If you're worried about oppression the solution is to start taking power away from people. And that means money. A ruling class uses oppression to keep a disproportionate amount of wealth for themselves. They use poverty and economic stress to keep the working class at each other's throats. How else can 1% of the population claim 50-90% of the wealth and get away with it? Money is power. Real freedom comes when we've guaranteed everyone's access to food, shelter, healthcare, education & transportation (the latter being needed to access the former). Until you do that you're one demagogue away from an angry mob, either joining it or being killed by it.
they were a third world hell hole until the price of oil spiked. Normally when that happens (a commodity becomes extremely valuable) nothing changes. A violent dictator takes it all for themselves. See the Congo and "Blood Diamonds" for a good example of what usually happens.
What made Venezuela so unique is Hugo Chavez. Instead of killing everyone in his way to claim the oil money for himself he used to it buy his way into the people's hearts, and in the process make the country a first world nation almost overnight.
They needed more time. Corruption was bound to happen. It's like a poor person winning the lottery. They don't know how to manage it. If they can hold onto enough of it for a few generations it becomes a dynasty. But right now it looks like Venezuela just didn't have enough time. Again, if the international community wasn't shitting all over them with sanctions (I suspect at the behest of the ultra rich, who don't like the idea of socialism spreading and biting into their status as God-Kings over mankind) then they might have pulled themselves up.
I'm guessing they're trying to avoid that. It's been 2 years since they've put out a new card. It'll be 3 or 4 by the time they finally do something. That's going to be a major generational leap, and when it happens it's going to render last gen's cards obsolete. They're worried about folks who stop buying cards waiting for the new stuff.
I was expecting at least the UK to send Uber packing for illegally classifying employees as contractors. Not sure how they do it. The other businesses that tried it (for stuff like maid services and the like) couldn't pull it off, they lost their court cases. But those court cases didn't have any effect on Uber (or Lyft for that matter). Are they just that well connected? In the meantime I'm guessing there's a raft of taxes they don't pay as a result, which is going to help drain the coffers of the NHS. That'll eventually be used as an excuse to pull public healthcare from people.
except maybe on a very, very small scale. I wish I could stop having to say this but Mao and Stalin were _not_ communists. They were fascists who happened to borrow Marx's books for rhetoric.
Socialism works just fine. Just ask Norway, Germany, France and Canada. But if you're entire country's basic systems fall apart and the rest of the world decides to punish you with sanctions for no particular reason (besides maybe not liking your system of economics) then no amount of socialism can save you.
Let me put it this way, does the American Great Depression mean Capitalism is a failure?
people who say that are the same crowd how think bitcoin's going to take down the international banking system. You don't fix oppression by working around it. You treat the root cause, which is poverty that allows desperate people to be organized into violent mobs.
context matters. Very, very few people will reuse a thin plastic bottle. I use plastic bags from the grocery store but a) I get more than even I can use (only have 1 dog) and b) they're too flimsy for much else.
You have to consider what the majority of people are going to do and not what a few outliers do when you make policy.
they're looking to maintain. To hang on. Remember 40% don't have $400 in the bank. They're one car accident or one health problem away from disaster and they know it. 40 years of declining wages means we've got millions of people on the edge.
it's from the working class of one country to another. The extremely rich are still extremely rich. Even more so now. Having reliable access to food, shelter, healthcare, education and transportation as well as retirement when you're too old to work does _not_ make you "extremely rich". It makes you Middle Class. The ground is being lost by the American Middle Class. Also, the losses the American Middle class have suffered are nearly 1 to 1 gains for the top 1%.
The American working class doesn't have to give ground so the rest of the world can be lifted out of poverty. That's one way to do it, but not the _only_ way. We could just as easily take it from the extremely rich. If we were willing to, that is.
Long on call hours. Declining inflation adjusted wages. Having to spend hours and hours of your own time training because companies don't train anymore. Constant threats of outsourcing or being replaced by an H1-B applicant (despite the fact that that is explicitly illegal).
Insurance companies _absolutely_ want to reduce costs. So do companies who pay premiums. I've been stuck seeing Nurse practitioners for heart palpitations since they started.
That other 9% is profit to insurance companies and big Pharma. IBM tried to muscle in on their territory. That IBM failed is a testament to how much power insurance & pharma wield.
