And every Brit who can't afford to live in England should move to Russia or Turkey instead?
All of California is insanely overpriced, and the place is so huge that moving somewhere more reasonably priced is basically moving to another country. It's not like you just pack up and drive somewhere an hour away and suddenly it's affordable. People born and raised here shouldn't have to uproot their entire lives and flee half a continent away just because rich people squeezed them out of their homelands.
I am also writing a book, kind of. 20 years ago I haphazardly began a process that I eventually intended to become an epic series of stories (epic in the original sense of a bunch of interconnected smaller stories) once I had my life well-enough sorted to work on them well, to make them my life's work, my magnum opus; and failing that, this year I decided to finally put some real effort into it anyway even though I still really don't feel like I'm in the right headspace to be writing properly.
I'm basically summarizing the highest-level structure of the overall thing into 243 short three-paragraph synopses of the episodes of which it's composed, adding up to about the length of a short novel (60kish words) by the time I'm done at the end of this year. I'm over 2/3 of the way through it now.
I consider owning any house at all to be luxury relative to the actual status quo, and simultaneously the minimum threshold for being actually not poor by non-relative standards.
I could live quite comfortably on a minimum wage income if it weren't for rent and saving desperately to someday have a chance to stop paying rent.
Yes, that was kind of the point of my post. Most people are in a position where it would be imprudent of them to have kids, and that is terrible, just how it's terrible where most people are in a position where it's imprudent to get preventative medical care because the cost will render them homeless. People shouldn't, for their own sake and others', do things they can't afford; but people should be able to afford more, because we shouldn't all be so poor.
I was born here and have spent my entire life here. I don't want to leave my home. You may as well call every Brit who can't afford a house in Britain a whiner for not "just" moving to Russia or Turkey where it's cheaper. That's about a comparable distance and relative population sizes and quality of civilization for moving from California to like, North Dakota or Alabama. I'm not choosing to go somewhere expensive, I just don't want to be chased out of my home. If people can't survive without being forced out of their homelands then that's a problem any way you swing it.
Yeah, I'm not saying that it's impossible to have an egalitarian automation revolution. Just that the doomsday scenario of the person I was replying to still ends up with an egalitarian future... for the survivors.
I will probably never own land, and therefore spend my entire life scrambling to pay the bulk of my income to someone or another for the right just to exist somewhere, even if I could miraculously manage to actually consume nothing at all. That's the meaningful threshold for the lower class. People who own land and other capital as necessary to live without paying to borrow from someone else, only working to fund their actual consumption, are the middle class. Those who can fund even their own consumption off the product of the labor of others by lending out their unused capital in perpetuity are the upper class.
I'm not saying "woe is me", because almost everyone for all of history has been part of the underclass by that definition. And as technology marches on, yeah, everything sucks less for everyone. That has nothing to do with class structure though. Even if I had a magic Star Trek replicator that could provide for all my material needs at nobody's expense, which would make a lot of things in life suck a lot less, I'd still (like almost everyone) have to justify my worth to someone else just for the right to exist somewhere. And it will probably take me my entire life to escape from that situation. That's underclass. Almost all of us are.
Not that obvious troll deserves a response, but 75% of Americans make less than me. Which doesn't make me rich in the slightest, they're all just even more poor; it just means I'm far from some kind of bottom-of-the-heap loser, I'm ahead of the pack and still part of the downtrodden underclass like the rest of us.
And then the super rich who own automatons and natural resources enough to completely sustain themselves without any labor become the only survivors in a miraculously egalitarian future, for those who live to see it. Egalitarian because everyone (who's still alive) has everything they need and for that reason nobody has to work for anybody else. Just predicated on the deaths of almost everyone else in the process. But for whoever survives, it's a bright future indeed.
I considered noting the analogy to that scenario in my post but couldn't find a way to work it in. Thanks.
As the child of people who couldn't afford kids: people shouldn't have kids until they can afford them.
Unfortunately, this means that most people just shouldn't ever have kids, because they will never afford them, because everyone is perpetually poor and only getting poorer.
And yes, that means I shouldn't have been born. And no, I'm probably never going to have kids.
