I have to wonder if anyone has actually calculated, based on the effective resolution of the human eye with 20/20 vision, how big the screen has to be for this resolution to be appreciably better than 4K? I can barely differentiate the difference between 1080P and 4K on a 50" screen from 10 feet away, but I am getting old.
For example, can the average person even tell the difference between 4K and 8K looking at a 70" screen from a reasonable viewing distance (say 10 feet)? I bought a 4K 40" TV to use as my computer monitor because at 24" viewing distance, it makes a difference, but I have to wonder.
I suspect the TV industry is just looking for the next gimmick to abnormally elevate the TV sales numbers. First it was HD adoption, then it was plasma, then it was LED, then it was 3D, then it was 4K, now it is 8K... I don't mind when there is real value and improvement (HD, flat LED TVs that you could hang on the wall and 4K were all real improvements), but the rest were just gimmicks.
You do realize that they don't manipulate their currency right?.. that has been proven many MANY times over.
And its not a matter of respecting IP that's the issue.. The larger cause for concern is basically an espionage group having the ability to review and possibly steal/alter code. IP is stolen all the time.. (from everyone)..
And a blanket embargo won't do anything other than make the local citizens hurt.. (its not like wages rise as fast as COL).. And salaries have been depressed for the last 30 years.
Actually, the value of their currency is defined by the central bank which is controlled by the government. It has been well documented that they have manipulated their currency. As AC said: "The RMB is a managed float and by definition is manipulated by the central bank to fulfill the "managed". That doesn't even consider the impacts of other policies they institute, such as those on foreign/domestic investment."
As far as IP theft goes, please show me the Chinese product or military hardware stolen by the US and put into production to damage Chinese business. Drawing equivalence between the US keeping tabs on the world for security purposes and China stealing IP at a massive rate from every successful business on the planet for the purpose of undercutting them and boosting their own economy is not justified by the facts, to the point of being an assinine assertion.
China's economy is what fuels their military and their government. Their booming economy https://www.google.com/search?...: is the only reason that they have not democratized long ago, in similar fashion to the USSR. When things get bad enough for the citizenry, they start to rebel. When a country can't feed it's army, it either disbands, or overthrows the government.
Seeing that you have provided no counter evidence, I am assuming that beyond sarcasm, you have no actual argument to validate your position and therefore concede that, while you don't like my statements on an emotional level, they are accurate.
Last time I checked, EMP weapons had been around for a long time (basically all you have to do is detonate a nuclear device in the ionosphere.) Most of the US military equipment is hardened against such an attack. I would have to think that China's military, including their ICBMs is also hardened against EMP attack. Hardening means that while the equipment directly in the blast zone of maybe 10 miles still gets fried, everything outside that radius still works. Also, to take out the entire US or China, you would need hundreds if not thousands of EMP devices. Even the largest warheads only have an effective EMP radius of 100-500 miles, depending on the device you are trying to disable ( a cell phone antenna is easy to fry, but trying to take out a PC surrounded by a Faraday cage, plugged in to a well made surge protector is far more difficult.) Most expensive electronics (medical/industrial) these days either have internal fusing and surge protection or are plugged into an external surge protector, since we have lightning storms to deal with that can also fry the electronics.
You seem to be confused about how debt works. Debt is only collectible if the governmental authority enforces it to be collected. If I were Trump, I would take that $1.1T and let the Chinese know that if they don't shape up, we will deduct that debt against the value of the IP and business they stole from the US using hacking and currency manipulation for the last 20 years. Care to figure out how much that would add up to? Any debt that China holds can be declared by the US government to be invalid and uncollectible. China could piss and moan but they couldn't get a cent since the rest of the world has also been getting screwed by them and their currency manipulation and IP theft for at least the last 20 years. Since each bond instrument is numbered, they would just become worthless pieces of paper, and China would be unable to sell or get any value from those bonds.
The theory that working and trading with China would eventually westernize them only made sense when the US was clearly dominant, but for the last 20 years, China has been working steadily to destroy the US using the very hand of friendship that we extended to them. Had we isolated them like we did the USSR they probably would have collapsed by now. As it stands today, they have stolen our technology, our jobs, our manufacturing and are poised to become the dominant power in the world within the next 20 years or less (depending if you are talking economically or militarily).
Sorry, that is revisionist BS. The changes made to the ACA were to get Democrats to vote for it who were not alt-left nut jobs (there were some at that time). Most of those who did vote for it have since lost their seats anyway because the public didn't want that monstrosity in the first place.
