Every time I hear about what Marvel is doing on the comic front, it sounds like a vampire draining the life out of its victim. Only in this case it's SJWs who can't produce anything of value on their own taking beloved characters and making them "unproblematic." If it weren't for the movies staying roughly true to the original characters, Lee would have definitely lived to see the life drained out of his legacy by now.
I'm an older millennial with apparently post-Gen Z kids. If I gave my older son a choice between my iPhone and a GameBoy (especially a GBA) I know that once he got the handle of the controls he'd have a lot more fun with the GameBoy than the phone. Fact is, the systems we grew up with were simply more fun and less frustrating for entertainment than a smartphone. Anyone who tries to do more than basic apps on a phone learns pretty quickly that they're just garbage for any sort of gaming experience that really pulls you in at that age range.
I'll also point out too that to the extent that I've noticed "kids shows" these days, they're also PC bullshit compared to what we grew up with. A lot of them have a preachy under current. I can't imagine shows like Macross/Robotech, Exo Squad, GI Joe, etc. being put out for boys today because ermagerd, toxic masculinity or something.
Is watching people on the left sputter in anger that it was somehow OK or totally not as reported when Obama's team harvested the social graph with Facebook's tacit official approval. One of their lead staffers boasted recently on Twitter that Facebook reps showed up and said they were only able to keep going because Facebook was "on their side."
*Puts on Morpheus mask* What if I told you that you can condemn Facebook and call Obama's campaign and Cambridge Analytica symptoms of the disease...
One of the commenters in the first link is a perfect example of the blame-everyone-but-Apple mentality:
I must have macOS 10.13.4 to run the version of Xcode that allows me to develop for iOS 11.3.
Rolling back my OS, even if I wanted to which I don't, is not an option. My options are 1. wait for a fix, again I might add, DisplayLink died on the last macOS update as well. Or 2. Buy a USB video adapter from another more reliable source.
While I don't want to go spend potentially hundreds, I also will not accept that a thousand dollar monitor is now sitting blank.
I should mention as a macOS and iOS developer, as others have that macOS has a beta program and you could easily have identified this issue weeks ago. Also as a developer, I will always need to update to the new macOS and xCode on the day of their release.
This issue is already 4 days old, waiting on an update from Apple is 100% unacceptable. Having this issue even crop up in the first place is about 98% unacceptable.
Who makes a good USB video adapter capable of between 1080p and 2k? I'll have an answer to this in the next 10 minutes. My relationship with DisplayLink that has lasted years is within 48 hours of being over. Nothing personal, but this is simply untenable.
Yes, blame a peripheral manufacturer for thinking that an update (10.13.3 ->10.13.4) wouldn't do something like break the subsystem that their drivers depend on. Couldn't possibly expect Apple to put some more QA on macOS updates and stop treating the OS like it's a legacy product WRT support.
Dude, I get why you're upset. Your livelihood has just been hit by Apple. However, you should be blaming Apple for doing stupid shit like breaking your drivers in an update and then forcing you to have that particular point release to run an IDE.
You want proof that Apple is now firmly a cult? People would be howling from the rafters if Visual Studio updates required a highly particular set of bleeding edge patches from Microsoft to run. No one outside of the SCADA space would tolerate this level of tied-at-the-hip releasing.
Apps that help people figure out if their followers follow them back or interact with them, analyze their audiences or find relevant hashtags are now quickly running into their API limits
Nothing of value was lost on the platform...
These are features that Instagram should have been providing already instead of leading to a data broker-friendly situation.
The company that built the product is going to automatically hold a strong majority of the mindshare around it unless they really behave like assholes. Case in point: don't be like Joyent viz a viz Node.JS (savagely attack core contributors on your corporate blog over pronoun politics). Be like Facebook with React (actually show you care about the community's concerns for the most part).
The amount of capital B, grade A Bullshit you have to deal with with screening Americans is bad enough. The amount of fraud you get from the developing world is just unbelievable. "Why yes, I have 20 years of experience with writing Hadoop applications in Go with a UI written in Rust."
Oh really, it say you graduated from a diploma mill 3 years ago...
Legal chain immigration brings about 1M legal immigrants into the country per year. That's on top of the illegals, most of whom compete with workers on the low end.
