That screws everyone not living on one of the coasts. Even though the electoral map painted most of the country red, an awful lot of the 'red states' had 30%+ people that voted Democrat. Your divorce idea is going to throw out a lot of babies with the bathwater.
Thanks for posting this. The first video is good. The second is outstanding. I think the overview of Raiders of the Lost Ark in the beginning as a contrast to Batman v Superman is stellar.
If you review the numbers of outrageous political lies shared on social media over the course of the last election, in terms of the number of lies and the amount of shares, the alt-right had more than double the numbers of the ctrl-left.
So you're still left with tens of millions of more reasonable people on the US left than the US right.
An alt-right fanatic isn't going to listen regardless of whether you're smart or stupid, civil or obnoxious, logical or wildly emotional. Don't engage them at all, it wastes your time and gives you stress for quite seriously no benefit.
Logical argument is for people in the middle. I hate Hillary Clinton. I think she's the flag bearer for corruption in the Democratic Party, and cares almost (but not quite) nothing for the middle class and working poor. I think her string of expensive speeches to Wall Street is a clear sign that all of the progressive aspects of her election promises were lies told to try to get the vote from Bernie Sanders supporters. She only came to support gay rights after enough popular sentiment shifted that it hurt her chances to oppose it. But I still voted for her. At her worst, she was still a better option than Donald Trump with respect to gay rights, abortion rights, issues of clean air and water (fuck global warming, but I care about reduced pollution because I have severely asthmatic children and the Flint Michigan lead scandal terrifies me), and appointing judges that have a reasonable perspective on those topics to the Supreme Court. I tried to convince the people who stayed home or voted for Jill Stein that Clinton, as bad as she is, is clearly not a Republican clone, much less a Donald Trump clone.
I think you're giving them too much credit. While what you write is true with respect to the long term effects of using imported educated workers, most companies and executives are strictly focused on the current fiscal quarter and year. They don't care what the impact of importing H1-B workers does to their own company in five years, let alone have interest in examining what it does to the country or the world.
And that's capitalism right there. If it's cheaper to poison the water, poison the air, have the laborers work in unsafe conditions, cut medical benefits, cut education costs, etc... for the next year, then the decision is automatic.
Nonsense. Barack Obama, George W Bush, Bill Clinton, George HW Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon all lied plenty but none - not even Nixon - have come out with as much nonsense as Donald Trump.
Or do you really think there was spy tech in his microwave, he won the most electoral votes since Reagan, his inauguration had the biggest crowd of supporters in the history of inauguration, the murder rate is at a 45 year high (stated in early February, when in fact the US murder rate is half of its 1980 peak), he only lost the national popular vote by over three million votes due to massive organized voter fraud, Kuwait has the same kind of Muslim immigration travel ban as the one he supported, the federal court block of his travel ban means any traveler can enter the US whenever they want with no screening, etc... etc... etc...etc....?
I don't mean to downplay the actors, but a lot of the problem is the writing.
I suspect given the same script that Christopher Reeve would still be a better Superman than Henry Cavill, but Cavill's biggest problem was his scenes and dialog in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman. Reeve would have been every bit as dumb with "save Martha!" and Cavill never got the chance to play the bumbling but adorable country boy with lines like, "Well gee, I don't know, Lois!" and "Golly!". Cavill never got to play off the transition from bumbling, awkward Clark in his disguise to Superman. All that is not his fault.
Likewise, the biggest thing that made Val Kilmer terrible as Batman was just the scenes and dialog as Bruce Wayne in Batman Forever. Keaton had much better writing in his two Batman films. Keaton and Christian Bale couldn't have done much with the stupidity Affleck had to deal with in Batman v Superman either.
And while we're at it, while I think Leto was especially bad in Suicide Squad (probably the worst super-powered movie I've ever seen), even Jack Nicholson, Mark Hamill, Cesar Romero, or for that matter Denzel Washington, Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, or Tom Hanks would not have made that Joker good. The story, scenes, and dialog for the role were just as unbelievable pointless, boring, and stupid as the rest of the movie.
Usually I find myself aligned with the average viewer vs. the critics, but I keep waiting for Iron Fist to tie story elements together in a coherent way and it doesn't. I'm going to finish the season, but unless the last two and a half episodes blow me away it will be a major disappointment.
Agreed. Young adults can't afford the ticket prices. Going to a movie theater was always a luxury event, but for some kid working at a gas station or earning a few dollars in a college work study can't drop $13 just for two hours at a theater.
