I think there's only one answer. Take me now Stalin!
Also, I'd be more impressed if heavy makeup of the sort I see on some women was a factor. We already knew facial recog has a tough time with stuff like this (and beards while we're at it). It just means the coppers will pull everyone over in heavy makeup and/or with a beard (no change there, amiright.gif)
Lots of places came out of it. Unless you believe the ones that didn't are somehow less human or inferior humans then you're forced to admit that there's another reason why these places are still hell holes while places like Israel are not (calling them out because they're one of the best examples of a middle east nation doing well, and because we heavily support them instead of screwing with them).
Iran was modernizing until we replaced their democratically elected government with one we approved of in a CIA coo. This is a historic fact. There are pictures from the 50s of girls in short skirts dancing for Christ's sake. For all Saddam's brutality he too was trying to modernize and secularize his country. And he was no worse off than anyone that we put in charge.
Face it, America needs to stop sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong and build a transportation system that doesn't rely on cheap oil.
that's what civilization is. You're forced to participate in it. If we don't guarantee a minimum quality of life what's the point? And if that quality of life isn't improving again, what's the point? That's humanism. The idea that all human beings have intrinsic value. It's the only principle that can lead to anything but dystopia.
Basically we all work together whether we like it or not because the alternative is objectively worse. Nobody gets left behind. Nobody gets abandoned to fate. Life is made fair because that's what human reason is for.
Or we could just keep trying your way. I mean, sure, we had close to 10 thousand years of nasty, brutish and short life that can be directly traced to your dog-eat-dog philosophy and nonsensical supply side economics. We can ignore the reason dictators rise to power and just be pointlessly scared of them, ignoring root causes right up until the point we've got another dark ages on our hands. That works too, I guess.
it's the ones escaping violence. The actual refugees. The economic migrants come to your country for a better life. They integrate well into society. The refugees are forced out by violence. They don't want to be in your country, they want to go home. So they don't integrate.
I think it'd be less of an issue without religion and religious differences. Europe's been secularizing for decades and having a huge influx of folks with strong beliefs and a general desire to have everyone think and act like they do is bound to make people nervous. I don't have a short term solution, but long term it would help if I could get my country (America) to stop fucking with the middle east in order to maintain our Military Industrial Complex. Maybe Bernie Sanders will win the presidency and we'll start pulling back. Hopefully Trump doesn't get us in a war with Iran in the meantime.
and if you're not prepared to take a call for a job interview 24/7 it goes to the next guy. We live in the world we're born in, not the one we want. And for a variety of reasons we're limited in our ability to change it.
the economy's weak globally because the post WII gains have shifted back to the ruling class. That puts pressure everywhere creating refugees like crazy. Refugees for their part are being forced out of their country instead of willingly immigrating. That means they don't integrate into the host society and threaten to overwhelm it. If you're in Europe right now you just spent the last 200 years secularizing and suddenly you've got millions of religious fundamentalists flooding in.
The correct solution is to start attacking the root cause of the refugee problem, which is mostly European and (especially) American meddling in the middle east. To do that we need more energy independence and we need to end the bloody wars (8 countries and counting that America is bombing...).
decides to make a gig economy out of your buddies business? How long will he last?
A man is only his own man if he can say "fuck off" when somebody with more money muscles in on his territory. The only way to do that is for us all to agree that nobody anywhere should be too poor to live.
Until then you're buddy's just enjoying the effects of survivor bias. Give it another 20 years of automation and productivity increases and you're buddy will be on a downward spiral from competing with all the out of work engineers doing gigs to afford this today's rent and food.
legalize drugs, crack down on money laundering and ransomware. That's basically that. The base line value of Bitcoin comes from it's use to trade illegal goods. In that market the crazy volatility doesn't matter since you're selling a plant for 100x what it cost to grow or you're laundering money you couldn't use anyway so the lost money is just transactional fees.