It doesn't matter what you feel about immigration. The fact is that our immigration policies are nothing more than a safety valve on capital to ensure that the supply side is always high enough that the demand side never has to negotiate.
Here's a simple plan that would cause real growth in average wages very quickly:
1. Build the wall with the military's budget like Trump is threatening. 2. Abolish chain immigration. 3. Shred the green cards of all immigrants who arrived on chain migration in the last 20 years and order them to self-deport or face prison time. 4. Tie corporate taxes to how much business and how many American citizens are employed by the business. 5. Impose steep FICA excise taxes on outsourced labor. Make that offshore team in India so damn expensive in FICA costs that its not competitive. 6. Shred NAFTA and impose a minimum 25% tariff on all goods made by American companies in Mexico for the American market. 7. Pass a federal law that allows state and federal law enforcement to declare any business that relies on illegals to be a criminal enterprise as a whole entity and make its entire asset sheet liable for liquidation upon conviction.
We're pissing and moaning over losing a $9.25 subsidy? You can go to Wal-Mart right now and buy a monthly plan for $30 that gives unlimited talk, text and 2g data + 3gb LTE. You can get an iPhone SE on that plan for ~$150 all in on the phone.
Funny thing, they've found a much higher correlation between obesity and cancer than between coffee and cancer. Heck, probably 95%+ of the things with warning labels. Kinda makes sense when you think about it; the more your body makes cells unnecessarily, the more potential for bad mutations that lead to cancer.
So what was the reaction when Trump wanted to move toward giving meal kits to the poor instead of letting buy whatever they want? Rawwwwwr!
Nope, can't have the government distributing government cheese, vegetables, etc. We gotta empower those poor folks to nobly pretend they're not eating on the state's dime as they buy cheap, obesity-enhancing processed foods that studies show may really up their chance of cancer.
I remember when it was received wisdom that one of the only two markets where Apple fought tooth and nail for was education. Now it seems more like Apple says if they can't give students a tablet, they'd rather cede the market. To them, if it's not a super profitable market, fuck it.
Here's why that's wrong...
At Apple's valuation, they could easily slice and dice the market to build a solid moat to protect their high end.
1. MacBook: $500-$1000. Simple, crappy specs, but solid design aimed at lower income people and students to suck them into the "Apple Lifestyle" as best as you can. 2. MacBook Air: $1000-$2000; ultra mobility laptop. 3. MacBook Pro: Desktop replacement; $2000-$5000 price tag.
The irony? My company wouldn't think twice about dropping $3500-$4000 on a desktop replacement w/ 32-64GB of RAM and rock solid design. Apple could segment the market even higher if they had the vision.
More evolved societies only worry about what can actually harm people
Like the UK which is about to send a comedian to prison for teaching his joke Nazi jokes or France where Le Pen is about to be prosecuted for sharing pictures of what ISIS does to remind me people to oppose any measure that lets jihad into France?
Explicit LTS versions vs non-LTS will enable the conservative to have a roadmap and the adventurous to keep going with new ideas and features where the two eventually converge.
I'm personally quite sick of joining "enterprise" teams that use wildly past their shelf life versions of Java and then get indignant when I pointedly ask them WTF they're doing calling it "secure" when the product has been abandonware WRT security for over a year.
Right now it feels like "Java 7 vs 8 vs 9" is a matter of opinion. Now at least we can say "you chose a non-LTS version and didn't keep up... WTF?" and stuff like that. Oracle is at least now saying "this is for this type of user and that is for that type of user" and if you try a third way the answer is "you're wrong" unless you accept full responsibility.
The public behaves like sheep and demands to be treated with respect...
by wolves.
No issue better illustrates this than gun control. Millions of voters who freak out at the idea of an armed public, taking responsibility for their own safety, etc. I'm not talking ARs in every closet; I'm talking Ms. Sophisticated Urbanite who wets herself at the idea of having a tiny.38 in her purse so she can do more than claw out the eyes of a rapist. Or Mr. Soccer Mom Dad who'd never own a 9mm/.40/.45 he could carry in public or a shotgun in case his home is burgled at night. They seriously believe they should be able to outsource everything to someone else and still not be treated like wards/sheep to be sheered by bad guys and the power structure.