Trying to blame Republicans for a Democrat authored bill voted for exclusively by Democrats is a nice trick though.
Not really. Get back to me when source code for software starts walking out the back door of the NSA and starts being sold legally with no recourse under a different brand name in the US. Because that is what we are talking about in China.
"Get your Wandows 10 here, $10 per license for unlimited use and resale. The same exact thing as Windows 10 at a fraction of the price. Only slightly pirated."
First off, the fascist alt-left with their sock puppet accounts are out in force today.
Regarding your statement, sorry, but that is a flat out lie. Obama's policies gave us 1% per year for 8 years. The growth rate right now is partially forward looking by businesses, who are expecting Obamacare to be repealed, taxes to be cut, regulations to be rolled back, and in part due to actual EOs that have been rescinded by Trump. Regulations can stifle business even worse than taxes, something Obama never understood. Businesses operate in part on what is, and in part on projections and expectations. Now that they don't have to worry about the EPA raping them unexpectedly, the EEOC making up BS claims on them, Obama pulling another regulation out of his ass that costs them 10% off the top, they are starting to ramp up.
This is exactly because of Trump, just like the massive reduction in illegal immigration (70%) even though there has been no walls built yet, just the fact that Trump will be enforcing our laws on immigration and will be building a wall has resulted in massive reductions in illegal immigration, though not much on the ground has actually changed yet. http://www.washingtontimes.com...
Let's see. Trump has real talent for self-promotion. He is, by definition, a politician. His first lawsuit was over racial discrimination, and he's been giving white supremacists breaks, so I'd have to call him a racist. He isn't actually an idiot, but there's a whole lot of things he shows absolutely no sign of understanding. Hitler was a lot smarter.
Business men are also good at self promotion, but at the end of the day they know what it takes to actually accomplish things if they last more than a few years (unlike politicians).
If Trump is a racist, why did Jesse Jackson give him an award for a lifetime of helping the African American community??? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Please show me one event or action performed by Trump that was racist. Not this guilt by association BS "Well Trumps sisters uncles brother in law five times removed once drove by a clan meeting." That kind of shit doesn't fly with people whose ability to think rationally has not been impaired by a lifetime of drug use and alphabet soup news networks.
Everyone in the alt-left only hate Trump because they believe all the bullshit being shoveled. They believe because they want to believe, and because they don't know their history, and make deciscions based on emotions instead of facts.
So in essence you are saying that because he started out with seed money (like every company that gets cash from a VC), and he did roughly as well as the other top 500 companies in the entire country over 40 years (that is what the fortune 500 is BTW) he is somehow less competent? Are you aware that 96% of all businesses fail within 10 years? Yet he managed to stay abreast with the top 500 companies in the US and employs thousands of people. How exactly is that bad performance?
You might want to re-examine your premise.
A kid getting money from rich parents usually ruins them. They buy expensive cars, get hooked on drugs and hookers and wind up in the gutter a few years later. That Trump was responsible with his inheritance is hardly typical or a bad thing...
Bend over and prepare to have your software stolen by the world's number one IP rights violator.
I hope the Trump administration starts putting real teeth in pushback against this kind of crap. As in blanket embargo on all goods imported from China until they start respecting our IP and stop manipulating their currency... I would be happy to buy lifetime guarantee products from the US instead of the chicom trash that stocks most department store shelves.
The bottom line is companies have had 8 years of garbage economy (1% growth) under Obama, and they are just taking a little while to adapt to the reality that they can't be as choosy about their employees with a robust economy, and they may have to pay more as well. The days of getting 100 applications for a single job and only taking the very best person are over. You hire who you can train to get the job done, or you get left behind in a growing economy. The winners will realize this, the losers will remain stagnant or shrinking.
Carter: economy in the tank, middle east in shambles
Reagan: great economy, strong military, powerful posture collapsed the USSR. His conservative policies grew the economy so much that it outstripped his initial deficit spending.
Bush elder: caved to liberals, economy in the tank
Clinton: first two years, alt-left policies, Hillary care, AWB, etc., economy in the tank, got his ass handed to him in the mid terms, pivoted and passed all conservative legislation for 6 years and economy was great with budget surplus. Fingered interns in the oval office and signed a treaty with North Korea that gave us the nuclear North Korea with ICBMs that we know and love today...
Bush Jr: inherited dot com bubble and recession, 9-11 destroyed $4T in wealth 6 months into presidency, still managed to keep economy growing with real unemployment under 6% for 7 years. Bad actor states behaved for the most part in fear of being whacked like Afghanistan and Iraq. These include Lybia giving up it's nuclear weapons, Iran and Pakistan behaving themselves, etc.
