of my already shaky internet connection (Charter fucking sucks) seems like it's just going to hamper me from playing the game. The hackers and cheats will find a way around their DRM, they always do.
Wish I could mod you up...
Oh, don't worry, I'm still you'll just be a "lost sale" to them, even if you never had any intention of buying the game in the first place.
What do you get for being online in a single-player game?
The honor of clicking through 6 screens of "NOW ON SALE IN THE BLIZZARD STORE!!!!!!!"
You don't complain about lack of single player in MMO games either, do you?
No, but Diablo III isn't an MMO. If they wanted to make it an MMO, they should have just done that. Instead it seems like they want to make a half-assed Single-Player/MMO-ish hybrid.
I can't wait until the Chinese gold farmers descend upon Diablo 3, though. That's definitely gonna make for an awesome online experience for the rest of us
...nothing of value was lost.
I'm not gonna bother picking out each assertion you made and responding to it like you did, but the reason why we do not allow things to revert to how they were at the birth of the industrial age when there were no social programs whatsoever is because it is in the interests of the greater good to provide these basic things.
The alternative is to end up with situations where you have large quantities of street rats banging on car windows at every intersection in every major city in the US, crime skyrocketing, property values plummeting, urban blight, disease due to poor living conditions and malnutrition. Basically, look at how the poor live in Mumbai or Rio, or hell, even here in the US in cities like Detroit and Cleveland. Those people are getting assistance and look at how bad off those areas are. Can you even imagine what it's gonna look like when they're cut off? Detroit is gonna burn to the ground.
Now, I'm sure I'll get some sort of "so?" response to that, or how it's their own fault for being lazy, or whatever the hell sin they committed to end up poor (since nobody has ever had problems outside of their control, like illness or job loss), but regardless, getting them aid is better than playing the "survival of the fittest" game that you seem to be championing for. This isn't a third world country; there are plenty of them to choose from if that's what you're looking for. Hell, I bet your money will go pretty damn far there, too, and I doubt there'd be too many tears shed if more like minded people followed suit, but that's not the type of country that so many people have given their lives defending.
You're still looking at it from the wrong point of view. We use that money to keep these areas from turning into the slums of Rio or Mumbai, which in turn keeps property values up, which in turn benefits the property owners. This also keeps the crime from spiraling out of control and spilling out into the surrounding area, which unchecked would further lower property values, which would kill the businesses in these areas, adding to the number of people living in these depressed areas, which then pushes crime farther out, and the cycle continues...
In the end, keeping poverty under control is in their best interests. They can either spend a little today in the form of raised taxes or they can spend a lot later trying to turn their home into a fucking fortress and living like they do in Somalia, where every trip to the grocery store has to be planned tactically to avoid the roving gangs stopping people and shaking them down. We have evidence of this from all over the globe, we have seen where it all ends up if we start cutting people off and letting them twist in the wind and live the "dog eat dog" lifestyle the neocons seem to want so bad.
I mean, do people deliberately ignore the link between crime and poverty, or did a large portion of the population just become suddenly blind to that fact?
You mean those crime-ridden hell-holes that your wise and benevolent government built for you as part of the myriad of social programs that you're vehemently arguing against cutting?
Yeah, those ones, because (and I'm sure this is going to blow your mind) it is still better than being homeless and living in a car, or on the fucking street. Where do you think these people are going to go? Oh, right:
the alternative isn't poor people starving and dying in the streets, it's poor people getting married to support their children in low-cost private housing, instead of being raised by government-subsidized single mothers only to become bastards who commit rape, robbery, murder, and other mayhem.
Really? It's that simple?! Oh my God!! Hey guys, looks like Mike here solved the problem with poverty in the US, we just need to pair them up and make them get married, then they will magically have all the means to raise those kids just fine without any assistance! We'll just put them in all that low-cost private housing! You know, all those decent neighborhoods filled with benevolent landlords that are waiting to receive all the people from the projects with open arms? How could we forget about them?!
You have no concept of what you speak of. The vast majority of the people in those situations didn't choose to be there, they ended up there due to circumstances outside of their control. With all the stories of people losing their homes and shit, with all the people getting laid off, are you seriously still holding to that ridiculous notion that only the dregs of society and the undeserving are desperate or on government assistance? Have you ever actually met a poor person, or do you just see them on TV and read about them in the paper?
