and all I could think was "Here is a promising industry coming to fruition, and, now, the government and the legacy phone companies want to fuck it over. Holy flaming shit on a stick."
How about the Super Big Gulp vs. someone's pancreas?
Whenever I see a Super Big Gulp, I smile and think "I love being an American" (seriously, freedom to do good also allows one to shoot one's foot off, as long as it hasn't been deemed terrorism:( ).
In the meantime, all the polticians will get bored with their prized tax-toy taken away from them.
1) All the shit jobs now get paid even less, despite the right wing's claims that the market forces would stabilize on a just wage. Turns out the market is just out to make money for themselves (gasp!).
Employees are fully a part of that market (funny, that). The main responsibility of the government is to enforce every person's will to work rights.
2) Federal funding is severely curtailed, and the states, who since the introduction of the income tax have come to live off of federal assistance, clamor to find new means of income (very similar to what has already occured with Bush's tax cut).
They are like a 950 lb. man trying to get off of the couch for the first time in years. Covered in his own feces, it'll take a while to get cleaned up and back into shape.
Knee-jerk policies extending federal benefits here and there and providing subsidies to states only does long-term harm by preserving an unhealthy status quo.
1. Capitalism sucks as bad as communism. It just takes a little longer to realise...but you realise it well when you are fired and you can't find a job.
So you like it, then you are fired, then, suddenly, you don't like it. You are a child.
3. Companies sell their products with up to 90% profit, especially those that outsource production. And the profit fills the pockets of their owners.
There is a long line of companies lining up to take down Microsoft, for example. StarOffice/OpenOffice.org is going to be the real killer (multiplatform with open storage formats). So, will you still be bitching when you see a monopoly disected by normal market forces, dropping prices all around to everyone's benefit?
5. The modern way of life is not humane enough. There is not enough time to get in true contact with your own people.
That's because were still hundreds or thousands of years from a truly mature economy. We are still pretty primitive, considering, for example, that so many fundamental diseases are still treated with guesswork (many cancers, auto-immune diseases, mental degeneration, etc.). We are still in an era where captialism has lots of milage left for aggressive growth. One day (in a few thousand years), perhaps there will no longer be room for growth, but, until then, we are not finished.
6. Poor people in India living in a cardbox are happier than average Joe that has a loan and a house to pay and sleeps and wakes up with the anxiety of when the next brick is coming from.
Have you really taken the time to research this one?
7. If you ever realized how good rich people live, a revolution would be started in a minute.
Have you ever known a rich person? 99% of them are normal people with normal day-to-day issues; they just have lots and lots of money for any number of reasons (earned it, inherited it, etc.). These are the people to take on the risks to make your job possible.
Which is why I want a true democracy and not a representative democracy.
Your true democracy will fail when everyone shows up to vote on American Idol rather than for President. Most Americans are STUPID. A lean (very lean) representitive government can be very effective.
A country where a corrupt government regularly bails out it's richest?
We need to elect new leadership.
too busy gutting social programs and giving that money to Enron, Haliburton, et al.
Quitting social programs is good, but the money needs to go back to the people.
Apparently I'm supposed to understand that supporting a corrupt system is "freedom" to you. Call it what you want, I won't support it, and neither will a growing number of Americans.
Freedom is generously allowed by the Constitution, but both Democrats and Republicans have trounced those freedoms over the past decades.
Socialism is not the answer (neither is capitalistic anarchy, so no flames on this).
Anti-capitalists are people who can only look as far back in history as this weeks financial report on CNN while selectively choosing historical events to further their cause. They ignore that the USA is still the most prosperous nation on the planet, due mostly to government non-involvement. The only reason why the USA can be considered to have peaked recently is that the government's arrogance is coming to fruition while the populace is too dumb and happy to do anything about it.
Joe CEO is making 1996% more than _he_ did in 1980
It seems shareholders are probably going to begin reining this one in a bit.
that startng over is as shitty as you think it is.
This is not a good generalization, because many people need to start over to explore their alternatives. Four years of experience in a shitty job can lead to wiser decision making for the next four years--and a much more fufilling experience. Money != Satisfaction.
