Don't get too smug. Open borders == death to working class, but it's OK since new immigrants tend to vote Democrat. Power > Citizens for Democrats. I do wish that there was a part for the working class in the US.
Liberal means 'pro liberty', more or less, the opposite of (leftist/marxist/socialist/progressive/American 'liberal').
Liberal means holding a broad worldview and being open to new ideas. It's not about liberty, per se. And that means having your eyes wide open and caring about the freedoms and rights of people other than yourself and not just your own interests.
A classic liberal would have laughed at safe spaces and abhorred PC speech codes. What is called a liberal, or a progressive if you want to be more trendy, in the US currently though thinks both are great improvements and enforces them.
This arrangement is typical, and it's more about tax avoidance than anything else.
It's so common that I wonder why this arrangement merits an article.
You want to see a master at work? Look at Ikea's corporate structure.
Yes Ikea is an absolute scam in terms of its tax situation. However one way to help fix it is to keep bringing it up and to try and force change. Want to make your country better? Start tackling scams like Ikea by forcing the government to actually do its job on the big guys and not just us peons. If only there was a party for the working class in the US.
The idea is to install a large solar array and combine it with an energy storage facility to store the excess energy during the day and use it at night when the sun is not shining.
Even if the average IQ of Slashdot readers has gone down in the last decade I think everyone knows what "night" means.
Thanks, dumbass.
You overestimate how smart people are. It's degenerated to where they can't even tell what gender they are or which bathroom to use correctly.
Citation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Non-competes are a problem, yes, but not the cause of wage stagnation. Job mobility is higher than it's ever been, despite the rash of non-compete contracts. Changing jobs (or threatening to) is often the only way to get a raise now, but it wasn't always this way. The main problem is that companies no longer value experience (except perhaps at hiring time but often not even then) and believe every employee with similar education is interchangeable.
Supply and demand is very much still in effect. Want to drive wages down or stagnate them? Simply import masses of people and outsource the rest. The part that economists who preach free trade don't tell you is that wages reach an equilibrium where higher wage countries go down while lower wage countries go up. We've sacrificed two generations and counting on the alter of free trade and mass immigration.
As a Chinese person living in the West, it's a shame to see Westerners not appreciating the modern culture they have about accepting people for on the kind of person they are.
It's probably because while we are certainly the most accepting we are also the most criticized for... not being accepting. It's in the process of back firing as we speak. Eventually people have had enough and tune out.
Agreed with you and the GP but isn't the 1%, the 1% includes the top end professions which work their asses off to overachieve like engineers, doctors, lawyers (jokes aside), yes even middle management and sales people.
There are over 300,000,000 people in this country, using a value of 100th's is all about masking out the real divisions. The 1% are only part of the problem in that they are overtaxed and punished. They include all the people who really did work harder and earn their place looking at all the slackers around them. They also include the children of those who did so a few generations back.
The issue isn't the 1%, the issue is the top 0.1% by wealth not income and those who control an equivalent amount of wealth in any corporation.
I agree with you also that 'we are the 99.5%' is probably more accurate but the simplicity of 'we are the 99%' is awesome. It would be OK to have the tax rate dependent on a mix of income and assets (ie wealth). If I were emperor for a day I'd tax the hell out of trust funds, implement a wealth tax on anything that people might actually want (ie land, housing) and let the uber rich instead spend their money bidding up non-essentials like collectibles and art, and put in a heavy handed inheritance tax. Plus I'd use the NSA to track tax cheats. That coupled with a death penalty for tax cheats >$50 million and a mere 30 day grace period to come clean. I'd have the national debt paid off in no time:-)
The problem is that power will not let you complain about this. You will be a radical, a communist, a know-nothing idiot who wants us back in the stone age or to give all your wealth to you, you greedy bastard....
The rhetoric is force fed to society. Same reason why society is "too stupid" to stop falling for religious woo (see the new agism bollocks, replacing christianity for those who find society able to let them stop falling for *christianity*, just not for woo "explanations").
