they were fascists who borrowed Marx's books for rhetoric. At no time did they implement any of Marx's ideas. A man can claim to be something he's not, ya know. People can lie. Propaganda is a thing. Actions are what matter, and no part of the USSR or China are or ever were communist.
with ownership. The land was here before us. So where the resources. Why is it that whoever has the muscle and the bombs to claim it gets it? Are we really just a bunch of growing dogs ready to savage each other for a steak?
I'd argue that all of humanity has a birthright to the planet's resources. This doesn't mean I'm a communist (I'm not, I'm a democratic socialist) but it means that when we allow somebody to lay claim to those resources and profit from them we also make them pay back (usually in the form of taxes). When it comes to things like oil, water, fertile land, etc then as a rule you really didn't build it (I'd be willing to argue on the soil if every anyone actually did large scale terraforming, but so far all I've seen are irrigation projects supported by oil byproducts).
Basically, think Alaska. Everybody gets a cut because we're all born of the same land.
Now, if somebody wants to say "I own this" go right ahead. So long as they pay their taxes I'm pretty indifferent. What I'm not so happy about is we've got the 1% laying claim to the entire world and demanding they be given everything while also shirking their responsibility to the society and civilization that made it possible. That's nothing new, mind you, but I've got the Internet, so I can see them doing it now.
and the Germans. And the French. And the British. And the Scandinavians.
And when you get done arguing (and losing the argument to) all those people then by all means, argue with a rock. I mean, we've got just as much evidence that you can argue with a rock as we do that socialism, when actually tried, doesn't work.
Or did you mean fascists dictatorships who happen to borrow socialism for their rhetoric? I mean, if people actually acted on professed beliefs then the parts of the Bible and Koran that require charity would have wiped out poverty centuries ago and the whole "Thou Shall not Kill" would sorta put a damper on wars. I mean, Hitler was a Christian after all. Stalin made peace with the Church. I guess you've still got Mao, but then again China is anything but socialist. They can't even claim to be communist anymore....
there was more money lost to wage theft (e.g. when an employer doesn't pay wages earned, for example by forcing hourly workers into unpaid overtime or just plain shorting checks) than all burglaries combined.
Another good point: Texas spent $1.2 billion sending the national guard to police borders. They stopped 10,000 illegal immigrants. That's $120k per illegal immigrant. Those guys would have taken jobs paying $30k/yr tops (probably much less). We could have given $60k to every person put out of work by them and still come out ahead.
There's a line from Fred Pohl's The Space Merchant's that's appropriate here: Better to punish a 1000 innocent men than let one guilty one go free. No, that's not typo, go read the book.
We spare no expense worrying about somebody occasionally getting some thing they didn't earn. As a result we make all our lives much, much worse. Those unemployed denied benefits are now gunning for your job and your boss knows it.
In 2008 the money lost was entirely paper and entirely paid for by the tax payer yet we all took pay cuts and worked longer hours. Our companies got away with that because they knew they could use the crash as an excuse to lay folks off and work the survivors harder, and if the survivors didn't like it they could become part of the problem and be unemployed.
a company can't, for example, hire you under false pretenses. They can't hire you for IT work at $80k/yr and then tell you to scrub toilets for $8/hr. They also can't hire you for 40/week and work you for 5/week twice a month.
That said, after 40 years of right wing people in charge of this country (closest we got was a moderate in Obama) these rules are very, very poorly enforced, even in left wing states like California & NY. Sucks too. Your wages are appreciably lower as a result. Remember, unemployment doesn't exist to protect you from losing your job, it exists to protect your job from the recently unemployed.
Insurance. Businesses usually have to pay into it. Will Uber be required to pay into it now?
In some districts businesses are not. If an ex-employee makes a claim and the business still exists then the state will come after them for the money. This has the unpleasant side effect of making it so businesses fight tooth and nail for excuses why the employee was fired and not laid off. I've witnessed employees written up 3 times in 1 day for the express purpose of firing them.
Also in a lot of places the people who decide if you were fired or laid off are arbitrators hand picked by the companies. You can imagine how well that goes. Had a legally blind buddy of mine who used to take the bus to work quit when the site moved to a place with no bus line. He was approved for unemployment but later forced by an arbitrator to pay it all back (with interest). The reasoning was there was ride sharing at the new site. It was about 6 months after we got to the new site that they announced a new ride sharing program....
Not saying I oppose unemployment, but it should be paid for by tax dollars and should apply regardless of why you were fired if you've had 90 days of continuous employment. The point isn't to protect the unemployed, it's to protect the employed from a massive number of desperate people taking jobs to eat. If you like the wages you're making now you'll understand why we need this.
about human civilization. The land and resources were here before us. We give it and everything it has to either whoever gets there first or whoever can con the most rubes out of it. I mean, when we used to give it to whoever had the biggest army I got that. But the current system is just nuts.