Your other points are very true, especially about selling a home. The real estate market just doesn't move enough (mostly) to reward short-term investments, especially considering the high costs of the transactions themselves.
In college, you'll hear a lot of talk about how engineering is worthless because it only pays some petty 5 figure salary.
College life is a fantasy, where children have yet to learn what real life really costs. This is why I almost wish I didn't go to college right away (but I did, because culture in high school says tech school is for losers).
Our educational culture in the US is seriously fucked up. Perhaps locking our kids away for 12 years in school is unwise?
That's because it's a FUCKING PIECE-OF-SHIT TAX that props up some politicians fantasy about saving jobs/feeding the poor/funding schools while simultaneously taking away your ability to do the same ten times more efficiently than the government only dreams about.
...by the time GWB is done selling this country to Halliburton, there won't be a single job left except in the Army (and I'm too old for that).
The optimist in me prefers to call it a "wake of opportunity." Sure, the IT economy is being reset (vigorously), but it is basically an acknowledgement of the truth, where supply is exceeding demand in the USA. Computer Science is currently overrated and undervalued. CS grads who go months unemployed waiting for that golden programming job probably would be much better off getting a job that simply requires a bachelors degree--in anything. There are jobs out there like this, and not all of them are in sales (hopefully).
I have a BS in CSIf you lie you have to explain why you haven't been working for the last 4 years, or in my case why my previous job was as a Systems Administrator and now I want to answer telephones at a reservation center?
Omitting that you have a BS isn't lying. If it isn't to your advantage for a particular job, don't even divulge it. It's called negotiation.
The Republican philosophy of fiscal responsibility, etc., is pretty much historical, anymore.
Republicans == Democrats. And, please, no one mention trivial differences between their platforms, because both parties are leading the US to tyranny--just with different candy coatings.
Consider all of the years that Bush I and II were in the White House. For each and every one of those years, you know how many net new jobs were created? None! After each year of them being president, fewer people were employed at the end of the year. Bush recovery my ass.
I think we need to stop the pissing matches regarding past presidents and vote out the top two parties, period. Only that will begin to purge our nation of the bi-partisan political corruption we are seing. Bush, Clinton, Gore, whatever. They are pawns in all this, anyway.
I don't have enough experience to work at a different trade(machinist or welder, for example), AND I know too much to get a job flipping burgers. Of course, the idea of an apprenticeship is completely out of the question, those are almost impossible to get these days. Employers *will* *not* train people. Period.
Go to nursing school for two years. Some hospitals will pay for your education if you agree to work for them afterwards. It's nearly like a private-sector ROTC, because supply is most definitely not meeting demand in the medical industry.
Across the board, the school districts that spend the most per student are inner-city, failing systems like Atlanta, Washington, DC, Richmond, VA, Detroit, etc. -- usually several thousand more per student than the neighboring suburban districts. The extra money tends to go toward (1) gigantic, corrupt administrative bureaucracies and (2) security.
Perhaps this is because the government allows inner cities to stagnate with social programs rather than provide genuine incentives for people to move out of the city entirely. If businesses left the inner cities decades ago, then why are there still so many people there with very high unemployment rates?!?!? The high costs of inner-city schooling are really a side-effect of other mis-guided policies.
What can the government do besides twiddling interest rates? Everything else they do is politically-motivated-candy-coated-shit-on-a-stick.
They'd do a lot of good for the economy by stopping neglecting their bastard child of government: the federal income tax. Get rid of it. US citizens pay way too much tax for a terribly inefficient bureaucracy that can't even manage buying textbooks for school kids. However, I'd bet getting rid of the IRS would make the federal government look like a heroin addict in withdrawl. No more precious data, no more 15% creamy goodness...they'll get the shakes pretty bad (well, that's just tough).
From his GWB rant: "Both men know that the Clinton presidency was the country's longest and most profound sustained era of growing optimism, wealth, opportunity, and hope!"