Bitcoin and other crypto currencies are already impractical to use as daily currencies because of transaction times. If you find a way to drop those times you'll probably also find a way to drop mining times and eliminate the artificial scarcity that keep the currency from collapsing. But you need proof of work or your currency becomes open to various forms of attack. You can do centralized proof of stake, but that's just a fiat currency. If you're going that route why not just whatever your country's local currency is?
proper education, clean, lead free drinking water and decent paying jobs stops crime. The number of criminally insane people is minuscule. Crap like this is just an excuse not to do the hard work of solving root causes.
at least about how the industrial revolution would negatively impact them. They lost their livelihoods and it took about 80 years and two world wars for the economy to fully catch up and employ everybody. During that time there was widespread poverty. The phrase "Nasty, Brutish and short" comes to mind.
Now, if the wealth generated had been more equitably distributed they would have been wrong, but the luddites correctly surmised that wasn't going to happen. These days we have the Internet and hindsight and access to history books at our local library. We can see the mass unemployment of the next major industrial revolution coming. That said, so far it doesn't look like we're going to do anything about it, or if we do it'll be the bare minimum needed to keep the ruling class in power. I could be wrong and I hope I am.
means you can never build any wealth. You're always losing what little you have in the next crash. Meanwhile the rich buy it off you during the crash for peanuts (using your money in the form of the bailouts they got). Crap like that is why I'm a Keynesian style Democratic Socialist.
and don't need a heart stint of bypass at 50 or blood pressure medicine. Also so long as you never hurt yourself. Also if you've got a nice piece of land with plenty of water that doesn't need modern irrigation, fertilizer and pest control techniques.
There's a whole host of reasons why Galt's Gultch isn't a nice place to live.
and it's a stat cherry picked to hide income inequality. It's _average_ income. Take everybody, take all the money, divide. This is why everybody looks at inflation adjusted wages.
Buddy of mine just got a call center job paying $8/hr. He had a job in the 90s doing about the same thing that paid $12. You could buy an economy car in the 90s for $6k. Same car today is $15. Has a few more features, gets about 3-5 mpg more. costs almost 3x as much. Same for rent. 1 bd when he was making $12? $500/mo. Today? $800. Same complex. Inflation's a bitch.
Better example. Woman "retires" from kmart when the store closed. Making $9/hr. She was making $3 something in the 70s. The problem? Adjusted for inflation she was making the equivalent of $16/hr in the 70s. She lost almost half her pay after 45 years of work.
You know damn well why we don't let municipalities choose. The billionaires find it easy to divide and conquer small municipalities. It takes organization on a national level to stand up to that much economic power. This is precisely why their media machines (Fox News, Sinclair, CNN, MSNBC, they're all economically right wing and they're all supply siders) push these "States Rights" narratives. I don't know if you work for them, the Russians, or if you just fell for their propaganda. But either way wake up. If you're one of their shills they'll turn on you eventually. If you're not then they've already turned on you. I don't know what kind of game you think you're playing, but you'll lose it in the end.
aside from climate change this is the biggest issue facing the human race this century. We've built a civilization around the notion that if you don't work you don't eat and we're about to run out of work. Productivity gains are already biting into wages. If minimum wage had kept pace with inflation it'd be > $20/hr. Instead it's about half what it was in the 70s inflation adjusted.
I keep hearing they'll be new jobs. But what I see is high paying factory jobs being replaced by low paying service sector jobs. We keep ignoring the fallout from the last few industrial revolutions. Luddite wasn't always a casual insult, it was a movement in response to job loses from new tech. It took 80 years for more new tech to catch up to the job losses from the last industrial revolution. This is fact, look it up.
Finally I get the people who kid themselves and say it's not a problem. What I don't understand is all these folks acknowledge the problem and shrug saying "laissez faire". Seriously, when in your life has the best answer to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it all works out for the best?
I'm not free so long as someone controls my access to food, shelter, health care and education. You see it as "distributive justice" but that's not correct. The goal of progressives isn't justice (funny word that, plenty loaded). The goal is to have a world where nobody's too poor to live. We're not there. By all accounts 45000 Americans die for lack of health care ever year (preventable diseases left untreated).