It isn't that society is TOO STUPID, it's that the power structure is forcing a propaganda war to stop you complaining.
So you will blame the left, the right, the immigrants, the managers, the patriarchy, the SJWs, the blacks, the chinese, ANYONE but those who are running the propaganda because in a capitalist society money means power, so you cannot fight those with money, you cannot BLAME those with money. So you have to blame it on some other identifiable group. ANY group.
And, having misdiagnosed the problem, any fixes done to that problem will not fix the actual issue, and so it spirals out of control and we "fall for it again".
Although I'm not a liberal I think one of the greatest slogans in recent times is "we are the 99%". I suspect that you like that notion too. However the 99% includes a great many Christians, a majority of white people, SJWs, both AntiFa and Nazis, and just about everything else under the sun. I don't like everyone in that mix however I have to put my dislike aside if the notion of stopping the 1% from taking everything is to be achieved. I mention this because the sooner we can keep the 1% from dividing us the sooner we can get some economic justice. So if you want to not 'fall for it again' stop making fun of Christians and keep your eye on the ball of economic justice. Neither the R nor D party in it's current form will get us there, so there's a lot of work to do.
You can't seriously argue that his behavior was ethical, he knowingly published false papers and deliberately misled people. That he did so to reveal a major problem in the industry is beneficial to us, but does not excuse his behavior.
You must love whistleblowers and other checks on abuse. You logic would allow Snowden to hang while praising him for being 'beneficial to us'.
So to you the AntiFa are the fascists, and the openly racist and bigoted MAGA-hat wearers waving their Nazi and Confederate flags are the good guy and the real "patriots". Go fuck yourself you anti-American piece of shit
No middle ground between the two eh? It's easy to spot the extremists, they only see in black and white with no gray. AntiFa are very much thugs and should be more seriously hunted because they actually attack people. There is a huge difference between peacefully marching, even for a cause one disagrees with such as Nazis, and attacking people. The political process can deal with Nazis as they never have much support in this country. However the method of attacking people you disagree with opens a *much* more dangerous can of worms. This is obvious quite honestly - I'm always amazed at anyone who doesn't denounce AntiFa and anyone else who practices political violence on principle.
Seems like the sensible solution would be to go single payer so everyone get the free healthcare but pays for it with taxes, then resolve the "illegals don't pay taxes" by letting the immigrants come in legally (drop the quotas, just process the paperwork to rubber stamp their entry permission and assign a SSN at the boarder) and taxing them.
Alas you solve the tax issue but create an even larger underclass. Well integrated immigrants can be a plus. If they speak the language, if they are skilled, if they largely adopt the local culture, and if they come in quantities small enough to be absorbed. None of these criteria are met by illegal immigrants and just handing out citizenship and tax IDs would *not* change that.
As an outsider (living in Sweden, Europe) I am a bit curious, but mostly alarmed how the US have got such a seemingly malfunctioning health care system. Most other 1:st world countries (in Europe, Japan, South Korea...) have some variation on a single-payer system, where hospital visits and drugs are in most part paid by everyone via taxes, without what seems like the bureaucracy of private or employer-paid insurance.
The advantage the EU and Japan have is that they don't have a huge underclass. This is changing as the EU is now committing suicide by importing a huge underclass. In California for example 1/3 of the state, a huge chunk of that illegal or anchor babies, is on free healthcare. Free. No co-pays to visit a doctor, no cost for medicine, no monthly fee. This is supported by virtually all legally working adults paying *lots* in taxes and getting nothing in return. It's unsustainable and will bankrupt the state. Working adults however pay hundreds a month just to have insurance, and the anger grows. To say that illegal immigration is killing the state is spot on.
Citation:
https://www.sacbee.com/news/lo...
He's not wrong about the war part. Bush, Cheney, and their cronies emptied the country's coffers to enrich a handful of millionaire and billionaires in the military industrial complex with their bullshit wars. What they did is inexcusable, especially when you consider the opportunity cost of not investing that vast sum of money elsewhere (ex infrastructure, education, healthcare, research, alternative energy, ect.). Think of what we could have if that money was spent productively, like finding cures for diseases (much more likely to hurt you than a terrorist) or aerospace, or any number of other things, and the US needs to get it's shit together when it comes to planning for the future.