What a trivial and superficial inference to make about a 4-year presidency which lies in the midst of much longer business cycles. The success of the USA really has little to do with Democrats or Republicans. Instead, it has to do with the US Constitution providing the essential freedom for people to seek prosperity. All the last several decades of government has succeeded in doing is slowing that progress through obsessive regulation that often trumps our original freedoms in favor of political ends.
Here's a hint: even the Democrats can't save us from GWB and his cronies, because their only differences are the causes they use to front their agendas.
The free market tries to make money out of the infrastructure this means low maintenance, low investment. It's a recipe for blackouts.
You can easily replace "free market" with "government." The government is absolutely no better, no more efficient, no less corrupt, and no more competent than any corporation. If you believe otherwise, I suggest you read statistics on things like neglected bridges and our public school system, to name just two.
People who believe the government will fix their problems are naive.
Sun Microsystems is notorious for charging way too much for their products...
You just have to know what to buy from Sun and what not to. RAM is a good example of what should be third-party (just don't go cheap irrationally and get marginal chips that cost more in problems than Sun's original price). Depending on your application, hard drives can be gotten elsewhere, too (situations where matched sets of drives and special firmware revisions aren't needed).
One aspect of Sun's high pricing on some parts is that they really are providing a service (one-stop shopping). It's sort of like being able to get a carton of milk at a gas station, but for twice what the grocer sells it for.
I happened to be watching a program on PBS last night about "accidents" involving nuclear weapons.
I think I saw this same show, but on cable. A multi-megaton warhead had fallen within an hour's drive of where I currently live (back in the 1950s, I think). Yep, makes me all warm and fuzzy.
Slashdot Mirror
and all I could think was "Here is a promising industry coming to fruition, and, now, the government and the legacy phone companies want to fuck it over. Holy flaming shit on a stick."
How about the Super Big Gulp vs. someone's pancreas?
Whenever I see a Super Big Gulp, I smile and think "I love being an American" (seriously, freedom to do good also allows one to shoot one's foot off, as long as it hasn't been deemed terrorism
Yeah, that'll do it!
Just not overnight. Write back in thirty years.
In the meantime, all the polticians will get bored with their prized tax-toy taken away from them.
1) All the shit jobs now get paid even less, despite the right wing's claims that the market forces would stabilize on a just wage. Turns out the market is just out to make money for themselves (gasp!).
Employees are fully a part of that market (funny, that). The main responsibility of the government is to enforce every person's will to work rights.
2) Federal funding is severely curtailed, and the states, who since the introduction of the income tax have come to live off of federal assistance, clamor to find new means of income (very similar to what has already occured with Bush's tax cut).
They are like a 950 lb. man trying to get off of the couch for the first time in years. Covered in his own feces, it'll take a while to get cleaned up and back into shape.
Knee-jerk policies extending federal benefits here and there and providing subsidies to states only does long-term harm by preserving an unhealthy status quo.
1. Capitalism sucks as bad as communism. It just takes a little longer to realise...but you realise it well when you are fired and you can't find a job.
So you like it, then you are fired, then, suddenly, you don't like it. You are a child.
3. Companies sell their products with up to 90% profit, especially those that outsource production. And the profit fills the pockets of their owners.
There is a long line of companies lining up to take down Microsoft, for example. StarOffice/OpenOffice.org is going to be the real killer (multiplatform with open storage formats). So, will you still be bitching when you see a monopoly disected by normal market forces, dropping prices all around to everyone's benefit?
5. The modern way of life is not humane enough. There is not enough time to get in true contact with your own people.
That's because were still hundreds or thousands of years from a truly mature economy. We are still pretty primitive, considering, for example, that so many fundamental diseases are still treated with guesswork (many cancers, auto-immune diseases, mental degeneration, etc.). We are still in an era where captialism has lots of milage left for aggressive growth. One day (in a few thousand years), perhaps there will no longer be room for growth, but, until then, we are not finished.
6. Poor people in India living in a cardbox are happier than average Joe that has a loan and a house to pay and sleeps and wakes up with the anxiety of when the next brick is coming from.
Have you really taken the time to research this one?