It's also an unfair comparison because even with Comcast's top DVR service you can't access everything. It's not like the buyer gets access to all television shows and movies ever made for just $50 per month paid to Comcast. A lot of the content I want isn't available on Comcast, or costs extra on Comcast/Xfinity On Demand, or requires an upgraded channel package that raises the monthly cost another $20.
So to use your example, say the four shows you bought from Amazon aren't available on Comcast for free right now, and you really want to watch Orange is the New Black, Daredevil, and House of Cards on Netflix. Now that's $12*12 + $40*4 you would still be expending even with a Comcast television subscription. That makes your choice between $38 per month for TV service and $125 for 1gbps internet vs. $160 for a Comcast television and internet bundle and $12 for Netflix and an averaged out $13 per month for shows bought on Amazon. $163 vs. $185, you're still better off with your current setup.
Comcast is the only high speed internet I can get other than 4G wireless. My experience has been that the local office staff are quick, knowledgeable, and efficient, and the company phone system is run by Satan and Cthulhu's less loving brother. So if you have any kind of question related to billing, subscription, and options, I suggest going to the closest office instead of torturing yourself on the phone.
Right. I'm paying $85 for 100/10 internet from Comcast. They'll sell me internet plus television service for $90/month for the first year and $110/month the second year.
Except it's a lie. Their television service has a $5 broadcast television fee (from Comcast, not the government), a $3 sports fee (again from Comcast, not the government), and $20-$25 for the DVR + HD receiver monthly rental. So they're pretending I would pay $90 per month the first year and $110 the second, but it's actually at least $118 and $138, respectively.
As I wrote elsewhere, that's actually not a terrible price. But I'm more angry at the dishonest advertising than anything else. Fuck no.
I don't watch professional sports, which makes it much easier to ditch paid television service. Most of my friends and family members do watch, so I don't blame them or you for keeping a paid television subscription for ESPN.
With respect to movies, I use Ebay, Amazon, and the bargain bins at Walmart and Target. I probably spend an average $40 per month that way, but it's still cheaper than a cable television service. My Kodi movie library is above 500 films at the moment, and (not that most people care) every single film was legally purchased and I still own the physical disks.
Most consumers just don't want to give up access to first run shows. As long as the bundle price isn't too much higher than the plain internet service price, most people will stay.
I've lived in places with Comcast, DirecTV, and Dish service and the advertised price in the brochure is never the price on your bill. Sometimes the fees and service charges they forgot to mention are $20 more. Sometimes they're $40. The promotional period expires and your bill jumps $50. I could pay the cost - I have a wonderful job in the technology field, my wife and I together spend more than $150 per month at Starbucks. But the thing is that Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus, Youtube Red, Sling TV, Playstation Vue, and Starbucks all advertise the actual price the consumer pays (not including taxes and applicable government regulatory fees). Comcast, DirecTV, and Dish still lie like hell in their advertising. But I've had enough of the dishonest pricing, we cut the cord.
Comcast, you want my television subscription back? Mail me an offer like this: "This is the price. These are the channels and features. Here is a notarized letter stating that if the price changes in the next ten years due to anything other than changes in US taxes and government regulatory fees, we will pay you $10,000." If the price is reasonable, I'll sign up tomorrow. But I've had enough of, "We'll advertise a price and bill a price, and advertising and billing are unrelated."
The intrinsically worthless currency drives the world economy. Bitcoin is driving up the net wealth of the early adopters and ripping off the latecomers, because it's incredibly deflationary. It also can't scale in the number of transactions per second high enough to meet a significant portion of the world's financial needs: Bitcoin protocol is capped at 10 per second, banks handle thousands per second. While the concept is novel, in practice it's just a new variation of pyramid scheme. The founder may not even have intended for that to be the result, but that's what happened. The people who bought or mined when it was $3 per BTC are millionaires preying on the late investors.
Now if someone invents a crypto-currency that's anonymous, scales to an unlimited number of concurrent transactions, and manages to neither be deflationary (which screws late adopters) or inflationary (which screws early adopters), the world will start paying attention. But for now, the only way to stabilize a currency so it neither inflates nor deflates too rapidly is having it backed by a government that can adjust the supply.
Brilliant post. Agreed. However, I still think Bitcoin is a good thing, because it opens the door for future options. Ethereum and MaidSafe are trying to build distributed, decentralized computing networks on a crypto-currency backbone. Storj.io is trying to build a distributed decentralized storage service on a crypto-currency backbone. Zcash and Zerocoin are attempting to offer features like Bitcoin but with true anonymity. Dogecoin is mostly a joke, but it tries to solve the inherent deflationary properties of Bitcoin.