The good news is, if everyone actually followed this advice (not that they will), whatever tiny number of kids were actually born in the future would live in a better world for it. If the underclasses upon whose backs the wealthy survive stop perpetuating themselves (ourselves, because I'm down here too), eventually the wealthy will have to support themselves, and the tiny future population will be forced to be more egalitarian.
I'm not really arguing against anything you're saying, but I think you misread a word I wrote.
I didn't say "co-existent", I said "co-extensive". That means that the extension of two terms is the same, where "extension of a term" means the objects that that term refers to. I was saying that, when the terms "conservative" and "right-wing" were coined, even though those mean different things and so might not always refer to the same people, at that time they did: right-wing favors the elites, at the time things were in the elites' favor, so they people who favored the elites didn't want anything changed, and people who oppose change are called conservatives.
So back in the beginning of the terms, they referred to the same people, so the connection between them is an easy thing with historical inertia, even if it's not technically accurate now because the present right-wing are the ones pulling us away from the current status quo, as you say. That is a historically unusual thing: usually, change has been leftward, so people pulling toward the right were opposing change, making them conservative.
To be fair, conservativism and right-wing politics, while not cointensive (don't mean the same thing) were coextensive (referred to the same people) at the start, far predating the modern conflation of the two terms. The original right wing were the party of the established elite, who already had all the power and didn't wan't anything to change from that, aking authoritarianism originally coextensive as well. The original left wing, representing the interests of the general populace, wanted change, making them progressive, and they wanted to achieve that change through reducing the authority of the elites, making them liberal.
That original left-wing, the liberal progressives, won, and established a new status quo. Then over time, after Marx, the left wing (still, by definition, representing the common people) started to think authority could be used as a tool for good (i.e. to help the common people), and so stopped being technically liberal; but in some places, like the US, we continued calling anyone on the left "liberal" anyway. Those who opposed those authoritarian-egalitarian changes in favor of the new status quo thus became the new conservatives, who in some places (outside the US) continued to be called "liberal" as well.
Since then the right have adopted many of the same authoritarian techniques of the new left (that's what's called neoconservativism), and then gone further into the worse authoritarianism of the old right, while the left, still more authoritarian than the original left or the until-recently-new right, are once again less authoritarian than the right, so things are tilting back toward their original alignment, at least between left-right and liberty-authority. But for a while back there, the until-recently-new left had largely won, so the direction of change away from their status quo (the New Deal) is now toward the right, making the left technically the conservative side, and the right the "progressive" side, at least inasmuch as "progress" can just mean "change" without value judgement. (i.e. since everything is drifting toward the right over time lately, those wanting to keep things more to the left are the ones in favor of keeping things how they were, or in other words, conservative).
So those college kids proudly waving around the flag of the people who tortured you, chanting the slogans of the people who tortured you, and espousing the ideology of the people who tortured you, doesn't bother you? They're not "real Nazis" despite adopting all the symbols of the real Nazis and standing for what real Nazis stood for? Why, because this generation of them haven't tortured you yet?
Let me make a sort of messy analogy. Just pretend for a minute highways and streets were privately owned. This would be the equivalent of saying these people can't drive on your streets, period. And not only that, they're not even allowed to have an address on a street. Does that really sound like something we want to say we did to someone else? And pretend it's somehow a "good thing"? Really?
I've been sympathetic to this angle of argument so far, but the flaw in your analogy has actually flipped my opinion.
Roads are not analogous to web hosts, they're analogous to ISPs. And yes, it would definitely be wrong for ISPs (so long as they remain local monopolies at least) to block traffic based on content or originator; that's what net neutrality is all about. But so long as ISPs are not blocking the content, anyone with any internet connection can buy any computer and plug it in and set up a web server and host whatever they want. You may need to buy a sufficiently fat pipe and a sufficiently powerful computer to handle your traffic well, but technically any old laptop on any old home internet connection can host a website.
More analogous to the commercial web host, perhaps, is something like a shopping center. It doesn't provide the roads, it just sits at at a site with good easy road access that can handle lots of traffic and rents out big spaces for people to operate their business out of. If a shopping center doesn't want to rent a space to The Nazi Store, that's their call. Someone else can, or if nobody else will, The Nazi Store can buy their own real estate and build their own building and use that for their storefront; or if they can't manage that, operate as a home business.