7. If you ever realized how good rich people live, a revolution would be started in a minute.
Have you ever known a rich person? 99% of them are normal people with normal day-to-day issues; they just have lots and lots of money for any number of reasons (earned it, inherited it, etc.). These are the people to take on the risks to make your job possible.
(there maybe a few exceptions)
There are a lot of exceptions.
Which is why I want a true democracy and not a representative democracy.
Your true democracy will fail when everyone shows up to vote on American Idol rather than for President. Most Americans are STUPID. A lean (very lean) representitive government can be very effective.
A country where a corrupt government regularly bails out it's richest?
We need to elect new leadership.
too busy gutting social programs and giving that money to Enron, Haliburton, et al.
Quitting social programs is good, but the money needs to go back to the people.
Apparently I'm supposed to understand that supporting a corrupt system is "freedom" to you. Call it what you want, I won't support it, and neither will a growing number of Americans.
Freedom is generously allowed by the Constitution, but both Democrats and Republicans have trounced those freedoms over the past decades.
Socialism is not the answer (neither is capitalistic anarchy, so no flames on this).
Vote for a Libertarian if you care about freedom.
What is the deal with anti-capitalists?
Anti-capitalists are people who can only look as far back in history as this weeks financial report on CNN while selectively choosing historical events to further their cause. They ignore that the USA is still the most prosperous nation on the planet, due mostly to government non-involvement. The only reason why the USA can be considered to have peaked recently is that the government's arrogance is coming to fruition while the populace is too dumb and happy to do anything about it.
Joe CEO is making 1996% more than _he_ did in 1980
It seems shareholders are probably going to begin reining this one in a bit.
that startng over is as shitty as you think it is.
This is not a good generalization, because many people need to start over to explore their alternatives. Four years of experience in a shitty job can lead to wiser decision making for the next four years--and a much more fufilling experience. Money != Satisfaction.
Your other points are very true, especially about selling a home. The real estate market just doesn't move enough (mostly) to reward short-term investments, especially considering the high costs of the transactions themselves.
In college, you'll hear a lot of talk about how engineering is worthless because it only pays some petty 5 figure salary.
College life is a fantasy, where children have yet to learn what real life really costs. This is why I almost wish I didn't go to college right away (but I did, because culture in high school says tech school is for losers).
Our educational culture in the US is seriously fucked up. Perhaps locking our kids away for 12 years in school is unwise?
That people are unemployed because there AREN'T ANY FUCKING JOBS TO BE FILLED, DON'T YOU?
1) end the minimum wage
2) end the federal income tax
boom
"THIS IS NOT A TAX."
That's because it's a FUCKING PIECE-OF-SHIT TAX that props up some politicians fantasy about saving jobs/feeding the poor/funding schools while simultaneously taking away your ability to do the same ten times more efficiently than the government only dreams about.
...by the time GWB is done selling this country to Halliburton, there won't be a single job left except in the Army (and I'm too old for that).
The optimist in me prefers to call it a "wake of opportunity." Sure, the IT economy is being reset (vigorously), but it is basically an acknowledgement of the truth, where supply is exceeding demand in the USA. Computer Science is currently overrated and undervalued. CS grads who go months unemployed waiting for that golden programming job probably would be much better off getting a job that simply requires a bachelors degree--in anything. There are jobs out there like this, and not all of them are in sales (hopefully).
I have a BS in CSIf you lie you have to explain why you haven't been working for the last 4 years, or in my case why my previous job was as a Systems Administrator and now I want to answer telephones at a reservation center?
Omitting that you have a BS isn't lying. If it isn't to your advantage for a particular job, don't even divulge it. It's called negotiation.
500 billion dollar defeceit
The Republican philosophy of fiscal responsibility, etc., is pretty much historical, anymore.
Republicans == Democrats. And, please, no one mention trivial differences between their platforms, because both parties are leading the US to tyranny--just with different candy coatings.
Consider all of the years that Bush I and II were in the White House. For each and every one of those years, you know how many net new jobs were created? None! After each year of them being president, fewer people were employed at the end of the year. Bush recovery my ass.
