Do you know why American schools suck? Because the rise of puritanical paranoia removes human beings from teaching positions, and replaces them with dull, lifeless, carbon copies of Stepford Wives and Husbands who make life miserable, because they are miserable. They can't inspire because they aren't inspired. Their idea of excitement is ordering children around in fascist, legalistic systems built on top of the facade of justice, covering up their new role as conformity enforcement. America has created schools that are more like prisons than learning environments.
(Given, it's not just schools, but reflective of our entire society. I watched Wozniak talk about how he once almost got the Pope on the phone back during his phreaking days. If he were caught doing the same thing today, he'd be thrown in jail along with Steve Jobs, without a doubt. That's where we're at as a nation.)
Some of my favorite teachers were the most unorthodox, including an English teacher who spent the first two weeks teaching us how to save for retirement, because in his (paraphrased) words, "They teach you how to write a check in home ec, but they don't teach you how to balance a checkbook, or how to get on the right side of interest. And learning how to do that is far more important than anything else I'm going to teach you this semester."
Now where would my favorite teachers be in the days of No Child Left Behind, where every single minute is plotted out in advance in order to fill in the right circle on test day? Truthfully, I don't know, and I don't want to know. The thought of an administrative bureaucrat taking way their jobs based on some algorithm or zero tolerance rule sincerely depresses me, not only for the people we're excluding from teaching, but for all of the kids that will never get to meet them.
And now, instead of asking if Kimberly Hester was a great teacher's aide (and respecting her privacy when we don't have any evidence), we're asking for her Facebook password to see if she violated the small-mindedness of someone she happened to know on Facebook. Someone who's apparently terrified by ass cheeks.
And the Law? Well, it's defending the rights of the person who is afraid of ass cheeks. Heaven knows that after witnessing thousands of murders on television, and watching their leaders march off to war to kill a few hundred thousand people, and watching the nightly news in a western country filled with unparalleled gun violence, let's fire Kimberly Hester because she may have accidentally exposed someone, or even their children, to ass cheeks.
This is a guy not under the influence being hassled at a checkpoint for the equivalent of carrying a small bottle of alcohol.
1) How many people lost time/money due to the checkpoint?
2) How many lives were saved due to the confiscation of a small amount of marijuana?
3) How much did tax payers spend for all of this nonsense?
It's effective at promoting stigma for the recreational use of a drug that is literally less dangerous than ibuprofen. It's effective at wasting taxpayer dollars for no benefit to society at large. It's effective at being ineffective, wasteful, and pointless.
"The problem is clear," wrote the US ambassador to Tunisia, Robert Godec, in July 2009, in a secret dispatch released by Beirut's al-Akhbar newspaper: "Tunisia has been ruled by the same president for 22 years. He has no successor. And, while President Ben Ali deserves credit for continuing many of the progressive policies of [predecessor] President Bourguiba, he and his regime have lost touch with the Tunisian people.
Here's the deal. We get lots of information all of the time, and the government dutifully plays the game of "officially" denying the truth because they are trying to play the difference; sometimes for good, sometimes for bad.
Assange does a little too much patting himself on the back, but in the end, he's right: the confirmation of the truth, out of the lying horse's mouth no less, means a great deal to the people who have been living under dictatorships for decades. Dictatorships that the insane cowardice, greed, and apathy of Washington DC have been perpetuating to keep their geopolitical calculations in balance so you can I can dig deeper into the hole of dependence on cheap oil, cheap labor, and so that American interests (which usually means "business interests" because they have little to do with freedom or Freedom) are attended to.
If Wikileaks didn't mean anything, the US government wouldn't be spending millions of dollars and political capital trying to hang Manning, the alleged leaker, and Assange, a foreign citizen who they probably have a sealed indictment against.
And if you think Stratfor seems childish and inane and is therefore suspect, just listen to the pathetic ramblings of Richard Nixon sometime. The fools and idiots running the country are sometimes just that: powerful men with stupid, backwards, and outdated ideas, who gladly scheme to kill and pillage because they think they know what is "right."
Yes, that's a much more plausible explanation than poorly trained terrorists trying the same plot again and succeeding because of a massive American intelligence bureaucracy that wasn't quick enough to adapt...
Compared to what they had on their plates it probably wasn't seen as a big whoop.
Don't paper over our intelligence failures. The title of the memo to the President of the US was "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the US." Bin Laden was, at that time, the head of an organization that had already carried out terrorist attacks against the United States in Kenya, as well as the bombing of the USS Cole. He wasn't a sales manager in Montreal.
