as always with a mega corp follow the money. This is all about cheaper labor. Women _are_ underrepresented in tech. The 'whys' of that aren't important to Google. What matters is there's an entire half of the population that could be trained up to work for them (thereby depressing wages and lowering costs) and isn't.
Me? I made damn sure my kid didn't go into tech. Sure, any job can be over taken, but tech is one of the cheapest to train and therefore easiest to outsource to poorer countries where wages are lower. Again, it's all about money. Ideals never factor into it. Cold hard cash does.
College Kids. It's easy to cart around in a backpack. The low power draws and SSD make it durable enough and it's small enough to fit on those tiny, tiny desks and arm rests they have in classes.
It's also not pre installed with 3000+ crapware programs to slow the thing down. Seriously, if we could just get PC manufacturers to stop doing that their computers could hang with Apple on performance & stability. I ended up buying my kid a Macbook and taking her Windows laptop because she said it kept crashing. She's in school for Nursing, I don't expect her to know how to sort out crashes. I gave up and did a clean load of Win 10 (possible since you can pull an iso from Microsoft nowadays) and low and behold it ran fine.
China can't feed it's population without our granaries. Also, you're massively underestimating the power of modern logistics. We need Taiwan for CPU manufacturing. That takes decades to build up. Everything else can be up and running in 5 years or less.
or is that competition? If Amazon infringed on a novel patent I could see it being a genuine rip off. But baring that, well, it's a camera tripod. Maybe even a really nice one, but still a camera tripod.
Now that said, I do think we ought to start thinking (and doing something) about the scenario where Amazon eats the world. Once everyone else is out of business it won't end well for us working stiffs.
The important thing is we're talking about this and not pesky gun control laws that might introduce waiting periods into gun buying.
A friend of a friend walked into a gun shop the other day to buy a pistol for target shooting and defense. Walked out with a $500 "assault" rifle and a bunch of ammo and accessories. If he had 7 days to contemplate that purchase he'd have cancelled the order. That's what the gun debate's about in nut shell.
but they're not very noticeable. Right wing media has heavy duty backing from wealthy interests who want to see deregulation happen. The left wing media is just a bunch of guys with patreon accounts and a few donations. And no, MSNBC is not left wing.
So you hear about the right wing media because they've got the money to get noticed. As always, follow the money.
promoting the conspiracy theory that the kids caught up in the last school shooting were "crisis actors" and that the shooting was a "false flag" (e.g. it never really happened).
Personally if I were Youtube I wouldn't want to be associated with those kind of nut jobs (if they believe it) or bastards (if they don't believe it and are just passing it around to get a rise out of the nut jobs). Remember kiddies, it's not censorship if the government didn't do it. You have a right to speak, you do not have a right to make google pay for your megaphone.
Meanwhile Youtube continue to de-rank left wing media in favor of corporate media (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc).
I'll momentarily put aside the decades of unemployment and social strife following the last few industrial revolutions to ask: who's gonna pay for it?
Who's gonna pay not only for all these workers to be retrained but to support them during that retraining? These folks had families before their jobs got automated ya know. They're also often past their prime learning years (25, 30, 40, even 50 and 60 years old) so it will take longer for them to learn. Are we going to suggest that they retrain in a few days/weeks for jobs that somehow involve a "skills shift"?
These are all loaded questions. But then again this is just another attempt by tech giants to have the cake of automation and eat the cake (e.g. profits) too.
to change the calculus. So far the administration (who's in charge of the response) doesn't seem to have done anything. Wait, strike that, They actually haven't done anything. It's almost as if they somehow benefited from it...
and you don't have any medical emergencies. Or any kind of emergency whatsoever. And you don't have kids in college. Or you're OK with not giving them much support. Or you've won the genetic lottery and they got a full ride on a sports or academic scholarship. Or your job doesn't get shipped overseas when you're over 40. Or...
