that normally would be really tough to get because most cities wouldn't let autonomous cars on their roads yet. Tesla's got an Apple grade reality distortion field that lets them get away with things nobody else seems to be able to.
the reason is bribes, which are essentially legal here in the form of Political Action Committees, campaign donations and jobs handed out after completion of a term in office. If we were sane we'd regulate PACs, only let people donate to candidates they can vote for and even then limit the amounts and give anyone who served a significant public office a pension for life and require them to retired without owning stock.
which are much better systems of Democracy. Our system was built from the ground up to protect the interests of the wealthy (especially land owners, but mostly because at the time being wealthy meant owning lots of land). We're not really a democracy. We've got dozens and dozens of systems in place to make it so we look like one but at the end of the day the laws don't reflect popular opinion. Heck, our head of State lost the popular vote by 3 _million_.... And that's just one example. There's our Senate, built from the ground up as a buffer between the population and wealthy land and slave owners. There's Gerrymandering. There's all manner of flavors of voter suppression. I could go on but the depressions making me want to stop...
because our system of government doesn't lend itself to them. The electoral college and Senate make it easy for the oligarchy to split the electorate down the middle and take control of the government. We'd need to switch to a parliamentary system to make their parties viable. That's tough to do because it means changing our constitution; and doing that while the oligarchy is in charge is a recipe for disaster. One we just adverted when the Dems took a few seats in the state legislature recently (making it basically impossible for a constitutional convention to be called).
No, for now the best bet is to take over one of the major parties from within. I'm for the Dems. They support Net Neutrality, Healthcare for all (though there's a lot of infighting on how to do it) and the Rs are a little too forgiving of racism for my blood. Though their stance on immigration (specifically the H1-B visa program) leaves me cold, there's some pressure from the Bernie wing (who's a D for all intents and purposes) to reign that in.
if you want these overwhelmingly unpopular things to stop happening you need to show up at your primaries. For a lot of us the choices are a moderate Republican, a "Blue Dog" Democrat or an Independent with zero chance of winning. They way to change that is to vote in your primary.
the problem is how we'd respond to the changes. For example, if the trend keeps up large parts of the Middle East will become uninhabitable. There will be massive numbers of refugees forced to migrate. After all, even small changes in temperature can have big impacts on crop yields. We're already experiencing some large scale migration of Muslims. Since these folks are being forced to leave they're not integrating into their new host societies. This is creating tensions which autocrats, dictators and Strongmen are quick to capitalize one.
If all humans were rational climate change would be no big deal. But they're not. So those of us who _are_ rational need to head these kinds of problems off at the pass.
it's what makes preserves... well... preserve. But cheap jellies that are mostly sugar end up tasking like cheap candy because, well, that's what they are.
Not what I needed. What I needed to know was you were doing it in the first place before I replace two iPhones due to performance issues instead of buying new batteries.
students have been routinely forced to work for Apple during crunch time to get enough iPhones out.
I don't think we really want them to have better conditions either. I don't think we want them to be worse either, if by 'We' you mean consumers in first world nations. We're largely indifferent.
But as for their working conditions, there's no shortages of less than uplifting stories about them. Also, these are masses of Factory workers. They're primed for Unionization but they never seem to do much of it. You probably don't want to think about what the Chinese government does to keep that under wraps. Any more than you want to think about what things were like in America before Unions...
don't have thrift stores. They have little outlets that only accept donations. Those donations never show up anywhere near the poor neighborhoods. I moved to here from a poorer city and was expecting the pickins to be pretty good. So when I got up here I cruised all the thrift stores for a couple months only to find junk and only junk time and time again. That's not completely true. Sometimes I'd find something marked up $10 more than new/ebay.
feeding the supply side doesn't really do much. Companies don't hire because you give them money. They hire because they have more demand. And they pay more because they need to keep talent; and the reason for that is other companies are poaching their workers.
but putting negotiating power in the hands of the people through their elected representatives. It does mean you've got to block laws like the one that prohibits the government from negotiating drug prices for Medicare, but if you're ever at the point where you can get single payer through I'm guessing that little bit won't be hard. Just overcoming the single payer hurdle alone would be huge.