Obama: inherited a similar sized recession as Bush Jr., made it 10x worse by giving his cronies the stimulus money instead of leveraging it to actually solve the housing crisis. Tanked the economy at 1% growth for 8 years with Obamacare and Executive Order regulation. More EO than any other president, more EO overturned as unconstitutional than any other president. Doubled the national debt to nearly $20,000,000,000,000. Left the white house with the middle east on fire, paid $20,000,000,000 in pallets of cash to Iran in ransom money, let a nuclear North Korea develop ICBMs... I could go on.
Trump: Mostly so far focused on undoing all the damage to the country and economy done by Obama. Economy is set to grow at least 3% this year, or as much as it grew in the last 3 years of the Obama term combined. Trump is stuck dealing with the middle east in flames, 40M people on food stamps, real unemployment north of 10%, 10-20M illegal aliens infiltrating the country and the list goes on.
The pattern here is clear. Democrats focus on theory and cock up reality every time they try to implement their ideology. Conservatives focus on what is reasonable, fact driven and is known to work and when they are in control the economy does better (we still have a recession about every 6-8 years of growth, that is just the cycle). When conservatives are in power, the world at large is also safer and more peaceful for the vast majority of the world.
Some, but usually the stuff that goes to the film festivals. The big commercial stuff used to be focused on giving the masses what they wanted, a pleasurable experience in some way or another. More and more stupid has been creeping in and thus movie revenue has been going down. This is an ebb and flow, and once Hollywood has made a bunch of garbage that they like but no one else watches, they will go make another Avatar or Titanic and fatten their wallets again.
The American movie audience has a fairly high bar for film quality (acting, special effects, production value, etc.). I have seen my fair share of foreign films, and though some are good, mostly from the UK due to their tradition of Shakespearean theater giving them a deep pool of talent to draw from, most foreign films are jarringly poorly acted on shoestring budgets which results in very low production values etc. This is the barrier that most foreign films have been up against for a long time. I will say that more recently, with the advent of "good enough" editing and special effects that are available with consumer grade software, there has been an uptick in more interesting film that is not painful to watch. However, when fan films on Youtube have better acting (including voice acting if it is a dub) and better production value than foreign films, don't be surprised when the foreign films don't do well in the American market.
If you want to see an example of how to do it right with foreign films, look at Japanese anime. It is still a niche market, but they have been expanding and making significant strides, and these days the sub and dub quality along with compelling, unexpected plots makes anime an enticing option for many American consumers.
Because clearly, anyone who disagrees with you and your opinions is a moron. Never mind that Trump successfully ran a real estate business for decades and survived recessions, fierce competition, dozens of idiot politicians, etc.
I am sick of the alt-left echo chamber flat out lying about Trump. He is not perfect and certainly has his flaws, but he is not a racist, he is not a politician, he is not an idiot, and he is not Hitler. If you say any of these things you immediately lose all credibility with any kind of informed audience (i.e. anyone other than an alt-leftie). The conservatives, myself included, disliked Obama as much as the left dislikes Trump, but we never lost our shit like the left is doing now.
But those were all abject failures. OTOH, Avatar made $2,700 million in the US or about 200% of your entire list of movies there, and that was just one well done movie. The US market is massive, but making shit movies and pandering to totalitarian regimes is destroying the US movie market.
The other problem from the original article is rampant bootlegging of US films. If we really want to make more money from China on movies, how about holding their feet to the fire until they start respecting our IP...
"All people are basically selfish and abusive underneath the hood the only thing that changes is circumstances and perspective."
This is true to an extent, but just look at all of the selfless people reaching out to help others in the wake of hurricane Harvey. People who actually adhere to Christian teachings believe their highest command is to love others as they love themselves. That creates some very clear guidelines for fairness and charity. They also believe that there will be an accounting after death where everyone is held responsible not only for their actions but their motivations behind those actions as well. While not perfect in this world, that is pretty strong motivation to act fairly and charitably.
OTOH, Atheists, hedonists and agnostics can be altruistic, but they have no motivation beyond their own self interest to feel good about themselves, which is where you get many of the cut throat business types that crush thousands of people financially to get ahead unfairly and unethically and then create a charitable foundation at 55 because they fell like the shit that they actually are and want to feel better about themselves and all the bad things they have done. Modern Satanists also fall in this category.