Bush and Cheney should definitely get blame for opening the can of worms however it's worth noting that little changed during Obama or Trump. We've yet to have a president that is serious about cutting military spending post 9/11.
However our taxes go mostly to the Military first, and what is left will get the crumbs. This creates a lot of holes in our safety net.
It's a common misconception that the military gets the majority of the federal budget. A better understanding is that the military gets the majority of the discretionary budget. That's a big difference because the discretionary budget is, as a complete category, is only 30% of the total. Mandatory spending is largely entitlements like social security and medicare and is ~65% of the total budget. Interest is also a huge factor, ~6% of the total, and is why fiscal conservatives like myself would love to see the federal debt paid down. Let me repeat that in case it was missed - the interest on the national debt was roughly half as big as military spending in 2015.
Here's a great breakdown of everything:
https://www.nationalpriorities...
PS - If you're worried about the safety net kill illegal immigration. You can have nice things or you can have open borders. You can't have both when you're living next to poor countries.
This is also how you get jury members thinking the defendant should get off because they already suffered more than they should for a given crime. I have had to deal with this, and it can be highly biased based on the age and color of the defendant.
Sadly you are correct. At it's core a democracy is only as good as its citizens. That's why I rail, in vain, against mass immigration of uneducated people from other cultures. Want to ensure more violence and crime - just import tons of uneducated people from cultures with lots of violence and crime.
> that he has set himself up for a huge lawsuit by whomever took the package.
And that is precisely why America is FUCKED.
Victim: I got tired of MY packages being stolen so I booby trapped them
Thief: I'm suing for emotional distress.
Victim: WTF!?
The key is having jurors with enough moral courage to do the right thing and to never forget jury nullification. A situation like this can can be declared not guilty even if the judge instructs you that 'you must follow the law even if the law is bad'. The whole point of a jury of your peers is to apply the law fairly and that sometimes means jury nullification.
Citation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The choice isn't between oil and no oil. There is a middle ground where we regulate industry, control pollution, and use resources in a way that compensates everyone for the damage it causes. Wild west, zero responsibility bullshit isn't a serious business model even if idiots are serious about defending it.
If this compensation is anything like the crazy numbers I hear for reparations and the like then I suspect that you'll get no takers and nothing is solved.
...and I would be a little cautious about holding up US government as a shining example, being as how it is led by a cartoon character and serves the interests of large corporations over the interests of people.
You probably didn't notice but at least the past 6, and probably more, administrations have served the interests of large corporations over the interests of people. If you think that voting for one of the two big parties is the solution you haven't been paying attention. If you regard the middle class as a barometer it's been falling since the 70's, during both D and R administrations.
Implicate all the tax dodgers in the murder/ murder-conspiracy of Daphne Caruana Galizia, and try them under Napoleonic principles of law, Guilty until proven innocent.
I'm not a fan of guilty until proven innocent generally but admittedly if your named in the Panama Papers it seems reasonable. The only good use for the NSA in my mind is tracking down international tax fraud.
THIS is EXACTLY why we need to pull corporate money out of politics AND reign in lobbyists. Bar lobbyists from serving on high level posts.
I propose reign in by guillotine. Works just as well for politicians as for lobbyists. Throw in international tax dodgers from the Panama Papers and other sources and we'll have a much better society in mere days.
Slashdot Mirror
...After all, Profit > People for Republicans.
Don't get too smug. Open borders == death to working class, but it's OK since new immigrants tend to vote Democrat. Power > Citizens for Democrats. I do wish that there was a part for the working class in the US.
Liberal means 'pro liberty', more or less, the opposite of (leftist/marxist/socialist/progressive/American 'liberal').