Am I investing in any of these crypto-currencies at this time? Hell no. But I suspect something useful genuinely will come out of the field within my lifetime.
Good point. This is what I'm thinking - the real solution to this kind of problem is to shift any centralized services on the web to distributed decentralized. It's impossible to DDOS Bitcoin, right? You can take out individual nodes, but not the whole Bitcoin network. I think we need DNS to work the same way.
I don't own any iBubble products, thanks. I have Ubuntu 14.04 on my work laptop - it's the only version supported by my employer's VPN provider, Elementary OS on my desktop, and Ubuntu MATE on the desktop my kids use, and last year I was using KDE Plasma.
But when I look at the screens of my colleagues' Macbooks, sorry but they do look better even than the nicest KDE Plasma layout. We can hate Apple for their walled gardens and patent lawsuits and other proprietary bullshit, but Macbooks are not "flimsy proprietary gadgets" that look like a thirteen year old version of KDE.
I picked some of the older desktop environments as an example. I meant no disrespect to the Blackbox developers or users. It might be pretty cool. I just remember that it's relatively old. I used FVWM fifteen years ago, give or take, and it was functional but not pretty.
To be fair or maybe a little generous to the corporate overlords, there is a problem on the developer side too. Most software is in maintenance mode. Maintaining some giant ugly thing someone else built is an essential service, but it's not as much fun as building something new with the hottest... whatever. So many developers who could be doing excellent work quit because starting something new is more exciting.
Agreed. Further, the biggest difference most people are going to notice from a 2011 Macbook and one today would be any improvements to display resolution. The latest Intel chips are faster, but not so much faster that you'll notice unless you take detailed benchmarks.
At least in my experience, 802.11ac bandwidth drops off so rapidly with distance that if you want the advertised speed you could be using a 10 foot cat5e cable anyway.
To be fair, 802.11b is just 17 years old and couldn't beat 11 Mb/s anywhere. So the fact that 802.11ac can reach 1300 Mb/s anywhere and 802.11ad (WiGig) can do 7 Gb/s is amazing. But if I had a chance to redo my networking decisions from last year I would have saved $250 for an 802.11ac router and just bought a gigabit switch and kept using my ancient WRT54GL for everything else.
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That screws everyone not living on one of the coasts. Even though the electoral map painted most of the country red, an awful lot of the 'red states' had 30%+ people that voted Democrat. Your divorce idea is going to throw out a lot of babies with the bathwater.
Thanks for posting this. The first video is good. The second is outstanding. I think the overview of Raiders of the Lost Ark in the beginning as a contrast to Batman v Superman is stellar.
:)
I'll watch the third now.
If you review the numbers of outrageous political lies shared on social media over the course of the last election, in terms of the number of lies and the amount of shares, the alt-right had more than double the numbers of the ctrl-left.
So you're still left with tens of millions of more reasonable people on the US left than the US right.
An alt-right fanatic isn't going to listen regardless of whether you're smart or stupid, civil or obnoxious, logical or wildly emotional. Don't engage them at all, it wastes your time and gives you stress for quite seriously no benefit.
Logical argument is for people in the middle. I hate Hillary Clinton. I think she's the flag bearer for corruption in the Democratic Party, and cares almost (but not quite) nothing for the middle class and working poor. I think her string of expensive speeches to Wall Street is a clear sign that all of the progressive aspects of her election promises were lies told to try to get the vote from Bernie Sanders supporters. She only came to support gay rights after enough popular sentiment shifted that it hurt her chances to oppose it. But I still voted for her. At her worst, she was still a better option than Donald Trump with respect to gay rights, abortion rights, issues of clean air and water (fuck global warming, but I care about reduced pollution because I have severely asthmatic children and the Flint Michigan lead scandal terrifies me), and appointing judges that have a reasonable perspective on those topics to the Supreme Court. I tried to convince the people who stayed home or voted for Jill Stein that Clinton, as bad as she is, is clearly not a Republican clone, much less a Donald Trump clone.
Absolutely. And even better, his 30 day plan to defeat ISIS.
I was trying to restrict myself to lies he said since the inauguration.
I think you're giving them too much credit. While what you write is true with respect to the long term effects of using imported educated workers, most companies and executives are strictly focused on the current fiscal quarter and year. They don't care what the impact of importing H1-B workers does to their own company in five years, let alone have interest in examining what it does to the country or the world.
And that's capitalism right there. If it's cheaper to poison the water, poison the air, have the laborers work in unsafe conditions, cut medical benefits, cut education costs, etc... for the next year, then the decision is automatic.
Nonsense. Barack Obama, George W Bush, Bill Clinton, George HW Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon all lied plenty but none - not even Nixon - have come out with as much nonsense as Donald Trump.