Muslims are only charged with fairness towards other Muslims and acts of charity towards fellow Muslims, and any charity or fairness towards the infidel is for the express purpose of conversion. Infidels who refuse to convert can justifiably be slain at any time.
Buddhism teaches detachment from the world, which if implemented makes Buddhists unable and unwilling to help those in need and removes them from productive society altogether.
Hinduism is a mixed bag regarding fairness and charity, there is some implementation of the concepts in that world view.
The bottom line is that your statement very significantly depends on the world view held by the individual. I would argue that there is significant evidence that Google has been co-opted at the upper management and C-level by alt-left radicals who tend to be in practice atheists, hedonists or agnostics. The same is true of most college campuses. This is why we are seeing the motto change from "Do no evil" to "Do the alt-left thing" and unfair and unethical examples of behavior by Google increasing dramatically in frequency.
I predict that within the next 10 years we will either see heavy regulation reign in Google's behavior, the company broken up as a monopoly, or a dystopian reality where Google rules the world by brainwashing the populace via self serving search filtering algorithms, because if you can't find it it on Google it might as well not exist at all.
That's a false choice. What's better is having 4 managers making 200K/year. The only reason that didn't happen was Obama shat all over the recovery with Obamacare and his pen and paper regulations. Senior level engineers have been stuck where they are for 8 years, and millenials who have graduated in that time and would have been managed by the new MBAs have been unable to even join the work force at all. Now that Obama is gone and his policies are going in the dust bin of history, we are seeing 3% growth rate in the economy. At 3-4% a year in 2 years we will have doubled the 1% average growth rate under Obama. In 4 years the economy will have grown roughly 14% or 160% more than the 8 years under Obama. If we get 8 years of Trump growth, we are looking at between 27% growth and 37% growth, or about 470% of Obama's measly 8%. This is nearly the exact same thing we saw in the Carter and Reagan years. Garbage economy under libtard Carter and then booming economy under Reagan.
I know the liberals out there, and they are going to point to Clinton. Well, please remember that Clinton was tanking the economy for his first two years and then was dragged kicking and screaming by the republican house and senate super majorities (Clinton's pivot) to enact conservative legislation like welfare to work that eventually lead to a budget surplus and a booming economy... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... The economy under Bill Clinton had nothing to do with him other than his willingness to admit that the American people did not want his liberal policies and signing mountains of common sense, conservative legislation during his last 6 years.
Step 1: Update the terms to require all Vermont cable companies to install an extension into rural areas based on their available subscriber base (if Comcast has 90% of Vermont and has to do 550miles, then a cable company that has 1% must run 5.5 miles). Now there is no discrimination between companies, it is a fair percentage.
Step 2: Put into the license that Comcast has 10 days to comply or their cable monopolies will be revoked and their equipment seized by the state of Vermont. Comcast will be reimbursed value on the equipment based on the remaining amortized value of said equipment based on Comcast prior tax year (Hint: most of the cable company's equipment has been completely amortized for years, meaning it is completely paid off, and it's use life has already ended, though the companies continue to charge consumers out the ass for the use of this equipment because they are a monopoly).
Step 3: In every county, allocate the seized hardware to a municipal non-profit who are responsible for proving service, and who are run by a manager who is accountable to a 5 elected citizen review board on 2 year staggered terms. All employees of these non profits cannot be paid more than industry standard wages for their positions, but they are eligible for 40% bonuses every year, based on a matrix that accounts for up-time vs downtime, average customer speed vs national average speed, customer satisfaction surveys, actual operating spending vs budgeted spending, annual reviews etc. with various weighting of the factors based on the employee's position and the importance of the factor. The bonus equation factors and weighting can be changed once per year to set goals for the year. When negotiating rates for cable content or backbone access, all of the non-profit cable companies negotiate as a single entity for the strongest bargaining power.
Step 4: Enjoy the locally owned and operated cable non profit nirvana that is still accountable and responsive to local customers with local accountability that harnesses inherent human greed to motivate it's employees to provide responsive, quality service at a price likely less than half what the cable company charges now.
I am all for a case by case review of these think tanks. From what I have seen, there are a fair number of such on both the political right and left who are genuinely focused on issues and spreading their ideas on the cable shows. Most of the grass roots Tea Party 501C organizations that Obama's IRS fraudulently sabotaged were in the same category and were genuinely focused on policy, voter education and turnout.
I don't know what the spread is between legit think tanks and lobbying proxies, but there are legitimate organizations.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to wonder if anyone has actually calculated, based on the effective resolution of the human eye with 20/20 vision, how big the screen has to be for this resolution to be appreciably better than 4K? I can barely differentiate the difference between 1080P and 4K on a 50" screen from 10 feet away, but I am getting old.