I think we need to stop the pissing matches regarding past presidents and vote out the top two parties, period. Only that will begin to purge our nation of the bi-partisan political corruption we are seing. Bush, Clinton, Gore, whatever. They are pawns in all this, anyway.
I don't have enough experience to work at a different trade(machinist or welder, for example), AND I know too much to get a job flipping burgers. Of course, the idea of an apprenticeship is completely out of the question, those are almost impossible to get these days. Employers *will* *not* train people. Period.
Go to nursing school for two years. Some hospitals will pay for your education if you agree to work for them afterwards. It's nearly like a private-sector ROTC, because supply is most definitely not meeting demand in the medical industry.
Across the board, the school districts that spend the most per student are inner-city, failing systems like Atlanta, Washington, DC, Richmond, VA, Detroit, etc. -- usually several thousand more per student than the neighboring suburban districts. The extra money tends to go toward (1) gigantic, corrupt administrative bureaucracies and (2) security.
Perhaps this is because the government allows inner cities to stagnate with social programs rather than provide genuine incentives for people to move out of the city entirely. If businesses left the inner cities decades ago, then why are there still so many people there with very high unemployment rates?!?!? The high costs of inner-city schooling are really a side-effect of other mis-guided policies.
Revisionist history in a pro-conservitive climate...
Or, is it revisionist-revisionist history? Blaming the current crop does not imply innocence for their predecessors.
Uh, actually, yes it is.
k .
What can the government do besides twiddling interest rates? Everything else they do is politically-motivated-candy-coated-shit-on-a-stic
They'd do a lot of good for the economy by stopping neglecting their bastard child of government: the federal income tax. Get rid of it. US citizens pay way too much tax for a terribly inefficient bureaucracy that can't even manage buying textbooks for school kids. However, I'd bet getting rid of the IRS would make the federal government look like a heroin addict in withdrawl. No more precious data, no more 15% creamy goodness...they'll get the shakes pretty bad (well, that's just tough).
From his GWB rant: "Both men know that the Clinton presidency was the country's longest and most profound sustained era of growing optimism, wealth, opportunity, and hope!"
What a trivial and superficial inference to make about a 4-year presidency which lies in the midst of much longer business cycles. The success of the USA really has little to do with Democrats or Republicans. Instead, it has to do with the US Constitution providing the essential freedom for people to seek prosperity. All the last several decades of government has succeeded in doing is slowing that progress through obsessive regulation that often trumps our original freedoms in favor of political ends.
Here's a hint: even the Democrats can't save us from GWB and his cronies, because their only differences are the causes they use to front their agendas.
The free market tries to make money out of the infrastructure this means low maintenance, low investment. It's a recipe for blackouts.
You can easily replace "free market" with "government." The government is absolutely no better, no more efficient, no less corrupt, and no more competent than any corporation. If you believe otherwise, I suggest you read statistics on things like neglected bridges and our public school system, to name just two.
People who believe the government will fix their problems are naive.
Sun Microsystems is notorious for charging way too much for their products...
You just have to know what to buy from Sun and what not to. RAM is a good example of what should be third-party (just don't go cheap irrationally and get marginal chips that cost more in problems than Sun's original price). Depending on your application, hard drives can be gotten elsewhere, too (situations where matched sets of drives and special firmware revisions aren't needed).
One aspect of Sun's high pricing on some parts is that they really are providing a service (one-stop shopping). It's sort of like being able to get a carton of milk at a gas station, but for twice what the grocer sells it for.
...having someone around that can tell the customer that its the cable they need is not cheap at all.
Then why are they so often wrong about it and merely parrot what their managment tells them?
I am not suggesting we would see a WW2 type atrocity happening in America.
Perhaps it will be a WW3 type atrocity, one that we cannot imagine until it occurs.
I happened to be watching a program on PBS last night about "accidents" involving nuclear weapons.
I think I saw this same show, but on cable. A multi-megaton warhead had fallen within an hour's drive of where I currently live (back in the 1950s, I think). Yep, makes me all warm and fuzzy.