If our governments are going to assume that we are all terrorists until proven innocent, the war on terror is over. We lost.
1. Wal-mart has a profit margin of 3.3%. Again, Apple could raise their prices marginally to cover this difference.
2. Apple pays it's Apple store employees only marginally better than Best Buy pays the Geek Squad. They pay the same rates for engineers as everyone else, as far as I can tell from Glass Door.
3. That was in 2005, right? iMacs are still way overpriced, and they still sell. All-in-one touch screens from competitors sell for 60% of Apple prices.
Again, according to iSupply, the material cost for the 32gb iPad 2 WiFi + 3g -- which sells for $729 -- is about $325, or $335 including labor, which puts Apple's gross margin (ex shipping/handling) at 54%. Just using the simple math above, if the iPad 2 was made in the U.S it would cost $617.77, bringing Apple's gross margin down to 15.25%! Of course, Apple is not in the business of self-immolation, and given their relatively substantial pricing power, they could just make the iPad 2 more expensive, let's say, increasing the price to the point where their gross margins stayed intact, from $729 to $1,144.02!
It is just wages. We're not talking about mining everything in the US too (but eventually, that would be good, if just for national security purposes).
Apple is free to manufacture wherever they want and charge whatever they want, but American consumers are also free to buy what they want, and boycott what they want, and picket where they would like. Whining about informed consumers is the sign of a company who knows they are doing wrong.
We shouldn't be criticized for using Chinese workers," a current Apple executive said. "The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need."
I suggest we reduce demand for their product until they change their tune. Apple would not be possible without the significant investments we have made in our country and infrastructure for decades. If they don't know how reinvest the fruits of American ingenuity into American workers, let's put them out of business and find someone who does.
Apple's margins are 40-50% in some of their devices, and by accepting the profit margins common thoughout the industry, or marginally increasing their own prices, they could all be built in the US. Instead of being a good citizen (corporations are people too!) and helping get our economy back on its feet by increasing domestic manufacturing, Apple is simply pocketing the difference. That's why they have one hundred billion dollars in the bank.
Additionally, Apple is very brand conscious. If people start boycotting and picketing Apple Stores, the protest could actually work. The other manufacturers like Lenovo and Dell and Microsoft have some retail presence, but nothing like Apple.
The question is, are you going to sit there and take it, or are you going to educate yourself and fight back? I'm afraid Carlin fell for an old trick: a tiny minority of powerful people telling the vast majority that they don't have any power. The term that has been coined for this is "antipolitics." Yes it is pervasive, and the message contained in the media and the whole platform of right wing anti-government and left-wing anarchist philosophies.
The truth is that we have (compared with the rest of the world) relatively free and fair elections, relatively uncorrupted government, and the capability to change our government however we want to if we are willing to sacrifice some time and money to make the change happen. The truth is that most Americans have the government they deserve. We have achieved the technical definition of democracy, but we are letting new forms of aristocracy corrupt it.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
--Plato
The planes you fly are modified bombers funded by decades of investment by the US government. The computer you use is based on technology that progressed under enormous investment by the US government. The internet, which is probably the source of all of your entertainment and possibly your income was invented, funded, and developed by the US government.
It's one of the few things we do well, and it does our society a tremendous amount of good to invest in new technologies, even if they don't immediately produce profitable outcomes. That's why we were the world's number one economy, and it's shortsighted nonsense like demanding that everything be developed by private industry -- most of which can't see past their next quarterly report -- which is going to continue our slide to last place in the western world.
If I were a farmer, my planning would be better than most (but not all) other farmer's planning.
Unless you break your leg. Or you get sick, or your spouse or mother or kids get sick, or there's a tornado, or a harsh winter, or a crop famine due to a fungus outbreak that no one has ever seen before, or the transportation infrastructure you depend on breaks down for some reason, or your equipment breaks down and holder of your warranty and insurance skipped town with the money.
There's a reason straight capitalism is fine in theory: it's got nothing to do with real life if you're interested in providing your society with more than wishes for good luck.
Who are you claiming is hoarding capital? Be specific here. Its as if you think there are folks with billion dollar savings accounts.
"The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that nonfinancial companies had socked away $1.84 trillion in cash and other liquid assets as of the end of March, up 26% from a year earlier and the largest-ever increase in records going back to 1952. Cash made up about 7% of all company assets, including factories and financial investments, the highest level since 1963."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704312104575298652567988246.html
Participating in two wars, cutting taxes, and then making the middle and working class pay with austerity measures while the wealthiest Americans sit on top of record amounts of wealth is evil, and ultimately a detriment to our economy.