For example, can the average person even tell the difference between 4K and 8K looking at a 70" screen from a reasonable viewing distance (say 10 feet)? I bought a 4K 40" TV to use as my computer monitor because at 24" viewing distance, it makes a difference, but I have to wonder.
I suspect the TV industry is just looking for the next gimmick to abnormally elevate the TV sales numbers. First it was HD adoption, then it was plasma, then it was LED, then it was 3D, then it was 4K, now it is 8K... I don't mind when there is real value and improvement (HD, flat LED TVs that you could hang on the wall and 4K were all real improvements), but the rest were just gimmicks.
Fair enough, I stand corrected.
Well said Petry, well said.
You do realize that they don't manipulate their currency right?.. that has been proven many MANY times over.
And its not a matter of respecting IP that's the issue.. The larger cause for concern is basically an espionage group having the ability to review and possibly steal/alter code. IP is stolen all the time.. (from everyone)..
And a blanket embargo won't do anything other than make the local citizens hurt.. (its not like wages rise as fast as COL).. And salaries have been depressed for the last 30 years.
Actually, the value of their currency is defined by the central bank which is controlled by the government. It has been well documented that they have manipulated their currency. As AC said: "The RMB is a managed float and by definition is manipulated by the central bank to fulfill the "managed". That doesn't even consider the impacts of other policies they institute, such as those on foreign/domestic investment."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/...
As far as IP theft goes, please show me the Chinese product or military hardware stolen by the US and put into production to damage Chinese business. Drawing equivalence between the US keeping tabs on the world for security purposes and China stealing IP at a massive rate from every successful business on the planet for the purpose of undercutting them and boosting their own economy is not justified by the facts, to the point of being an assinine assertion.
China's economy is what fuels their military and their government. Their booming economy https://www.google.com/search?...: is the only reason that they have not democratized long ago, in similar fashion to the USSR. When things get bad enough for the citizenry, they start to rebel. When a country can't feed it's army, it either disbands, or overthrows the government.
Seeing that you have provided no counter evidence, I am assuming that beyond sarcasm, you have no actual argument to validate your position and therefore concede that, while you don't like my statements on an emotional level, they are accurate.
Going for the ad homonym clearly puts you in your place and validates all I said above.
Last time I checked, EMP weapons had been around for a long time (basically all you have to do is detonate a nuclear device in the ionosphere.) Most of the US military equipment is hardened against such an attack. I would have to think that China's military, including their ICBMs is also hardened against EMP attack. Hardening means that while the equipment directly in the blast zone of maybe 10 miles still gets fried, everything outside that radius still works. Also, to take out the entire US or China, you would need hundreds if not thousands of EMP devices. Even the largest warheads only have an effective EMP radius of 100-500 miles, depending on the device you are trying to disable ( a cell phone antenna is easy to fry, but trying to take out a PC surrounded by a Faraday cage, plugged in to a well made surge protector is far more difficult.) Most expensive electronics (medical/industrial) these days either have internal fusing and surge protection or are plugged into an external surge protector, since we have lightning storms to deal with that can also fry the electronics.
You seem to be confused about how debt works. Debt is only collectible if the governmental authority enforces it to be collected. If I were Trump, I would take that $1.1T and let the Chinese know that if they don't shape up, we will deduct that debt against the value of the IP and business they stole from the US using hacking and currency manipulation for the last 20 years. Care to figure out how much that would add up to? Any debt that China holds can be declared by the US government to be invalid and uncollectible. China could piss and moan but they couldn't get a cent since the rest of the world has also been getting screwed by them and their currency manipulation and IP theft for at least the last 20 years. Since each bond instrument is numbered, they would just become worthless pieces of paper, and China would be unable to sell or get any value from those bonds.
The theory that working and trading with China would eventually westernize them only made sense when the US was clearly dominant, but for the last 20 years, China has been working steadily to destroy the US using the very hand of friendship that we extended to them. Had we isolated them like we did the USSR they probably would have collapsed by now. As it stands today, they have stolen our technology, our jobs, our manufacturing and are poised to become the dominant power in the world within the next 20 years or less (depending if you are talking economically or militarily).
Sorry, that is revisionist BS. The changes made to the ACA were to get Democrats to vote for it who were not alt-left nut jobs (there were some at that time). Most of those who did vote for it have since lost their seats anyway because the public didn't want that monstrosity in the first place.