Liberal means holding a broad worldview and being open to new ideas. It's not about liberty, per se. And that means having your eyes wide open and caring about the freedoms and rights of people other than yourself and not just your own interests.
A classic liberal would have laughed at safe spaces and abhorred PC speech codes. What is called a liberal, or a progressive if you want to be more trendy, in the US currently though thinks both are great improvements and enforces them.
If so, this seems like Nobel Prize for Physics worthy, as well as having the potential to make some people extremely wealthy.
If only it worked that way. A CEO somewhere will give these guys an award and maybe a small bonus. The CEO will get 100x that.
This arrangement is typical, and it's more about tax avoidance than anything else.
It's so common that I wonder why this arrangement merits an article. You want to see a master at work? Look at Ikea's corporate structure.
Yes Ikea is an absolute scam in terms of its tax situation. However one way to help fix it is to keep bringing it up and to try and force change. Want to make your country better? Start tackling scams like Ikea by forcing the government to actually do its job on the big guys and not just us peons. If only there was a party for the working class in the US.
Even if the average IQ of Slashdot readers has gone down in the last decade I think everyone knows what "night" means.
Thanks, dumbass.
You overestimate how smart people are. It's degenerated to where they can't even tell what gender they are or which bathroom to use correctly. Citation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Non-competes are a problem, yes, but not the cause of wage stagnation. Job mobility is higher than it's ever been, despite the rash of non-compete contracts. Changing jobs (or threatening to) is often the only way to get a raise now, but it wasn't always this way. The main problem is that companies no longer value experience (except perhaps at hiring time but often not even then) and believe every employee with similar education is interchangeable.
Supply and demand is very much still in effect. Want to drive wages down or stagnate them? Simply import masses of people and outsource the rest. The part that economists who preach free trade don't tell you is that wages reach an equilibrium where higher wage countries go down while lower wage countries go up. We've sacrificed two generations and counting on the alter of free trade and mass immigration.
As a Chinese person living in the West, it's a shame to see Westerners not appreciating the modern culture they have about accepting people for on the kind of person they are.
It's probably because while we are certainly the most accepting we are also the most criticized for ... not being accepting. It's in the process of back firing as we speak. Eventually people have had enough and tune out.
Agreed with you and the GP but isn't the 1%, the 1% includes the top end professions which work their asses off to overachieve like engineers, doctors, lawyers (jokes aside), yes even middle management and sales people.
There are over 300,000,000 people in this country, using a value of 100th's is all about masking out the real divisions. The 1% are only part of the problem in that they are overtaxed and punished. They include all the people who really did work harder and earn their place looking at all the slackers around them. They also include the children of those who did so a few generations back.
The issue isn't the 1%, the issue is the top 0.1% by wealth not income and those who control an equivalent amount of wealth in any corporation.
I agree with you also that 'we are the 99.5%' is probably more accurate but the simplicity of 'we are the 99%' is awesome. It would be OK to have the tax rate dependent on a mix of income and assets (ie wealth). If I were emperor for a day I'd tax the hell out of trust funds, implement a wealth tax on anything that people might actually want (ie land, housing) and let the uber rich instead spend their money bidding up non-essentials like collectibles and art, and put in a heavy handed inheritance tax. Plus I'd use the NSA to track tax cheats. That coupled with a death penalty for tax cheats >$50 million and a mere 30 day grace period to come clean. I'd have the national debt paid off in no time :-)
The problem is that power will not let you complain about this. You will be a radical, a communist, a know-nothing idiot who wants us back in the stone age or to give all your wealth to you, you greedy bastard....
The rhetoric is force fed to society. Same reason why society is "too stupid" to stop falling for religious woo (see the new agism bollocks, replacing christianity for those who find society able to let them stop falling for *christianity*, just not for woo "explanations").
It isn't that society is TOO STUPID, it's that the power structure is forcing a propaganda war to stop you complaining.
So you will blame the left, the right, the immigrants, the managers, the patriarchy, the SJWs, the blacks, the chinese, ANYONE but those who are running the propaganda because in a capitalist society money means power, so you cannot fight those with money, you cannot BLAME those with money. So you have to blame it on some other identifiable group. ANY group.