Surely those people that make luxury items dont need to earn a living, and they never spend that money...
Find a single economist who will tell you that sinking 10 million dollars into a painting has the same economic value as investing 10 million dollars in education, infrastructure, or scientific research. In fact, pushing up the values of rarities and luxury real estate does less for the economy than simply giving that money away to random people who would spend it on goods and services that create jobs in a much greater proportion.
This is super basic economics, going all the way back to Adam Smith:
When the toll upon carriages of luxury, upon coaches, post-chaises, etc. is made somewhat higher in proportion to their weight, than upon carriages of necessary use, such as carts, waggons, etc. the indolence and vanity of the rich is made to contribute, in a very easy manner, to the relief of the poor, by rendering cheaper the transportation of heavy goods to all the different parts of the country.
who also said
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.
And that's what we're dealing with: power and capital have concentrated in the hands of people who make money by destroying American jobs and infrastructure, and reaping the profit from that destruction. What Smith could not have imagined is that people like you would support the destruction of their own nation's ability to provide for itself for the benefit of a handful of producers, who are "architecting" the whole system to have their own needs "most peculiarly attended to."
Don't you mean iOS? My mac isn't locked down in the least, and in fact is more open than windows.
What happens when you try to put a Linux installer in your optical drive and reboot on a Mac versus virtually any PC? Why do they make you download rEfit to install what you want on your own hardware?
I'm amazed that you got modded to 5 on slashdot. I guess even the nerds aren't using Linux anymore.
All of your numbers are based on per capita rates, which doesn't show the effects of income disparity. The argument here is that in the western world, poor Americans are relatively worse off than poor Europeans, at least according to the Brookings Institution that is correct. Statistically, poor Americans have less of a chance of moving into higher income brackets than much of the Western world. Fifty thousand Americans die every year of lack of access to health care, a figure that is unheard of in the rest of the Western world.
Regardless of how deep you keep sinking your head into the sand, the reality is that Americans are for the first time faced with less options than the generation before. You're welcome to pretend that it isn't happening, but abandoning enlightenment principles for the purpose of ignoring the welfare of your fellow citizens is hardly what I consider patriotic.
Other than some stupid, made up statistic going down it is impossible for you to name one real benefit to this happening.
How about money getting invested into infrastructure and education instead of sitting in a bank somewhere, or going to buy works of art, or spent on high end luxury items with very little economic long term benefit for society at large? There are actually plenty of better ways to use excess capital in our society.
In terms of absolute poverty, we're one of the highest in the West, and all of the other nations on the list provide universal health care.
In either case, it's safe to stay that Americans have some of the worst income inequality out of any country, and among similar Western nations, are in the bottom 10% when it comes to relative poverty rates, absolute poverty rates, child poverty rates, health care, and education. If you'd like to be proud of that, you're welcome to, but I'm certainly not.
Patriotism is doing meaningful things to improve the lives of your fellow citizens, not pretending a problem doesn't exist to make yourself feel better about your country.
40% of Median Income: ======================= 14.9% Mexico 13.2% Israel 11.3% United States 11.2% Chile 10.1% Japan 10.0% Turkey ======================= 7.0% Canada 5.9% UK 4.9% Switzerland 4.2% Germany 3.4% France
Thanks for reinforcing the stereotype that Americans don't think about facts before they start screaming "We're #1!"
Africa is not my country, why do I give a damn about their own mismanagement of their economy and resources?
I was pointing out how strong governments with progressive taxation do very well versus all other forms of governments that I know if. If you have a counter example, please provide it.
(On another note, most people believe that caring about other human beings is central to being a good person. You seem to have a terrible lack of empathy for other people. You may want to ask yourself why that is.)
You didn't even try to read what I posted. If East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania underwent four decades of dictatorship much worse than anything the Shah did, how come Iran has so much trouble moving forward?
Because the United States refuses to allow them to move forward. Iran does not do as they are told, so our goal in the region is to strangle them through economic, political, and military policy. Consider our allies Saudi Arabia: women are treated as property, people are regularly beheaded for spiritual crimes, and there's not a single synagogue or church in the whole country. But since they sell us oil and play along with our plans -- they like being friends with a military power with the same regional interests -- last year we agreed to sell them 80 billion dollars worth of military equipment. Saudi Arabia makes Iran look like a democratic paradise, but we don't care. Iran could start holding legitimate elections and dismantle their religious police tomorrow, but if they were still critics of American policies, they'd be under constant threat of economic strangulation and warfare.