Explain how something like a universal tax credit of 25% the mean income funded by a 25% flat tax -- which is, by definition, revenue-neutral, because that's how averages work, and which would provide a guaranteed income of over $1000/mo to everyone -- would "bankrupt the United States in nothing flat".
Wait, wait, you're going to get caught up on that "25% tax!?!?!" bit and calculate how much money that is and show how it dwarfs every other already-large expenditure, so let me rephrase that in an equivalent but hopefully clearer way:
Have every taxpayer trade 25% of their income for 25% of the mean income. For people near the mean, that means almost nothing happens; what they pay and what they get is almost exactly the same. For the whole country's tax accounting, on average, that means exactly nothing happens; exactly as much money is spent as raised. So there's no tax apocalypse there.
But for people with zero income, that adds up to over $1000/mo to live off of. And for over 75% of the country, that adds up to some net benefit, however small, and no cost. For most of the remaining population, it adds up to only a small cost, because they're mostly still not far above the mean. And yeah, the tiny handful of people who make way, way above the mean bear the cost of those who see the benefits, but they can afford it.
I agree, that userid is not one that has been around 15 years. Mine, yes, that one, no. Guess she could have got an ID after being an AC for years....
Um? You're talking about user scsirob (246572), while you are OYAHHH (322809). Last I looked, 236,572 is less than 322,809 (commas added for clarity). And I, Pfhorrest (545131), was definitely here in 2002, 15 years ago, so both of you, with UIDs lower than mine, were here at least 15 years ago too.
The headline is saying that if you "feel bad about" feeling bad in the sense of rejecting it and fighting it, it can make you feel worse than if you accept it and let it pass, which is also what the summary says.
What is with all the cremier hate I have been seeing on this site lately? What has he done? Apparently he's a friend of some friend of mine on this site so I'd expect I would be seeing his posts filtered up for me frequently but I have no friggin' clue who he even is, just that I keep seeing posts like this hating on him. What's the deal?
What's maybe even worse is how other people will come down on your for how you spend your compassion.
As a white male myself, I don't really feel like I am discriminated against on that basis in my daily life, so I wouldn't bring up topics like this on my own and I pretty much only hear about it from people on the internet. While I am highly skeptical about possible ulterior motives of people who are expressing such concerns, as a compassionate person I still want to give them the benefit of the doubt, knowing that their life experiences might be different than mine and they might not be lying about their experiences. I just want to hear them out before judging them, and maybe express some kind of entirely conditional sympathy: to agree in disapproving of the bad things they claim are happening to them, if indeed those things should turn out to be happening, which I have no way of verifying one way or another.
But I'm frequently afraid to do even that, because of past experiences that if I don't hate the right people enough, that will in turn earn me the ire of other people. Even if on the whole I side more with those other people and not the ones I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt. There is such a strong "with us or against us" mentality in the air these days, that anyone who is not actively fighting someone else's enemy (or not fighting them hard enough) will often be taken as siding with that enemy.
To take an extreme example for illustration: to oppose the extralegal lynching of an accused child molester would likely paint you as some kind of baby-fucker yourself, even if you simply want to uphold due process for everyone like a civilized society should.
An opinion is actually capable of being correct or incorrect. A race or sex or so on is not. If you think the Earth is flat and at the center of the universe, you are just objectively wrong. Being the "objectively wrong" race or sex or so on doesn't make any sense at all. So if any of those things were to have one correct standard that everyone should adhere to, it would be opinion, not race or sex or so on.
I would much prefer that smokers be forced to stay in contained spaces and the air scrubbed before venting to the outside. I've put forward that very suggestion myself.
The function of cigarette shaming it to make the filthy smokers keep their goddamn drugs out of air that other people have to breath. Who gives a flying fuck about their health -- that's their own business, and they can kill themselves faster for all I care, so long as they leave me out of it. It's public health that's at stake there.
Somebody being fat, on the other hand, is nobody's business but their own.
Slashdot Mirror
And every Brit who can't afford to live in England should move to Russia or Turkey instead?