I could keep going on, but the fact is with wages being in decline for 40 years it's bloody _hard_ to stay out of debt.
and honestly for most debts they do. What companies have taken to doing is buying up a lot of debt from the same consumer to make it worthwhile to sue. It works because the courts and legal system now do the collection for them (once the initial paper work has been filed). Of course if the amount is high enough they won't sell the debt, they'll do it themselves. From what I can tell the threshold's around $3k-$5k, but I've been out of debt for a while (knock on wood) so it's hard to tell.
it was a Republican program invented by the right wing "Heritage Foundation" (which is less a think tank and more a mouthpiece of the party meant to give it a veneer of psuedo-scientific legitimacy). The ACA was RomneyCare before it was Obamacare.
The scheme is to force everyone to buy private insurance in order to lower costs by increasing the pool. It doesn't work because once the profit motive is in play costs continue to rise. It _did_ slow the growth of costs, but it did nothing to remove the incentive for insurance companies to deny care or fix the problems of folks not paying their medical bills or skipping the doctor due to high copays and eventually using much, much more care for much worse conditions.
The ACA was the best bill we could get with a Congress full of Republicans and right wing ("Blue Dog") Democrats. The country needs to move left if we want to solve these problems. Funny thing is voters know that, which is why they elected Trump (who, if you just listened to his rhetoric and gave the jingoism a pass ran a left wing populist campaign). Sadly Trump, like the ACA, isn't really going to solve any problems; heck, so far he seems to be making things worse. We get the jingoism without the populism...
The hospital won't come after you for that $100k. Not with any real force. Ambulance companies are billed out of a completely different bucket and they _will_ get their money. Ambulance companies have notoriously bad debt collection practices that most poor people are well aware of.
Furthermore, you can't file bankruptcy anymore. Not for real. All you can do is restructure your debt and pay it. It's one of the major legacies of the Bush Jr administration. They gutted the laws. If the judge likes you, you can pay slowly, but you'll still pay. If the judge doesn't like you your just boned. They'll order wage garnishment on behalf of private companies for amounts they see fit. If you're in the south you might end up in a debtors prison via contempt or court charges. The judge orders you to pay, you can't pay, they lock you up for contempt.
There's been a major shift in how debt works in this country that nobody really talks about. Considering our media is largely owned by billionaires that's not surprising. Regardless, what used to be unsecured debt is now secured against all future earnings and any property you might own when you die.
to buy a gun illegally, and as a result of that people who normally couldn't get guns (like criminals, violent spouses and the severely mentally ill) do, then yeah, you probably do have a case to make against them.
but will buy online. A drug dealer could be a cop, or a junkie looking for someone to mug. An anonymous online transaction is safe, and if you're reasonable well to do in a blue state (or very well to do in a red one) it's essentially legal. You won't even got a slap on the wrist.
There are _lots_ of folks looking for pain meds because our healthcare system is so fucked up. Some of them need the meds to manage cronic pain, some of them need them because they have treatable conditions they can't afford to treat. A lot of them are (to be frank) middle class whites unlikely to be punished for having a gram of heroine. Why risk the poor neighborhood if you don't have to?
But is this going to change how anyone here votes? Either in a primary or general election? If not, there's zero reason for Congress not to support these kind of things. There are people who _will_ vote for Congresscritters who push this sort of legislation. This is part of the "tough on crime" theme that's dominated American politics for ages.
So again, if this kind of overreach isn't going to change how anyone votes it's hardly worth discussion.
They still own the State Legislatures, local offices and all branches of government. There's a lot of talk of a 'blue wave' but with few exceptions they're still winning most of their elections. More importantly they own the main stream media, since they're completely pro-corporate (as opposed to the Dems, which are only pro-corporate in the corporate wing of the party). Hell, the Dems big victory was winning one extra state legislature seat so the Republicans couldn't call a Constitutional convention.
Also, even if the Rs lose a bit they're mostly losing to those right wing 'corporate' democrats who vote exactly the same as Republicans except on social issues.
If somebody like Bernie Sanders or Liz Warren wins the Whitehouse we'll talk.
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as always with a mega corp follow the money. This is all about cheaper labor. Women _are_ underrepresented in tech. The 'whys' of that aren't important to Google. What matters is there's an entire half of the population that could be trained up to work for them (thereby depressing wages and lowering costs) and isn't.
