Look, it's already against the law to say a lot of things. You can't say "I'm going to shoot the president." You can't threaten someone that you're going to maim or kill them. (Try it; you'll have police knocking on your door if the recipient of your threat thinks you're serious.) You can't slander or libel someone without consequences. You can't outright lie in advertisements. You can't say a number of things, and I think most of us agree that the things you can't currently say are fairly reasonable restrictions on free speech.
These guys are just trying to find a way to add another thing to that list. Some may think it's reasonable, some may not, but it's not an outright attack on the 1st amendment, and it's also not something that you can claim to have no precedence.
And the reason you were able to have those jobs and not be exploited for pennies a day was, hey, you guessed it! Child labor laws, and other labor-related laws!
I also had a paper route and made pretty decent money at it; your comparing it to coal mining and other hard labor and using it to dismiss the mistreatment of children is idiocy at its finest.
Your point is infantile. Please explain how India and China have lifted themselves up from primitive hellholes to powerhouse, world class economies. I'm sure it was on the back of shitloads of fair labor laws.
So... are you saying that you think we should have a caste system like India or live under a totalitarian communist regime like China, because it's produced some good results for their economies? If not, what's your point?
whenever someone says something like millionaires should be executed or sent to re-eduction camps
Because anyone who says that is an idiot and their opinions aren't worth worrying about. If you can cite some credible person that seriously advocates killing millionaires or sending them to be brainwashed, you might have a point; otherwise, you're just blowing smoke.
It's worth noting here that the value of a college education is declining due to rampant cheating and lax grading standards. I believe this can be traced to the fact that universities are dependent on subsidized student loans. The laxer the standards, the more money that can be pulled in from student loans.
You're also leaving out one very important fact, which seems funny since you're obviously such a defender of free markets and have (presumably) an understanding of supply and demand: when there is a ton of supply (college degree holders), demand goes down. When demand goes down for your degree, you can expect to earn less.
So I'll agree that a college degree doesn't mean as much as it used to, but I think you're being overly simplistic by laying declining wages squarely at the feet of cheating and lax standards.
Before you can blame the problems of the Great Depression on the Gilded Age, you have to explain why it never happened before.
Easy. Before that time, a very large portion of the population was subsistence farmers. It only took a few decades of 'everybody has to have a job' for those in control of wealth to, basically, corner the market on dollars and tell everybody else to fuck off.
Or are you honestly suggesting that the economy in 1940 was similar to the economy in 1840? Or 1870? Or 1900?
And I'll bet that of the demographic that frequents Slashdot, it's much higher than that; probably "most people" for the context of usual commenters to Slashdot posts.
HTC doesn't have nearly the marketshare of the iPhone. It's only one of many players in the Android handset market. A lot of people don't give a shit about HTC's security problems.
Second, many of us who *do* have HTC phones have installed Cyanogen or some other ROM and it's a non issue. I bought a HTC phone for the hardware, not the software. What they do to fuck up their default OTAs is a complete non-issue to me because I have the freedom to not deal with their default OTAs.
That said, hopefully this isn't indicative of things to come from HTC. I like their hardware and their hacker-friendly mentality and would hate to have to start avoiding them.
Actually, I think the ACLU's stance on the 2nd amendment is that that one is pretty well covered by the NRA, so they don't concern themselves with cases involving gun rights.
You're welcome to provide evidence of the ACLU having an official stance that individuals don't have the right to bear arms. I've never heard any such thing.
If you equate PC with the Harrison Bergeron story, I think you're woefully far down a "slippery slope" argument. In case you hadn't noticed, nobody is being forced to wear weights, masks, or be fitted with earpieces.
PC definitely has flaws, but its general goal is behavior modification, not ability modification.
Maybe the fact that educated people dismiss your arguments while ignorant ones eat them up should tell you something?