You want to be respected and feared as a group? You have to:
1. Care. 2. Take responsibility. 3. Be willing to do your small part to make bad guys suffer.
With Facebook's resources they should already have algorithms that can roughly pinpoint who started the hoax, ID them and publicly castigate them or ban them.
Or even better, the originators just get a notice saying "Facebook Legal has determined that you are one of the first/most influential sharers of this hoax. All information about this defamatory post has been preserved in the event that the target wishes to pursue legal action."
I think that would cause enough puckering sphincters to start changing attitudes.
Ironically, we're facing the same issue of cost and time vs value and don't even want to acknowledge it. Russia's top of the line missiles can already operate well beyond the range of a carrier's jets, which means that if we got into a serious war with China all Hell would break loose for the Pacific Fleet if the carriers had to move into effective operating range. In 50 years, we're likely to regard carriers as having been a technology that only made sense during infancy of radar and missile/rocket tech.
Generic Relative/Friend: What Facebook did is horrible! Someone should go to jail. Muh privacy! You: Hey, I heard about this other social media site with different business model. You want to try it out together to see if we like it better than FB? Generic Relative/Friend: No! I have no time for that! *Posts more crappy memes on Facebook*
In terms of reputation, if Comcast is the bottom of the barrel, Facebook's rep is now buried 6 ft under the barrel and Generic Relative/Friend cannot even spend 10 minutes to try a competing site.
This is why politicians are absolutely justified in thinking the masses are moronic asses.
They can bring down BTC by just having someone inject a few dozen images of child pornography into the chain. In fact, if they wanted to be truly malicious they could just get an informant to run a script with a well-funded wallet that would periodically dump new images into the chain to make "just beyond repair" in terms of legality.
The Clinton campaign used an online smear campaign to try to turn Sanders into the candidate whose supports are misogynists. Then Russian intelligence says "hold our vodka, we'll show you what professionals can do."
And the best part? 95% of what they did was dump dirty laundry that would have destroyed her before the primary if the MSM had not been in her pocket. They didn't even have to deep dive into dezinformatsia to undermine her.
Maybe if they'd run a candidate who didn't epitomize her nickname on the right, Felonia Von Pantsuit, they'd have had a tougher target.
they could post about their love of deadly weapons without being judged by family and friends
No one wants their uncle to constantly pop up in the comment section telling that any handgun whose caliber doesn't start with "4" belongs in their wife's purse.
It's the "gig economy" that's the problem, where up to 20% of us don't actually have FICA withholdings from any employer at all. It keeps personnel counts down for the corporations, and means there's less pesky litigation from employees, because contractors can be largely fired at will, for any and all kinds of reasons, really anything at all.
The gig economy didn't create the problem. The outsourcing and free trade cult is the source of the problem. Read an overview of Ricardo's "famous arguments" that are parroted by every smug free trader on the Internet and laugh hysterically at how out of touch with reality they are. FFS they didn't even survive the 19th century when banks began to accept remote money transfers.
Not true. Social Security and Medicare taxes are based on wages that the employee earns, not how much the companies are making
I didn't suggest anything to the contrary. You just missed my point which is that every foreign worker doing an American market-related job is a) not paying FICA taxes (employee or employer) and b) not contributing to the welfare of our national community.
The more a company that does business in the US chooses to export to the US instead of creating jobs in our market, the more they should face in taxes. The more they provide services to our market, the more their native clients should pay in FICA-related taxes. Specifically, I am saying that offshored work should incur punitive FICA excise taxes. A company that sacrifices $5m worth of native worker jobs to offshore to a $800k team supporting them should incur bare minimum a 100% FICA excise tax on the value of the contract. Plus the year end percentage of the company's total workforce based abroad who support the American market should factor into the overall tax rates of the company.
In other words, a company like IBM should be largely treated like a foreign company because it's about 75% foreign employees (citizenship + location) and heavily supports the domestic American market. Accordingly, it should be taxed in a way that privileges companies that have a higher ratio of American citizens to foreign employees.
You mean the corporate welfare system, where corporations stash profits overseas, and find ways to pay not one cent of US Federal taxes? The one that so vastly underpays its employees that the employees have to get government assistance for basics like food and housing-- not to mention the screaming costs of health care?