On a national level they might (might) have too many fronts to fight. On the State level they can levy their full resources against each State whenever they consider switching.
Insurance companies are still bigger than even California or NY can take on by themselves. That's not hyperbole. They're approaching the $1 trillion dollar mark in size, and they're rapidly merging to boot; consolidating power. Normally they'd need to devote a lot of that money to being profitable. But faced with the prospect of single payer Armageddon they'll bring all their resources into play. They are quite literally fighting for their lives.
Because Everytime at the local thrift stores was too ratty to wear. Part of that is cloths are made more cheaply now (thanks fast fashion) and part of that is the thrift stores eBay all the really nice stuff. I suspect if your poor that's got to suck. When I was a broke ass college kid I could get something ok for a job interview for $20 bucks. Nowadays that stuff is on eBay for $100 or more...
because offering Internet costs about $9/month, all costs included. Comcast admitted as much in their SEC filing. This isn't surprising. It's mostly public infrastructure and what isn't was paid for by tax breaks and direct subsidies.
Anyone that tries to compete at this point can't. Comcast would just drop its pants until the competitor was run out of business. That's exactly what happened to Google fiber.
I think the FCC is on pretty solid footing here, just like I did when they made NN happen. The FCC has the regulatory authority it needs to act here, so I don't see this lawsuit working. Hell, the lawsuits that made NN possible are likely to be used against this suit.
I want a parliamentary system with proportional representation, and end to the Senate who's original purpose was to put the breaks on Democracy (or populism if you want to be nasty about it) and the end to the electoral college that served the same purpose.
Our entire system of government was designed by wealthy landowners to give themselves a disproportionate amount of political power at the expense of the working class.
The Republicans control all three branches. They're not ruling by fiat. They won. I suppose you could argue that gerrymandering, voter suppression and our generally corrupt system let them win unfairly. But the one thing you _can't_ argue is that they're ruling by fiat. America got exactly what we voted for. And if you didn't vote for it, well, this is what happens when you don't show up to the polls.
And yes, for what I hope is the last bloody time this _is_ a partisan issue. When a Dems was in the Whitehouse we had NN. When the Dem left a Republican appointed an additional Anti-Net Neutrality FCC chair who did exactly what he was appointed to do. Hell, the Republicans central plank is eliminating regulation, of which NN is one. Meanwhile every Democrat Senator just signed on to undo the FCC ruling. When one party supports an issue and another party doesn't that _is_ partisan politics.
by pointing out that government is far too useful for the ruling class to just pretend it doesn't exist, and so you're going to have government involvement whether you like it or not. So the only question is are you going to take control of the government or are you going to leave a power vacuum in place for the wealthy to exploit to your detriment?
but they don't know what else to do. The rest of the electorate hasn't left them with very many options. We're talking about Rust Belters here. Those are the ones that put him in office. They've spent the last 30 years being look down on and told to retrain. But what do you do if you're not college material? I don't even mean blue collar types, but just folks who for whatever reason can't make it through a 4 year degree. We keep telling those people they have to go back to school when they didn't make it the first time.
And again, you keep side stepping my point. They're not surprised. They've been shit on their entire lives many of them (30+ years of declining wages and stalling social mobility after all). But their lives aren't any worse under Trump. Yeah, somebody's is. But _there's_ isn't. That's the price we pay for abandoning them. This is what happens when you abandon a large portion of your people to poverty. They can be organized into scary things out of desperation.
The nice thing about google is I can find quotes I otherwise would have forgotten. Here's one now.
There's a pretty big stigma to admitting to hard financial times, but I'd bet money these folks just couldn't afford to keep their own car anymore. For those of you playing at home this is a Bad Thing.