Also, in my experience, poor, rural farmland and union shop floors are the *exact* places I'd expect to find conservative views. Or do you have some notion that all those poor dirt farmers and unskilled labor are bastions of progressive thinking? Not so much libertarian, I'll grant you, because that's a fringe that mostly gets ignored everywhere except Slashdot.
...How many Office bugs have you run into? I don't use Office a lot, but I can honestly say that I don't think I've experienced a crash (or buggy behavior) of any of its components in years.
The problem is that none of the supposed "solutions" are actually solutions.
So you acknowledging that warming is happening. Ok, good. Now you're just moving the goalposts; no "solution" in your mind will ever actually be a 100% perfect, no-cost-to-anybody solution, therefore you can just impugn the credibility of whoever suggests the solution.
Same way a mother bird will know if its babies have come into contact with humans and then just abandon them. Nature just knows. Human produced CO2 smells different than regular ol' CO2.
One side says, "we're all gonna burn in 'Hell on Earth' if we're right.
No it doesn't; this is a flat out strawman argument. (i.e. lie). Of course you can find hysterical people on any topic that say crazy things; to characterize the entire group to be the same as the extremists is as bad as assuming that every Tea Party member is a barely literate racist because you saw some dude holding a poorly spelled sign.
This is a good theory. You should declare a formal hypothesis, build a model to test it, write a paper to be reviewed by your fellow climate scientists, and win a Nobel prize for disproving AGW. You might even be able to get some money from the oil industry or the Heritage Foundation or something to fund it.
We were able to fix the ozone hole. If we'd listened to jackasses like you, we may have ignored it and all be forced to wear big floppy hats and SPF 50 every time we step outside for more than 2 minutes. Instead, we bit the bullet, acknowledged the problem, and addressed it head on like grown-ups.
Also, global cooling was a theory in the 70s that was discredited by the scientific community, which even then had the general consensus that we should expect warming. Even now you can probably find people predicting global cooling; does that mean in 20 years you'll be reminding us that back in 2011 they were predicting cooling and somehow use that as evidence that warming can't/won't happen?
This has truly been a constructive thread to read. I imagine that exchanges like this are commonplace in the upper echelons of science. Thanks for the glimpse into what must be your daily world.
I'll tell you what I believe, though I can't speak for all "Progs".
I believe that 'harder' work should always yield better income than less work; I believe that someone making $1.5 million/year should take home more than someone making $0.5 million/year. Nothing too radical there, I believe.
I believe that once you start getting into higher income brackets, it should be exponentially more difficult to take home even more money. Sure, you can make an extra $million/year, and a percentage of it *will* go into your pocket, but you won't be taking home all of it, or even most of it. According to you, this will make it so all the rich just give up and go homeless or move to Somalia or some other bullshit. I believe we should tax the fuck out of large estates when the person/couple who built the estate dies. I disagree that taxation equals slavery; THAT is a talking point and demagoguery.
The *reason* I want vast sums of wealth taxed out of existence is that wealth has a huge, distorting effect on a) the free market, b) the economy in general, and c) politics (which then enables further distortions on a and b). I believe that NOBODY should be able to live on compound interest for generations. I believe that there should be no entrenched entities (Rockefellers, Carnegies, Bushes, Kennedys) that are essentially guaranteed to be inter-generational major players unless somebody REALLY fucks up. If someone has to keep working to keep their wealth, I see that as a GOOD thing; not just the one-hit wonder musician that is able to live off of royalties for their entire lives, but also the trial lawyer who wins a class action lawsuit and takes home millions -- it's great that they accomplished something good, now keep doing it if you want to keep living high on the hog.