The United States has the world's largest economy, and the world's largest military, and we use that leverage to punish nations that don't serve our interests. We aren't exceptionally bad; we just behave exactly as you would expect any other empire to behave. We demand loyalty and trade -- fair or not -- from countries that have resources we want, or we strangle them. That's been an open secret since the end of WWII.
The only nations that get better deals are powerful nations like China. Remember Tiananmen Square? US investment increased after they ran over students with tanks, because Beijing proved they were in control and could provide a stable place for investment. Morality has almost nothing to do with our foreign policy. Turks are free to slaughter Kurds because they play ball.
Perhaps they're remembering the near three decades of the Shah's rule in Iran, marked by murders, torture, SAVAK secret police -- all supported by the United States and Britain? That ended in 1979. Or maybe they're remembering the war we helped create that killed a million Iraqis and Iranians in the 1980s once the Shah fell from power, and we decided to crown Saddam Hussein as our new friend on the block. That ended around 1988.
But answer this question for me: how many decades would pass before you would forget having your government overthrown, controlled by an outside party, and then being subjected to three decades of a police state followed by an eight year war that wrecked your whole nation? I guess real men can watch their families and society get destroyed and just "get over it."
Bill Gates had a rich family, but like many others that became mega rich he worked his arse off, whether you like him or hate him he certainly worked for it.
Had he not attended an exclusive prep school with a Teletype Model 33, and been given free access to computers because of the school he was attending, it's doubtful you'd know his name. So who is to say there weren't dozens of people in Seattle who could have seen the same success?
You seem to want a communist state, I suggest you move to a communist country which determines how much an individual can have.
I don't believe in utopianism, so communism is out. Even so you have a pretty shallow view of it; perhaps you are thinking of totalitarian dictatorships?
where the fuck did these kiddies come from that have this moronic sense of entitlement, get out and fucking earn it.
Without my grandfather's service during WWII and the tax dollars contributed to our societal infrastructure from my (and your) ancestors going back generations, you'd spend most of your day looking for food and fuel and water. You're welcome.
Incidently Bill Gates does more to help poverty stricken children in a single day then you will in your entire life.
How many African children have died because they didn't have:
1) a stable government providing security and 2) a way to collect taxes and provide equitable infrastructure?
Probably 10 million people have been murdered in the DRC over resources in the last ten years, precisely because there's no one ensuring an equitable distribution of their natural resources. Don't confuse entitlement with civilization.
Err...what's wrong with this? People work and figure out how to do things...you seem to have an objection to them keeping what they earned through whatever actions they (legally) took to aquire such wealth and possessions?
Bill Gates without taxpayer infrastructure would be just a guy named Bill Gates. Same goes for every rich person in the United States; that's why Africa doesn't have anything like the Silicon Valley. While I agree that people have a right to earn money, it's limited, just like every other right we have.
Who is to decide what is enough? You? Me? The Federal Govt? And what does morality have to do with whatever a person attains as long as it is acquired in a legal manner?
You almost had it... it's you and me through the federal government. That's how democratic governments work.
Morality has everything to do with it. If we, as a society, let children wallow in poverty while a tiny percentage of our population makes millions of dollars per day, we're making a moral choice: feed, clothe, and educate children, or let one person have an amazing set of priceless art in his fourth vacation home. Those are choices, and choices always have moral consequences.
I'm sorry, this really is the dumbest idea I've come across in the longest time. If humans are self-regulating, why don't we just legalize slavery, fraud, rape, and murder? If they have to be mandatory, the idea of preventing these crimes must be horrible if we're to follow your logic.
The reason rich people don't want equity in society is because they want to keep all of their stuff. That's it. There's no shining moral justification for it: they want their third and fourth vacation homes, their exotic luxury cars, their private jets and million dollar birthday parties, and you and your whole community can burn in hell for all they care.
If you're actually interested in liberating humans, you should be primarily concerned with subverting concentrations of power: whether in the church, in the state, the military, or in the economy, it's concentrations of power that lead to injustice. That's why democracy is a vote and not a dollar (or at least, that's how it used to be.) As long as the government is carrying out the true will of the populace, you will typically have very good results. Even if you disagree with that premise, there's no denying what usually happens when concentrations of power abuse their position: there's a massive revolution, and many lives are lost either on the way to achieving more equity in society, or on the way to arriving at a police state like North Korea.
These are the ideas that our nation was founded on: you are no better than me, nor is the King, nor is the Pope, nor is the Banker. We play by the same rules, because all men are created equal, and we deserve equal treatment in front of the Law.