Or do you really think there was spy tech in his microwave, he won the most electoral votes since Reagan, his inauguration had the biggest crowd of supporters in the history of inauguration, the murder rate is at a 45 year high (stated in early February, when in fact the US murder rate is half of its 1980 peak), he only lost the national popular vote by over three million votes due to massive organized voter fraud, Kuwait has the same kind of Muslim immigration travel ban as the one he supported, the federal court block of his travel ban means any traveler can enter the US whenever they want with no screening, etc... etc... etc... etc....?
I don't mean to downplay the actors, but a lot of the problem is the writing.
I suspect given the same script that Christopher Reeve would still be a better Superman than Henry Cavill, but Cavill's biggest problem was his scenes and dialog in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman. Reeve would have been every bit as dumb with "save Martha!" and Cavill never got the chance to play the bumbling but adorable country boy with lines like, "Well gee, I don't know, Lois!" and "Golly!". Cavill never got to play off the transition from bumbling, awkward Clark in his disguise to Superman. All that is not his fault.
Likewise, the biggest thing that made Val Kilmer terrible as Batman was just the scenes and dialog as Bruce Wayne in Batman Forever. Keaton had much better writing in his two Batman films. Keaton and Christian Bale couldn't have done much with the stupidity Affleck had to deal with in Batman v Superman either.
And while we're at it, while I think Leto was especially bad in Suicide Squad (probably the worst super-powered movie I've ever seen), even Jack Nicholson, Mark Hamill, Cesar Romero, or for that matter Denzel Washington, Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, or Tom Hanks would not have made that Joker good. The story, scenes, and dialog for the role were just as unbelievable pointless, boring, and stupid as the rest of the movie.
Usually I find myself aligned with the average viewer vs. the critics, but I keep waiting for Iron Fist to tie story elements together in a coherent way and it doesn't. I'm going to finish the season, but unless the last two and a half episodes blow me away it will be a major disappointment.
So what are you then? Hipster? Goth? Snob?
Agreed. Young adults can't afford the ticket prices. Going to a movie theater was always a luxury event, but for some kid working at a gas station or earning a few dollars in a college work study can't drop $13 just for two hours at a theater.
It's also an unfair comparison because even with Comcast's top DVR service you can't access everything. It's not like the buyer gets access to all television shows and movies ever made for just $50 per month paid to Comcast. A lot of the content I want isn't available on Comcast, or costs extra on Comcast/Xfinity On Demand, or requires an upgraded channel package that raises the monthly cost another $20.
So to use your example, say the four shows you bought from Amazon aren't available on Comcast for free right now, and you really want to watch Orange is the New Black, Daredevil, and House of Cards on Netflix. Now that's $12*12 + $40*4 you would still be expending even with a Comcast television subscription. That makes your choice between $38 per month for TV service and $125 for 1gbps internet vs. $160 for a Comcast television and internet bundle and $12 for Netflix and an averaged out $13 per month for shows bought on Amazon. $163 vs. $185, you're still better off with your current setup.
Comcast is the only high speed internet I can get other than 4G wireless. My experience has been that the local office staff are quick, knowledgeable, and efficient, and the company phone system is run by Satan and Cthulhu's less loving brother. So if you have any kind of question related to billing, subscription, and options, I suggest going to the closest office instead of torturing yourself on the phone.
Right. I'm paying $85 for 100/10 internet from Comcast. They'll sell me internet plus television service for $90/month for the first year and $110/month the second year.
Except it's a lie. Their television service has a $5 broadcast television fee (from Comcast, not the government), a $3 sports fee (again from Comcast, not the government), and $20-$25 for the DVR + HD receiver monthly rental. So they're pretending I would pay $90 per month the first year and $110 the second, but it's actually at least $118 and $138, respectively.
As I wrote elsewhere, that's actually not a terrible price. But I'm more angry at the dishonest advertising than anything else. Fuck no.
I don't watch professional sports, which makes it much easier to ditch paid television service. Most of my friends and family members do watch, so I don't blame them or you for keeping a paid television subscription for ESPN.
With respect to movies, I use Ebay, Amazon, and the bargain bins at Walmart and Target. I probably spend an average $40 per month that way, but it's still cheaper than a cable television service. My Kodi movie library is above 500 films at the moment, and (not that most people care) every single film was legally purchased and I still own the physical disks.
Most consumers just don't want to give up access to first run shows. As long as the bundle price isn't too much higher than the plain internet service price, most people will stay.