Slashdot Mirror
that normally would be really tough to get because most cities wouldn't let autonomous cars on their roads yet. Tesla's got an Apple grade reality distortion field that lets them get away with things nobody else seems to be able to.
the reason is bribes, which are essentially legal here in the form of Political Action Committees, campaign donations and jobs handed out after completion of a term in office. If we were sane we'd regulate PACs, only let people donate to candidates they can vote for and even then limit the amounts and give anyone who served a significant public office a pension for life and require them to retired without owning stock.
which are much better systems of Democracy. Our system was built from the ground up to protect the interests of the wealthy (especially land owners, but mostly because at the time being wealthy meant owning lots of land). We're not really a democracy. We've got dozens and dozens of systems in place to make it so we look like one but at the end of the day the laws don't reflect popular opinion. Heck, our head of State lost the popular vote by 3 _million_.... And that's just one example. There's our Senate, built from the ground up as a buffer between the population and wealthy land and slave owners. There's Gerrymandering. There's all manner of flavors of voter suppression. I could go on but the depressions making me want to stop...
because our system of government doesn't lend itself to them. The electoral college and Senate make it easy for the oligarchy to split the electorate down the middle and take control of the government. We'd need to switch to a parliamentary system to make their parties viable. That's tough to do because it means changing our constitution; and doing that while the oligarchy is in charge is a recipe for disaster. One we just adverted when the Dems took a few seats in the state legislature recently (making it basically impossible for a constitutional convention to be called).
No, for now the best bet is to take over one of the major parties from within. I'm for the Dems. They support Net Neutrality, Healthcare for all (though there's a lot of infighting on how to do it) and the Rs are a little too forgiving of racism for my blood. Though their stance on immigration (specifically the H1-B visa program) leaves me cold, there's some pressure from the Bernie wing (who's a D for all intents and purposes) to reign that in.
if you want these overwhelmingly unpopular things to stop happening you need to show up at your primaries. For a lot of us the choices are a moderate Republican, a "Blue Dog" Democrat or an Independent with zero chance of winning. They way to change that is to vote in your primary.
the problem is how we'd respond to the changes. For example, if the trend keeps up large parts of the Middle East will become uninhabitable. There will be massive numbers of refugees forced to migrate. After all, even small changes in temperature can have big impacts on crop yields. We're already experiencing some large scale migration of Muslims. Since these folks are being forced to leave they're not integrating into their new host societies. This is creating tensions which autocrats, dictators and Strongmen are quick to capitalize one.
If all humans were rational climate change would be no big deal. But they're not. So those of us who _are_ rational need to head these kinds of problems off at the pass.
it's what makes preserves... well... preserve. But cheap jellies that are mostly sugar end up tasking like cheap candy because, well, that's what they are.
A lot less calories and I like the taste better. It's a pain to find the ones that are more fruit than cane sugar though.
is that some kind of euphemism for a blue screen or bricking?
Not what I needed. What I needed to know was you were doing it in the first place before I replace two iPhones due to performance issues instead of buying new batteries.
students have been routinely forced to work for Apple during crunch time to get enough iPhones out.
I don't think we really want them to have better conditions either. I don't think we want them to be worse either, if by 'We' you mean consumers in first world nations. We're largely indifferent.
But as for their working conditions, there's no shortages of less than uplifting stories about them. Also, these are masses of Factory workers. They're primed for Unionization but they never seem to do much of it. You probably don't want to think about what the Chinese government does to keep that under wraps. Any more than you want to think about what things were like in America before Unions...
don't have thrift stores. They have little outlets that only accept donations. Those donations never show up anywhere near the poor neighborhoods. I moved to here from a poorer city and was expecting the pickins to be pretty good. So when I got up here I cruised all the thrift stores for a couple months only to find junk and only junk time and time again. That's not completely true. Sometimes I'd find something marked up $10 more than new/ebay.
feeding the supply side doesn't really do much. Companies don't hire because you give them money. They hire because they have more demand. And they pay more because they need to keep talent; and the reason for that is other companies are poaching their workers.