That goal in turn leads to real freedom. Real freedom is being able to say 'no' when you boss tries to screw you and not dying of starvation or a preventable heart attack as a result.
like Internet. They have to worry about government regulation if they raise the price too high. Or at least they used to. With the current administration I don't think that's the case. I know my bill's gone up $20 in the last 6 months and it'll jump another $40 by the end of the year (assuming I want the same tier service I have now).
because people voted folks into office who repealed it. If congress was stacked with Liz Warrens and Bernie Sanders instead of Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells it never would have been repealed.
Getting rid of the bribes wouldn't hurt, but if the end result is still guys like Ryan, McConnell and other "Small Government" right wingers running the show then nothing changes. We need to convince people government can work so they'll stop voting people into office whose goal is to break government.
take glass steagall. For 50 years it did a decent job of preventing the kinds of economic crashes we had in 2008. After 50 years without a major economic crash people came to the conclusion that since we hadn't had a blow up the regulations could go. Seriously, people think because bad things that regulations were passed don't happen anymore we don't need the regulations...
I hate Ronald Reagan with a passion. He and his ilk (Karl Rove & the like) rolled back 100 years of hard fought workers rights in a few decades and turned the working class against the very notion of organizing for their own benefit. They turned "Union" into a dirty word and convinced folks to scrap the whole system because of a few bad apples and some Mafia interference. They were masters at it too. I'm singling him out because he was the spokesman for that crap. Mr "Government's the problem, not the solution". But crap like this is part of a broader trend to weaken the power structures that created and allow the continued existence of a middle class.
Google still has it, so it doesn't make any difference to me which mega corporation has it. Besides, I've said this before on this forum but I'm just not that worried about my privacy. I'm lower working class (I'd be doing better but my family has a lot of health problems and being American it's constantly crushing me financially). Privacy is mostly an upper middle class concern. In my income bracket I'm more worried about having basic needs met.
The way I see it is this: The ultra wealthy want to invade my privacy so they can use that information to oppress me. But the only reason they're bothering to oppress me is so they can take all the money for themselves. If we had a society where we didn't let them do that and didn't give them so much money that it truns into power I wouldn't care if they knew what web sites I browsed. In other words, if I had guaranteed access to food, shelter, healthcare, education then they wouldn't have any leverage to oppress me.
That's what true freedom really is. It's when nobody has any leverage over you. It's why I'm a Democratic Socialist. Nobody Should be too Poor to Live. And nobody should get to decide who lives and who dies.
are still pretty low. The odds of her getting knocked up are much higher. We regulate sex more than violence because relatively few people want to commit wanton acts of violence while just about everybody want sex. And if you've ever known anyone who's had an unplanned pregnancy or had one yourself you know it's just as life changingly devastating. Maybe moreso. Blow me away and my life insurance kicks in but if I go knock somebody up I've got a $12k+/mo bill for at least the next 18 years.
it's not nothing to do with moral policing. Credit card transactions are effectively loans. In large parts of the world you have a legal right to dispute any charge on your card as a result. Adult content has a high percentage of disputes (probably from guys who's wives/girlfriends notice the charge). Even if you can prove the charge is valid it's still expensive to do so. Hence why nobody wants to be involved in it.
With corporations always, always, always follow the money. Anything bigger than a leomonade stand is completely amoral.
about HTTPS. You just answered my question. They don't want the ISPs to have the detailed data google has (they still have URLs but no page content) and they can't replace google's ads with their own. Now it makes sense.
when we have stuff like this in America? Seriously, If I didn't know for a fact that that link is real and that somebody in a position of power made an argument against teaching critical thinking I'd have chalked it up to Poe's law.
What I'm saying is our education system and our society's values (at least in regards to critical thinking skills) failed these people. These aren't like climate change deniers for flat earthers or some such. They aren't choosing to be ignorant and dumb. They were either born that way or made that way.
The correct response isn't to laugh at them, it's to take pity and try to lift them out of their ignorance. Hell, you should do that even if it wasn't the right thing to do. These guys are dumb, yeah, but if you can talk them into giving up their Uber passwords imagine what a demagogue can talk them into. Where do you think dictatorships come from?
Slashdot Mirror
I think there's only one answer. Take me now Stalin!