Me? I made damn sure my kid didn't go into tech. Sure, any job can be over taken, but tech is one of the cheapest to train and therefore easiest to outsource to poorer countries where wages are lower. Again, it's all about money. Ideals never factor into it. Cold hard cash does.
College Kids. It's easy to cart around in a backpack. The low power draws and SSD make it durable enough and it's small enough to fit on those tiny, tiny desks and arm rests they have in classes.
It's also not pre installed with 3000+ crapware programs to slow the thing down. Seriously, if we could just get PC manufacturers to stop doing that their computers could hang with Apple on performance & stability. I ended up buying my kid a Macbook and taking her Windows laptop because she said it kept crashing. She's in school for Nursing, I don't expect her to know how to sort out crashes. I gave up and did a clean load of Win 10 (possible since you can pull an iso from Microsoft nowadays) and low and behold it ran fine.
China can't feed it's population without our granaries. Also, you're massively underestimating the power of modern logistics. We need Taiwan for CPU manufacturing. That takes decades to build up. Everything else can be up and running in 5 years or less.
or is that competition? If Amazon infringed on a novel patent I could see it being a genuine rip off. But baring that, well, it's a camera tripod. Maybe even a really nice one, but still a camera tripod.
Now that said, I do think we ought to start thinking (and doing something) about the scenario where Amazon eats the world. Once everyone else is out of business it won't end well for us working stiffs.
vs
The important thing is we're talking about this and not pesky gun control laws that might introduce waiting periods into gun buying.
A friend of a friend walked into a gun shop the other day to buy a pistol for target shooting and defense. Walked out with a $500 "assault" rifle and a bunch of ammo and accessories. If he had 7 days to contemplate that purchase he'd have cancelled the order. That's what the gun debate's about in nut shell.
Google can do what they want with their private service. It's not a free speech issue until the government censors.
but they're not very noticeable. Right wing media has heavy duty backing from wealthy interests who want to see deregulation happen. The left wing media is just a bunch of guys with patreon accounts and a few donations. And no, MSNBC is not left wing.
So you hear about the right wing media because they've got the money to get noticed. As always, follow the money.
promoting the conspiracy theory that the kids caught up in the last school shooting were "crisis actors" and that the shooting was a "false flag" (e.g. it never really happened).
Personally if I were Youtube I wouldn't want to be associated with those kind of nut jobs (if they believe it) or bastards (if they don't believe it and are just passing it around to get a rise out of the nut jobs). Remember kiddies, it's not censorship if the government didn't do it. You have a right to speak, you do not have a right to make google pay for your megaphone.
Meanwhile Youtube continue to de-rank left wing media in favor of corporate media (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc).
here's one right now. The bill that landed the guy in jail was for an ambulance too.
I'll momentarily put aside the decades of unemployment and social strife following the last few industrial revolutions to ask: who's gonna pay for it?
Who's gonna pay not only for all these workers to be retrained but to support them during that retraining? These folks had families before their jobs got automated ya know. They're also often past their prime learning years (25, 30, 40, even 50 and 60 years old) so it will take longer for them to learn. Are we going to suggest that they retrain in a few days/weeks for jobs that somehow involve a "skills shift"?
These are all loaded questions. But then again this is just another attempt by tech giants to have the cake of automation and eat the cake (e.g. profits) too.
in film critique, e.g. reviews, which last I heard was fair use.
to change the calculus. So far the administration (who's in charge of the response) doesn't seem to have done anything. Wait, strike that, They actually haven't done anything. It's almost as if they somehow benefited from it...
and you don't have any medical emergencies. Or any kind of emergency whatsoever. And you don't have kids in college. Or you're OK with not giving them much support. Or you've won the genetic lottery and they got a full ride on a sports or academic scholarship. Or your job doesn't get shipped overseas when you're over 40. Or...
