there wasn't anything impressive about the iPhone. What made is so amazing is that Apple was able to break up the cartel run by the Cell Phone companies and get some decent tech in. That plus they welcomed third party devs at a time when a cell phone dev kit started at $25k. I can't speak to the Macbook air much. I know Sony was doing the equivalent for Windows laptops but at even worse price points. They were also built like tissue paper. I bought my kid an air recently. I'll be interested to see how it holds up (and moderately terrified, the thing was $1200).
I don't really want innovation, I want improvement. Longer battery life and better radios is what I want. That's why I went with an Android.
but they got their start as a Veblen good. I had an MP3 player back in the day and the iPod was no where near the best. Creative's players had better sound and better controls. And besides being a brick the Zune was amazing.
What Apple had was an expensive device that everyone could see you owning. This is similar to what Beats by Dre did, and it's exactly why Apple bought them.
Now, I don't find Apple devices play that much better together then Windows ones. My kid is all Apple (iPhone, iPad, Macbook and iTunes music) and the stuff breaks just as often as my Windows + Android setup. But my Windows pc isn't OEM, so no bloatware. I tried a Windows laptop for her and the bloatware manufactures load on it made it unusable. I found this out after she took it to college, had it break, and I let her buy a Macbook to replace it. When I got my hands on the Windows laptop all it took was a reinstall without the bloat to make it work.
Apple's killer feature is they're not trying to squeeze every penny out of their customers. I don't think that's because they're good hearted, I think they're afraid of killing the goose laying all those gold eggs.
Caste systems are how the wealthy divide the working class into easily manageable chunks. I can't think of a single country that doesn't have one. In America we use skin color. In Japan they use employment (Morticians, butchers and actors have their own caste). India has it various castes and Britain has it's classes. Even Canada has it's Eskimos (South Park rather famously made fun of it).
What amazes me is how little talk there is about this pattern. There's a lot of SJWs going on about how bad bigotry is, but nobody addresses where these systems come from. Instead they waste their time calling the bigots deplorables instead of educating them on how they're being taken advantage of by a centuries old method of keeping the working class at each other's throats...
if folks stopped pretending then there'd be demands to do something about it. There's only one thing that can be done about it, which is socialist style wealth redistribution. The folks running these companies don't want that because, well, it's their wealth that'll get redistributed.
I experienced this first hand when my kid was young. The "Doctor" Barbie sets cost more than the McDonald's sets. I didn't really noticed it until it was pointed out to me by one of those SJW type sites, but it's one of those things you can't unsee when you see it. I haven't had to buy Barbie in years though and I wonder if the bad press made them stop doing it. Still annoyed the hell out of me (as did paying $200 for a cheap plastic doll house because I suck at wood work).
to 40 years of declining wages. My 1994 Accord is completely untraceable. Even if you bolt something onto it the constant vibrations from the knocking engine and iffy transmission are just going to make it fall off.
people make mistakes. Also, it doesn't help that the gunman (no longer alleged, he's confessed) _is_ a White supremacist. I'm aware retractions don't get as many page views, but in this case I'm not so sure it's such a big deal. The bigger news to me is that there's somebody out there who's such a nut case that the white supremacists looked at him and say "uh... no" and he still had an AR-15.
The phrase "Main Stream Media" is a bug-a-boo of the right. Like Dog Whistling your intentions were clear. It didn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out what you were on about.
Also you're moving the goal post. You attacked the media for falsified stories and now your saying the stories don't need to be false.
And now you're just making up stories. I guess the good news is that to anyone on the fence your silly hyperbole will put them off. The bad news is there's lots of folks like yourself who've bought into the clap trap being pushed by right wing, pro-corporate media.