Big Pharma has long since demonstrated they have no shame. They can easily hold both beliefs. e.g. that Marijuana has no medicinal applications and that this drug treats epilepsy. When money is at stake it's easy to have your cake and eat it too. And there's no shortage of people who are happy to keep Marijuana illegal for their own reasons (tough on crime, racism, fear, indifference, etc). It's easy enough to turn those voters out and get anti-Marijuana folks like Jeff Session in power.
I'm not saying what they're doing is going to help, but I _am_ saying it's not likely to make things much worse for them. You're underestimating how bad off 40% of America is. Like the man said, what have you got to lose? For a lot of people there really isn't anything. That's what 40 years of declining wages means.
that fast, right? These people lost ground for 8 years under Obama, 8 years under Bush and 8 years under Clinton. The older ones lost ground before that too. These trends have been going on for over 40 years. They've been ignored that long. There was a brief respite during the.com boom and an even briefer one during the housing boom.
It's kinda hard to shoot yourself in the foot when somebody else already cut you off at the knees.
when you have an industry to protect. China has leverage because we've let them take over virtually all our manufacturing. We've kept a few of the heavy duty stuff in case we need to spin up for a war.
Thing is, Trump's base wants action and they want it now. Given that wages keep falling (inflation's 3%, wage growth's 2.5%, do the math) and 40% of Americans don't have $400 bucks in the bank I can't blame them.
This is what happens when you ignore a sizable portion of the country. They find somebody who'll listen. If you happen to be doing pretty well in this economy and don't want the boat rocked, well, tough shit. If you don't want desperate people destabilizing the world then you need to do something about their desperation. You'd think we'd have learned this from WWI and II.
Reason #1 is our private prison industry, which wouldn't be profitable if the only people we locked up were actual violent criminals. Pot heads are great because they just quietly do their time.
Bonus reason #3 is that our uneven law enforcement policy allows states to implement defacto segregation by harassing and locking up minorities that show up in the 'wrong' place. Bonus reason #4 is harassing people who get uppity about political issues like the hippy left.
But it's not illegal to run a Pachinko parlor and give out prizes. It's also not illegal to buy those prizes for more than they are worth. Japan has no RICO act so there's no legal framework to tie the two acts together. The people playing at the Pachinko parlor are coming to gamble (Pachinko is not generally a skill based game, it's more like a slot machine). They spend a lot of money hoping to win more than they spend.
Of course the government knows this. The point is to have a quasi-legal form of gambling. It's sort of how drug laws in the United States are enforced. If things get out of control or if you just plain don't like somebody you can send the cops in to bust everybody's chops. Otherwise you leave people be so long as they're not causing too much trouble.
Overall I think it's a terrible system (just like I think America's drug war is terrible) but hey, it's a system.
I think that's more likely the real problem. It's folks finding something to do with their time besides work and have mountains of kids. If you're a member of the ruling class that worries you. You can't have your slaves cutting back on hours or babies because that's where all your power comes from.
that's why Mozilla started signing apps. It gives them a kill switch in case a plugin author sells their plugin to someone dishonest. There's been a few moderate profile cases of it happening (nothing more than a few hundred thousand users, which sounds like a lot until you realize how many FF users there are).
for years. Go into a pachinko parlor and play until you get a prize. Prize is worthless, but there's a store across the street (usually run by the local Yakuza) who'll trade the prize for way more cash than it's worth. I always wondered why Pachinko was so popular in Japan until I found this out.
Lootboxes are being used for much the same way. At the moment they don't even need the Yakuza for a lot of games because there's people paying big money for in game skins.
is that the "just works" claims come from them not putting bloatware and crapware on their laptops. My kid started college with a pretty high end Toshiba (i7, 7200 rpm drive, 16gb ram) and it ran so bad we thought it was broken and replaced it with a Mac book (I needed her focused on studies so I ponied up the money). When I got my hands on the Toshiba to return it I couldn't find anything wrong so I did a clean load of Win10 and it was fine after that.
As somebody who only ever builds their laptops it hadn't occurred to me that in 2016 (when this all went down) bloatware could still be that big a problem, especially on something with those specs. Just leaving the bloatware off and bumping the price $100 bucks to make up for it was the smartest thing Apple ever did.