And, having misdiagnosed the problem, any fixes done to that problem will not fix the actual issue, and so it spirals out of control and we "fall for it again".
Although I'm not a liberal I think one of the greatest slogans in recent times is "we are the 99%". I suspect that you like that notion too. However the 99% includes a great many Christians, a majority of white people, SJWs, both AntiFa and Nazis, and just about everything else under the sun. I don't like everyone in that mix however I have to put my dislike aside if the notion of stopping the 1% from taking everything is to be achieved. I mention this because the sooner we can keep the 1% from dividing us the sooner we can get some economic justice. So if you want to not 'fall for it again' stop making fun of Christians and keep your eye on the ball of economic justice. Neither the R nor D party in it's current form will get us there, so there's a lot of work to do.
You can't seriously argue that his behavior was ethical, he knowingly published false papers and deliberately misled people. That he did so to reveal a major problem in the industry is beneficial to us, but does not excuse his behavior.
You must love whistleblowers and other checks on abuse. You logic would allow Snowden to hang while praising him for being 'beneficial to us'.
Clearly proof that our Universities are broken.
I found an edge case where something didn't work correctly. Clearly this invalidates the entire discipline.
If the edge case is the journal of that field then yes, it probably does.
So to you the AntiFa are the fascists, and the openly racist and bigoted MAGA-hat wearers waving their Nazi and Confederate flags are the good guy and the real "patriots". Go fuck yourself you anti-American piece of shit
No middle ground between the two eh? It's easy to spot the extremists, they only see in black and white with no gray. AntiFa are very much thugs and should be more seriously hunted because they actually attack people. There is a huge difference between peacefully marching, even for a cause one disagrees with such as Nazis, and attacking people. The political process can deal with Nazis as they never have much support in this country. However the method of attacking people you disagree with opens a *much* more dangerous can of worms. This is obvious quite honestly - I'm always amazed at anyone who doesn't denounce AntiFa and anyone else who practices political violence on principle.
Seems like the sensible solution would be to go single payer so everyone get the free healthcare but pays for it with taxes, then resolve the "illegals don't pay taxes" by letting the immigrants come in legally (drop the quotas, just process the paperwork to rubber stamp their entry permission and assign a SSN at the boarder) and taxing them.
Alas you solve the tax issue but create an even larger underclass. Well integrated immigrants can be a plus. If they speak the language, if they are skilled, if they largely adopt the local culture, and if they come in quantities small enough to be absorbed. None of these criteria are met by illegal immigrants and just handing out citizenship and tax IDs would *not* change that.
As an outsider (living in Sweden, Europe) I am a bit curious, but mostly alarmed how the US have got such a seemingly malfunctioning health care system. Most other 1:st world countries (in Europe, Japan, South Korea ...) have some variation on a single-payer system, where hospital visits and drugs are in most part paid by everyone via taxes, without what seems like the bureaucracy of private or employer-paid insurance.
The advantage the EU and Japan have is that they don't have a huge underclass. This is changing as the EU is now committing suicide by importing a huge underclass. In California for example 1/3 of the state, a huge chunk of that illegal or anchor babies, is on free healthcare. Free. No co-pays to visit a doctor, no cost for medicine, no monthly fee. This is supported by virtually all legally working adults paying *lots* in taxes and getting nothing in return. It's unsustainable and will bankrupt the state. Working adults however pay hundreds a month just to have insurance, and the anger grows. To say that illegal immigration is killing the state is spot on. Citation: https://www.sacbee.com/news/lo...
Now corporations own the streets and, oh, the right to conduct a homicide. Wonderful, part of making America great again!
Roughly 3000 people die *every month* currently. We can improve on that and should keep trying to. Learn from mistakes yes but keep trying.