I suppose it's possible your one of those Russian trolls I keep hearing about, or just a regular troll. If it's the former, well, I can't argue with who signs your paychecks. If it's the latter, you're not helping yourself. You're actively hurting yourself. Don't kid yourself, the right are not your friends. They're going to eat you alive (and your family if you've got one). Their goals are clear: lower wages and fewer protections for the working class. If you've got time to post to/. you're not one of them, you're one of us.
will this change how anyone votes in the mid terms (or in any other election for that matter)? And change doesn't just mean "I'm not voting for so and so" it also means "I'm going to show up at the polls this year".
it's the millions of single issue voter gun otaku. Bill Clinton might have been a right wing philanderer (we have him to thank for the big push to deregulate Wallstreet in the 90s) but he got one thing right: You don't mess with a mans guns. For the gun crowd it's a culture and a community. Anything that threatens that threatens their identity (as well as a hobby that grants them access to their entire circle of friends). It's like anything nerds obsess over: a third rail. These people show up to vote pro gun at every election. Unless you can talk some sense into them then getting the NRA money out won't even put a dent in the current apathy towards gun legislation.
What I'm staying is stop dumping on the NRA and start getting these folks to vote against anything that touches guns. Either that or give up on gun control laws. Really I'd rather see us do that. I don't think this is a battle we can win.
buy everything. The complete lack of any anti-trust enforcement combined with the out of control levels of wealth at the top means the 1% just keep buying up everything. It's not big loss now, but in 10 years I could see Disney buying out Netflix. Bring enough money to the table and anything's possible. And we seem to be letting them have that money.
and piling on Venezuela. Venezuela is in a uniquely strange position. They were a third world hell hole that suddenly had a ton of oil money and for some bizarre reason instead of hoarding for the ruling class they used it to (briefly) become a first world nation. When the oil money bubble burst they went right back to being a poor country because, well, besides oil they're a poor country. Saudi Arabia gets away with this crap because their oil's easier to get to than the big V.
Anyway, I find it funny that what we have here is a country that is quite possibly going to use Cryptocurrencies for what the libertarian types have always dreamed of: to whit, getting off the Petro-Dollar; and those same libertarians seem to be ready to slag them non-stop because (as near as I can tell) the Socialisms. It is funny watching the cognitive dissonance at work though.
they look at me like I have lobsters crawling out of my ears. If I use the term 'public' housing I still get the look, but it's more of a condescending "isn't that cute" look (even though they're the same thing). Folks remember the "projects" from the 70s. What they don't remember is what those projects were. We brought a bunch of super-poor dirt farmers to the city with the intent of providing them training, education and jobs. They got the apartments built and then the funding got pulled before the training/education got done and the whole thing collapse. Our manufacturing base being allowed to go overseas without so much as a peep didn't help matters either. The moral is half assed approaches don't work. Start something and finish it.
who finds it disturbing that we're starting the see the kinds of absurd wastes of money here in America that we traditionally associated with Saudi Arabian Sheiks and Abu Dubai? Not too long ago the uber-wealthy were making it a point to hide this stuff from us working class slobs least we get uppity about it.
was turned into the big 'ole beast that was the Turbografx 16. I kinda liked the itty bitty PC Engine, though I've also heard the larger size appealed to Americans.
that doesn't mean I want it legalized (drugs, OTOH, I _do_ want legalized, but that's another conversation).
Some things _should_ be illegal. And for law to be fair there needs to be specifics about what is and isn't illegal. Right now this tech is so new there isn't much of anything on the books to address it. That makes it possible, even likely, that somebody could do something to ruin your life (stopping just short of framing your for a crime) and get away with it.
Let's say you're applying to Google and I videoshop you into a white supremacist rally. Is that illegal? Heck, it might not even be libel.
I don't recall the last time I saw CNN doing this. Nor the Washington Post or NY Times. Heck, Jon Oliver & the Daily Show are both meticulously researched (as Oliver put it, they have to be or they'd be sued into oblivion by the mega corps they periodically go after).