I've lived in places with Comcast, DirecTV, and Dish service and the advertised price in the brochure is never the price on your bill. Sometimes the fees and service charges they forgot to mention are $20 more. Sometimes they're $40. The promotional period expires and your bill jumps $50. I could pay the cost - I have a wonderful job in the technology field, my wife and I together spend more than $150 per month at Starbucks. But the thing is that Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus, Youtube Red, Sling TV, Playstation Vue, and Starbucks all advertise the actual price the consumer pays (not including taxes and applicable government regulatory fees). Comcast, DirecTV, and Dish still lie like hell in their advertising. But I've had enough of the dishonest pricing, we cut the cord.
Comcast, you want my television subscription back? Mail me an offer like this: "This is the price. These are the channels and features. Here is a notarized letter stating that if the price changes in the next ten years due to anything other than changes in US taxes and government regulatory fees, we will pay you $10,000." If the price is reasonable, I'll sign up tomorrow. But I've had enough of, "We'll advertise a price and bill a price, and advertising and billing are unrelated."
Agreed. But the way the AC wrote, I think he or she has put their faith and support in Bitcoin.
The intrinsically worthless currency drives the world economy. Bitcoin is driving up the net wealth of the early adopters and ripping off the latecomers, because it's incredibly deflationary. It also can't scale in the number of transactions per second high enough to meet a significant portion of the world's financial needs: Bitcoin protocol is capped at 10 per second, banks handle thousands per second. While the concept is novel, in practice it's just a new variation of pyramid scheme. The founder may not even have intended for that to be the result, but that's what happened. The people who bought or mined when it was $3 per BTC are millionaires preying on the late investors.
Now if someone invents a crypto-currency that's anonymous, scales to an unlimited number of concurrent transactions, and manages to neither be deflationary (which screws late adopters) or inflationary (which screws early adopters), the world will start paying attention. But for now, the only way to stabilize a currency so it neither inflates nor deflates too rapidly is having it backed by a government that can adjust the supply.
Brilliant post. Agreed. However, I still think Bitcoin is a good thing, because it opens the door for future options. Ethereum and MaidSafe are trying to build distributed, decentralized computing networks on a crypto-currency backbone. Storj.io is trying to build a distributed decentralized storage service on a crypto-currency backbone. Zcash and Zerocoin are attempting to offer features like Bitcoin but with true anonymity. Dogecoin is mostly a joke, but it tries to solve the inherent deflationary properties of Bitcoin.
Am I investing in any of these crypto-currencies at this time? Hell no. But I suspect something useful genuinely will come out of the field within my lifetime.
Good point. This is what I'm thinking - the real solution to this kind of problem is to shift any centralized services on the web to distributed decentralized. It's impossible to DDOS Bitcoin, right? You can take out individual nodes, but not the whole Bitcoin network. I think we need DNS to work the same way.
I don't own any iBubble products, thanks. I have Ubuntu 14.04 on my work laptop - it's the only version supported by my employer's VPN provider, Elementary OS on my desktop, and Ubuntu MATE on the desktop my kids use, and last year I was using KDE Plasma.
But when I look at the screens of my colleagues' Macbooks, sorry but they do look better even than the nicest KDE Plasma layout. We can hate Apple for their walled gardens and patent lawsuits and other proprietary bullshit, but Macbooks are not "flimsy proprietary gadgets" that look like a thirteen year old version of KDE.
I picked some of the older desktop environments as an example. I meant no disrespect to the Blackbox developers or users. It might be pretty cool. I just remember that it's relatively old. I used FVWM fifteen years ago, give or take, and it was functional but not pretty.
To be fair or maybe a little generous to the corporate overlords, there is a problem on the developer side too. Most software is in maintenance mode. Maintaining some giant ugly thing someone else built is an essential service, but it's not as much fun as building something new with the hottest... whatever. So many developers who could be doing excellent work quit because starting something new is more exciting.
Agreed. Further, the biggest difference most people are going to notice from a 2011 Macbook and one today would be any improvements to display resolution. The latest Intel chips are faster, but not so much faster that you'll notice unless you take detailed benchmarks.
At least in my experience, 802.11ac bandwidth drops off so rapidly with distance that if you want the advertised speed you could be using a 10 foot cat5e cable anyway.
To be fair, 802.11b is just 17 years old and couldn't beat 11 Mb/s anywhere. So the fact that 802.11ac can reach 1300 Mb/s anywhere and 802.11ad (WiGig) can do 7 Gb/s is amazing. But if I had a chance to redo my networking decisions from last year I would have saved $250 for an 802.11ac router and just bought a gigabit switch and kept using my ancient WRT54GL for everything else.