Trying to blame Republicans for a Democrat authored bill voted for exclusively by Democrats is a nice trick though.
Huh... Last time I checked, Hong Kong was a limited democracy form of government and not part of mainland China.
Not really. Get back to me when source code for software starts walking out the back door of the NSA and starts being sold legally with no recourse under a different brand name in the US. Because that is what we are talking about in China.
"Get your Wandows 10 here, $10 per license for unlimited use and resale. The same exact thing as Windows 10 at a fraction of the price. Only slightly pirated."
First off, the fascist alt-left with their sock puppet accounts are out in force today.
Regarding your statement, sorry, but that is a flat out lie. Obama's policies gave us 1% per year for 8 years. The growth rate right now is partially forward looking by businesses, who are expecting Obamacare to be repealed, taxes to be cut, regulations to be rolled back, and in part due to actual EOs that have been rescinded by Trump. Regulations can stifle business even worse than taxes, something Obama never understood. Businesses operate in part on what is, and in part on projections and expectations. Now that they don't have to worry about the EPA raping them unexpectedly, the EEOC making up BS claims on them, Obama pulling another regulation out of his ass that costs them 10% off the top, they are starting to ramp up.
This is exactly because of Trump, just like the massive reduction in illegal immigration (70%) even though there has been no walls built yet, just the fact that Trump will be enforcing our laws on immigration and will be building a wall has resulted in massive reductions in illegal immigration, though not much on the ground has actually changed yet. http://www.washingtontimes.com...
Let's see. Trump has real talent for self-promotion. He is, by definition, a politician. His first lawsuit was over racial discrimination, and he's been giving white supremacists breaks, so I'd have to call him a racist. He isn't actually an idiot, but there's a whole lot of things he shows absolutely no sign of understanding. Hitler was a lot smarter.
Business men are also good at self promotion, but at the end of the day they know what it takes to actually accomplish things if they last more than a few years (unlike politicians).
If Trump is a racist, why did Jesse Jackson give him an award for a lifetime of helping the African American community??? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Please show me one event or action performed by Trump that was racist. Not this guilt by association BS "Well Trumps sisters uncles brother in law five times removed once drove by a clan meeting." That kind of shit doesn't fly with people whose ability to think rationally has not been impaired by a lifetime of drug use and alphabet soup news networks.
Everyone in the alt-left only hate Trump because they believe all the bullshit being shoveled. They believe because they want to believe, and because they don't know their history, and make deciscions based on emotions instead of facts.
So in essence you are saying that because he started out with seed money (like every company that gets cash from a VC), and he did roughly as well as the other top 500 companies in the entire country over 40 years (that is what the fortune 500 is BTW) he is somehow less competent? Are you aware that 96% of all businesses fail within 10 years? Yet he managed to stay abreast with the top 500 companies in the US and employs thousands of people. How exactly is that bad performance?
You might want to re-examine your premise.
A kid getting money from rich parents usually ruins them. They buy expensive cars, get hooked on drugs and hookers and wind up in the gutter a few years later. That Trump was responsible with his inheritance is hardly typical or a bad thing...
Bend over and prepare to have your software stolen by the world's number one IP rights violator.
I hope the Trump administration starts putting real teeth in pushback against this kind of crap. As in blanket embargo on all goods imported from China until they start respecting our IP and stop manipulating their currency... I would be happy to buy lifetime guarantee products from the US instead of the chicom trash that stocks most department store shelves.
How about that Trump economy folks?
The bottom line is companies have had 8 years of garbage economy (1% growth) under Obama, and they are just taking a little while to adapt to the reality that they can't be as choosy about their employees with a robust economy, and they may have to pay more as well. The days of getting 100 applications for a single job and only taking the very best person are over. You hire who you can train to get the job done, or you get left behind in a growing economy. The winners will realize this, the losers will remain stagnant or shrinking.
Let me jog your memory:
Carter: economy in the tank, middle east in shambles
Reagan: great economy, strong military, powerful posture collapsed the USSR. His conservative policies grew the economy so much that it outstripped his initial deficit spending.
Bush elder: caved to liberals, economy in the tank
Clinton: first two years, alt-left policies, Hillary care, AWB, etc., economy in the tank, got his ass handed to him in the mid terms, pivoted and passed all conservative legislation for 6 years and economy was great with budget surplus. Fingered interns in the oval office and signed a treaty with North Korea that gave us the nuclear North Korea with ICBMs that we know and love today...