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If you're worried about oppression the solution is to start taking power away from people. And that means money. A ruling class uses oppression to keep a disproportionate amount of wealth for themselves. They use poverty and economic stress to keep the working class at each other's throats. How else can 1% of the population claim 50-90% of the wealth and get away with it? Money is power. Real freedom comes when we've guaranteed everyone's access to food, shelter, healthcare, education & transportation (the latter being needed to access the former). Until you do that you're one demagogue away from an angry mob, either joining it or being killed by it.
they were a third world hell hole until the price of oil spiked. Normally when that happens (a commodity becomes extremely valuable) nothing changes. A violent dictator takes it all for themselves. See the Congo and "Blood Diamonds" for a good example of what usually happens.
What made Venezuela so unique is Hugo Chavez. Instead of killing everyone in his way to claim the oil money for himself he used to it buy his way into the people's hearts, and in the process make the country a first world nation almost overnight.
They needed more time. Corruption was bound to happen. It's like a poor person winning the lottery. They don't know how to manage it. If they can hold onto enough of it for a few generations it becomes a dynasty. But right now it looks like Venezuela just didn't have enough time. Again, if the international community wasn't shitting all over them with sanctions (I suspect at the behest of the ultra rich, who don't like the idea of socialism spreading and biting into their status as God-Kings over mankind) then they might have pulled themselves up.
I'm guessing they're trying to avoid that. It's been 2 years since they've put out a new card. It'll be 3 or 4 by the time they finally do something. That's going to be a major generational leap, and when it happens it's going to render last gen's cards obsolete. They're worried about folks who stop buying cards waiting for the new stuff.
I was expecting at least the UK to send Uber packing for illegally classifying employees as contractors. Not sure how they do it. The other businesses that tried it (for stuff like maid services and the like) couldn't pull it off, they lost their court cases. But those court cases didn't have any effect on Uber (or Lyft for that matter). Are they just that well connected? In the meantime I'm guessing there's a raft of taxes they don't pay as a result, which is going to help drain the coffers of the NHS. That'll eventually be used as an excuse to pull public healthcare from people.
except maybe on a very, very small scale. I wish I could stop having to say this but Mao and Stalin were _not_ communists. They were fascists who happened to borrow Marx's books for rhetoric.
Socialism works just fine. Just ask Norway, Germany, France and Canada. But if you're entire country's basic systems fall apart and the rest of the world decides to punish you with sanctions for no particular reason (besides maybe not liking your system of economics) then no amount of socialism can save you.
Let me put it this way, does the American Great Depression mean Capitalism is a failure?
people who say that are the same crowd how think bitcoin's going to take down the international banking system. You don't fix oppression by working around it. You treat the root cause, which is poverty that allows desperate people to be organized into violent mobs.
context matters. Very, very few people will reuse a thin plastic bottle. I use plastic bags from the grocery store but a) I get more than even I can use (only have 1 dog) and b) they're too flimsy for much else.
You have to consider what the majority of people are going to do and not what a few outliers do when you make policy.
I'm assuming they're afraid of getting nailed by the SEC, just not sure why.
they're looking to maintain. To hang on. Remember 40% don't have $400 in the bank. They're one car accident or one health problem away from disaster and they know it. 40 years of declining wages means we've got millions of people on the edge.
it's from the working class of one country to another. The extremely rich are still extremely rich. Even more so now. Having reliable access to food, shelter, healthcare, education and transportation as well as retirement when you're too old to work does _not_ make you "extremely rich". It makes you Middle Class. The ground is being lost by the American Middle Class. Also, the losses the American Middle class have suffered are nearly 1 to 1 gains for the top 1%.
The American working class doesn't have to give ground so the rest of the world can be lifted out of poverty. That's one way to do it, but not the _only_ way. We could just as easily take it from the extremely rich. If we were willing to, that is.
Long on call hours. Declining inflation adjusted wages. Having to spend hours and hours of your own time training because companies don't train anymore. Constant threats of outsourcing or being replaced by an H1-B applicant (despite the fact that that is explicitly illegal).
Insurance companies _absolutely_ want to reduce costs. So do companies who pay premiums. I've been stuck seeing Nurse practitioners for heart palpitations since they started.
That other 9% is profit to insurance companies and big Pharma. IBM tried to muscle in on their territory. That IBM failed is a testament to how much power insurance & pharma wield.