No, I mean Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are going bankrupt because companies can send all of those taxable positions overseas without facing any consequences. Employers should be given a good set of choices:
1. Be part of society, participate in the safety net and pay very low corporate income taxes. 2. Exist on the margins to hedge your bets and pay through the nose.
If IBM had another 50k American workers tomorrow, all of those employees would be paying income and FICA taxes. IBM would be paying employer share FICA. IBM would then be justified in demanding a 5-10% tax rate and not a 25%+ rate because they're putting a lot of people to work and funding the safety net which is the lion's share of the budget.
The tech industry doesn't want to face the fact that its pro-immigration, pro-outsourcing, pro-get-it-done-no-matter-who-gets-fucked culture makes this necessary. Most of the clamoring for a UBI is essentially this if you read between the lines:
I'm not going to change how I do business, so you better change the welfare system to not inconvenience me.
If we punished outsourcing, H1B use, etc. with hefty FICA taxes levied on their users, we could not only create more domestic jobs, but help reduce the deficits in our welfare system.
Slashdot Mirror
Every time I hear about what Marvel is doing on the comic front, it sounds like a vampire draining the life out of its victim. Only in this case it's SJWs who can't produce anything of value on their own taking beloved characters and making them "unproblematic." If it weren't for the movies staying roughly true to the original characters, Lee would have definitely lived to see the life drained out of his legacy by now.
I'm an older millennial with apparently post-Gen Z kids. If I gave my older son a choice between my iPhone and a GameBoy (especially a GBA) I know that once he got the handle of the controls he'd have a lot more fun with the GameBoy than the phone. Fact is, the systems we grew up with were simply more fun and less frustrating for entertainment than a smartphone. Anyone who tries to do more than basic apps on a phone learns pretty quickly that they're just garbage for any sort of gaming experience that really pulls you in at that age range.
I'll also point out too that to the extent that I've noticed "kids shows" these days, they're also PC bullshit compared to what we grew up with. A lot of them have a preachy under current. I can't imagine shows like Macross/Robotech, Exo Squad, GI Joe, etc. being put out for boys today because ermagerd, toxic masculinity or something.
Is watching people on the left sputter in anger that it was somehow OK or totally not as reported when Obama's team harvested the social graph with Facebook's tacit official approval. One of their lead staffers boasted recently on Twitter that Facebook reps showed up and said they were only able to keep going because Facebook was "on their side."
*Puts on Morpheus mask* What if I told you that you can condemn Facebook and call Obama's campaign and Cambridge Analytica symptoms of the disease...
They gave up on the whole "don't be evil" schtick a long time ago...
One of the commenters in the first link is a perfect example of the blame-everyone-but-Apple mentality:
Yes, blame a peripheral manufacturer for thinking that an update (10.13.3 ->10.13.4) wouldn't do something like break the subsystem that their drivers depend on. Couldn't possibly expect Apple to put some more QA on macOS updates and stop treating the OS like it's a legacy product WRT support.
Dude, I get why you're upset. Your livelihood has just been hit by Apple. However, you should be blaming Apple for doing stupid shit like breaking your drivers in an update and then forcing you to have that particular point release to run an IDE.
You want proof that Apple is now firmly a cult? People would be howling from the rafters if Visual Studio updates required a highly particular set of bleeding edge patches from Microsoft to run. No one outside of the SCADA space would tolerate this level of tied-at-the-hip releasing.
Nothing of value was lost on the platform...
These are features that Instagram should have been providing already instead of leading to a data broker-friendly situation.
The company that built the product is going to automatically hold a strong majority of the mindshare around it unless they really behave like assholes. Case in point: don't be like Joyent viz a viz Node.JS (savagely attack core contributors on your corporate blog over pronoun politics). Be like Facebook with React (actually show you care about the community's concerns for the most part).
The amount of capital B, grade A Bullshit you have to deal with with screening Americans is bad enough. The amount of fraud you get from the developing world is just unbelievable. "Why yes, I have 20 years of experience with writing Hadoop applications in Go with a UI written in Rust."
Oh really, it say you graduated from a diploma mill 3 years ago...
Legal chain immigration brings about 1M legal immigrants into the country per year. That's on top of the illegals, most of whom compete with workers on the low end.
It doesn't matter what you feel about immigration. The fact is that our immigration policies are nothing more than a safety valve on capital to ensure that the supply side is always high enough that the demand side never has to negotiate.