Bush Jr: inherited dot com bubble and recession, 9-11 destroyed $4T in wealth 6 months into presidency, still managed to keep economy growing with real unemployment under 6% for 7 years. Bad actor states behaved for the most part in fear of being whacked like Afghanistan and Iraq. These include Lybia giving up it's nuclear weapons, Iran and Pakistan behaving themselves, etc.
Obama: inherited a similar sized recession as Bush Jr., made it 10x worse by giving his cronies the stimulus money instead of leveraging it to actually solve the housing crisis. Tanked the economy at 1% growth for 8 years with Obamacare and Executive Order regulation. More EO than any other president, more EO overturned as unconstitutional than any other president. Doubled the national debt to nearly $20,000,000,000,000. Left the white house with the middle east on fire, paid $20,000,000,000 in pallets of cash to Iran in ransom money, let a nuclear North Korea develop ICBMs... I could go on.
Trump: Mostly so far focused on undoing all the damage to the country and economy done by Obama. Economy is set to grow at least 3% this year, or as much as it grew in the last 3 years of the Obama term combined. Trump is stuck dealing with the middle east in flames, 40M people on food stamps, real unemployment north of 10%, 10-20M illegal aliens infiltrating the country and the list goes on.
The pattern here is clear. Democrats focus on theory and cock up reality every time they try to implement their ideology. Conservatives focus on what is reasonable, fact driven and is known to work and when they are in control the economy does better (we still have a recession about every 6-8 years of growth, that is just the cycle). When conservatives are in power, the world at large is also safer and more peaceful for the vast majority of the world.
Some, but usually the stuff that goes to the film festivals. The big commercial stuff used to be focused on giving the masses what they wanted, a pleasurable experience in some way or another. More and more stupid has been creeping in and thus movie revenue has been going down. This is an ebb and flow, and once Hollywood has made a bunch of garbage that they like but no one else watches, they will go make another Avatar or Titanic and fatten their wallets again.
The American movie audience has a fairly high bar for film quality (acting, special effects, production value, etc.). I have seen my fair share of foreign films, and though some are good, mostly from the UK due to their tradition of Shakespearean theater giving them a deep pool of talent to draw from, most foreign films are jarringly poorly acted on shoestring budgets which results in very low production values etc. This is the barrier that most foreign films have been up against for a long time. I will say that more recently, with the advent of "good enough" editing and special effects that are available with consumer grade software, there has been an uptick in more interesting film that is not painful to watch. However, when fan films on Youtube have better acting (including voice acting if it is a dub) and better production value than foreign films, don't be surprised when the foreign films don't do well in the American market.
If you want to see an example of how to do it right with foreign films, look at Japanese anime. It is still a niche market, but they have been expanding and making significant strides, and these days the sub and dub quality along with compelling, unexpected plots makes anime an enticing option for many American consumers.
Because clearly, anyone who disagrees with you and your opinions is a moron. Never mind that Trump successfully ran a real estate business for decades and survived recessions, fierce competition, dozens of idiot politicians, etc.
I am sick of the alt-left echo chamber flat out lying about Trump. He is not perfect and certainly has his flaws, but he is not a racist, he is not a politician, he is not an idiot, and he is not Hitler. If you say any of these things you immediately lose all credibility with any kind of informed audience (i.e. anyone other than an alt-leftie). The conservatives, myself included, disliked Obama as much as the left dislikes Trump, but we never lost our shit like the left is doing now.
But those were all abject failures. OTOH, Avatar made $2,700 million in the US or about 200% of your entire list of movies there, and that was just one well done movie. The US market is massive, but making shit movies and pandering to totalitarian regimes is destroying the US movie market.
The other problem from the original article is rampant bootlegging of US films. If we really want to make more money from China on movies, how about holding their feet to the fire until they start respecting our IP...
"All people are basically selfish and abusive underneath the hood the only thing that changes is circumstances and perspective."
This is true to an extent, but just look at all of the selfless people reaching out to help others in the wake of hurricane Harvey. People who actually adhere to Christian teachings believe their highest command is to love others as they love themselves. That creates some very clear guidelines for fairness and charity. They also believe that there will be an accounting after death where everyone is held responsible not only for their actions but their motivations behind those actions as well. While not perfect in this world, that is pretty strong motivation to act fairly and charitably.
OTOH, Atheists, hedonists and agnostics can be altruistic, but they have no motivation beyond their own self interest to feel good about themselves, which is where you get many of the cut throat business types that crush thousands of people financially to get ahead unfairly and unethically and then create a charitable foundation at 55 because they fell like the shit that they actually are and want to feel better about themselves and all the bad things they have done. Modern Satanists also fall in this category.