Also, I'd be more impressed if heavy makeup of the sort I see on some women was a factor. We already knew facial recog has a tough time with stuff like this (and beards while we're at it). It just means the coppers will pull everyone over in heavy makeup and/or with a beard (no change there, amiright.gif)
Lots of places came out of it. Unless you believe the ones that didn't are somehow less human or inferior humans then you're forced to admit that there's another reason why these places are still hell holes while places like Israel are not (calling them out because they're one of the best examples of a middle east nation doing well, and because we heavily support them instead of screwing with them).
Iran was modernizing until we replaced their democratically elected government with one we approved of in a CIA coo. This is a historic fact. There are pictures from the 50s of girls in short skirts dancing for Christ's sake. For all Saddam's brutality he too was trying to modernize and secularize his country. And he was no worse off than anyone that we put in charge.
Face it, America needs to stop sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong and build a transportation system that doesn't rely on cheap oil.
that's what civilization is. You're forced to participate in it. If we don't guarantee a minimum quality of life what's the point? And if that quality of life isn't improving again, what's the point? That's humanism. The idea that all human beings have intrinsic value. It's the only principle that can lead to anything but dystopia.
Basically we all work together whether we like it or not because the alternative is objectively worse. Nobody gets left behind. Nobody gets abandoned to fate. Life is made fair because that's what human reason is for.
Or we could just keep trying your way. I mean, sure, we had close to 10 thousand years of nasty, brutish and short life that can be directly traced to your dog-eat-dog philosophy and nonsensical supply side economics. We can ignore the reason dictators rise to power and just be pointlessly scared of them, ignoring root causes right up until the point we've got another dark ages on our hands. That works too, I guess.
it's the ones escaping violence. The actual refugees. The economic migrants come to your country for a better life. They integrate well into society. The refugees are forced out by violence. They don't want to be in your country, they want to go home. So they don't integrate.
I think it'd be less of an issue without religion and religious differences. Europe's been secularizing for decades and having a huge influx of folks with strong beliefs and a general desire to have everyone think and act like they do is bound to make people nervous. I don't have a short term solution, but long term it would help if I could get my country (America) to stop fucking with the middle east in order to maintain our Military Industrial Complex. Maybe Bernie Sanders will win the presidency and we'll start pulling back. Hopefully Trump doesn't get us in a war with Iran in the meantime.
and if you're not prepared to take a call for a job interview 24/7 it goes to the next guy. We live in the world we're born in, not the one we want. And for a variety of reasons we're limited in our ability to change it.
the economy's weak globally because the post WII gains have shifted back to the ruling class. That puts pressure everywhere creating refugees like crazy. Refugees for their part are being forced out of their country instead of willingly immigrating. That means they don't integrate into the host society and threaten to overwhelm it. If you're in Europe right now you just spent the last 200 years secularizing and suddenly you've got millions of religious fundamentalists flooding in.
The correct solution is to start attacking the root cause of the refugee problem, which is mostly European and (especially) American meddling in the middle east. To do that we need more energy independence and we need to end the bloody wars (8 countries and counting that America is bombing...).
decides to make a gig economy out of your buddies business? How long will he last?
A man is only his own man if he can say "fuck off" when somebody with more money muscles in on his territory. The only way to do that is for us all to agree that nobody anywhere should be too poor to live.
Until then you're buddy's just enjoying the effects of survivor bias. Give it another 20 years of automation and productivity increases and you're buddy will be on a downward spiral from competing with all the out of work engineers doing gigs to afford this today's rent and food.
legalize drugs, crack down on money laundering and ransomware. That's basically that. The base line value of Bitcoin comes from it's use to trade illegal goods. In that market the crazy volatility doesn't matter since you're selling a plant for 100x what it cost to grow or you're laundering money you couldn't use anyway so the lost money is just transactional fees.