I suppose you could say that about Fox News. You might even say the same about Politico and Mother Jones. Though those two aren't exactly MSM and Fox News themselves claims to be an entertainment network (that's how they get out of equal time rules and the like). But for most of Main Stream Media there's enough cross checking going on that you don't get too many stories that count as fake.
both the food and the people. The food gets massive farm subsidies, the employees are subsidized in the form of food stamps, low income health care, etc. There's also a ton of hidden subsidies around the wasteful packaging (oil subsidies make the cheap plastics possible and we shift the cost of the waste disposal). And the farming techniques used to keep those prices down have a ton of long term issues (that's where the "sustainability" comes in).
Fast food is 'cheap' because the costs are externalized.
You can dig smaller tunnels and they're too young to understand the risks. I'm not kidding either. There's lots of stories of kids in mining in the US from before child labor laws.
This isn't a complex situation. This isn't the 1800s let alone the 1600s. There is zero reason these kids are being sent to the mines. The alternatives are worse because the foreign policy of the leading nations makes it worse. You're just telling yourself (and everyone else) this clap trap to make yourself feel better about not solving the problem.
A ton of work has been done on real time "photoshop". Like a lot of things the vanguard here was Adult movies and advertisements (I'm reminded of another old movie). Folks have been thinking about this and working on it for decades.
What we need is more education (and clean, lead free water and air). We probably also need to lessen deep seated religious devotion (since it tends to foster unquestioned obedience to authorities). Basically, we need an electorate that isn't just capable of critical thinking, but for whom critical thinking is the default state of being. This is all doable, but I'm not sure you can get Americans to pay for it. We get upset when we're told to pay for making other folks better.
It's 3% because much of the cost has been externalized in the form of oil subsidies, wars and ignoring environmental damage. As a result shaving 3% off the amount of gas used has a disproportionate impact on the entire global situation let alone any single country's economy, than just the base 3% savings.
it's the human ones that worry me. Especially when they don't need me anymore. They don't need me to buy their crap if they've got robots to do everything for them and they own everything anyway.
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there wasn't anything impressive about the iPhone. What made is so amazing is that Apple was able to break up the cartel run by the Cell Phone companies and get some decent tech in. That plus they welcomed third party devs at a time when a cell phone dev kit started at $25k. I can't speak to the Macbook air much. I know Sony was doing the equivalent for Windows laptops but at even worse price points. They were also built like tissue paper. I bought my kid an air recently. I'll be interested to see how it holds up (and moderately terrified, the thing was $1200).
I don't really want innovation, I want improvement. Longer battery life and better radios is what I want. That's why I went with an Android.
but they got their start as a Veblen good. I had an MP3 player back in the day and the iPod was no where near the best. Creative's players had better sound and better controls. And besides being a brick the Zune was amazing.
What Apple had was an expensive device that everyone could see you owning. This is similar to what Beats by Dre did, and it's exactly why Apple bought them.
Now, I don't find Apple devices play that much better together then Windows ones. My kid is all Apple (iPhone, iPad, Macbook and iTunes music) and the stuff breaks just as often as my Windows + Android setup. But my Windows pc isn't OEM, so no bloatware. I tried a Windows laptop for her and the bloatware manufactures load on it made it unusable. I found this out after she took it to college, had it break, and I let her buy a Macbook to replace it. When I got my hands on the Windows laptop all it took was a reinstall without the bloat to make it work.
Apple's killer feature is they're not trying to squeeze every penny out of their customers. I don't think that's because they're good hearted, I think they're afraid of killing the goose laying all those gold eggs.
Caste systems are how the wealthy divide the working class into easily manageable chunks. I can't think of a single country that doesn't have one. In America we use skin color. In Japan they use employment (Morticians, butchers and actors have their own caste). India has it various castes and Britain has it's classes. Even Canada has it's Eskimos (South Park rather famously made fun of it).
What amazes me is how little talk there is about this pattern. There's a lot of SJWs going on about how bad bigotry is, but nobody addresses where these systems come from. Instead they waste their time calling the bigots deplorables instead of educating them on how they're being taken advantage of by a centuries old method of keeping the working class at each other's throats...
during the last big one. There were two World Wars. Decades of misery and social strife.