All of California is insanely overpriced, and the place is so huge that moving somewhere more reasonably priced is basically moving to another country. It's not like you just pack up and drive somewhere an hour away and suddenly it's affordable. People born and raised here shouldn't have to uproot their entire lives and flee half a continent away just because rich people squeezed them out of their homelands.
I am also writing a book, kind of. 20 years ago I haphazardly began a process that I eventually intended to become an epic series of stories (epic in the original sense of a bunch of interconnected smaller stories) once I had my life well-enough sorted to work on them well, to make them my life's work, my magnum opus; and failing that, this year I decided to finally put some real effort into it anyway even though I still really don't feel like I'm in the right headspace to be writing properly.
I'm basically summarizing the highest-level structure of the overall thing into 243 short three-paragraph synopses of the episodes of which it's composed, adding up to about the length of a short novel (60kish words) by the time I'm done at the end of this year. I'm over 2/3 of the way through it now.
I'm continually posting the work in progress to my website as I go: The Chronicles of Quelouva.
I consider owning any house at all to be luxury relative to the actual status quo, and simultaneously the minimum threshold for being actually not poor by non-relative standards.
I could live quite comfortably on a minimum wage income if it weren't for rent and saving desperately to someday have a chance to stop paying rent.
Yes, that was kind of the point of my post. Most people are in a position where it would be imprudent of them to have kids, and that is terrible, just how it's terrible where most people are in a position where it's imprudent to get preventative medical care because the cost will render them homeless. People shouldn't, for their own sake and others', do things they can't afford; but people should be able to afford more, because we shouldn't all be so poor.
I was born here and have spent my entire life here. I don't want to leave my home. You may as well call every Brit who can't afford a house in Britain a whiner for not "just" moving to Russia or Turkey where it's cheaper. That's about a comparable distance and relative population sizes and quality of civilization for moving from California to like, North Dakota or Alabama. I'm not choosing to go somewhere expensive, I just don't want to be chased out of my home. If people can't survive without being forced out of their homelands then that's a problem any way you swing it.
Yeah, I'm not saying that it's impossible to have an egalitarian automation revolution. Just that the doomsday scenario of the person I was replying to still ends up with an egalitarian future... for the survivors.
I will probably never own land, and therefore spend my entire life scrambling to pay the bulk of my income to someone or another for the right just to exist somewhere, even if I could miraculously manage to actually consume nothing at all. That's the meaningful threshold for the lower class. People who own land and other capital as necessary to live without paying to borrow from someone else, only working to fund their actual consumption, are the middle class. Those who can fund even their own consumption off the product of the labor of others by lending out their unused capital in perpetuity are the upper class.
I'm not saying "woe is me", because almost everyone for all of history has been part of the underclass by that definition. And as technology marches on, yeah, everything sucks less for everyone. That has nothing to do with class structure though. Even if I had a magic Star Trek replicator that could provide for all my material needs at nobody's expense, which would make a lot of things in life suck a lot less, I'd still (like almost everyone) have to justify my worth to someone else just for the right to exist somewhere. And it will probably take me my entire life to escape from that situation. That's underclass. Almost all of us are.
Not that obvious troll deserves a response, but 75% of Americans make less than me. Which doesn't make me rich in the slightest, they're all just even more poor; it just means I'm far from some kind of bottom-of-the-heap loser, I'm ahead of the pack and still part of the downtrodden underclass like the rest of us.
And then the super rich who own automatons and natural resources enough to completely sustain themselves without any labor become the only survivors in a miraculously egalitarian future, for those who live to see it. Egalitarian because everyone (who's still alive) has everything they need and for that reason nobody has to work for anybody else. Just predicated on the deaths of almost everyone else in the process. But for whoever survives, it's a bright future indeed.
I considered noting the analogy to that scenario in my post but couldn't find a way to work it in. Thanks.
As the child of people who couldn't afford kids: people shouldn't have kids until they can afford them.
Unfortunately, this means that most people just shouldn't ever have kids, because they will never afford them, because everyone is perpetually poor and only getting poorer.
And yes, that means I shouldn't have been born. And no, I'm probably never going to have kids.