What I'm saying is that everywhere should be like Alaska. As human beings we've all got a legitimate claim to the earth's resources. Aside from humanism (the idea that human beings have intrinsic worth) this is the other major moral justification for socialism.
I mean, wouldn't consumers see the crummy phones and refuse to buy them? Wouldn't there be a rush of high quality phones that protected privacy? Or, well, could it be that the free market isn't a Wunderheilung (and yes, I shamelessly used google translate for that).
from best buy because the thing dies like clockwork every 6 months or so and with the extended warranty they just keep on replacing it. I keep expecting them to send me packing but they never do. Sometimes I have to pay $2 bucks because the cost of the warranty went up and I have to pay the difference.
I do the same with Costco & car batteries. I live the the southwest and they last about 2 years. Costco warranty is 3 years. Haven't bought a car battery in ages.
it'll be done by private individuals. And it's not about humans caring who they kill. If fact that makes humans worse. One charismatic leader can turn your entire security force against you. Happened to the Tzars. Happened to the Chinese. Happens all the damn time. So much so we have a word for it (coup).
The machines might get taken over, but not if you pay your engineers well. And engineers aren't a charismatic lot. They'll collect their pay for the killer robots without ever bothering to overthrow the ruling class. They're perfectly content to be well compensated.
for electronics stores. There's a few regionals, but only in the big cities. And somehow they've avoided getting Bain'd like Toys R Us did. So far anyway. If you don't know what Newegg is they're pretty much it for computers and if you want to buy something in town then yeah, they're it.
there's plenty of countermeasures if we just bother with them, which post 9/11 we will. 911 wasn't an inside job, but that doesn't mean we didn't let it happen. The various agencies knew there were terrorists preparing for 911 and let them swim. The only question is did they let them swim hoping to catch bigger fish or so they could get a rise out of the public. If it was the latter, well, they got their rise all right. Post 911 we threw away our rights and acted like "everything changed" when nothing changed until we changeed it.
Or we could just not do it. It really is that simple. Of course, let's ask ourselves why we want killer robots. We're pretty much past the stage of "defense". Nukes & MAD make that pointless. And hell, so did globalization. You don't shit in your own backyard and for the same reason we're not going to go off and start blowing each other away. The damage done would outweigh the benefit. There'll be brush fires here and there but big scale wars are a thing of the past, if only because they rich won't let us wreck their stuff anymore.
That leaves the other reason for killer robots: so a small group of people can police the impoverished population without risking them turning to a charismatic strongman. If you want to avoid that the only real option is to eliminate those impoverished people and/or to constrain the amount of wealth individuals can claim for their own so they're not building killer robots to defend it.
Seriously, the rich are already thinking about a post capitalist society where the working class doesn't factor in. Automated weapons are the way to go. You keep a few engineers on staff to monitor them and pay the engineers well. Unlike the captains of your private military they lack the ambition and charisma to overthrow you.
Meanwhile the rest of us will just be screwed. Think living like the American Indians on the res except without the casinos. If you want to prevent that now's the time. Start demanding a decent quality of life for everyone. Establish it as a basic human right. Or cast your eyes to the reservations circa the 1900s because that's your future. Me? I'm 40 and come from a short lived family. I'll be long gone.
it's a $250 el cheap and has survived several pavement drops. The key is it's got a cheap, thin plastic back and a (by today's standards) thick bezel. Unless it lands on a rock it's fine.
they're practically a bookie. They don't operate much of anything, they're a middle man. And they take 8-15% of gross. Are they losing that much to fraud? They don't have any crazy tech initiatives, and they sold off Paypal. They had almost $10 billion in revenue and spent $11 billion. What the devil did they do with all that money?
this makes it sound like he's taking responsibility when in fact he's taken none. At his income bracket he's above the law and he knows it. We don't spill the blood of kings.
my carrier locks them to my phone by marking them as system applications. At one point I had an Android phone with a demo of a Puzzle Bobble clone that was marked as a critical system app. Pissed me off because I wanted the 127 mb of space back (which is a hell of a lot for a Puzzle Bobble Clone). To be fair I'm an American though.
Meanwhile I don't think Europeans are going to care if they have to pay $10 bucks for Android, and I don't think Google will be able to charge much more than that.
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they were fascists who borrowed Marx's books for rhetoric. At no time did they implement any of Marx's ideas. A man can claim to be something he's not, ya know. People can lie. Propaganda is a thing. Actions are what matter, and no part of the USSR or China are or ever were communist.
with ownership. The land was here before us. So where the resources. Why is it that whoever has the muscle and the bombs to claim it gets it? Are we really just a bunch of growing dogs ready to savage each other for a steak?