The thing you have to remember, and seem to fail to understand, is that everybody works. I know in the minds of many people, anyone that isn't making $100k/year is some sort of fucking parasite that would be better off just euthanized, but believe it or not I think that the janitor working 40 hours per week should make a wage that allows them to live a comfortable life. I believe that someone flipping burgers or working behind a cash register for 40 hours per week shouldn't be treated like some second class citizen that has to scrape by just to pay rent. I don't think that just because you didn't go to school to get a law degree or become an engineer that you should be doomed to live hand-to-mouth for your entire life. I don't think that if someone making subsistence wages decides to splurge and, say, pay for cable or a (heaven forbid!) cell phone, they should be demonized for not saving every fucking penny they have. (Which will just be depreciated to worthlessness anyway over a few years) Sure, the person who chose to go to school should be rewarded somehow -- maybe they can afford the Lexus instead of the Honda, or can buy a slightly nicer house or whatever they choose to spend their extra cash on; but NOBODY deserves to make hundreds or thousands of times what the average person does.
I believe we have *plenty* of resources in this country: we're tearing down houses because nobody can afford to live in them -- not because nobody *wants* to live in them, but because nobody can *afford* to live in them. We have plenty of food -- when was the last time you heard about a famine in the US? We have plenty of cars -- the government just bought a bunch to destroy to get people to buy new ones. We have plenty of gas -- I've never been unable to get my car filled up, and I'll bet you haven't either. We have enough manpower to get things done, there is enough concrete and asphalt to make/repair all the roads we want, we have materials to build the structures we need. We have enough resources to go around. We have enough *tangible* things that nobody should ever go hungry or not be able to make rent. What we don't have is "money," which is a completely abstract concept that we essentially use to determine who gets access to
Slashdot Mirror
Shop only on the outside of the grocery stores (veggies/fruit, meats, dairy, etc). Plan and COOK your own food.
Careful there -- you're starting to sound like one of those liberal health food nuts.
--Jeremy
Look, it's already against the law to say a lot of things. You can't say "I'm going to shoot the president." You can't threaten someone that you're going to maim or kill them. (Try it; you'll have police knocking on your door if the recipient of your threat thinks you're serious.) You can't slander or libel someone without consequences. You can't outright lie in advertisements. You can't say a number of things, and I think most of us agree that the things you can't currently say are fairly reasonable restrictions on free speech.
These guys are just trying to find a way to add another thing to that list. Some may think it's reasonable, some may not, but it's not an outright attack on the 1st amendment, and it's also not something that you can claim to have no precedence.
--Jeremy
This happens both ways. What you (and all the other butthurt Republicans who also bitch about this) are experiencing is called "confirmation bias".
You can spot "trends" in a lot of things if you don't actually collect data.
--Jeremy
And the reason you were able to have those jobs and not be exploited for pennies a day was, hey, you guessed it! Child labor laws, and other labor-related laws!
I also had a paper route and made pretty decent money at it; your comparing it to coal mining and other hard labor and using it to dismiss the mistreatment of children is idiocy at its finest.
--Jeremy
Your point is infantile. Please explain how India and China have lifted themselves up from primitive hellholes to powerhouse, world class economies. I'm sure it was on the back of shitloads of fair labor laws.
So ... are you saying that you think we should have a caste system like India or live under a totalitarian communist regime like China, because it's produced some good results for their economies? If not, what's your point?
--Jeremy
whenever someone says something like millionaires should be executed or sent to re-eduction camps
Because anyone who says that is an idiot and their opinions aren't worth worrying about. If you can cite some credible person that seriously advocates killing millionaires or sending them to be brainwashed, you might have a point; otherwise, you're just blowing smoke.
--Jeremy
It's worth noting here that the value of a college education is declining due to rampant cheating and lax grading standards. I believe this can be traced to the fact that universities are dependent on subsidized student loans. The laxer the standards, the more money that can be pulled in from student loans.
You're also leaving out one very important fact, which seems funny since you're obviously such a defender of free markets and have (presumably) an understanding of supply and demand: when there is a ton of supply (college degree holders), demand goes down. When demand goes down for your degree, you can expect to earn less.
So I'll agree that a college degree doesn't mean as much as it used to, but I think you're being overly simplistic by laying declining wages squarely at the feet of cheating and lax standards.
--Jeremy
Before you can blame the problems of the Great Depression on the Gilded Age, you have to explain why it never happened before.