But go ahead; throw it all away for some pithy political regurgitations. We'll see how you like neanderthal ethics when you're the one without a club.
That fact alone tells that U.S. has never been about, or seek to know, science
This is wrong. America (as in the nation-state) was founded by followers of the Enlightenment, who believed fully that science was the answer to everything. It was an outright rejection of supernaturalism, though many were Deists and believed that someone had set the universal machine in motion.
Don't let anyone tell you that America was founded on religious zealotry. It was settled by Puritans, whose horrible intolerance have never quite gone away, but the blight of Evangelicals is a modern problem. So modern that Bush I was the first Republican to lose the election (in part) because he refused to self-identify as an Evangelical, and because he made the mistake of doing something sensible like raising taxes to cover deficits. Mitt Romney will be the second to lose because of his religious affiliation, because he's not pure enough for the religious voting bloc that now controls the GOP.
There are plenty of very well respected and efficient charities that do amazing work across the globe. I donate to Oxfam, but choosing your charity is an important part of the process. If you believe that giving food contributes to long term economic problems, find a charity that helps communities start local businesses, or start farms, or dig wells.
For the most part, finding local volunteers is not a problem in the United States. We have plenty of leisure time, and many Americans spend it helping others. What people across the world need is a buffer to protect themselves against natural disasters, because they have been living on the edge of subsistence for a long time.
An hour of your pay can go a long way in the hands of an established charity. If you have limited time to donate, there's no way you can outperform a trained volunteer.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know why American schools suck? Because the rise of puritanical paranoia removes human beings from teaching positions, and replaces them with dull, lifeless, carbon copies of Stepford Wives and Husbands who make life miserable, because they are miserable. They can't inspire because they aren't inspired. Their idea of excitement is ordering children around in fascist, legalistic systems built on top of the facade of justice, covering up their new role as conformity enforcement. America has created schools that are more like prisons than learning environments.
(Given, it's not just schools, but reflective of our entire society. I watched Wozniak talk about how he once almost got the Pope on the phone back during his phreaking days. If he were caught doing the same thing today, he'd be thrown in jail along with Steve Jobs, without a doubt. That's where we're at as a nation.)
Some of my favorite teachers were the most unorthodox, including an English teacher who spent the first two weeks teaching us how to save for retirement, because in his (paraphrased) words, "They teach you how to write a check in home ec, but they don't teach you how to balance a checkbook, or how to get on the right side of interest. And learning how to do that is far more important than anything else I'm going to teach you this semester."
Now where would my favorite teachers be in the days of No Child Left Behind, where every single minute is plotted out in advance in order to fill in the right circle on test day? Truthfully, I don't know, and I don't want to know. The thought of an administrative bureaucrat taking way their jobs based on some algorithm or zero tolerance rule sincerely depresses me, not only for the people we're excluding from teaching, but for all of the kids that will never get to meet them.
And now, instead of asking if Kimberly Hester was a great teacher's aide (and respecting her privacy when we don't have any evidence), we're asking for her Facebook password to see if she violated the small-mindedness of someone she happened to know on Facebook. Someone who's apparently terrified by ass cheeks.
And the Law? Well, it's defending the rights of the person who is afraid of ass cheeks. Heaven knows that after witnessing thousands of murders on television, and watching their leaders march off to war to kill a few hundred thousand people, and watching the nightly news in a western country filled with unparalleled gun violence, let's fire Kimberly Hester because she may have accidentally exposed someone, or even their children, to ass cheeks.
This is a guy not under the influence being hassled at a checkpoint for the equivalent of carrying a small bottle of alcohol.
1) How many people lost time/money due to the checkpoint?
2) How many lives were saved due to the confiscation of a small amount of marijuana?
3) How much did tax payers spend for all of this nonsense?
It's effective at promoting stigma for the recreational use of a drug that is literally less dangerous than ibuprofen. It's effective at wasting taxpayer dollars for no benefit to society at large. It's effective at being ineffective, wasteful, and pointless.
Here's the deal. We get lots of information all of the time, and the government dutifully plays the game of "officially" denying the truth because they are trying to play the difference; sometimes for good, sometimes for bad.
Assange does a little too much patting himself on the back, but in the end, he's right: the confirmation of the truth, out of the lying horse's mouth no less, means a great deal to the people who have been living under dictatorships for decades. Dictatorships that the insane cowardice, greed, and apathy of Washington DC have been perpetuating to keep their geopolitical calculations in balance so you can I can dig deeper into the hole of dependence on cheap oil, cheap labor, and so that American interests (which usually means "business interests" because they have little to do with freedom or Freedom) are attended to.