I'd argue that all of humanity has a birthright to the planet's resources. This doesn't mean I'm a communist (I'm not, I'm a democratic socialist) but it means that when we allow somebody to lay claim to those resources and profit from them we also make them pay back (usually in the form of taxes). When it comes to things like oil, water, fertile land, etc then as a rule you really didn't build it (I'd be willing to argue on the soil if every anyone actually did large scale terraforming, but so far all I've seen are irrigation projects supported by oil byproducts).
Basically, think Alaska. Everybody gets a cut because we're all born of the same land.
Now, if somebody wants to say "I own this" go right ahead. So long as they pay their taxes I'm pretty indifferent. What I'm not so happy about is we've got the 1% laying claim to the entire world and demanding they be given everything while also shirking their responsibility to the society and civilization that made it possible. That's nothing new, mind you, but I've got the Internet, so I can see them doing it now.
and the Germans. And the French. And the British. And the Scandinavians.
And when you get done arguing (and losing the argument to) all those people then by all means, argue with a rock. I mean, we've got just as much evidence that you can argue with a rock as we do that socialism, when actually tried, doesn't work.
Or did you mean fascists dictatorships who happen to borrow socialism for their rhetoric? I mean, if people actually acted on professed beliefs then the parts of the Bible and Koran that require charity would have wiped out poverty centuries ago and the whole "Thou Shall not Kill" would sorta put a damper on wars. I mean, Hitler was a Christian after all. Stalin made peace with the Church. I guess you've still got Mao, but then again China is anything but socialist. They can't even claim to be communist anymore....
there was more money lost to wage theft (e.g. when an employer doesn't pay wages earned, for example by forcing hourly workers into unpaid overtime or just plain shorting checks) than all burglaries combined.
Another good point: Texas spent $1.2 billion sending the national guard to police borders. They stopped 10,000 illegal immigrants. That's $120k per illegal immigrant. Those guys would have taken jobs paying $30k/yr tops (probably much less). We could have given $60k to every person put out of work by them and still come out ahead.
There's a line from Fred Pohl's The Space Merchant's that's appropriate here: Better to punish a 1000 innocent men than let one guilty one go free. No, that's not typo, go read the book.
We spare no expense worrying about somebody occasionally getting some thing they didn't earn. As a result we make all our lives much, much worse. Those unemployed denied benefits are now gunning for your job and your boss knows it.
In 2008 the money lost was entirely paper and entirely paid for by the tax payer yet we all took pay cuts and worked longer hours. Our companies got away with that because they knew they could use the crash as an excuse to lay folks off and work the survivors harder, and if the survivors didn't like it they could become part of the problem and be unemployed.
a company can't, for example, hire you under false pretenses. They can't hire you for IT work at $80k/yr and then tell you to scrub toilets for $8/hr. They also can't hire you for 40/week and work you for 5/week twice a month.
That said, after 40 years of right wing people in charge of this country (closest we got was a moderate in Obama) these rules are very, very poorly enforced, even in left wing states like California & NY. Sucks too. Your wages are appreciably lower as a result. Remember, unemployment doesn't exist to protect you from losing your job, it exists to protect your job from the recently unemployed.
this is what you get when you have regulations about how poorly a business can treat it's workers and then you do not enforce those regulations.
We can make it _real_ easy to engage in commerce if you like. It wasn't hard at all to ship slaves in the 1800s...
Insurance. Businesses usually have to pay into it. Will Uber be required to pay into it now?
In some districts businesses are not. If an ex-employee makes a claim and the business still exists then the state will come after them for the money. This has the unpleasant side effect of making it so businesses fight tooth and nail for excuses why the employee was fired and not laid off. I've witnessed employees written up 3 times in 1 day for the express purpose of firing them.
Also in a lot of places the people who decide if you were fired or laid off are arbitrators hand picked by the companies. You can imagine how well that goes. Had a legally blind buddy of mine who used to take the bus to work quit when the site moved to a place with no bus line. He was approved for unemployment but later forced by an arbitrator to pay it all back (with interest). The reasoning was there was ride sharing at the new site. It was about 6 months after we got to the new site that they announced a new ride sharing program....
Not saying I oppose unemployment, but it should be paid for by tax dollars and should apply regardless of why you were fired if you've had 90 days of continuous employment. The point isn't to protect the unemployed, it's to protect the employed from a massive number of desperate people taking jobs to eat. If you like the wages you're making now you'll understand why we need this.
about human civilization. The land and resources were here before us. We give it and everything it has to either whoever gets there first or whoever can con the most rubes out of it. I mean, when we used to give it to whoever had the biggest army I got that. But the current system is just nuts.