The way I think of it is this: When in your life or mine has the best solution to a complex problem been to do nothing and let it sort itself out?
if folks stopped pretending then there'd be demands to do something about it. There's only one thing that can be done about it, which is socialist style wealth redistribution. The folks running these companies don't want that because, well, it's their wealth that'll get redistributed.
I experienced this first hand when my kid was young. The "Doctor" Barbie sets cost more than the McDonald's sets. I didn't really noticed it until it was pointed out to me by one of those SJW type sites, but it's one of those things you can't unsee when you see it. I haven't had to buy Barbie in years though and I wonder if the bad press made them stop doing it. Still annoyed the hell out of me (as did paying $200 for a cheap plastic doll house because I suck at wood work).
to 40 years of declining wages. My 1994 Accord is completely untraceable. Even if you bolt something onto it the constant vibrations from the knocking engine and iffy transmission are just going to make it fall off.
people make mistakes. Also, it doesn't help that the gunman (no longer alleged, he's confessed) _is_ a White supremacist. I'm aware retractions don't get as many page views, but in this case I'm not so sure it's such a big deal. The bigger news to me is that there's somebody out there who's such a nut case that the white supremacists looked at him and say "uh... no" and he still had an AR-15.
The phrase "Main Stream Media" is a bug-a-boo of the right. Like Dog Whistling your intentions were clear. It didn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out what you were on about.
/. you're not one of them, you're one of us.
Also you're moving the goal post. You attacked the media for falsified stories and now your saying the stories don't need to be false.
And now you're just making up stories. I guess the good news is that to anyone on the fence your silly hyperbole will put them off. The bad news is there's lots of folks like yourself who've bought into the clap trap being pushed by right wing, pro-corporate media.
I suppose it's possible your one of those Russian trolls I keep hearing about, or just a regular troll. If it's the former, well, I can't argue with who signs your paychecks. If it's the latter, you're not helping yourself. You're actively hurting yourself. Don't kid yourself, the right are not your friends. They're going to eat you alive (and your family if you've got one). Their goals are clear: lower wages and fewer protections for the working class. If you've got time to post to
will this change how anyone votes in the mid terms (or in any other election for that matter)? And change doesn't just mean "I'm not voting for so and so" it also means "I'm going to show up at the polls this year".
it's the millions of single issue voter gun otaku. Bill Clinton might have been a right wing philanderer (we have him to thank for the big push to deregulate Wallstreet in the 90s) but he got one thing right: You don't mess with a mans guns. For the gun crowd it's a culture and a community. Anything that threatens that threatens their identity (as well as a hobby that grants them access to their entire circle of friends). It's like anything nerds obsess over: a third rail. These people show up to vote pro gun at every election. Unless you can talk some sense into them then getting the NRA money out won't even put a dent in the current apathy towards gun legislation.
What I'm staying is stop dumping on the NRA and start getting these folks to vote against anything that touches guns. Either that or give up on gun control laws. Really I'd rather see us do that. I don't think this is a battle we can win.
buy everything. The complete lack of any anti-trust enforcement combined with the out of control levels of wealth at the top means the 1% just keep buying up everything. It's not big loss now, but in 10 years I could see Disney buying out Netflix. Bring enough money to the table and anything's possible. And we seem to be letting them have that money.
and piling on Venezuela. Venezuela is in a uniquely strange position. They were a third world hell hole that suddenly had a ton of oil money and for some bizarre reason instead of hoarding for the ruling class they used it to (briefly) become a first world nation. When the oil money bubble burst they went right back to being a poor country because, well, besides oil they're a poor country. Saudi Arabia gets away with this crap because their oil's easier to get to than the big V.