Easy. Before that time, a very large portion of the population was subsistence farmers. It only took a few decades of 'everybody has to have a job' for those in control of wealth to, basically, corner the market on dollars and tell everybody else to fuck off.
Or are you honestly suggesting that the economy in 1940 was similar to the economy in 1840? Or 1870? Or 1900?
--Jeremy
Mostly getting an easy joke in
No, you weren't. You were being a dismissive douche, like the rest of the commenters that made the same joke.
most documentaries are 1 heavy on fiction 2 meant to show a specific event.
Bullshit.
--Jeremy
And I'll bet that of the demographic that frequents Slashdot, it's much higher than that; probably "most people" for the context of usual commenters to Slashdot posts.
--Jeremy
I'm thinking a couple of reasons:
HTC doesn't have nearly the marketshare of the iPhone. It's only one of many players in the Android handset market. A lot of people don't give a shit about HTC's security problems.
Second, many of us who *do* have HTC phones have installed Cyanogen or some other ROM and it's a non issue. I bought a HTC phone for the hardware, not the software. What they do to fuck up their default OTAs is a complete non-issue to me because I have the freedom to not deal with their default OTAs.
That said, hopefully this isn't indicative of things to come from HTC. I like their hardware and their hacker-friendly mentality and would hate to have to start avoiding them.
--Jeremy
Actually, I think the ACLU's stance on the 2nd amendment is that that one is pretty well covered by the NRA, so they don't concern themselves with cases involving gun rights.
You're welcome to provide evidence of the ACLU having an official stance that individuals don't have the right to bear arms. I've never heard any such thing.
--Jeremy
If you equate PC with the Harrison Bergeron story, I think you're woefully far down a "slippery slope" argument. In case you hadn't noticed, nobody is being forced to wear weights, masks, or be fitted with earpieces.
PC definitely has flaws, but its general goal is behavior modification, not ability modification.
--Jeremy
Maybe the fact that educated people dismiss your arguments while ignorant ones eat them up should tell you something?
Also, in my experience, poor, rural farmland and union shop floors are the *exact* places I'd expect to find conservative views. Or do you have some notion that all those poor dirt farmers and unskilled labor are bastions of progressive thinking? Not so much libertarian, I'll grant you, because that's a fringe that mostly gets ignored everywhere except Slashdot.
--Jeremy
...How many Office bugs have you run into? I don't use Office a lot, but I can honestly say that I don't think I've experienced a crash (or buggy behavior) of any of its components in years.
--Jeremy
Here's one from half a decade ago:
HP tx1000
I'm guessing you don't follow the computer industry much beyond Apple's keynotes.
--Jeremy
*acknowledge; edited part of the sentence and didn't edit the verb to match. Too hasty on the preview.
--Jeremy
The problem is that none of the supposed "solutions" are actually solutions.
So you acknowledging that warming is happening. Ok, good. Now you're just moving the goalposts; no "solution" in your mind will ever actually be a 100% perfect, no-cost-to-anybody solution, therefore you can just impugn the credibility of whoever suggests the solution.
Yeah, we know your type well.
--Jeremy
Same way a mother bird will know if its babies have come into contact with humans and then just abandon them. Nature just knows. Human produced CO2 smells different than regular ol' CO2.
--Jeremy
One side says, "we're all gonna burn in 'Hell on Earth' if we're right.
No it doesn't; this is a flat out strawman argument. (i.e. lie). Of course you can find hysterical people on any topic that say crazy things; to characterize the entire group to be the same as the extremists is as bad as assuming that every Tea Party member is a barely literate racist because you saw some dude holding a poorly spelled sign.
--Jeremy
This is a good theory. You should declare a formal hypothesis, build a model to test it, write a paper to be reviewed by your fellow climate scientists, and win a Nobel prize for disproving AGW. You might even be able to get some money from the oil industry or the Heritage Foundation or something to fund it.