If Wikileaks didn't mean anything, the US government wouldn't be spending millions of dollars and political capital trying to hang Manning, the alleged leaker, and Assange, a foreign citizen who they probably have a sealed indictment against.
And if you think Stratfor seems childish and inane and is therefore suspect, just listen to the pathetic ramblings of Richard Nixon sometime. The fools and idiots running the country are sometimes just that: powerful men with stupid, backwards, and outdated ideas, who gladly scheme to kill and pillage because they think they know what is "right."
Yes, that's a much more plausible explanation than poorly trained terrorists trying the same plot again and succeeding because of a massive American intelligence bureaucracy that wasn't quick enough to adapt...
Turn off the Alex Jones and go outside.
Don't paper over our intelligence failures. The title of the memo to the President of the US was "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the US." Bin Laden was, at that time, the head of an organization that had already carried out terrorist attacks against the United States in Kenya, as well as the bombing of the USS Cole. He wasn't a sales manager in Montreal.
If our governments are going to assume that we are all terrorists until proven innocent, the war on terror is over. We lost.
1. Wal-mart has a profit margin of 3.3%. Again, Apple could raise their prices marginally to cover this difference. 2. Apple pays it's Apple store employees only marginally better than Best Buy pays the Geek Squad. They pay the same rates for engineers as everyone else, as far as I can tell from Glass Door. 3. That was in 2005, right? iMacs are still way overpriced, and they still sell. All-in-one touch screens from competitors sell for 60% of Apple prices.
It is just wages. We're not talking about mining everything in the US too (but eventually, that would be good, if just for national security purposes).
Apple is free to manufacture wherever they want and charge whatever they want, but American consumers are also free to buy what they want, and boycott what they want, and picket where they would like. Whining about informed consumers is the sign of a company who knows they are doing wrong.
I suggest we reduce demand for their product until they change their tune. Apple would not be possible without the significant investments we have made in our country and infrastructure for decades. If they don't know how reinvest the fruits of American ingenuity into American workers, let's put them out of business and find someone who does.
Apple's margins are 40-50% in some of their devices, and by accepting the profit margins common thoughout the industry, or marginally increasing their own prices, they could all be built in the US. Instead of being a good citizen (corporations are people too!) and helping get our economy back on its feet by increasing domestic manufacturing, Apple is simply pocketing the difference. That's why they have one hundred billion dollars in the bank.
Additionally, Apple is very brand conscious. If people start boycotting and picketing Apple Stores, the protest could actually work. The other manufacturers like Lenovo and Dell and Microsoft have some retail presence, but nothing like Apple.
Carlin was mostly right.
The question is, are you going to sit there and take it, or are you going to educate yourself and fight back? I'm afraid Carlin fell for an old trick: a tiny minority of powerful people telling the vast majority that they don't have any power. The term that has been coined for this is "antipolitics." Yes it is pervasive, and the message contained in the media and the whole platform of right wing anti-government and left-wing anarchist philosophies.
The truth is that we have (compared with the rest of the world) relatively free and fair elections, relatively uncorrupted government, and the capability to change our government however we want to if we are willing to sacrifice some time and money to make the change happen. The truth is that most Americans have the government they deserve. We have achieved the technical definition of democracy, but we are letting new forms of aristocracy corrupt it.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
--Plato
The planes you fly are modified bombers funded by decades of investment by the US government. The computer you use is based on technology that progressed under enormous investment by the US government. The internet, which is probably the source of all of your entertainment and possibly your income was invented, funded, and developed by the US government.
It's one of the few things we do well, and it does our society a tremendous amount of good to invest in new technologies, even if they don't immediately produce profitable outcomes. That's why we were the world's number one economy, and it's shortsighted nonsense like demanding that everything be developed by private industry -- most of which can't see past their next quarterly report -- which is going to continue our slide to last place in the western world.
Unless you break your leg. Or you get sick, or your spouse or mother or kids get sick, or there's a tornado, or a harsh winter, or a crop famine due to a fungus outbreak that no one has ever seen before, or the transportation infrastructure you depend on breaks down for some reason, or your equipment breaks down and holder of your warranty and insurance skipped town with the money.
There's a reason straight capitalism is fine in theory: it's got nothing to do with real life if you're interested in providing your society with more than wishes for good luck.
"The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that nonfinancial companies had socked away $1.84 trillion in cash and other liquid assets as of the end of March, up 26% from a year earlier and the largest-ever increase in records going back to 1952. Cash made up about 7% of all company assets, including factories and financial investments, the highest level since 1963." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704312104575298652567988246.html
The bottom 80% of Americans only hold 15% of net worth in the United States.