What I'm saying is that everywhere should be like Alaska. As human beings we've all got a legitimate claim to the earth's resources. Aside from humanism (the idea that human beings have intrinsic worth) this is the other major moral justification for socialism.
TL;DR, pay your taxes, Mr Mega-corporations.
I mean, wouldn't consumers see the crummy phones and refuse to buy them? Wouldn't there be a rush of high quality phones that protected privacy? Or, well, could it be that the free market isn't a Wunderheilung (and yes, I shamelessly used google translate for that).
from best buy because the thing dies like clockwork every 6 months or so and with the extended warranty they just keep on replacing it. I keep expecting them to send me packing but they never do. Sometimes I have to pay $2 bucks because the cost of the warranty went up and I have to pay the difference.
I do the same with Costco & car batteries. I live the the southwest and they last about 2 years. Costco warranty is 3 years. Haven't bought a car battery in ages.
it'll be done by private individuals. And it's not about humans caring who they kill. If fact that makes humans worse. One charismatic leader can turn your entire security force against you. Happened to the Tzars. Happened to the Chinese. Happens all the damn time. So much so we have a word for it (coup).
The machines might get taken over, but not if you pay your engineers well. And engineers aren't a charismatic lot. They'll collect their pay for the killer robots without ever bothering to overthrow the ruling class. They're perfectly content to be well compensated.
You don't read a lot of /. do you?
For the record, stuff like this is why not releasing your tax returns is a big deal. We have no idea who has their hooks in Trump and how deep...
oh wait, I guess it still counts if you're the one capitulating...
for electronics stores. There's a few regionals, but only in the big cities. And somehow they've avoided getting Bain'd like Toys R Us did. So far anyway. If you don't know what Newegg is they're pretty much it for computers and if you want to buy something in town then yeah, they're it.
What do they call this? Survival Bias?
there's plenty of countermeasures if we just bother with them, which post 9/11 we will. 911 wasn't an inside job, but that doesn't mean we didn't let it happen. The various agencies knew there were terrorists preparing for 911 and let them swim. The only question is did they let them swim hoping to catch bigger fish or so they could get a rise out of the public. If it was the latter, well, they got their rise all right. Post 911 we threw away our rights and acted like "everything changed" when nothing changed until we changeed it.
Or we could just not do it. It really is that simple. Of course, let's ask ourselves why we want killer robots. We're pretty much past the stage of "defense". Nukes & MAD make that pointless. And hell, so did globalization. You don't shit in your own backyard and for the same reason we're not going to go off and start blowing each other away. The damage done would outweigh the benefit. There'll be brush fires here and there but big scale wars are a thing of the past, if only because they rich won't let us wreck their stuff anymore.
That leaves the other reason for killer robots: so a small group of people can police the impoverished population without risking them turning to a charismatic strongman. If you want to avoid that the only real option is to eliminate those impoverished people and/or to constrain the amount of wealth individuals can claim for their own so they're not building killer robots to defend it.
and he'll get his legislation.
FTFY.
Seriously, the rich are already thinking about a post capitalist society where the working class doesn't factor in. Automated weapons are the way to go. You keep a few engineers on staff to monitor them and pay the engineers well. Unlike the captains of your private military they lack the ambition and charisma to overthrow you.
Meanwhile the rest of us will just be screwed. Think living like the American Indians on the res except without the casinos. If you want to prevent that now's the time. Start demanding a decent quality of life for everyone. Establish it as a basic human right. Or cast your eyes to the reservations circa the 1900s because that's your future. Me? I'm 40 and come from a short lived family. I'll be long gone.
you think our president has nothing better to do all day besides posting useless comments on the internet? Oh.... wait....
it's a $250 el cheap and has survived several pavement drops. The key is it's got a cheap, thin plastic back and a (by today's standards) thick bezel. Unless it lands on a rock it's fine.
they're practically a bookie. They don't operate much of anything, they're a middle man. And they take 8-15% of gross. Are they losing that much to fraud? They don't have any crazy tech initiatives, and they sold off Paypal. They had almost $10 billion in revenue and spent $11 billion. What the devil did they do with all that money?
this makes it sound like he's taking responsibility when in fact he's taken none. At his income bracket he's above the law and he knows it. We don't spill the blood of kings.
my carrier locks them to my phone by marking them as system applications. At one point I had an Android phone with a demo of a Puzzle Bobble clone that was marked as a critical system app. Pissed me off because I wanted the 127 mb of space back (which is a hell of a lot for a Puzzle Bobble Clone). To be fair I'm an American though.
Meanwhile I don't think Europeans are going to care if they have to pay $10 bucks for Android, and I don't think Google will be able to charge much more than that.
that wants e-voting without a paper trail. Always in the name of fiscal austerity...