The biggest tragedy is all the people calling for the end to social security. In civilized cultures the elderly are revered and taken care of because they raised us and everything we have today was built upon their hard work and sacrifices when they were our age. They take care of them because they fucking deserve it and because it's the morally right thing to do. Anyone that's calling for those cuts, go down to Walmart and look at that 80 year old people greeter that is handing out shopping carts and struggling with stickers due to their arthritis. Really look. If you can do that and not be completely ashamed, then you are a far colder man than I, and frankly, if that's the type of society you want to live in where we can't even take care of our forebears, then I want no part of it.
I mean, what the hell did we spend all these billions defending our country if we can't even take care of our own? We have fucking veterans sleeping under bridges. We can't even take care of the people that risked their lives to defend the country that made these assholes rich and they're supposed to "tighten their belts"?!
Man, what I would give just to lock a group of millionaires in a room with those "bastards" and have them justify why they can't pay a few more percentage points a year in taxes...I bet they could suggest a few ways they could trim their budgets without fucking over the disadvantaged...
Yet another person placing the blame for the US economy on the people living in the ghetto and the elderly...
There's a reason for those social programs, and that reason is the greater good. Cut welfare and social security and all of that and you know what we end up with? Groups of kids banging on car windows at every light begging for money. Rampant disease due to poor living conditions and malnutrition. Entire neighborhoods that are run by drug lords and gang bangers with no police presence whatsoever. People being murdered in the streets while others walk by.
Go watch the movie Slumdog Millionaire and look at the living conditions of those people. That is what the U.S. will look like if we cut social programs and let people twist in the wind. Hell, there are some parts of this country that already look like that, like Detroit, Cleveland, parts of L.A.
Raising the tax rate on the wealthy by a few percentage points isn't going to mean a fucking thing to them either financially or in terms of the lifestyle they are able to afford. But that same amount of money conferred upon the needy makes a world of difference. But the have's in this country have all gotten it into their head that they are being stolen from by undeserving thieves, conveniently ignoring all the times in their own lives that they got benefit from money others spent to help get them where they are today. It's like they think they grew up in a vacuum with no government or something, but as we all know how ridiculous that notion is, it's plainly bullshit.
I'm all for going after fraud and waste in government spending; Medicare fraud in particular is obscene. Remember, these are doctors scamming the government for thousands of dollars a year with bogus Medicare claims. Doctors. What, they don't make enough money a year being a fucking doctor? What the hell kind of lifestyle are they trying to live? They can't be happy with what they have that they need to try and take advantage of the system to scam taxpayers? Meanwhile, the women in the ghetto that buys her kids a used 360 for Christmas so they have something enjoyable in their lives, she's the evil one?
We need to put things in their proper perspective. I'm perfectly fine with paying a little more to help get us out of this mess, and I don't even make very much money as it is, but goddamnit, I am not gonna sit here and listen to millionaires cry poor. If we're tightening belts, let's start with the biggest belts and work our way down for a fucking change...rather than telling the poor and elderly that they're going to have to switch it up from Kraft Macaroni and Cheese to the generic to make up the difference.
The poor? Those guys with government housing, free health care, food stamps, welfare, WIC and government cheese? The guys with a PS3 and an Xbox on their 42" LCD TV?
You know, it amazes me how many people think being poor is just so awesome...
As someone that's actually been poor and lived in the projects, (really poor, not "my parents can't afford to buy me a car for my 16th birthday" poor) that's a bunch of crap. More right-wing propaganda to justify their moral bankruptcy and not being satisfied with what they have, nor grateful that they are successful enough not to be in that position. I went to sleep every night listening to gun shots, police sirens, dogs barking, and helicopters, watched families get torn apart by drugs as they sought some escape from their dismal existence, seen fist-fights break out over job openings at McDonald's and Walmart because there's nowhere else to work. Yeah, that sure is an awesome lifestyle. Highly recommend it...if you want to grow up without a childhood.
Meanwhile, the right finds that one guy out of a thousand that made it out and broke the cycle and holds him up as being some sort of proof that anyone can do it, conveniently ignoring how ridiculously lucky that guy really was. Throw 1,000 darts at a dartboard and you're probably going to get a bullseye, but that doesn't count for shit when the other 999 are embedded all over the bar.