Here's a simple plan that would cause real growth in average wages very quickly:
1. Build the wall with the military's budget like Trump is threatening.
2. Abolish chain immigration.
3. Shred the green cards of all immigrants who arrived on chain migration in the last 20 years and order them to self-deport or face prison time.
4. Tie corporate taxes to how much business and how many American citizens are employed by the business.
5. Impose steep FICA excise taxes on outsourced labor. Make that offshore team in India so damn expensive in FICA costs that its not competitive.
6. Shred NAFTA and impose a minimum 25% tariff on all goods made by American companies in Mexico for the American market.
7. Pass a federal law that allows state and federal law enforcement to declare any business that relies on illegals to be a criminal enterprise as a whole entity and make its entire asset sheet liable for liquidation upon conviction.
We're pissing and moaning over losing a $9.25 subsidy? You can go to Wal-Mart right now and buy a monthly plan for $30 that gives unlimited talk, text and 2g data + 3gb LTE. You can get an iPhone SE on that plan for ~$150 all in on the phone.
Funny thing, they've found a much higher correlation between obesity and cancer than between coffee and cancer. Heck, probably 95%+ of the things with warning labels. Kinda makes sense when you think about it; the more your body makes cells unnecessarily, the more potential for bad mutations that lead to cancer.
So what was the reaction when Trump wanted to move toward giving meal kits to the poor instead of letting buy whatever they want? Rawwwwwr!
Nope, can't have the government distributing government cheese, vegetables, etc. We gotta empower those poor folks to nobly pretend they're not eating on the state's dime as they buy cheap, obesity-enhancing processed foods that studies show may really up their chance of cancer.
I remember when it was received wisdom that one of the only two markets where Apple fought tooth and nail for was education. Now it seems more like Apple says if they can't give students a tablet, they'd rather cede the market. To them, if it's not a super profitable market, fuck it.
Here's why that's wrong...
At Apple's valuation, they could easily slice and dice the market to build a solid moat to protect their high end.
1. MacBook: $500-$1000. Simple, crappy specs, but solid design aimed at lower income people and students to suck them into the "Apple Lifestyle" as best as you can.
2. MacBook Air: $1000-$2000; ultra mobility laptop.
3. MacBook Pro: Desktop replacement; $2000-$5000 price tag.
The irony? My company wouldn't think twice about dropping $3500-$4000 on a desktop replacement w/ 32-64GB of RAM and rock solid design. Apple could segment the market even higher if they had the vision.
Like the UK which is about to send a comedian to prison for teaching his joke Nazi jokes or France where Le Pen is about to be prosecuted for sharing pictures of what ISIS does to remind me people to oppose any measure that lets jihad into France?
Explicit LTS versions vs non-LTS will enable the conservative to have a roadmap and the adventurous to keep going with new ideas and features where the two eventually converge.
I'm personally quite sick of joining "enterprise" teams that use wildly past their shelf life versions of Java and then get indignant when I pointedly ask them WTF they're doing calling it "secure" when the product has been abandonware WRT security for over a year.
Right now it feels like "Java 7 vs 8 vs 9" is a matter of opinion. Now at least we can say "you chose a non-LTS version and didn't keep up... WTF?" and stuff like that. Oracle is at least now saying "this is for this type of user and that is for that type of user" and if you try a third way the answer is "you're wrong" unless you accept full responsibility.
The public behaves like sheep and demands to be treated with respect...
by wolves.
No issue better illustrates this than gun control. Millions of voters who freak out at the idea of an armed public, taking responsibility for their own safety, etc. I'm not talking ARs in every closet; I'm talking Ms. Sophisticated Urbanite who wets herself at the idea of having a tiny .38 in her purse so she can do more than claw out the eyes of a rapist. Or Mr. Soccer Mom Dad who'd never own a 9mm/.40/.45 he could carry in public or a shotgun in case his home is burgled at night. They seriously believe they should be able to outsource everything to someone else and still not be treated like wards/sheep to be sheered by bad guys and the power structure.
You want to be respected and feared as a group? You have to:
1. Care.
2. Take responsibility.
3. Be willing to do your small part to make bad guys suffer.
With Facebook's resources they should already have algorithms that can roughly pinpoint who started the hoax, ID them and publicly castigate them or ban them.