He's not wrong about the war part. Bush, Cheney, and their cronies emptied the country's coffers to enrich a handful of millionaire and billionaires in the military industrial complex with their bullshit wars. What they did is inexcusable, especially when you consider the opportunity cost of not investing that vast sum of money elsewhere (ex infrastructure, education, healthcare, research, alternative energy, ect.). Think of what we could have if that money was spent productively, like finding cures for diseases (much more likely to hurt you than a terrorist) or aerospace, or any number of other things, and the US needs to get it's shit together when it comes to planning for the future.
Bush and Cheney should definitely get blame for opening the can of worms however it's worth noting that little changed during Obama or Trump. We've yet to have a president that is serious about cutting military spending post 9/11.
However our taxes go mostly to the Military first, and what is left will get the crumbs. This creates a lot of holes in our safety net.
It's a common misconception that the military gets the majority of the federal budget. A better understanding is that the military gets the majority of the discretionary budget. That's a big difference because the discretionary budget is, as a complete category, is only 30% of the total. Mandatory spending is largely entitlements like social security and medicare and is ~65% of the total budget. Interest is also a huge factor, ~6% of the total, and is why fiscal conservatives like myself would love to see the federal debt paid down. Let me repeat that in case it was missed - the interest on the national debt was roughly half as big as military spending in 2015. Here's a great breakdown of everything: https://www.nationalpriorities... PS - If you're worried about the safety net kill illegal immigration. You can have nice things or you can have open borders. You can't have both when you're living next to poor countries.
This is also how you get jury members thinking the defendant should get off because they already suffered more than they should for a given crime. I have had to deal with this, and it can be highly biased based on the age and color of the defendant.
Sadly you are correct. At it's core a democracy is only as good as its citizens. That's why I rail, in vain, against mass immigration of uneducated people from other cultures. Want to ensure more violence and crime - just import tons of uneducated people from cultures with lots of violence and crime.
> that he has set himself up for a huge lawsuit by whomever took the package.
And that is precisely why America is FUCKED.
Victim: I got tired of MY packages being stolen so I booby trapped them Thief: I'm suing for emotional distress. Victim: WTF!?
The key is having jurors with enough moral courage to do the right thing and to never forget jury nullification. A situation like this can can be declared not guilty even if the judge instructs you that 'you must follow the law even if the law is bad'. The whole point of a jury of your peers is to apply the law fairly and that sometimes means jury nullification. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"A middle class was not possible until the energy freedom that oil provided" Instantly debunked bullshit, next?
It was so instant that I missed your evidence that debunked it.
The choice isn't between oil and no oil. There is a middle ground where we regulate industry, control pollution, and use resources in a way that compensates everyone for the damage it causes. Wild west, zero responsibility bullshit isn't a serious business model even if idiots are serious about defending it.
If this compensation is anything like the crazy numbers I hear for reparations and the like then I suspect that you'll get no takers and nothing is solved.
...and I would be a little cautious about holding up US government as a shining example, being as how it is led by a cartoon character and serves the interests of large corporations over the interests of people.
You probably didn't notice but at least the past 6, and probably more, administrations have served the interests of large corporations over the interests of people. If you think that voting for one of the two big parties is the solution you haven't been paying attention. If you regard the middle class as a barometer it's been falling since the 70's, during both D and R administrations.
Implicate all the tax dodgers in the murder/ murder-conspiracy of Daphne Caruana Galizia, and try them under Napoleonic principles of law, Guilty until proven innocent.
I'm not a fan of guilty until proven innocent generally but admittedly if your named in the Panama Papers it seems reasonable. The only good use for the NSA in my mind is tracking down international tax fraud.
... it was a slur when I was in school as it implied multiple personalities.
When did you go to school? That has been valid usage since at least the time of Shakespeare.
Referring to yourself, a single person, as 'them' or 'they' is not what I'd call traditional usage.
THIS is EXACTLY why we need to pull corporate money out of politics AND reign in lobbyists. Bar lobbyists from serving on high level posts.
I propose reign in by guillotine. Works just as well for politicians as for lobbyists. Throw in international tax dodgers from the Panama Papers and other sources and we'll have a much better society in mere days.