Amazon just said they hand your echo data to the government.
but putting negotiating power in the hands of the people through their elected representatives. It does mean you've got to block laws like the one that prohibits the government from negotiating drug prices for Medicare, but if you're ever at the point where you can get single payer through I'm guessing that little bit won't be hard. Just overcoming the single payer hurdle alone would be huge.
Also, I addressed the reason why Obama didn't get more in my original comment:
On a national level they might (might) have too many fronts to fight. On the State level they can levy their full resources against each State whenever they consider switching.
Insurance companies are still bigger than even California or NY can take on by themselves. That's not hyperbole. They're approaching the $1 trillion dollar mark in size, and they're rapidly merging to boot; consolidating power. Normally they'd need to devote a lot of that money to being profitable. But faced with the prospect of single payer Armageddon they'll bring all their resources into play. They are quite literally fighting for their lives.
Because Everytime at the local thrift stores was too ratty to wear. Part of that is cloths are made more cheaply now (thanks fast fashion) and part of that is the thrift stores eBay all the really nice stuff. I suspect if your poor that's got to suck. When I was a broke ass college kid I could get something ok for a job interview for $20 bucks. Nowadays that stuff is on eBay for $100 or more...
because offering Internet costs about $9/month, all costs included. Comcast admitted as much in their SEC filing. This isn't surprising. It's mostly public infrastructure and what isn't was paid for by tax breaks and direct subsidies.
Anyone that tries to compete at this point can't. Comcast would just drop its pants until the competitor was run out of business. That's exactly what happened to Google fiber.
I think the FCC is on pretty solid footing here, just like I did when they made NN happen. The FCC has the regulatory authority it needs to act here, so I don't see this lawsuit working. Hell, the lawsuits that made NN possible are likely to be used against this suit.
I want a parliamentary system with proportional representation, and end to the Senate who's original purpose was to put the breaks on Democracy (or populism if you want to be nasty about it) and the end to the electoral college that served the same purpose.
Our entire system of government was designed by wealthy landowners to give themselves a disproportionate amount of political power at the expense of the working class.
The Republicans control all three branches. They're not ruling by fiat. They won. I suppose you could argue that gerrymandering, voter suppression and our generally corrupt system let them win unfairly. But the one thing you _can't_ argue is that they're ruling by fiat. America got exactly what we voted for. And if you didn't vote for it, well, this is what happens when you don't show up to the polls.
And yes, for what I hope is the last bloody time this _is_ a partisan issue. When a Dems was in the Whitehouse we had NN. When the Dem left a Republican appointed an additional Anti-Net Neutrality FCC chair who did exactly what he was appointed to do. Hell, the Republicans central plank is eliminating regulation, of which NN is one. Meanwhile every Democrat Senator just signed on to undo the FCC ruling. When one party supports an issue and another party doesn't that _is_ partisan politics.
by pointing out that government is far too useful for the ruling class to just pretend it doesn't exist, and so you're going to have government involvement whether you like it or not. So the only question is are you going to take control of the government or are you going to leave a power vacuum in place for the wealthy to exploit to your detriment?
but they don't know what else to do. The rest of the electorate hasn't left them with very many options. We're talking about Rust Belters here. Those are the ones that put him in office. They've spent the last 30 years being look down on and told to retrain. But what do you do if you're not college material? I don't even mean blue collar types, but just folks who for whatever reason can't make it through a 4 year degree. We keep telling those people they have to go back to school when they didn't make it the first time.
And again, you keep side stepping my point. They're not surprised. They've been shit on their entire lives many of them (30+ years of declining wages and stalling social mobility after all). But their lives aren't any worse under Trump. Yeah, somebody's is. But _there's_ isn't. That's the price we pay for abandoning them. This is what happens when you abandon a large portion of your people to poverty. They can be organized into scary things out of desperation.
The nice thing about google is I can find quotes I otherwise would have forgotten. Here's one now.
There's a pretty big stigma to admitting to hard financial times, but I'd bet money these folks just couldn't afford to keep their own car anymore. For those of you playing at home this is a Bad Thing.