The good news is, if everyone actually followed this advice (not that they will), whatever tiny number of kids were actually born in the future would live in a better world for it. If the underclasses upon whose backs the wealthy survive stop perpetuating themselves (ourselves, because I'm down here too), eventually the wealthy will have to support themselves, and the tiny future population will be forced to be more egalitarian.
It worked with the black plague.
People with a sense of humor, and pedants for being technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
...the glasses didn't so much cause permanent blindness as they merely failed to prevent permanent blindness.
I'm not really arguing against anything you're saying, but I think you misread a word I wrote.
I didn't say "co-existent", I said "co-extensive". That means that the extension of two terms is the same, where "extension of a term" means the objects that that term refers to. I was saying that, when the terms "conservative" and "right-wing" were coined, even though those mean different things and so might not always refer to the same people, at that time they did: right-wing favors the elites, at the time things were in the elites' favor, so they people who favored the elites didn't want anything changed, and people who oppose change are called conservatives.
So back in the beginning of the terms, they referred to the same people, so the connection between them is an easy thing with historical inertia, even if it's not technically accurate now because the present right-wing are the ones pulling us away from the current status quo, as you say. That is a historically unusual thing: usually, change has been leftward, so people pulling toward the right were opposing change, making them conservative.
To be fair, conservativism and right-wing politics, while not cointensive (don't mean the same thing) were coextensive (referred to the same people) at the start, far predating the modern conflation of the two terms. The original right wing were the party of the established elite, who already had all the power and didn't wan't anything to change from that, aking authoritarianism originally coextensive as well. The original left wing, representing the interests of the general populace, wanted change, making them progressive, and they wanted to achieve that change through reducing the authority of the elites, making them liberal.
That original left-wing, the liberal progressives, won, and established a new status quo. Then over time, after Marx, the left wing (still, by definition, representing the common people) started to think authority could be used as a tool for good (i.e. to help the common people), and so stopped being technically liberal; but in some places, like the US, we continued calling anyone on the left "liberal" anyway. Those who opposed those authoritarian-egalitarian changes in favor of the new status quo thus became the new conservatives, who in some places (outside the US) continued to be called "liberal" as well.
Since then the right have adopted many of the same authoritarian techniques of the new left (that's what's called neoconservativism), and then gone further into the worse authoritarianism of the old right, while the left, still more authoritarian than the original left or the until-recently-new right, are once again less authoritarian than the right, so things are tilting back toward their original alignment, at least between left-right and liberty-authority. But for a while back there, the until-recently-new left had largely won, so the direction of change away from their status quo (the New Deal) is now toward the right, making the left technically the conservative side, and the right the "progressive" side, at least inasmuch as "progress" can just mean "change" without value judgement. (i.e. since everything is drifting toward the right over time lately, those wanting to keep things more to the left are the ones in favor of keeping things how they were, or in other words, conservative).
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/...
So those college kids proudly waving around the flag of the people who tortured you, chanting the slogans of the people who tortured you, and espousing the ideology of the people who tortured you, doesn't bother you? They're not "real Nazis" despite adopting all the symbols of the real Nazis and standing for what real Nazis stood for? Why, because this generation of them haven't tortured you yet?
Let me make a sort of messy analogy. Just pretend for a minute highways and streets were privately owned. This would be the equivalent of saying these people can't drive on your streets, period. And not only that, they're not even allowed to have an address on a street. Does that really sound like something we want to say we did to someone else? And pretend it's somehow a "good thing"? Really?
I've been sympathetic to this angle of argument so far, but the flaw in your analogy has actually flipped my opinion.
Roads are not analogous to web hosts, they're analogous to ISPs. And yes, it would definitely be wrong for ISPs (so long as they remain local monopolies at least) to block traffic based on content or originator; that's what net neutrality is all about. But so long as ISPs are not blocking the content, anyone with any internet connection can buy any computer and plug it in and set up a web server and host whatever they want. You may need to buy a sufficiently fat pipe and a sufficiently powerful computer to handle your traffic well, but technically any old laptop on any old home internet connection can host a website.