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
Participating in two wars, cutting taxes, and then making the middle and working class pay with austerity measures while the wealthiest Americans sit on top of record amounts of wealth is evil, and ultimately a detriment to our economy.
Find a single economist who will tell you that sinking 10 million dollars into a painting has the same economic value as investing 10 million dollars in education, infrastructure, or scientific research. In fact, pushing up the values of rarities and luxury real estate does less for the economy than simply giving that money away to random people who would spend it on goods and services that create jobs in a much greater proportion.
This is super basic economics, going all the way back to Adam Smith:
who also said
And that's what we're dealing with: power and capital have concentrated in the hands of people who make money by destroying American jobs and infrastructure, and reaping the profit from that destruction. What Smith could not have imagined is that people like you would support the destruction of their own nation's ability to provide for itself for the benefit of a handful of producers, who are "architecting" the whole system to have their own needs "most peculiarly attended to."
What happens when you try to put a Linux installer in your optical drive and reboot on a Mac versus virtually any PC? Why do they make you download rEfit to install what you want on your own hardware?
I'm amazed that you got modded to 5 on slashdot. I guess even the nerds aren't using Linux anymore.
All of your numbers are based on per capita rates, which doesn't show the effects of income disparity. The argument here is that in the western world, poor Americans are relatively worse off than poor Europeans, at least according to the Brookings Institution that is correct. Statistically, poor Americans have less of a chance of moving into higher income brackets than much of the Western world. Fifty thousand Americans die every year of lack of access to health care, a figure that is unheard of in the rest of the Western world.
Regardless of how deep you keep sinking your head into the sand, the reality is that Americans are for the first time faced with less options than the generation before. You're welcome to pretend that it isn't happening, but abandoning enlightenment principles for the purpose of ignoring the welfare of your fellow citizens is hardly what I consider patriotic.
How about money getting invested into infrastructure and education instead of sitting in a bank somewhere, or going to buy works of art, or spent on high end luxury items with very little economic long term benefit for society at large? There are actually plenty of better ways to use excess capital in our society.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/absolute-poverty/
In terms of absolute poverty, we're one of the highest in the West, and all of the other nations on the list provide universal health care.
In either case, it's safe to stay that Americans have some of the worst income inequality out of any country, and among similar Western nations, are in the bottom 10% when it comes to relative poverty rates, absolute poverty rates, child poverty rates, health care, and education. If you'd like to be proud of that, you're welcome to, but I'm certainly not.
Patriotism is doing meaningful things to improve the lives of your fellow citizens, not pretending a problem doesn't exist to make yourself feel better about your country.
Thanks for reinforcing the stereotype that Americans don't think about facts before they start screaming "We're #1!"
In this case, we are 33rd out of 36.
I was pointing out how strong governments with progressive taxation do very well versus all other forms of governments that I know if. If you have a counter example, please provide it.
(On another note, most people believe that caring about other human beings is central to being a good person. You seem to have a terrible lack of empathy for other people. You may want to ask yourself why that is.)
Because the United States refuses to allow them to move forward. Iran does not do as they are told, so our goal in the region is to strangle them through economic, political, and military policy. Consider our allies Saudi Arabia: women are treated as property, people are regularly beheaded for spiritual crimes, and there's not a single synagogue or church in the whole country. But since they sell us oil and play along with our plans -- they like being friends with a military power with the same regional interests -- last year we agreed to sell them 80 billion dollars worth of military equipment. Saudi Arabia makes Iran look like a democratic paradise, but we don't care. Iran could start holding legitimate elections and dismantle their religious police tomorrow, but if they were still critics of American policies, they'd be under constant threat of economic strangulation and warfare.
The United States has the world's largest economy, and the world's largest military, and we use that leverage to punish nations that don't serve our interests. We aren't exceptionally bad; we just behave exactly as you would expect any other empire to behave. We demand loyalty and trade -- fair or not -- from countries that have resources we want, or we strangle them. That's been an open secret since the end of WWII.
The only nations that get better deals are powerful nations like China. Remember Tiananmen Square? US investment increased after they ran over students with tanks, because Beijing proved they were in control and could provide a stable place for investment. Morality has almost nothing to do with our foreign policy. Turks are free to slaughter Kurds because they play ball.