Muslims are only charged with fairness towards other Muslims and acts of charity towards fellow Muslims, and any charity or fairness towards the infidel is for the express purpose of conversion. Infidels who refuse to convert can justifiably be slain at any time.
Buddhism teaches detachment from the world, which if implemented makes Buddhists unable and unwilling to help those in need and removes them from productive society altogether.
Hinduism is a mixed bag regarding fairness and charity, there is some implementation of the concepts in that world view.
The bottom line is that your statement very significantly depends on the world view held by the individual. I would argue that there is significant evidence that Google has been co-opted at the upper management and C-level by alt-left radicals who tend to be in practice atheists, hedonists or agnostics. The same is true of most college campuses. This is why we are seeing the motto change from "Do no evil" to "Do the alt-left thing" and unfair and unethical examples of behavior by Google increasing dramatically in frequency.
I predict that within the next 10 years we will either see heavy regulation reign in Google's behavior, the company broken up as a monopoly, or a dystopian reality where Google rules the world by brainwashing the populace via self serving search filtering algorithms, because if you can't find it it on Google it might as well not exist at all.
That's a false choice. What's better is having 4 managers making 200K/year. The only reason that didn't happen was Obama shat all over the recovery with Obamacare and his pen and paper regulations. Senior level engineers have been stuck where they are for 8 years, and millenials who have graduated in that time and would have been managed by the new MBAs have been unable to even join the work force at all. Now that Obama is gone and his policies are going in the dust bin of history, we are seeing 3% growth rate in the economy. At 3-4% a year in 2 years we will have doubled the 1% average growth rate under Obama. In 4 years the economy will have grown roughly 14% or 160% more than the 8 years under Obama. If we get 8 years of Trump growth, we are looking at between 27% growth and 37% growth, or about 470% of Obama's measly 8%. This is nearly the exact same thing we saw in the Carter and Reagan years. Garbage economy under libtard Carter and then booming economy under Reagan.
I know the liberals out there, and they are going to point to Clinton. Well, please remember that Clinton was tanking the economy for his first two years and then was dragged kicking and screaming by the republican house and senate super majorities (Clinton's pivot) to enact conservative legislation like welfare to work that eventually lead to a budget surplus and a booming economy... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... The economy under Bill Clinton had nothing to do with him other than his willingness to admit that the American people did not want his liberal policies and signing mountains of common sense, conservative legislation during his last 6 years.
Solution:
Step 1: Update the terms to require all Vermont cable companies to install an extension into rural areas based on their available subscriber base (if Comcast has 90% of Vermont and has to do 550miles, then a cable company that has 1% must run 5.5 miles). Now there is no discrimination between companies, it is a fair percentage.
Step 2: Put into the license that Comcast has 10 days to comply or their cable monopolies will be revoked and their equipment seized by the state of Vermont. Comcast will be reimbursed value on the equipment based on the remaining amortized value of said equipment based on Comcast prior tax year (Hint: most of the cable company's equipment has been completely amortized for years, meaning it is completely paid off, and it's use life has already ended, though the companies continue to charge consumers out the ass for the use of this equipment because they are a monopoly).
Step 3: In every county, allocate the seized hardware to a municipal non-profit who are responsible for proving service, and who are run by a manager who is accountable to a 5 elected citizen review board on 2 year staggered terms. All employees of these non profits cannot be paid more than industry standard wages for their positions, but they are eligible for 40% bonuses every year, based on a matrix that accounts for up-time vs downtime, average customer speed vs national average speed, customer satisfaction surveys, actual operating spending vs budgeted spending, annual reviews etc. with various weighting of the factors based on the employee's position and the importance of the factor. The bonus equation factors and weighting can be changed once per year to set goals for the year. When negotiating rates for cable content or backbone access, all of the non-profit cable companies negotiate as a single entity for the strongest bargaining power.
Step 4: Enjoy the locally owned and operated cable non profit nirvana that is still accountable and responsive to local customers with local accountability that harnesses inherent human greed to motivate it's employees to provide responsive, quality service at a price likely less than half what the cable company charges now.
I am all for a case by case review of these think tanks. From what I have seen, there are a fair number of such on both the political right and left who are genuinely focused on issues and spreading their ideas on the cable shows. Most of the grass roots Tea Party 501C organizations that Obama's IRS fraudulently sabotaged were in the same category and were genuinely focused on policy, voter education and turnout.
I don't know what the spread is between legit think tanks and lobbying proxies, but there are legitimate organizations.