More analogous to the commercial web host, perhaps, is something like a shopping center. It doesn't provide the roads, it just sits at at a site with good easy road access that can handle lots of traffic and rents out big spaces for people to operate their business out of. If a shopping center doesn't want to rent a space to The Nazi Store, that's their call. Someone else can, or if nobody else will, The Nazi Store can buy their own real estate and build their own building and use that for their storefront; or if they can't manage that, operate as a home business.
Explain how something like a universal tax credit of 25% the mean income funded by a 25% flat tax -- which is, by definition, revenue-neutral, because that's how averages work, and which would provide a guaranteed income of over $1000/mo to everyone -- would "bankrupt the United States in nothing flat".
Wait, wait, you're going to get caught up on that "25% tax!?!?!" bit and calculate how much money that is and show how it dwarfs every other already-large expenditure, so let me rephrase that in an equivalent but hopefully clearer way:
Have every taxpayer trade 25% of their income for 25% of the mean income. For people near the mean, that means almost nothing happens; what they pay and what they get is almost exactly the same. For the whole country's tax accounting, on average, that means exactly nothing happens; exactly as much money is spent as raised. So there's no tax apocalypse there.
But for people with zero income, that adds up to over $1000/mo to live off of. And for over 75% of the country, that adds up to some net benefit, however small, and no cost. For most of the remaining population, it adds up to only a small cost, because they're mostly still not far above the mean. And yeah, the tiny handful of people who make way, way above the mean bear the cost of those who see the benefits, but they can afford it.
I agree, that userid is not one that has been around 15 years. Mine, yes, that one, no. Guess she could have got an ID after being an AC for years....
Um? You're talking about user scsirob (246572), while you are OYAHHH (322809). Last I looked, 236,572 is less than 322,809 (commas added for clarity). And I, Pfhorrest (545131), was definitely here in 2002, 15 years ago, so both of you, with UIDs lower than mine, were here at least 15 years ago too.
The headline is saying that if you "feel bad about" feeling bad in the sense of rejecting it and fighting it, it can make you feel worse than if you accept it and let it pass, which is also what the summary says.
What is with all the cremier hate I have been seeing on this site lately? What has he done? Apparently he's a friend of some friend of mine on this site so I'd expect I would be seeing his posts filtered up for me frequently but I have no friggin' clue who he even is, just that I keep seeing posts like this hating on him. What's the deal?
What's maybe even worse is how other people will come down on your for how you spend your compassion.
As a white male myself, I don't really feel like I am discriminated against on that basis in my daily life, so I wouldn't bring up topics like this on my own and I pretty much only hear about it from people on the internet. While I am highly skeptical about possible ulterior motives of people who are expressing such concerns, as a compassionate person I still want to give them the benefit of the doubt, knowing that their life experiences might be different than mine and they might not be lying about their experiences. I just want to hear them out before judging them, and maybe express some kind of entirely conditional sympathy: to agree in disapproving of the bad things they claim are happening to them, if indeed those things should turn out to be happening, which I have no way of verifying one way or another.
But I'm frequently afraid to do even that, because of past experiences that if I don't hate the right people enough, that will in turn earn me the ire of other people. Even if on the whole I side more with those other people and not the ones I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt. There is such a strong "with us or against us" mentality in the air these days, that anyone who is not actively fighting someone else's enemy (or not fighting them hard enough) will often be taken as siding with that enemy.
To take an extreme example for illustration: to oppose the extralegal lynching of an accused child molester would likely paint you as some kind of baby-fucker yourself, even if you simply want to uphold due process for everyone like a civilized society should.
An opinion is actually capable of being correct or incorrect. A race or sex or so on is not. If you think the Earth is flat and at the center of the universe, you are just objectively wrong. Being the "objectively wrong" race or sex or so on doesn't make any sense at all. So if any of those things were to have one correct standard that everyone should adhere to, it would be opinion, not race or sex or so on.
I would much prefer that smokers be forced to stay in contained spaces and the air scrubbed before venting to the outside. I've put forward that very suggestion myself.
The function of cigarette shaming it to make the filthy smokers keep their goddamn drugs out of air that other people have to breath. Who gives a flying fuck about their health -- that's their own business, and they can kill themselves faster for all I care, so long as they leave me out of it. It's public health that's at stake there.
Somebody being fat, on the other hand, is nobody's business but their own.