--Jeremy
We were able to fix the ozone hole. If we'd listened to jackasses like you, we may have ignored it and all be forced to wear big floppy hats and SPF 50 every time we step outside for more than 2 minutes. Instead, we bit the bullet, acknowledged the problem, and addressed it head on like grown-ups.
Also, global cooling was a theory in the 70s that was discredited by the scientific community, which even then had the general consensus that we should expect warming. Even now you can probably find people predicting global cooling; does that mean in 20 years you'll be reminding us that back in 2011 they were predicting cooling and somehow use that as evidence that warming can't/won't happen?
--Jeremy
You'll really take any excuse to rationalize the things you already believe, won't you?
Don't feel too bad, it's a known phenomenon and everybody does it.
--Jeremy
This has truly been a constructive thread to read. I imagine that exchanges like this are commonplace in the upper echelons of science. Thanks for the glimpse into what must be your daily world.
--Jeremy
I'll tell you what I believe, though I can't speak for all "Progs".
I believe that 'harder' work should always yield better income than less work; I believe that someone making $1.5 million/year should take home more than someone making $0.5 million/year. Nothing too radical there, I believe.
I believe that once you start getting into higher income brackets, it should be exponentially more difficult to take home even more money. Sure, you can make an extra $million/year, and a percentage of it *will* go into your pocket, but you won't be taking home all of it, or even most of it. According to you, this will make it so all the rich just give up and go homeless or move to Somalia or some other bullshit. I believe we should tax the fuck out of large estates when the person/couple who built the estate dies. I disagree that taxation equals slavery; THAT is a talking point and demagoguery.
The *reason* I want vast sums of wealth taxed out of existence is that wealth has a huge, distorting effect on a) the free market, b) the economy in general, and c) politics (which then enables further distortions on a and b). I believe that NOBODY should be able to live on compound interest for generations. I believe that there should be no entrenched entities (Rockefellers, Carnegies, Bushes, Kennedys) that are essentially guaranteed to be inter-generational major players unless somebody REALLY fucks up. If someone has to keep working to keep their wealth, I see that as a GOOD thing; not just the one-hit wonder musician that is able to live off of royalties for their entire lives, but also the trial lawyer who wins a class action lawsuit and takes home millions -- it's great that they accomplished something good, now keep doing it if you want to keep living high on the hog.
The thing you have to remember, and seem to fail to understand, is that everybody works. I know in the minds of many people, anyone that isn't making $100k/year is some sort of fucking parasite that would be better off just euthanized, but believe it or not I think that the janitor working 40 hours per week should make a wage that allows them to live a comfortable life. I believe that someone flipping burgers or working behind a cash register for 40 hours per week shouldn't be treated like some second class citizen that has to scrape by just to pay rent. I don't think that just because you didn't go to school to get a law degree or become an engineer that you should be doomed to live hand-to-mouth for your entire life. I don't think that if someone making subsistence wages decides to splurge and, say, pay for cable or a (heaven forbid!) cell phone, they should be demonized for not saving every fucking penny they have. (Which will just be depreciated to worthlessness anyway over a few years) Sure, the person who chose to go to school should be rewarded somehow -- maybe they can afford the Lexus instead of the Honda, or can buy a slightly nicer house or whatever they choose to spend their extra cash on; but NOBODY deserves to make hundreds or thousands of times what the average person does.
I believe we have *plenty* of resources in this country: we're tearing down houses because nobody can afford to live in them -- not because nobody *wants* to live in them, but because nobody can *afford* to live in them. We have plenty of food -- when was the last time you heard about a famine in the US? We have plenty of cars -- the government just bought a bunch to destroy to get people to buy new ones. We have plenty of gas -- I've never been unable to get my car filled up, and I'll bet you haven't either. We have enough manpower to get things done, there is enough concrete and asphalt to make/repair all the roads we want, we have materials to build the structures we need. We have enough resources to go around. We have enough *tangible* things that nobody should ever go hungry or not be able to make rent. What we don't have is "money," which is a completely abstract concept that we essentially use to determine who gets access to