I could keep going on, but the fact is with wages being in decline for 40 years it's bloody _hard_ to stay out of debt.
and honestly for most debts they do. What companies have taken to doing is buying up a lot of debt from the same consumer to make it worthwhile to sue. It works because the courts and legal system now do the collection for them (once the initial paper work has been filed). Of course if the amount is high enough they won't sell the debt, they'll do it themselves. From what I can tell the threshold's around $3k-$5k, but I've been out of debt for a while (knock on wood) so it's hard to tell.
it was a Republican program invented by the right wing "Heritage Foundation" (which is less a think tank and more a mouthpiece of the party meant to give it a veneer of psuedo-scientific legitimacy). The ACA was RomneyCare before it was Obamacare.
The scheme is to force everyone to buy private insurance in order to lower costs by increasing the pool. It doesn't work because once the profit motive is in play costs continue to rise. It _did_ slow the growth of costs, but it did nothing to remove the incentive for insurance companies to deny care or fix the problems of folks not paying their medical bills or skipping the doctor due to high copays and eventually using much, much more care for much worse conditions.
The ACA was the best bill we could get with a Congress full of Republicans and right wing ("Blue Dog") Democrats. The country needs to move left if we want to solve these problems. Funny thing is voters know that, which is why they elected Trump (who, if you just listened to his rhetoric and gave the jingoism a pass ran a left wing populist campaign). Sadly Trump, like the ACA, isn't really going to solve any problems; heck, so far he seems to be making things worse. We get the jingoism without the populism...
The hospital won't come after you for that $100k. Not with any real force. Ambulance companies are billed out of a completely different bucket and they _will_ get their money. Ambulance companies have notoriously bad debt collection practices that most poor people are well aware of.
Furthermore, you can't file bankruptcy anymore. Not for real. All you can do is restructure your debt and pay it. It's one of the major legacies of the Bush Jr administration. They gutted the laws. If the judge likes you, you can pay slowly, but you'll still pay. If the judge doesn't like you your just boned. They'll order wage garnishment on behalf of private companies for amounts they see fit. If you're in the south you might end up in a debtors prison via contempt or court charges. The judge orders you to pay, you can't pay, they lock you up for contempt.
There's been a major shift in how debt works in this country that nobody really talks about. Considering our media is largely owned by billionaires that's not surprising. Regardless, what used to be unsecured debt is now secured against all future earnings and any property you might own when you die.
but honestly, who wants to pay for single payer healthcare? I mean, the cost alone is -$17 trillion
to buy a gun illegally, and as a result of that people who normally couldn't get guns (like criminals, violent spouses and the severely mentally ill) do, then yeah, you probably do have a case to make against them.
but will buy online. A drug dealer could be a cop, or a junkie looking for someone to mug. An anonymous online transaction is safe, and if you're reasonable well to do in a blue state (or very well to do in a red one) it's essentially legal. You won't even got a slap on the wrist.
There are _lots_ of folks looking for pain meds because our healthcare system is so fucked up. Some of them need the meds to manage cronic pain, some of them need them because they have treatable conditions they can't afford to treat. A lot of them are (to be frank) middle class whites unlikely to be punished for having a gram of heroine. Why risk the poor neighborhood if you don't have to?
But is this going to change how anyone here votes? Either in a primary or general election? If not, there's zero reason for Congress not to support these kind of things. There are people who _will_ vote for Congresscritters who push this sort of legislation. This is part of the "tough on crime" theme that's dominated American politics for ages.
So again, if this kind of overreach isn't going to change how anyone votes it's hardly worth discussion.
that's not what addiction is.
as a criminal your goal is to do crime big enough to live well but small enough that the authorities moves onto easier targets.
on these might have expired. I mean, if the goal is to make a crappy keyboard, why stop at half measures?
They still own the State Legislatures, local offices and all branches of government. There's a lot of talk of a 'blue wave' but with few exceptions they're still winning most of their elections. More importantly they own the main stream media, since they're completely pro-corporate (as opposed to the Dems, which are only pro-corporate in the corporate wing of the party). Hell, the Dems big victory was winning one extra state legislature seat so the Republicans couldn't call a Constitutional convention.
Also, even if the Rs lose a bit they're mostly losing to those right wing 'corporate' democrats who vote exactly the same as Republicans except on social issues.
If somebody like Bernie Sanders or Liz Warren wins the Whitehouse we'll talk.