Or even better, the originators just get a notice saying "Facebook Legal has determined that you are one of the first/most influential sharers of this hoax. All information about this defamatory post has been preserved in the event that the target wishes to pursue legal action."
I think that would cause enough puckering sphincters to start changing attitudes.
Ironically, we're facing the same issue of cost and time vs value and don't even want to acknowledge it. Russia's top of the line missiles can already operate well beyond the range of a carrier's jets, which means that if we got into a serious war with China all Hell would break loose for the Pacific Fleet if the carriers had to move into effective operating range. In 50 years, we're likely to regard carriers as having been a technology that only made sense during infancy of radar and missile/rocket tech.
Generic Relative/Friend: What Facebook did is horrible! Someone should go to jail. Muh privacy!
You: Hey, I heard about this other social media site with different business model. You want to try it out together to see if we like it better than FB?
Generic Relative/Friend: No! I have no time for that! *Posts more crappy memes on Facebook*
In terms of reputation, if Comcast is the bottom of the barrel, Facebook's rep is now buried 6 ft under the barrel and Generic Relative/Friend cannot even spend 10 minutes to try a competing site.
This is why politicians are absolutely justified in thinking the masses are moronic asses.
They can bring down BTC by just having someone inject a few dozen images of child pornography into the chain. In fact, if they wanted to be truly malicious they could just get an informant to run a script with a well-funded wallet that would periodically dump new images into the chain to make "just beyond repair" in terms of legality.
The Clinton campaign used an online smear campaign to try to turn Sanders into the candidate whose supports are misogynists. Then Russian intelligence says "hold our vodka, we'll show you what professionals can do."
And the best part? 95% of what they did was dump dirty laundry that would have destroyed her before the primary if the MSM had not been in her pocket. They didn't even have to deep dive into dezinformatsia to undermine her.
Maybe if they'd run a candidate who didn't epitomize her nickname on the right, Felonia Von Pantsuit, they'd have had a tougher target.
No one wants their uncle to constantly pop up in the comment section telling that any handgun whose caliber doesn't start with "4" belongs in their wife's purse.
The gig economy didn't create the problem. The outsourcing and free trade cult is the source of the problem. Read an overview of Ricardo's "famous arguments" that are parroted by every smug free trader on the Internet and laugh hysterically at how out of touch with reality they are. FFS they didn't even survive the 19th century when banks began to accept remote money transfers.
I didn't suggest anything to the contrary. You just missed my point which is that every foreign worker doing an American market-related job is a) not paying FICA taxes (employee or employer) and b) not contributing to the welfare of our national community.
The more a company that does business in the US chooses to export to the US instead of creating jobs in our market, the more they should face in taxes. The more they provide services to our market, the more their native clients should pay in FICA-related taxes. Specifically, I am saying that offshored work should incur punitive FICA excise taxes. A company that sacrifices $5m worth of native worker jobs to offshore to a $800k team supporting them should incur bare minimum a 100% FICA excise tax on the value of the contract. Plus the year end percentage of the company's total workforce based abroad who support the American market should factor into the overall tax rates of the company.
In other words, a company like IBM should be largely treated like a foreign company because it's about 75% foreign employees (citizenship + location) and heavily supports the domestic American market. Accordingly, it should be taxed in a way that privileges companies that have a higher ratio of American citizens to foreign employees.
No, I mean Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are going bankrupt because companies can send all of those taxable positions overseas without facing any consequences. Employers should be given a good set of choices:
1. Be part of society, participate in the safety net and pay very low corporate income taxes.
2. Exist on the margins to hedge your bets and pay through the nose.
If IBM had another 50k American workers tomorrow, all of those employees would be paying income and FICA taxes. IBM would be paying employer share FICA. IBM would then be justified in demanding a 5-10% tax rate and not a 25%+ rate because they're putting a lot of people to work and funding the safety net which is the lion's share of the budget.
The tech industry doesn't want to face the fact that its pro-immigration, pro-outsourcing, pro-get-it-done-no-matter-who-gets-fucked culture makes this necessary. Most of the clamoring for a UBI is essentially this if you read between the lines:
If we punished outsourcing, H1B use, etc. with hefty FICA taxes levied on their users, we could not only create more domestic jobs, but help reduce the deficits in our welfare system.