Bitcoin and other crypto currencies are already impractical to use as daily currencies because of transaction times. If you find a way to drop those times you'll probably also find a way to drop mining times and eliminate the artificial scarcity that keep the currency from collapsing. But you need proof of work or your currency becomes open to various forms of attack. You can do centralized proof of stake, but that's just a fiat currency. If you're going that route why not just whatever your country's local currency is?
proper education, clean, lead free drinking water and decent paying jobs stops crime. The number of criminally insane people is minuscule. Crap like this is just an excuse not to do the hard work of solving root causes.
at least about how the industrial revolution would negatively impact them. They lost their livelihoods and it took about 80 years and two world wars for the economy to fully catch up and employ everybody. During that time there was widespread poverty. The phrase "Nasty, Brutish and short" comes to mind.
Now, if the wealth generated had been more equitably distributed they would have been wrong, but the luddites correctly surmised that wasn't going to happen. These days we have the Internet and hindsight and access to history books at our local library. We can see the mass unemployment of the next major industrial revolution coming. That said, so far it doesn't look like we're going to do anything about it, or if we do it'll be the bare minimum needed to keep the ruling class in power. I could be wrong and I hope I am.
means you can never build any wealth. You're always losing what little you have in the next crash. Meanwhile the rich buy it off you during the crash for peanuts (using your money in the form of the bailouts they got). Crap like that is why I'm a Keynesian style Democratic Socialist.
and don't need a heart stint of bypass at 50 or blood pressure medicine. Also so long as you never hurt yourself. Also if you've got a nice piece of land with plenty of water that doesn't need modern irrigation, fertilizer and pest control techniques.
There's a whole host of reasons why Galt's Gultch isn't a nice place to live.
and it's a stat cherry picked to hide income inequality. It's _average_ income. Take everybody, take all the money, divide. This is why everybody looks at inflation adjusted wages.
Buddy of mine just got a call center job paying $8/hr. He had a job in the 90s doing about the same thing that paid $12. You could buy an economy car in the 90s for $6k. Same car today is $15. Has a few more features, gets about 3-5 mpg more. costs almost 3x as much. Same for rent. 1 bd when he was making $12? $500/mo. Today? $800. Same complex. Inflation's a bitch.
Better example. Woman "retires" from kmart when the store closed. Making $9/hr. She was making $3 something in the 70s. The problem? Adjusted for inflation she was making the equivalent of $16/hr in the 70s. She lost almost half her pay after 45 years of work.
You know damn well why we don't let municipalities choose. The billionaires find it easy to divide and conquer small municipalities. It takes organization on a national level to stand up to that much economic power. This is precisely why their media machines (Fox News, Sinclair, CNN, MSNBC, they're all economically right wing and they're all supply siders) push these "States Rights" narratives. I don't know if you work for them, the Russians, or if you just fell for their propaganda. But either way wake up. If you're one of their shills they'll turn on you eventually. If you're not then they've already turned on you. I don't know what kind of game you think you're playing, but you'll lose it in the end.
aside from climate change this is the biggest issue facing the human race this century. We've built a civilization around the notion that if you don't work you don't eat and we're about to run out of work. Productivity gains are already biting into wages. If minimum wage had kept pace with inflation it'd be > $20/hr. Instead it's about half what it was in the 70s inflation adjusted.
I keep hearing they'll be new jobs. But what I see is high paying factory jobs being replaced by low paying service sector jobs. We keep ignoring the fallout from the last few industrial revolutions. Luddite wasn't always a casual insult, it was a movement in response to job loses from new tech. It took 80 years for more new tech to catch up to the job losses from the last industrial revolution. This is fact, look it up.
Finally I get the people who kid themselves and say it's not a problem. What I don't understand is all these folks acknowledge the problem and shrug saying "laissez faire". Seriously, when in your life has the best answer to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it all works out for the best?
I'm not free so long as someone controls my access to food, shelter, health care and education. You see it as "distributive justice" but that's not correct. The goal of progressives isn't justice (funny word that, plenty loaded). The goal is to have a world where nobody's too poor to live. We're not there. By all accounts 45000 Americans die for lack of health care ever year (preventable diseases left untreated).