Anyway, I find it funny that what we have here is a country that is quite possibly going to use Cryptocurrencies for what the libertarian types have always dreamed of: to whit, getting off the Petro-Dollar; and those same libertarians seem to be ready to slag them non-stop because (as near as I can tell) the Socialisms. It is funny watching the cognitive dissonance at work though.
they look at me like I have lobsters crawling out of my ears. If I use the term 'public' housing I still get the look, but it's more of a condescending "isn't that cute" look (even though they're the same thing). Folks remember the "projects" from the 70s. What they don't remember is what those projects were. We brought a bunch of super-poor dirt farmers to the city with the intent of providing them training, education and jobs. They got the apartments built and then the funding got pulled before the training/education got done and the whole thing collapse. Our manufacturing base being allowed to go overseas without so much as a peep didn't help matters either. The moral is half assed approaches don't work. Start something and finish it.
who finds it disturbing that we're starting the see the kinds of absurd wastes of money here in America that we traditionally associated with Saudi Arabian Sheiks and Abu Dubai? Not too long ago the uber-wealthy were making it a point to hide this stuff from us working class slobs least we get uppity about it.
was turned into the big 'ole beast that was the Turbografx 16. I kinda liked the itty bitty PC Engine, though I've also heard the larger size appealed to Americans.
then what does that say about the people consuming that media in the developed world. After all, the media publishes what folks want.
that doesn't mean I want it legalized (drugs, OTOH, I _do_ want legalized, but that's another conversation).
Some things _should_ be illegal. And for law to be fair there needs to be specifics about what is and isn't illegal. Right now this tech is so new there isn't much of anything on the books to address it. That makes it possible, even likely, that somebody could do something to ruin your life (stopping just short of framing your for a crime) and get away with it.
Let's say you're applying to Google and I videoshop you into a white supremacist rally. Is that illegal? Heck, it might not even be libel.
I don't recall the last time I saw CNN doing this. Nor the Washington Post or NY Times. Heck, Jon Oliver & the Daily Show are both meticulously researched (as Oliver put it, they have to be or they'd be sued into oblivion by the mega corps they periodically go after).
I suppose you could say that about Fox News. You might even say the same about Politico and Mother Jones. Though those two aren't exactly MSM and Fox News themselves claims to be an entertainment network (that's how they get out of equal time rules and the like). But for most of Main Stream Media there's enough cross checking going on that you don't get too many stories that count as fake.
both the food and the people. The food gets massive farm subsidies, the employees are subsidized in the form of food stamps, low income health care, etc. There's also a ton of hidden subsidies around the wasteful packaging (oil subsidies make the cheap plastics possible and we shift the cost of the waste disposal). And the farming techniques used to keep those prices down have a ton of long term issues (that's where the "sustainability" comes in).
Fast food is 'cheap' because the costs are externalized.
You can dig smaller tunnels and they're too young to understand the risks. I'm not kidding either. There's lots of stories of kids in mining in the US from before child labor laws.
This isn't a complex situation. This isn't the 1800s let alone the 1600s. There is zero reason these kids are being sent to the mines. The alternatives are worse because the foreign policy of the leading nations makes it worse. You're just telling yourself (and everyone else) this clap trap to make yourself feel better about not solving the problem.
It comes down to this quote
to those old Weird Al Yankovic interviews compared to what they have today.
A ton of work has been done on real time "photoshop". Like a lot of things the vanguard here was Adult movies and advertisements (I'm reminded of another old movie). Folks have been thinking about this and working on it for decades.
What we need is more education (and clean, lead free water and air). We probably also need to lessen deep seated religious devotion (since it tends to foster unquestioned obedience to authorities). Basically, we need an electorate that isn't just capable of critical thinking, but for whom critical thinking is the default state of being. This is all doable, but I'm not sure you can get Americans to pay for it. We get upset when we're told to pay for making other folks better.
It's 3% because much of the cost has been externalized in the form of oil subsidies, wars and ignoring environmental damage. As a result shaving 3% off the amount of gas used has a disproportionate impact on the entire global situation let alone any single country's economy, than just the base 3% savings.
it's the human ones that worry me. Especially when they don't need me anymore. They don't need me to buy their crap if they've got robots to do everything for them and they own everything anyway.