Big Pharma has long since demonstrated they have no shame. They can easily hold both beliefs. e.g. that Marijuana has no medicinal applications and that this drug treats epilepsy. When money is at stake it's easy to have your cake and eat it too. And there's no shortage of people who are happy to keep Marijuana illegal for their own reasons (tough on crime, racism, fear, indifference, etc). It's easy enough to turn those voters out and get anti-Marijuana folks like Jeff Session in power.
I'm not saying what they're doing is going to help, but I _am_ saying it's not likely to make things much worse for them. You're underestimating how bad off 40% of America is. Like the man said, what have you got to lose? For a lot of people there really isn't anything. That's what 40 years of declining wages means.
that fast, right? These people lost ground for 8 years under Obama, 8 years under Bush and 8 years under Clinton. The older ones lost ground before that too. These trends have been going on for over 40 years. They've been ignored that long. There was a brief respite during the .com boom and an even briefer one during the housing boom.
It's kinda hard to shoot yourself in the foot when somebody else already cut you off at the knees.
when you have an industry to protect. China has leverage because we've let them take over virtually all our manufacturing. We've kept a few of the heavy duty stuff in case we need to spin up for a war.
Thing is, Trump's base wants action and they want it now. Given that wages keep falling (inflation's 3%, wage growth's 2.5%, do the math) and 40% of Americans don't have $400 bucks in the bank I can't blame them.
This is what happens when you ignore a sizable portion of the country. They find somebody who'll listen. If you happen to be doing pretty well in this economy and don't want the boat rocked, well, tough shit. If you don't want desperate people destabilizing the world then you need to do something about their desperation. You'd think we'd have learned this from WWI and II.
Reason #1 is our private prison industry, which wouldn't be profitable if the only people we locked up were actual violent criminals. Pot heads are great because they just quietly do their time.
Bonus reason #3 is that our uneven law enforcement policy allows states to implement defacto segregation by harassing and locking up minorities that show up in the 'wrong' place. Bonus reason #4 is harassing people who get uppity about political issues like the hippy left.
But it's not illegal to run a Pachinko parlor and give out prizes. It's also not illegal to buy those prizes for more than they are worth. Japan has no RICO act so there's no legal framework to tie the two acts together. The people playing at the Pachinko parlor are coming to gamble (Pachinko is not generally a skill based game, it's more like a slot machine). They spend a lot of money hoping to win more than they spend.
Of course the government knows this. The point is to have a quasi-legal form of gambling. It's sort of how drug laws in the United States are enforced. If things get out of control or if you just plain don't like somebody you can send the cops in to bust everybody's chops. Otherwise you leave people be so long as they're not causing too much trouble.
Overall I think it's a terrible system (just like I think America's drug war is terrible) but hey, it's a system.
I think that's more likely the real problem. It's folks finding something to do with their time besides work and have mountains of kids. If you're a member of the ruling class that worries you. You can't have your slaves cutting back on hours or babies because that's where all your power comes from.
that's why Mozilla started signing apps. It gives them a kill switch in case a plugin author sells their plugin to someone dishonest. There's been a few moderate profile cases of it happening (nothing more than a few hundred thousand users, which sounds like a lot until you realize how many FF users there are).
And isn't that a common bus? Not as fast as PCIe so you're not gonna be running a GTA 1080 off it but it's still a bus isn't it?
for years. Go into a pachinko parlor and play until you get a prize. Prize is worthless, but there's a store across the street (usually run by the local Yakuza) who'll trade the prize for way more cash than it's worth. I always wondered why Pachinko was so popular in Japan until I found this out.
Lootboxes are being used for much the same way. At the moment they don't even need the Yakuza for a lot of games because there's people paying big money for in game skins.
Sorry, 64 bit x86
As I understand the last one didn't. If it's got full compatibility then I could see Intel and AMD (especially Intel) really starting to worry.
is that the "just works" claims come from them not putting bloatware and crapware on their laptops. My kid started college with a pretty high end Toshiba (i7, 7200 rpm drive, 16gb ram) and it ran so bad we thought it was broken and replaced it with a Mac book (I needed her focused on studies so I ponied up the money). When I got my hands on the Toshiba to return it I couldn't find anything wrong so I did a clean load of Win10 and it was fine after that.
As somebody who only ever builds their laptops it hadn't occurred to me that in 2016 (when this all went down) bloatware could still be that big a problem, especially on something with those specs. Just leaving the bloatware off and bumping the price $100 bucks to make up for it was the smartest thing Apple ever did.