That goal in turn leads to real freedom. Real freedom is being able to say 'no' when you boss tries to screw you and not dying of starvation or a preventable heart attack as a result.
here and here
like Internet. They have to worry about government regulation if they raise the price too high. Or at least they used to. With the current administration I don't think that's the case. I know my bill's gone up $20 in the last 6 months and it'll jump another $40 by the end of the year (assuming I want the same tier service I have now).
because people voted folks into office who repealed it. If congress was stacked with Liz Warrens and Bernie Sanders instead of Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells it never would have been repealed.
Getting rid of the bribes wouldn't hurt, but if the end result is still guys like Ryan, McConnell and other "Small Government" right wingers running the show then nothing changes. We need to convince people government can work so they'll stop voting people into office whose goal is to break government.
there's a class war on in America. The best kind of war is one where the other side isn't fighting.
take glass steagall. For 50 years it did a decent job of preventing the kinds of economic crashes we had in 2008. After 50 years without a major economic crash people came to the conclusion that since we hadn't had a blow up the regulations could go. Seriously, people think because bad things that regulations were passed don't happen anymore we don't need the regulations...
I hate Ronald Reagan with a passion. He and his ilk (Karl Rove & the like) rolled back 100 years of hard fought workers rights in a few decades and turned the working class against the very notion of organizing for their own benefit. They turned "Union" into a dirty word and convinced folks to scrap the whole system because of a few bad apples and some Mafia interference. They were masters at it too. I'm singling him out because he was the spokesman for that crap. Mr "Government's the problem, not the solution". But crap like this is part of a broader trend to weaken the power structures that created and allow the continued existence of a middle class.
Google still has it, so it doesn't make any difference to me which mega corporation has it. Besides, I've said this before on this forum but I'm just not that worried about my privacy. I'm lower working class (I'd be doing better but my family has a lot of health problems and being American it's constantly crushing me financially). Privacy is mostly an upper middle class concern. In my income bracket I'm more worried about having basic needs met.
The way I see it is this: The ultra wealthy want to invade my privacy so they can use that information to oppress me. But the only reason they're bothering to oppress me is so they can take all the money for themselves. If we had a society where we didn't let them do that and didn't give them so much money that it truns into power I wouldn't care if they knew what web sites I browsed. In other words, if I had guaranteed access to food, shelter, healthcare, education then they wouldn't have any leverage to oppress me.
That's what true freedom really is. It's when nobody has any leverage over you. It's why I'm a Democratic Socialist. Nobody Should be too Poor to Live. And nobody should get to decide who lives and who dies.
are still pretty low. The odds of her getting knocked up are much higher. We regulate sex more than violence because relatively few people want to commit wanton acts of violence while just about everybody want sex. And if you've ever known anyone who's had an unplanned pregnancy or had one yourself you know it's just as life changingly devastating. Maybe moreso. Blow me away and my life insurance kicks in but if I go knock somebody up I've got a $12k+/mo bill for at least the next 18 years.
it's not nothing to do with moral policing. Credit card transactions are effectively loans. In large parts of the world you have a legal right to dispute any charge on your card as a result. Adult content has a high percentage of disputes (probably from guys who's wives/girlfriends notice the charge). Even if you can prove the charge is valid it's still expensive to do so. Hence why nobody wants to be involved in it.
With corporations always, always, always follow the money. Anything bigger than a leomonade stand is completely amoral.
about HTTPS. You just answered my question. They don't want the ISPs to have the detailed data google has (they still have URLs but no page content) and they can't replace google's ads with their own. Now it makes sense.
when we have stuff like this in America? Seriously, If I didn't know for a fact that that link is real and that somebody in a position of power made an argument against teaching critical thinking I'd have chalked it up to Poe's law.
What I'm saying is our education system and our society's values (at least in regards to critical thinking skills) failed these people. These aren't like climate change deniers for flat earthers or some such. They aren't choosing to be ignorant and dumb. They were either born that way or made that way.
The correct response isn't to laugh at them, it's to take pity and try to lift them out of their ignorance. Hell, you should do that even if it wasn't the right thing to do. These guys are dumb, yeah, but if you can talk them into giving up their Uber passwords imagine what a demagogue can talk them into. Where do you think dictatorships come from?