Perhaps they're remembering the near three decades of the Shah's rule in Iran, marked by murders, torture, SAVAK secret police -- all supported by the United States and Britain? That ended in 1979. Or maybe they're remembering the war we helped create that killed a million Iraqis and Iranians in the 1980s once the Shah fell from power, and we decided to crown Saddam Hussein as our new friend on the block. That ended around 1988.
But answer this question for me: how many decades would pass before you would forget having your government overthrown, controlled by an outside party, and then being subjected to three decades of a police state followed by an eight year war that wrecked your whole nation? I guess real men can watch their families and society get destroyed and just "get over it."
Had he not attended an exclusive prep school with a Teletype Model 33, and been given free access to computers because of the school he was attending, it's doubtful you'd know his name. So who is to say there weren't dozens of people in Seattle who could have seen the same success?
I don't believe in utopianism, so communism is out. Even so you have a pretty shallow view of it; perhaps you are thinking of totalitarian dictatorships?
Without my grandfather's service during WWII and the tax dollars contributed to our societal infrastructure from my (and your) ancestors going back generations, you'd spend most of your day looking for food and fuel and water. You're welcome.
How many African children have died because they didn't have:
1) a stable government providing security and
2) a way to collect taxes and provide equitable infrastructure?
Probably 10 million people have been murdered in the DRC over resources in the last ten years, precisely because there's no one ensuring an equitable distribution of their natural resources. Don't confuse entitlement with civilization.
Bill Gates without taxpayer infrastructure would be just a guy named Bill Gates. Same goes for every rich person in the United States; that's why Africa doesn't have anything like the Silicon Valley. While I agree that people have a right to earn money, it's limited, just like every other right we have.
You almost had it... it's you and me through the federal government. That's how democratic governments work.
Morality has everything to do with it. If we, as a society, let children wallow in poverty while a tiny percentage of our population makes millions of dollars per day, we're making a moral choice: feed, clothe, and educate children, or let one person have an amazing set of priceless art in his fourth vacation home. Those are choices, and choices always have moral consequences.
I'm sorry, this really is the dumbest idea I've come across in the longest time. If humans are self-regulating, why don't we just legalize slavery, fraud, rape, and murder? If they have to be mandatory, the idea of preventing these crimes must be horrible if we're to follow your logic.
The reason rich people don't want equity in society is because they want to keep all of their stuff. That's it. There's no shining moral justification for it: they want their third and fourth vacation homes, their exotic luxury cars, their private jets and million dollar birthday parties, and you and your whole community can burn in hell for all they care.
If you're actually interested in liberating humans, you should be primarily concerned with subverting concentrations of power: whether in the church, in the state, the military, or in the economy, it's concentrations of power that lead to injustice. That's why democracy is a vote and not a dollar (or at least, that's how it used to be.) As long as the government is carrying out the true will of the populace, you will typically have very good results. Even if you disagree with that premise, there's no denying what usually happens when concentrations of power abuse their position: there's a massive revolution, and many lives are lost either on the way to achieving more equity in society, or on the way to arriving at a police state like North Korea.
These are the ideas that our nation was founded on: you are no better than me, nor is the King, nor is the Pope, nor is the Banker. We play by the same rules, because all men are created equal, and we deserve equal treatment in front of the Law.
But go ahead; throw it all away for some pithy political regurgitations. We'll see how you like neanderthal ethics when you're the one without a club.
This is wrong. America (as in the nation-state) was founded by followers of the Enlightenment, who believed fully that science was the answer to everything. It was an outright rejection of supernaturalism, though many were Deists and believed that someone had set the universal machine in motion.
Don't let anyone tell you that America was founded on religious zealotry. It was settled by Puritans, whose horrible intolerance have never quite gone away, but the blight of Evangelicals is a modern problem. So modern that Bush I was the first Republican to lose the election (in part) because he refused to self-identify as an Evangelical, and because he made the mistake of doing something sensible like raising taxes to cover deficits. Mitt Romney will be the second to lose because of his religious affiliation, because he's not pure enough for the religious voting bloc that now controls the GOP.
There are plenty of very well respected and efficient charities that do amazing work across the globe. I donate to Oxfam, but choosing your charity is an important part of the process. If you believe that giving food contributes to long term economic problems, find a charity that helps communities start local businesses, or start farms, or dig wells.
For the most part, finding local volunteers is not a problem in the United States. We have plenty of leisure time, and many Americans spend it helping others. What people across the world need is a buffer to protect themselves against natural disasters, because they have been living on the edge of subsistence for a long time.
An hour of your pay can go a long way in the hands of an established charity. If you have limited time to donate, there's no way you can outperform a trained volunteer.