While I agree wholeheartedly that our government is ridiculously corrupt and that the people of this country no longer have representation (unless they make $250,000+ or are one of those new "people", i.e., a major Corporation), I don't think we need to leverage our financial solvency strictly on the backs of the poor and disadvantaged. Cutting these social programs isn't going to effect the crack dealers and hustlers in the ghetto, it's going to hurt the kids, the elderly, and the infirm. The kids that the right all professes to care about when they're railing against Planned Parenthood, they're the ones that are going to go hungry. What the hell did they do to deserve their lives? They were born to the wrong mother and father so screw 'em, that's what they get for being poor? Yeah, right...
But, by all means, keep talking about that awesome welfare existence. It helps identify those that truly have no clue what they're talking about...
Yeah, and God Forbid the people that can afford to give a little more to help the country that allowed them the opportunity to become wealthy in the first place actually do so. They didn't write those big bribe checks...oh, I'm sorry, campaign contributions... to have someone turn around and raise their taxes and cost them an extra percent a year. I mean, what is that, a few thousand dollars less a year? How will they ever survive?!
I'm all for spending cuts, but without taxes being raised on the wealthy, it's just more of the same BS. Tell the people living on 12 grand a year in the projects that it's time to tighten their belts so that the asshole speculators on Wall Street can get away with their ridiculously low effective tax rates. Oh, but I forgot, all that paper being traded back and forth "creates jobs". That's why these there's so many jobs out there now, right? That's why these companies are all sitting on record amounts of cash in the bank both here and abroad, meanwhile they're laying people off left and right...
This is just Part II of the extortion scheme that started with the bailouts as the rich try to snatch up an even bigger piece of the pie than they already have.
Nah, I think we need tax reform more than anything. Every other time in history we've raised taxes in war time to pay for it; that is, until Bush II comes along, he does the opposite, goes to war and lowers taxes. Add to that idiocy the enormous amount of speculation going on, the obscenely low tax rates on income from hedge funds, and the fact that multi-billion dollar corporations not only pay no effective tax at all but collect checks from the government in the form of refunds...
Sorry, but let's cut the bullshit. All this talk about raising taxes on the wealthy "killing small business" is crap. Something like 80% of businesses in this country bring in less than $75,000 a year, the statistics are all on the various government agencies that do the reporting. All this crap about taxes "hurting business" is just more emotional game playing. Then we hear about how it's all a liberal agenda to foster "class warfare", c'mon, we're already at war. It's the problem of the corporate mentality...no system can grow indefinitely. But the corporate cycle demands growth every single quarter, as do the investors in our economy. But that's unsustainable...and current events show this to be true. Business is hitting the point where there is very little wealth left for them to suck up and now they are simply looking for more creative ways to suck.
Atlas is shrugging, all right, but it's not the wealthy that are shrugging, it's the poor, who as they get more desperate are going to start reacting with force. It's a historical inevitability. Crime is going through the roof all over the U.S. and it's because there is no opportunity. For all the "stimulation" of Big Business the tax payer has been paying for none of the fucking wealth is trickling down. The businesses are sitting on it, the largest companies are all sitting on record amounts of cash both here and abroad. Meanwhile, they're laying people off and then crying how the little in taxes they do pay is hurting them and they need more of a break. Yeah, right.
Ayn Rand was just another person trying to justify to the masses why it's okay for one person to have more wealth than they could spend in 100 lifetimes while others starved outside of the gates of their compound. It was disingenuous then and it's disingenuous now. We've got 30 years of "Trickle Down" and nothing to show for it but more debt and social problems. Time to give "Trickle Up" a shot now...that is, if they're not afraid of actually having to compete again...
This is definitely something worth arguing about.
If you clicked through TFA and read the actual abstract, you'd find that they found that stuff behind the screen with the screen at distance was more likely to cause discomfort, and stuff coming out of the screen with the screen at a short distance also more likely.
So basically you're saying that they've discovered the discomfort when viewing 3D movies has to do with the 3D effect? Amazing!
And the need to wear glasses exacerbates it, given the changes it makes to the focal point of the eyes, a core component of stereoscopic vision? Mind Blowing!
I'm all for layering, but I have a feeling that I would get sent home if I removed enough layers to be comfortable in our office in the summer time.
Funny though, suggest that they put on a sweater in the winter to keep warm, as opposed to turning the heat up so high paper starts to char, and you'd think you'd asked them for sexual favors or something. You know it's bad when fighting over the thermostat settings spills over into email and ends up going like 4 steps up the ladder before a random VP tells everyone to stop wasting their fucking time...
I think we should focus on sources closer to home, though.